A New Angelology: Mapping the Angel through Twentieth‐Century Literature

Abstract

AbstractIn ‘Professions for Women’, Virginia Woolf memorably calls on female writers to kill the ‘Angel in the House’. She implies that the angel, traditionally connoting feminine virtue and chastity, has no place in twentieth‐century literature. The literary texts and theoretical debates surveyed in this article suggest rather the opposite. They reveal that instead of being left behind at the end of the nineteenth century by a cultural imaginary which had outgrown religious orthodoxy and Victorian moral codes, the angel was reinvented, in a sense, modernised for the twentieth century. This article looks first at the importance of Walter Benjamin in carving out a politically charged space for this figure in contemporary literary criticism. It then turns to the angels in texts by Djuna Barnes, H.D., Carolyn Forché, Tony Kushner, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Salman Rushdie and W. G. Sebald among others to show how the angel comes to figure the ‘new’– both the technologically advanced and the unexpectedly ‘avant‐garde’ as regards moral values and sexual propriety.