Ministering angel
Ministering
angel
In Brief
Gerty thinks of herself as a virtuous and helpful wife-to-be: "A sterling good daughter was Gerty just like a second mother in the house, a ministering angel too with a little heart worth its weight in gold." The phrase "ministering angel" comes ultimately from Shakespeare's Hamlet, but the sentiment was a commonplace of Victorian gender ideals, just as "sterling" and "worth its weight in gold" were proverbial figures for value of any kind. Various literary works might be cited as possible sources for Gerty's language of angelic womanhood. One of them, Coventry Patmore's The Angel in the House, does not seem to have received sufficient attention.
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In the graveyard, Laertes abominates the priest who is giving
Ophelia truncated burial rites: "I tell thee, churlish priest,
/ A minist'ring angel shall my sister be / When thou
liest howling" (5.1.240-42). Thornton cites only this one
allusion, but the conceit of an angelic woman ministering to
fallen mankind (better than the male minister does) evidently
struck a chord with people in the 19th century, when new
economic realities were fostering sharp distinctions in gender
roles. Gifford seems to be aware of this development, noting
that "Sir Walter Scott uses the phrase in Marmion
(1808), sending it on its way toward cliché":
O Woman! in our hours of ease,Scott's picture of women ministering to male needs found followers as the century wore on. Slote notes that Maria Cummins uses the same Shakespearean phrase as a chapter title in the best-selling 1854 novel that did so much to inspire the sentimental prose in Nausicaa. Chapter 14 of The Lamplighter, "The Ministering Angel," shows Gerty tenderly assisting Trueman Flint, the kindly old man who adopted her four or five years previously. True has suffered a debilitating stroke and he dies at the end of the chapter, after Gerty warmly reciprocates the loving care he has shown her:
Uncertain, coy, and hard to please,
And variable as the shade
By the light quivering aspen made;
When pain and anguish wring the brow,
A ministering angel thou! (6.30)
With the simplicity of a child, but a woman's firmness; with the stature of a child, but a woman's capacity; the earnestness of a child, but a woman's perseverance—from morning till night, the faithful little nurse and housekeeper labours untiringly in the service of her first, her best friend. Ever at his side, ever attending to his wants, and yet most wonderfully accomplishing many things which he never sees her do, she seems, indeed, to the fond old man, what he once prophesied she would become—God's embodied blessing to his latter years, cheering his pathway to the grave.This chapter may have prompted Joyce's phrase "ministering angel," but he could have encountered many other expressions of the idea in Victorian writing. One work in particular seems important to cite as a possible source for the gender stereotypes in Nausicaa, as well as its focus on marriage. English poet and literary critic Coventry Patmore's The Angel in the House (1863), a long narrative poem compiled from four earlier volumes published from 1854 to 1862, celebrates an ideal of womanhood that Patmore saw embodied in his wife Emily. Instead of the overt religiosity and relative gender parity of Cummins's novel, Patmore's poem defines essential traits, especially purity and submission, that suit women for the role of wife. It proved hugely popular and retained its appeal well into the 20th century.
By the time the poem was written, men were commonly understood to be more aggressive, demanding, and impatient than women––qualities suited to the industrial and capitalist workplaces in which they made their way. Women were becoming housewives, and Patmore's poem helped to define their roles in life: to create a quiet and comforting domestic sanctuary in which the man was master, and to pour oil on the troubled waters of his afflictions, demands, rages, and silences. The poem praises its angel's "virtuous spirit," her "woman's gentleness," her "maiden kindness." One section, titled "The Wife's Tragedy," describes the selflessness required for such a role:
Man must be pleased; but him to pleasePatmore never uses the word "ministering" to describe women's saintly altruism, but Joyce must have been thinking of his poem or at least of the cult of virtuous housewifery that it inspired. His Gerty MacDowell is "A fair unsullied soul," a creature of "gentle ways" who blushes at "unladylike" words, an angelic creature with "an infinite store of mercy" in her eyes and "a word of pardon" on her lips. "From everything in the least indelicate her finebred nature instinctively recoiled." She knows that men are "so different," capable of becoming a "devil," "brute," "wretch," or "cad," "the lowest of the low." She can see maleness coming on even in a young child: "The temper of him! O, he was a man already was little Tommy Caffrey." She knows "that a mere man liked that feeling of hominess," and she looks forward to meeting Mr. Right and settling down "in a nice snug and cosy little homely house" where they will have brekky in the morning "and before he went out to business he would give his dear little wifey a good hearty hug."
Is woman’s pleasure; down the gulf
Of his condoled necessities
She casts her best, she flings herself.
How often flings for nought, and yokes
Her heart to an icicle or whim,
Whose each impatient word provokes
Another, not from her, but him;
While she, too gentle even to force
His penitence by kind replies,
Waits by, expecting his remorse,
With pardon in her pitying eyes;
And if he once, by shame oppress’d,
A comfortable word confers,
She leans and weeps against his breast,
And seems to think the sin was hers;
And whilst his love has any life,
Or any eye to see her charms,
At any time, she’s still his wife,
Dearly devoted to his arms;
She loves with love that cannot tire;
And when, ah woe, she loves alone,
Through passionate duty love springs higher,
As grass grows taller round a stone.
In her 1931 paper "Professions for Women," Virginia Woolf recounts battling "a certain phantom" that she named "after the heroine of a famous poem, the Angel in the House." She describes this soul-draining archetype: "She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it––in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all––I need not say it––she was pure." "Had I not killed her," Woolf says, "she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing." "Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer."
It goes without saying that this act of extermination was not so urgent a part of the literary occupation for Joyce as it was for Woolf. But readers of Nausicaa can see that he added it to his list.
