The Angel in the House
Lessons on form and authenticity from Virginia Woolf
It’s not the common way to find wisdom in a fashion house podcast. (Careful! Keira Knightley warns us: “Certain things have been considered frivolous because they are considered feminine. We have to be careful of that. Fashion has always suffered from that misconception.”)1 Then again, does wisdom ever come in a common way? What would that even look like? Wisdom, I suppose, like many things, will come in whatever way it will—and if we’re lucky, or alert, or awake to the moment, we might catch it. ‘Catch it’ I did this morning, as I walked in my neighborhood. The wisdom came through and blew through the very oak trees that shaded the walk. But it did not stop there. It came throughout the day. It made me selfless, it made me selfish. I made me all things, it made me no…thing. No thing. I became a connoisseur today about formlessness. The words of Virginia Woolf penetrated every brain cell. Her fantastically non-linear way of…cutting to the chase…yes, that’s it…brought me into a deeper, richer alignment with formless truth.
Edward Albee asked the question, Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? That brings me back to the fashion house podcast that ended up being the impetus for this infinite flow of wisdom—Les Rendez-vous Littéraires Rue Cambon. (Everything sounds wiser in French, oui?) It might not be well known outside of Paris—or the internet’s fashionista corners. It was established by Chanel spokesperson/ambassador/model Charlotte Casiraghi, the co-author of Archipel des Passions, a work of philosophy that has been translated from original French into German, Spanish, and Italian. She wrote the book with her lycée philosophy teacher, Robert Maggiori, with whom she is co-founder (and president) of Les Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco—abbreviated as “Philo Monaco.” Her mother is Monaco’s Princess Caroline. Monaco is a little tax haven country on the French Riviera. It’s been said that the whole country of Monaco is smaller than Central Park. It seems to be known mostly for its casino, Grand Prix, Grace Kelly, and port full of yachts owned by Central Asian oligarchs. Anyway, they have a Sovereign Prince—Albert, Grace Kelly’s son—and he’s married to Charlene, an Olympic swimmer from South Africa. Albert has two sisters: Caroline (Charlotte Casiraghi’s mother) and Stephanie, who dated Rob Lowe and was a pop star in the 80s; she had at least one hit song, called “Irresistible” (1986). While in the circus, she dated an elephant trainer; she had a short marriage to an acrobat, and in more recent years, she took care of two retired circus elephants in her backyard. I always thought Monaco has a more interesting way of having a royal family than other countries. I’m not fond of the idea of having a royal family myself (well, it’s very un-American, isn’t it?) but if I was going to have one, I’d like them to be more like the Grimaldis than the Windsors. No offense meant, but there doesn’t seem to be any stiff upper lip nonsense in Monaco, and I say that as someone who enjoys Windsor drama on The Crown and actually read Ben Pimlott’s biography of the late Queen Elizabeth II twice. I’m not sure how Virginia Woolf felt about royalty, but I feel like even she might approve of Charlotte’s Aunt Stephanie’s way of free-styling it. Throwing off the shackles of Victorian repression and conformity was exactly what Virginia Woolf made it her life mission to do. She was part of that exciting period of transition known as the Edwardian era, when women began to show some ankle and push for the right to vote.
The House of Chanel was founded by another turn-of-the-century rebel, Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel. Gabrielle began designing women’s fashions because she saw a need to liberate female movement from its Victorian trappings. (This idea was expressed by Fanny Arama, who wrote a beautiful piece about Gabrielle for a Chanel-produced supplement to System magazine. The piece discusses how Gabrielle liberated her mind through literature and her body through fashion.)2 Gabrielle was a voracious reader who amassed an incredible private library. Succeeding her as chief designer at her eponymous fashion house, Karl Lagerfeld furthered her legacy in more ways than one. (He was obsessed with Gabrielle’s personal story and he wrote and produced a film about her called Once Upon a Time and starring Keira Knightley.) He collected more books (over 300,000)3 than he could fit in any of his homes—and he did have some fabulous homes, one of which was Villa La Vigie just outside of Monaco, where his enjoyment was greatly enhanced, no doubt, by his intimate friendship with Princess Caroline Grimaldi. Anyway, he founded the Paris bookshop Librarie 7L. Erica Wagner wrote that Karl always stacked his books horizontally, just like they are stacked to this day at Librarie 7L, so that he could read the titles without tilting his head.4 This Instagram image (below) is a picture of Charlotte Casiraghi hosting the seventh edition of the Rendezvous in the 7L bookstore.
Karl was the chief designer at Chanel until his death in 2019, after which Virginie Viard took over. In recognition of that literary legacy begun by Coco, and continued by Karl, Viard oversees the Literary Rendezvous at the flagship on Rue Cambon. The Literary Rendezvous—in French: Rendez-vous littéraires—is a free podcast for highlighting authors and books. Charlotte Casiraghi, a “House Ambassador” and spokesperson, is the host of the podcasts, which are usually conducted in French. Every now and then, they do a podcast in English. The Rendezvous has a sister series called “In the Library with [insert guest celebrity],” where the guest talks about her favorite books and what they mean to her. One of my personal favorites from that series is the one with Kristen Stewart talking movingly about John Steinbeck.5 There’s another one I like where Margot Robbie talks about her love for the Harry Potter novels and To Kill a Mockingbird.6 Charlotte Casiraghi did one of the “In the Library” episodes, in French with English subtitles. Whether those segments are done in French or English totally depends on the choice of that guest—always a female, since, as Charlotte confessed to Erica Wagner, the whole project is centered on the link between Gabrielle Chanel’s love of literature and women’s emancipation.7
The Rendezvous did its debut English-language episode (fourth edition overall) to honor the legacy of Virginia Woolf at Somerset House in London, with cohosts Erica Wagner and Charlotte Casiraghi, the actress Keira Knightley reading from Professions for Women, and the writer Jeanette Winterson expounding on Virginia’s lifelong mission to drive off the patriarchy.
It’s the “angel in the house” reference that hits you like a dart. Virginia took this phrase from the “Angel in the House” poem by Coventry Patmore. I’ll let her take the narrative from here, and I will see you on the other side:
Articles have to be about something. Mine, I seem to remember, was about a novel by a famous man. And while I was writing this review, I discovered that if I were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And the phantom was a woman, and when I came to know her better I called her after the heroine of a famous poem, The Angel in the House. It was she who used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her. You who come of a younger and happier generation may not have heard of her—you may not know what I mean by the Angel in the House. I will describe her as shortly as I can. 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. Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty—her blushes, her great grace. In those days—the last of Queen Victoria—every house had its Angel. And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room. Directly, that is to say, I took my pen in my hand to review that novel by a famous man, she slipped behind me and whispered: "My dear, you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure." And she made as if to guide my pen. I now record the one act for which I take some credit to myself, though the credit rightly belongs to some excellent ancestors of mine who left me a certain sum of money—shall we say five hundred pounds a year?—so that it was not necessary for me to depend solely on charm for my living. I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defence. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must—to put it bluntly—tell lies if they are to succeed. Thus, whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping back when I thought I had despatched her. Though I flatter myself that I killed her in the end, the struggle was severe; it took much time that had better have been spent upon learning Greek grammar; or in roaming the world in search of adventures. But it was a real experience; it was an experience that was bound to befall all women writers at that time. Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.8
The Angel in the House is a phantom that probably lives in every woman’s mind. It’s the voice telling you to think of others before yourself. We inherit this phantom from the women who nurtured us; it haunts us as it haunted them. It fills us with a compelling urge to deny our true feelings, whims, and desires. If you’re a man, the Angel does not bother you. Men have always been free of her, and yet they’ve always had the benefit of her. It’s the woman, not the man, who is, generation after generation, called on to supply the body for the Angel in the House. Men do not know what to do without her and yet they never think about her; the Angel takes care of them, but does not interfere in their mental faculties. Virginia Woolf argued that because a man has always been free to live his life without an Angel of the House to haunt his mind and taunt his activities, he lives more creatively and productively than a woman does. Only when a woman learns to kill the Angel in the House (and that doesn’t mean she stops cleaning her house; it just means that she stops sacrificing her free expression to the needs of others) can she achieve her fullest creative potential. Until a woman claims a ROOM OF HER OWN, just as men have done for all time, and will always do, she cannot fully realize her highest and truest being. I’m merging the “angel in the house” metaphor with another famous pair of speeches delivered by her—published as A Room of One’s Own by Hogarth Press (the company she founded with her husband) in 1929. All of these talks from Virginia Woolf remind us of the mental prisons that constantly threaten to keep women from our full creative power. Our minds do not belong in the constraints of the physical form. Our minds can go anywhere, imagine anything, and become anything. Dare to imagine, dare to dream!
Women are still haunted and taunted by the Angel in the House, even in 2023. Emancipation from the “angel” is a constant struggle. Keira and Charlotte, both mothers of young children, were equally struck by the connection between the “Angel in the House” and the timeless pressure on mothers—pressure on a woman to be everything, to give everything to her child, and the guilt that a woman feels if she fails in that. Like Virginia said, “It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.” The Angel constantly creeps back into a woman’s mind. The Angel wants a woman to lie to the world and to herself about who she is, what she feels, what she thinks. The Angel implores you to be the perfect self-sacrificing mother, the multitasker, the juggler, the shapeshifter, the perfectionist. The Angel implores you to hide your suffering, to change your appearance as you age.
So who is afraid of Virginia Woolf? In the Literary Rendezvous (video below, audio above) Charlotte Casiraghi asked that very question with a smirk—obviously pleased by her intentional pun! Charlotte echoed the thoughts of my own brain as she spoke about the difficulty of reading Virginia Woolf until you can learn to appreciate the nonlinear stream of consciousness. More than once in the podcast, there was some mention or allusion to this narrative style—the natural stream of human thought. Charlotte made the point that if you try to read one of Virginia’s novels from start to finish, in proper order, digesting every word, you might understandably become confused and frustrated; but if you treat it as poetry and approach it in a nonlinear way, taking it in random bites, you might begin to appreciate its poetic beauty. It was Jeanette Winterson who, in another moment during the podcast, pointed out that our brains do not naturally think in a linear way. We’re often trying to force our brains to think that way, but our memories and thoughts don’t actually work in a point-A-to-B framework. Our thoughts are messy! Our memories jump around! And so Virginia Woolf really taps into our brains’ natural rhythms. We just have to relax enough to fall into it! So, please, don’t be afraid of Virginia Woolf!
I’ll add just two more episodes from the Rendezvous—first, the American debut. Siri Hustvedt & Rachel Eliza Griffiths sat down in NYC’s Metrograph Theatre to talk to Charlotte Casiraghi & Erica Wagner.
And secondly, a Summer Reading episode in Monaco, with Charlotte and Erica discussing four books on the theme of female empowerment.
Keira Knightley: Pages 60-71, Les Rendez-vous Littéraires Rue Cambon. Supplement to System Magazine Issue 18. December 2021.
Fanny Arama: “Gabrielle Channel and literature.” Les Rendez-vous Littéraires Rue Cambon. System Magazine supplement. December 2021.
Erica Wagner: “‘Virginia Woolf’s vision, for women, for culture, marks a path that CHANEL will continue to take.” Les Rendez-vous Littéraires Rue Cambon. System Magazine supplement. December 2021.
ibid.
See note 2.
This passage has been transcribed from: http://www.somanybooks.org/eng239/Woolf.htm