The second angel in the house: Disruption of domestic ideology in the literature of nineteenth-century Great Britain and the United States

This study focuses on nineteenth-century remarriages, which complicate the stereotype of the domestic "angel in the house," by comparing the second spouse to the first. Such comparison contributes to a competitive discourse of remarriage that interacts with other discursive practices and reveals the "limited" agency of second wives and remarried widows--second "angels" and "angels" for a second time.;Using Pierre Bourdieu's ideas of capital and symbolic power, this study examines middle-class women's struggles for subject positions and agency in nineteenth-century Britain and America as reproduced in the literature of five women authors. In their works, these authors develop a competitive discourse of remarriage that bespeaks women's secondary social status, reveals the "second rate" nature of remarriage, and disrupts domestic ideals of "angelic" management and sisterly affection among women. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Louisa May Alcott's Work and "Behind a Mask" consider how a woman negotiates her position from lowly governess to (second) wife in courtship and remarriage practice. Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and George Eliot's Middlemarch contextualize cultural codes of remarriage by portraying their interactions with laws concerning women's widowing or divorce, child custody, and property rights. Mary Wilkins Freeman questions the domestic ideal not just with her discussion of remarriage but with her use of the supernatural, which challenges accepted phenomena.;This study also considers nonliterary texts, such as marriage manuals, and borrows from the vocabulary and ideas discussed in twentieth-century works on remarriage. The social roles of second "angels" or "angels" for a second time and the discourse of remarriage provide points of focus by which to explore the sociohistorical power relations of women; the tensions between (re)marriage for material wealth and for love; the complicated nature of "replacement" in remarriage; and, to borrow from Rene Girard, the triangles which structure these signifying practices.