Helping Virginia Woolf to Kill the Angel in the House: What we can learn from theological feminist’s insights to deconstruct ‘the Angel in the House’.

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how insights from theological feminists can be helpful in deconstructing the myth of ‘the Angel in the House’ as portrayed by Virginia Woolf. Two methods, the imaginative interpretation method and the executive method, are discussed in detail to establish in what way they can contribute to the deconstruction of the myth. The focus of the analysis of the methods was to examine how they provide insights in dichotomies and the power relationships that are included within them. The thesis first examines how myths operate in general in order to gain an understanding of how the myth of ‘the Angel in the House’ is constructed. The focus hereby lies in the question of what makes a myth problematic. This concluded in the importance of the role of dichotomies and patriarchal structures. Eventually the insights gained by the analyses of the two methods were applied to the myth of ‘the Angel in the House’. This involved drawing upon the knowledge of the question of how a myth is problematic. It was concluded that the imaginative interpretation method was not able to deconstruct the whole myth of ‘the Angel in the House’ and only had an effect on changing the dichotomy. The executive method was partly helpful in deconstructing the myth, but only if it was based on certain insights that the method provided.