The phrase 'Angel in the House' comes from the title of an immensely popular poem by Coventry Patmore." (Lewis). The only proper place for a respectable woman was in the home, providing care, nurturance and comfort to her husband and children.
Despite the view that nineteenth-century society had on women, Edna Pontellier understood that the marriage she was in was not what she wanted in life. Once married, in the nineteenth-century, women were completely dependent on their husbands; she [women] essentially become "an empty vessel, without legal or emotional existence of her own" (Welter 3). Women were viewed as a piece of property bound by the wedding ring. We see this in Kate Chopin's writing when Edna "stopped, and taking off her wedding ring, flung it upon the carpet. When she saw it lying there, she stamped her heel upon it, striving to crush it. But her small boot heel did not make an indenture, not a mark upon the little glittering circlet" (Chopin 50-51). In some ways, this is symbolic in the fact that she was trying to break the binding contract that her ring represented. Once she became married to Lance Pontellier, Edna's husband, she became his property. "In the eyes of the law, women did not exist as legal beings in their own right. Their persons were 'merged' or under the direction of first their fathers, and on marriage, their husbands [if unmarried, their brothers also]. They were termed to be under coverture, literally translated as 'covered'" (Lewis). The best example of this in Kate Chopin's The Awakening is when Leonce Pontellier says " 'You are burnt beyond recognition,'looking at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage" (Chopin 4). .
"Another time she would have gone in at his request. She would, through habit, have yielded to his desire; not with any sense of submission or obedience to his compelling wishes, but unthinkingly, as we walk, move, sit, stand, go through the daily treadmill of the life which has been portioned out to us.
