(Brown, Gillian. “From Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in the Nineteenth-Century America.” Theory of the Novel. Ed. Michael McKeon. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. 467-475. Print.)
“In the feminist exegesis of American cultural archetypes, the housewife, whom the prototypical canonical literature (and criticism) would evade, signifies a reformist rather than conformist ethos. As the Angel in the House, the woman at home exemplified ideal values and presided over a superior, moral economy...domesticity constitutes an alternative to, and escape from, the masculine economic order.” (479)
