Talk:The Angel in the House

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Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 10:58, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

User:Gendervictorian

Please stop pasting in text which in wholly uncited to Angel in the House. There are bracketed references to "sources" that are not in the article. The whole text appears to have been cut and pasted from something, an essay perhaps. Frankly, it appears to me to be very simplistic and one-sided, to say the least, but such assertions simply cannot be included unless they are properly cited. Paul B (talk) 18:35, 2 March 2013 (UTC)

Please see W:CITE, WP:NPOV and WP:MOS. Paul B (talk) 09:41, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

The sources are cited below in the References. The problem is that the citations aren't in Wikipedia style. Rather than deleting all that text, you should simply change the citations to Wikipedia-style citations. --Nbauman (talk) 20:33, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

What are you talking about? The text referred to in the message from 2013 is long gone, and was very poor anyway. Paul B (talk) 20:41, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

This page hasn't been that active since 2013. I checked the page history to see what people wrote before. I was looking for some kind of analysis and the deleted material was better than nothing. It was deleted because it was poorly sourced. I'm saying that it was properly sourced; the only problem was that the citations weren't in Wikipedia format.

Now there's almost no analysis. There's a paragraph about how Virginia Woolf and other feminist writers played against the stereotype, but the article doesn't describe the original stereotype so that readers can understand what Woolf was playing against.

"Poor" is subjective. It sounded like the usual sources an undergraduate uses when writing a paper. Do you have better sources? What are they?--Nbauman (talk) 18:33, 25 February 2015 (UTC)

Part of the problem is that when undergraduates write about "the angel in the house" they are not really writing about the poem, but rather a set of stereotypical ideas about supposed "victorian" conceptions of femininity, derived from various sources. The phrase is just used to stand for that. And yes, it did read like an undergraduate essay. It was full of cliches about the Victorians, which I, as a specialist in the period, did find very tedious. Nothing Gendervictorian's contributions was actually about the poem at all. If one wants to write about Victorian-era conceptions of femininity create an article on that topic. Paul B (talk) 19:14, 25 February 2015 (UTC)

One of the strengths/weaknesses of Wikipedia is that we don't write about our own ideas (which is WP:OR), but we write about the ideas of WP:RSs, which include scholarly journals and books. Peterson, 1984, "No Angels in the House: The Victorian Myth and the Paget Women", The American Historical Review, looks like a WP:RS about the poem.

If the ideas in those books and articles are a set of stereotypical ideas about the supposed victorian conceptions of femininity, and there are many of them, then under WP:WEIGHT that's what goes into Wikipedia, unless there is a consensus otherwise.

If you think those stereotypes don't don't accurately reflect the victorian conceptions of femininity, then you are free to add other authors who have an accurate idea of victorian conceptions of femininity, and I'd like to see it. But you can't just delete ideas that you think are cliches or tedious.

As you probably know by now, the fact that you are a specialist in the victorians doesn't carry much weight in Wikipedia. You certainly can't delete the ideas of other specialists that you disagree with. However, it should help you find better WP:RSs which you can add.--Nbauman (talk) 23:58, 26 February 2015 (UTC)