Passage Analysis #1-"Professions for Women"

“Professions For Women”-Virginia Woolf 

What could be easier than to write articles and to buy Persian cats with the profits? (2) But wait a moment. (3) Articles have to be about something. (4) Mine, I seem to remember, was about a novel by a famous man. (5) And while I was writing this review, I discovered [that if I were going to review books] I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. (6) And the phantom was a woman, and when I came to know her better I called her after the heroine of a famous poem, The Angel in the House. (7) It was she who used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. (8) It was also she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her. (9) You who come of a younger and happier generation may not have heard of her—you may not know what I mean by the Angel in the House. (10) I will describe her as shortly as I can. (11) She was intensely sympathetic. (12) She was immensely charming. (13) She was utterly unselfish. (14) She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. (15) She sacrificed herself daily. (16) If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it—in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. (17) Above all—I need not say it—she was pure. (18) Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty—her blushes, her great grace. (19) In those days—the last of Queen Victoria—every house had its Angel. (20) And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words. (21) The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room. (22) Directly, that is to say, I took my pen in my hand to review that novel by a famous man, she slipped behind me and whispered: {‘My dear, you are a young woman. (23) You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. (24) Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. (25) Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. (26) Above all, be pure.’} (27) And she made as if to guide my pen. (28) I now record on that one act for which I take some credit to myself, though the credit rightly belongs to some excellent ancestors of mine who left me a certain sum of money—shall we say five hundred pounds a year?—so that it was not necessary for me to depend solely on charm for my living. (29) I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. (30) I did my best to kill her. (31) My excuse, if I were to be had up I n a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defense. (32) Had I not killed her she would have killed me. (33) She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. (34) For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of you own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. (35) And all these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must to put it bluntly tell lies if they are to succeed. (36) Thus, whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. (37) It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. (38) She was always creeping back when I thought I had despatched her. (39) Though I flatter myself that I killed her in the end, the struggle was severe; it took much time that had better have been spent upon learning Greek grammar; or in roaming the world in search of adventures. (40) But it was a real experience; it was an experience that was found to befall all women writers at the time. (41) Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a women writer.

             This paragraph shows up in Woolf’s essay “Professions for Women.” As a whole, this essay expresses what came to Woolf’s mind when she was asked to talk about her experience as a professional woman, and through this she brings up a common struggle woman writers might. This struggle has to do with women following a set standard for their writing that was acceptable for their gender (she is writing on a time when women were held by many boundaries), and by writing like this falseness is what appears on the page; ones real thoughts and feeling aren’t truly shown. In this particular paragraph, which appears third in the essay, Woolf personifies that struggle.

            The first thing that stands out about this paragraph is its size. Woolf is defining a struggle, a conflict. Conflicts aren’t short and sweet, they take time to figure out and resolve and thus the length in a way represents working out a problem. The next thing to stand out is this personified struggle. Woolf defines this struggle as being “The Angel in the House” (451), the woman who was always there whispering in her ear that she needed to put up a front when she wrote, and this is the women that Woolf set out to destroy.

            Some of the smaller elements I noticed was in sentence ten when she says how she will try to define The Angel in the House in a concise manner and then proceeds with five very short back to back sentences. She also switches from “I” to “you”, relating not only her own experience but at the same time making the reader feel as though the essay is directed at them.