Professions for Women － Virginia Woolf

1. Professions for Women－ Virginia Woolf

2. The Victorian ideology of Femininity • The French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose demands for human liberty had been influential upon a number of movements for political reform, forcefully articulated some of the most restrictive tenets of what can be called the nineteenth century’s ideology of femininity. ‘The whole education of women ought to be relative to men. To please them, to console them, and to make life sweet and agreeable to them – these are the duties of women at all times, and what should be taught them from their infancy.’

3. The Victorian ideology of Femininity • The ideal women he thus envisioned – a pure, decorous, and even angelic creature – was only one particularly notable representative of a standard against which every middle- and upper-class woman’s conduct was measured, and other writers, female as well as male, elaborated upon the virtues of such an ideal. • In 1854, in a long and very popular poem, ‘The Angle in the House’, Coventry Patmore described such selflessness more extravagantly, Man must be pleased, but him to please Is woman’s pleasure; down the gulf Of his condoled necessities She casts her best, she flings herself….

4. The model woman was an angel or a queen • She must appear delicate, frail, ethereal. She must look and act like a fragile creature. • A good woman was essentially passionless: if men were beasts ruled by sexual desire, their pure wives and daughters knew nothing of such matters. It was generally agreed that on her wedding night, the angelic virgin should in one way or another behave as Queen Victoria was said to have: close her eyes and think of England. • Otherwise, a woman was in danger of becoming a ‘fallen woman’.

5. Fanny Burney (1752 –1840) At 15, burned early writing because her stepmother felt that a reputation for scribbling would harm the girl’s marriage prospects and because she herself was early impressed ‘with ideas that fastened degradation to this class of composition’ then, as now, called the novel. • Evelina (1778)‘Explored the social development of a heroine who proves herself worthy of her well-born suitor’. • Cecilia; or Memoirs of an Heiress (1782) ‘Analysized the social and economic problems of women’ • Tried to raise the status of the novel by combining verisimilitude with instructions.

6. Aphra Behn (1640 –1689) • Spy and playwright, traveler and wit, Aphra Behn was England’s first professional woman writer. In a age when many women of letters were intellectual aristocrats who claimed to write only for pleasure and ‘fame’ among their friends, Behn was a middle-class widow who frankly wrote for money and public acclaim. • In 1666, she entered the intelligence service of King Charles II, when such public toils of state affairs were unusual with her sex. She carried out her mission remarkably well, but was never paid properly. So she ended up spending some time in 1668 in a London debtors’ prison, which decided her upon what was, for a woman, an unprecedented step: writing for money. She became a professional and highly productive playwright.

7. Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) • She was more rigorously and formally educated than most women of her time. She was precociously and independently interested in economic topics • Her father's death in 1826 forced her to support her mother and herself by needlework and writing for the Globe on economic topics such as machinery and labor. • Illustrations of Political Economy, 1832-34 Illustrations of Taxation, 1834. Society in America, 1837. Retrospect of Western Travel. Deerbrook, 1839.

8. Jane Austen (1775 -1817) • She defined herself as a writer by self-consciously satirizing not only the female tradition in literature but also its effects on the growth and development of the female imagination. She comically criticized the overvaluation of love, the miseducation of women, the subterfuges of the marriage market, the rivalry among women for male approval, the female cult of weakness and dependency, the discrepancy between women’s private sphere and public (male) history.

9. George Eliot (1819-1880) • Eliot was aware that her identification with masculine achievement threatened to undermine her consciousness of herself as a woman. ‘You may try, but you cannot imagine what it is to have a man’s force of genius in you, yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl.’, said a heroin in her novel.

10. ‘I thought of that old gentleman, who is dead now, but was a bishop, I think, who declared that it was impossible for any woman, past, present, or to come, to have the genius of Shakespeare. …but what is true in it, so it seemed to me, reviewing the story of Shakespeare’s sister as I had made it, is that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.’

11. Questions • What problems does the author discuss through her two experiences? What figurative devices were employed? • What are the advantages for using metaphors? • What would left literally without the metaphors?

12. Metaphor (the similarity view) A metaphor is a departure from the literal use of language which serves as a condensed or elliptical simile, in that it involves an implicit comparison between two disparate things. This view assumes that the metaphor can be translated into a statement of literal similarity without loss of cognitive content. A metaphor serves mainly to enhance the rhetorical force and stylistic vividness and pleasantness of a discourse.

13. Metaphor (the interaction view) John is a pig. tenor vehicle A metaphor works by bringing together the disparate ‘thoughts’ of the vehicle and tenor so as to effect a meaning that is a resultant of their interaction and that cannot be duplicated by literal assertions of a similarity between the two elements. Metaphor cannot be viewed simply as a rhetorical or poetic departure from ordinary usage, in that it permeates all language and affects the ways we perceive and conceive the world.

14. Metaphor (the cognitive view) • Rejects the assumption in many earlier theories of metaphor that the ordinary, normal use of language is literal, from which metaphor is a deviation for special rhetorical and poetic purposes. It claims that the ordinary use of language is pervasively and indispensably metaphorical, and that metaphor persistently and profoundly structures the ways human beings perceive, what they know, and how they think. • In using and understanding a metaphor, part of the conceptual structure of the source domain is ‘mapped’ onto the conceptual structure of the target domain, in a one-way ‘transaction’ which may serve to alter and re-organize the way we perceive or think about the latter element.

15. Rhetorical question • A rhetorical question is a sentence in the grammatical form of a question which is not asked in order to request information or to invite a reply, but to achieve a greater expressive force than a direct assertion. (1) Isn’t it a shame? It is a shame. (2) O, Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? • In terms of modern speech-act theory, its ‘illocutionary force’ is not to question but to assert. • The figure is often used in persuasive discourse, and tends to impart an oratorical tone to an utterance

16. Personification • Personification is a figure in which either an inanimate object or an abstract concept is spoken of as though it were endowed with life or with human attributes or feelings. Sky lowered, and muttering thunder, some sad drops Wept at completing of the mortal sin. (Milton, Paradise Lost – as Adam bit into the fatal apple)

17. 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. 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. • In those days – the last of Queen Victoria –every house had its Angel. • She slipped behind me and whispered… And she made as if to guide my pen. • I turned upon her and caught her bythe throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse,… would be that I acted in self-defence. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. • 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. She died hard.

18. I, a woman writer who wants to review a man’s novel. I have a mind of my own. I have five hundred pounds a year so that I don’t have to depend solely on charm for my living. I want to express what I think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. The Angel in the House, a Model woman representing the Victorian ideology of femininity. ‘Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Above all, be pure.’ She never has a mind or wish of her own. These questions cannot be dealt with freely and openly by woman. Killing the Angel in the House

19. Came between me and my paper. Bothered me and wasted my time and tormented me Shadow of her wings fell on my page; the rustling of her skirts in the room Slipped behind me and whispered Would have killed me; would have plucked the heart out of my writing. Died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. She always crept back. I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. I acted in self-defence. I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. I dispatched her. It’s far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. I flatter myself that I killed her in the end. Killing the Angel in the House

20. Do a battle with a phantom. The phantom was a woman….the Angel in the House • With this metaphor, the author invites us to look at her struggle to free herself from the Victorian ideology of femininity as a severe battle between enemies. And the enemy has complicated natures. Describing the enemy as a phantom, she allows the reader to imagine the great difficulty in fighting an intangible enemy. By personifying the traditional ideology of femininity as the Angel in the house, the author left a powerful impression upon the reader, for they can feel its existence and its each and every movement.

21. Meaning of ‘Arts and Cats’ • Arts: 1. She excelled in the difficult arts of life. 2. Use all the arts and wiles of our sex. 3. I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill. • Cat: 1. But to show you how little I deserve to be called a professional woman, …I went out and bought a cat – a beautiful cat, a Persian cat. 2. What could be easier than to write articles and to buy Persian cats with the profits? 3. I made one pound ten and six by my first review; and I bought a Persian cat with the proceeds. Then I grew ambitious. A Persian cat is all very well, I said; but a Persian cat is not enough. I must have a motor car.

22. questions • What is a novelist’s state of mind? • Why does the author use the metaphor of fishing to describe her state of mind? In what way does the image of a fisherman at a deep lake fit the situation of a woman writer? • What was the problem discussed in the second experience?

23. The fisherman at a deep lake perfectly fits the situation the author is trying to describe. Outwardly, the lake appears deadly calm, and the fisherman sunk in dreams – calm, too. Beneath the surface of the water, there are big fish as well as hard stones, hidden in darkness. The line may go deep into the water to catch the biggest fish or, to crash on a hard rock. Inside the fisherman/writer, there are conflicting thoughts. That is, the freest imagination that, according to traditional thinking, should be held privately and not dealt with in public, as well as the awareness of the consequences of revealing the imagination to the public. Through this metaphor the reader perceives that the truth about body and passion and sex is forced into darkness by traditional values of femininity. And within the woman writer herself, the wish to explore the forbidden topic and the awareness of the double standards men have against women tears her asunder.

24. To sum up the two experiences, while the first experience is a fight against something outside – the phantom, or the Angel in the house, the second experience is about the inner struggle between the conflicting ideas within the writer herself.