Woolf

Virginia Woolf (e-text)

Even the beginning of this excerpt is a tribute to the power of women. Woolf claims that it was easy for her to become a journalist: “She had only to move the pen from left to right--from ten o’clock to one. Then it occurred to her to do what was simple and cheap enough after all--to slip a few of those pages into an envelope, fix a penny stamp in the corner, and drop the envelope into the red box at the corner.” Her easy transition into writer essentially refutes the common prejudices against women in professional or “men’s” occupations. Her only remorse was that, at first, she did not know the struggles of professional women, and with her first wages bought a cat instead of paying bills.

Woolf’s battle with a certain phantom she calls The Angel in the House is truly the main theme of this excerpt. This allusion to a poem of the same name by Coventry Patmore gives her phantom the character of the “perfect Victorian woman” who is meek, domestic, subservient, and judged by surface material. This angel “excelled in the arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. 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.“ Woolf’s Angel is the descendent of these beliefs. Her fight is with modern societal prejudices against the ability and roles of women. This angel is a personification of the social identity that was ingrained into Woolf ,and many other women of her time, since birth. But in oder to succeed in her journalist career, Woolf had to thoroughly shed these hindering beliefs. Or as she puts it, she had to kill the angel.

The killing of these beliefs was an act of self defense to Woolf: “Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart right out of my writing.” Identifying as one with her writing, Woolf realizes that internalizing the beliefs of her phantom would have been the death of her writing and of herself. Internalizing unjust beliefs is demoralizing and perpetuates a cycle of sex based inequality., which is exactly what Woolf and her contemporaries fought against. This struggle to her was in a sense a waste of time. She had to spend precious moments fighting for an equality that should have been a natural right instead of learning a new language or seeking adventures but in her words “Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.”