|
And here, for everyone's erudition, is a transcription of a speech
Virginia Woolf gave to the Women's Service League, 1931 . . . all
typos are my fault . . . it's quite long so you might want to
print it out.
======================================================
When your secretary invited me to come here, she told me that your
Society is concerned with the employment of women and she
suggested that I might tell you something about my own
professional experiences. It is true I am a woman; it is true I am
employed; but what professional experiences have I had? It is
difficult to say. My profession is literature; and in that
profession there are fewer experiences for women than in any
other, with the exception of the stage -- fewer, I mean, that are
peculiar to women. For the road was cut many years ago -- by
Fanny Burney, by Aphra Behn, by Harriet Martineau, by Jane
Austen, by George Eliot -- many famous women, and many more
unknown and forgotten, have been before me, making the path
smooth, and regulating my steps. |Thus, when I came to write,
there were very few material obstacles in my way. Writing was a
reputable and harmless occupation. The family peace was not
broken by the scratching of a pen. No demand was made upon the
family ;purse. For ten and sixpence one can buy paper enough to
write all the plays of Shakespeare -- if one has a mind that way.
Pianos and models, Paris, Vienna and Berlin, masters and
mistresses, are not needed by a writer. The cheapness of writing
paper is, of course, the reason why women have succeeded as
writers before they have succeeded in the other professions.
But to tell you my story -- it is a simple one. You have only got
to figure to yourselves a girl in a bedroom with a pen in her
hand. She had only to move that pen from left to right -- from
ten o'clock to one. Then it occurred to her to do what is 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
in the red box at the corner. IT was thus that I became a
journalist; and my effort was rewarded on the first day of the
following month -- a very glorious day it was for me -- by a
letter from an editor containing a check for one pound ten
shillings and sixpence. But to show you how little I deserve to be
called a professional woman, how little I know of the struggles
and difficulties of such lives, I have to admit that instead of
spending that sum upon bread and butter, rent, shoes and
stockings, or butcher's bills, I went out and bought a cat -- a
beautiful cat, a Persian cat, which very soon involved me in
bitter disputes with my neighbors.
What could be easier than to write articles and to buy Persian
cats with the profits? But wait a moment. Articles have to be
about something. Mine, I seem to remember, was about a novel by a
a famous man. 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. It was she who used to come between
me and my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who
bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I
killed her. You who have 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. I will describe her as shortly as I can. She
was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was
utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult 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 a wish of her
own,m but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes
of others. Above all -- I need not say it -- she was pure. Her
purity was supposed to be her chief beauty -- her blushes, her
great grace. In those days -- the last of Queen Victoria -- every
house had its Angel. And when I came to write I encountered her
with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my
page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room. Directly,
that is to say, I took my pen in hand to review that novel by a
famous man, she slipped behind me and whispered: "My dear, you
are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been
written by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive;
use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess
that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure." And she
made as if to guide my pen. I now record the 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 500 pounds a year? -- so that it was not
necessary for me to depend solely on charm for my living. I
turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to
kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law,
would be that I acted in self-defense. Had I not killed her she
would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my
writing. For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot
review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without
expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations,
morality, sex. And all those questions, according to the Angel in
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. 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. Her
fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far
harder to kill a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping
back when I thought I had dispatched her. Though I flatter myself
that I killed her in the end, the struggle was severe; it too much
time that had better have been spent upon learning Greek grammar;
or in roaming the world in search of adventures. But it was a
real experience; it was an experience that was bound to befall all
women writers at that time. Killing the Angel in the House was
part of the occupation of a woman writer.
But to continue my story. The Angel was dead; what then remained?
You may say that what remained was a simple and common object -- a
young woman in a bedroom with an inkpot. In other words, now that
she had rid herself of falsehood, that young woman had only to be
herself. Ah, but what is 'herself'? I mean, what is a woman? I
assure you, I do not know. I do not believe that you know. I do
not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself
in all the arts and professions open to human skill. That indeed
is one of the reasons why I have come here -- out of respect for
you, who are in process of showing us by your experiments what a
woman is, who are in process of providing us, by your failures and
successes, with that extremely important piece of information.
But to continue the story of my professional experiences. 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. And it was thus that I became a novelist --
for it is a very good thing that people will give you a motor car
if you will tell them a story. It is a still stranger thing that
there is nothing so delightful in the world as telling stories.
It is far pleasanter than writing reviews of famous novels. And
yet, if I am to obey your secretary and tell you my professional
experiences as a novelist, I must tell you about a very strange
experience that befell me as a novelist. And to understand it you
must try first to imagine a novelist's state of mind. I hope I am
not giving away professional secrets if I say that a novelist's
chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to
induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to
proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the
same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day
after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing
may break the illusion in which he is living -- so that nothing
may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings
round, darts, dashes and sudden discoveries of that very shy and
illusive spirit, the imagination. I suspect that this state is
the same both for men and women. Be that as it may, I want you to
imagine me writing a novel in a state of trance. I want you to figure
to yourselves a girl sitting with a pen in her hand, which for
minutes, and indeed for hours, she never dips into the inkpot.
The image that comes to my mind when I think of this girl is the
image of a fisherman lying sunk in dreams on the verge of a deep
lake with a rod held out over the water. She was letting her
imagination sweep unchecked round every rock and cranny of the
world that lies submerged in the depths of our unconscious being.
Now came the experience, the experience that I believe to be far
commoner with women writers than with men. The line raced through
the girl's fingers. Her imagination had rushed away. It had
sought the pools, the depths, the dark places where the largest
fish slumber. And then there was a smash. There was an
explosion. There was foam and confusion. The imagination had
dashed itself against something hard. The girl was roused from
her dream. She was indeed in a state of the most acute and
difficult distress. To speak without figure she had thought of
something, something about the body, about the passions which it
was unfitting for her as a woman to say. Men, her reason told
her, would be shocked. The consciousness of what men will say of
a woman who speaks the truth about her passions had roused her
form her artist's state of unconsciousness. She could write no
more. The trance was over. Her imagination could work no longer.
This I believe to be a very common experience with women writers
-- they are impeded by the extreme conventionality of the other
sex. For though men sensibly allow themselves great freedom in
these respects, I doubt that they realize or can control the
extreme severity with which they condemn such freedom in women.
These then were two very genuine experiences of my own. These
were two of the adventures of my professional life. The first --
killing the Angel in the House -- I think I solved. She died.
But the second, telling the truth about my own experiences as a
body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved
it yet. The obstacles against her are still immensely powerful --
and yet they are very difficult to define. outwardly, what is
simpler than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there
for a woman rather than for a man? Inwardly, I think., the case
is very different' she has still many ghosts to fight, many
prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I
think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without fining
a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against. And if this
is so in literature, the freest of all professions for women, how
is it in the new professions which you are now for the first time
entering?
Those are the questions that I should like, had I time , to ask
you. And indeed, if I have laid stress upon these professional
experiences of mine, it is because I believe that they are, though
in different forms, yours also. Even when the path is nominally
open -- when there is nothing to prevent a woman from being a
doctor, a lawyer, a civil servant -- there are many phantoms and
obstacles, as I believe, looming in her way. To discuss and
define them is I think of great value and importance; for thus
only can the labor be shared, the difficulties be solved. But
besides this, it is necessary also to discuss the ends and the
aims for which we are fighting, for which we are doing battle with
these formidable obstacles. Those aims cannot be taken for
granted; they must be perpetually questioned and examined. The
whole position, as I see it -- here in this hall surrounded by
women practicing for the first time in history I know not how many
different professions =-- is one of extraordinary interest and
importance. You have won rooms of your own in the house hitherto
exclusively owned by men. You are able, though not without great
labor and effort, to pay the rent. You are earning your five
hundred pounds a year. But this freedom is only a beginning; the
room is your own, but it is still bare. It has to be furnished;
it has to be decorated; it has to be shared. How are you going to
furnish it, how are you going to decorate it? With whom are you
going to share it, and upon what terms? These, I think, are
questions of the utmost importance and interest. For the first
time in history you are able to ask them; for the first time you
are able to decide for yourselves what the answers should be.
Willingly would I stay and discuss those questions and answers --
but not tonight. My time is up; and I must cease.
|