TOW #5 - "Professions For Women" by Virginia Woolf (Written Text)

             In a speech delivered to the Women’s Service League by Virginia Woolf, a novelist and critic who has provided psychological insight through her works in the past, she speaks to the group with the intention of convincing members to share their experiences regarding joining new fields of works that were exclusive to men. By sharing their experiences, she hopes that it would aid in gradually destroying mental obstacles that women face constantly since many would soon begin to assist each other in getting through what may become common struggles among them. Through this method, she wants women to find more comfort in their chosen places in society and less tentativeness, and she starts off the idea with experiences of her own as a woman writer.

            With the objective to persuade, Woolf starts off the speech by discrediting herself as a completely reliable source for a look into the struggles of women. In the very first paragraph, she states, “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” (Woolf 525). By getting this point across and establishing it in the very beginning, Woolf uses the organization of her text that way in order to return to this point later in her speech. If she is able to make the audience believe that her profession is a more lenient one towards women, then she is able to more properly convince them when she asks them to try comparing her supposedly easygoing field of work to the more underdeveloped fields in which women are just starting to get a feel for things within.

            Woolf also alludes to a poem by Coventry Patmore called “The Angel in the House” in order to bring the concept of an idea into perspective for those who may not understand. The poem itself speaks about the ideal image of a woman in the form of the Angel, and Woolf uses Her in the form of her first experience. While writing a review, she claims to have been haunted by a phantom, the Angel, and in order to escape Her whispers of being an ideal and pure, Woolf kills her. “Had I not killed her,” Woolf insisted, “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” (Woolf 526). The Angel, also being a symbol for the traditional expectations of women, is the first obstacle Woolf revealed to have hopefully overcome in her career. Her allusion helps the audience understand the situation she speaks of, being pressed down by gender roles, much more easily, and they can more quickly relate as, during their time, it was only more recent in their perspective that women were starting to be allowed in all fields of work. This would help coax other women into sharing their experiences as well if they have a sense of familiarity in the community and can believe that their knowledge will also be relatable as well as useful among their group.

            Finally, Woolf uses parallelism between the experiences of men and women while writing to further her point. While this second professional experience becomes more specific to writers, it still carries the overall idea she tries to convey. She confesses that a writer’s “chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible”. She describes that ideal state of mind, but the only pronoun used in the description consists of “He”. She then moves on to acknowledge that, feigning a hypothesis that ‘she’ could be interchangeable with ‘he’ in that description since all writers are supposedly the same, but instead she asks the audience to imagine a girl writing in that unconscious-like state. “Now came the experience, the experience that I believe to be far commoner with women writers than with men,” Woolf explained, “The line had raced through the girl’s fingers. Her imagination had rushed away… And then there was a smash. There was an explosion. There was a foam of confusion. The imagination had dashed itself against something hard. The girl was roused from her dream” (Woolf 527-528). This use of contrasting the girl’s erratic writing process with the much smoother writing process of the man, Woolf is able to emphasize the extent to which a man’s expectation, the later explained dashing against the rock, inhibits the abilities of women. With this emphasis, Woolf can show that she knows what it is like to be stopped from expressing oneself based on what outside influences may think, the outside influence in this case being men, and is able to possibly evoke a sense of empathy in her audience who would most likely know what it is like being in that position. The mutual understanding helps to possibly achieve Woolf’s goal in convincing her audience to begin sharing their experiences with one another in order to solve these issues collectively as a whole and overcome them together.

            Overall, by using these different devices, it would seem highly likely for Woolf to have garnered the desired effect with her audience, and I feel as though she was very clever in expressing her ideas and intentions through her speech.