双语：Professions for Women（女人的职业）

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　　Professions for Women
        　　by Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
        　　Born in England, Virginia Woolf was the daughter of Leslie Stephen, a
well-known scholar. She was educated primarily at home and attributed her love
of reading to the early and complete access she was given to her father’s
library. With her husband, Leonard Woolf, she founded the Hogarth Press and
became known as member of the Bloomsbury group of intellectuals, which included
economist John Maynard Keynes, biographer Lytton Strachey, novelist E. M.
Forster, and art historian Clive Bell. Although she was a central figure in
London literary life, Woolf often saw herself as isolated from the mains stream
because she was a woman. Woolf is best known for her experimental, modernist
novels, including Mrs. Dalloway(1925) and To the Lighthouse(1927) which are
widely appreciated for her breakthrough into a new mode and technique--the
stream of consciousness. In her diary and critical essays she has much to say
about women and fiction. Her 1929 book A Room of One’s Own documents her desire
for women to take their rightful place in literary history and as an essayist
she has occupied a high place in 20th century literature. The common Reader
(1925 first series; 1932 second series) has acquired classic status. She also
wrote short stories and biographies. “Professions for Women” taken from The
collected Essays Vol 2. is originally a paper Woolf read to the Women’s Service
League, an organization for professional women in London.
        　　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 that 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 into 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 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 an 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 come off 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 draft she sat in it--in short she was so
constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, 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 my 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 art and wiles of our sex.
Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of our 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 five hundred
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 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. 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 took 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 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 succeeded, with that extremely important piece of
information.
            
            

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        　　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 motorcar. And it was thus that I became a
novelist--for it is a very strange thing that people will give you a motorcar 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 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 from her artist’s state of unconsciousness. She could
write no more. The trace 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 finding 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 revert 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 yourself 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.
        　　Questions for Comprehension and Consideration
        　　1. Woolf’s essay is titled “Professions for Women.” Which profession does
she discuss in detail? What reasons does Woolf give for finding writing a
comfortable profession for a woman to pursue? What do these reasons suggest
about the relationship between women, their families, and the world of work?
Woolf says, “Pianos and models, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, masters and
mistresses, are not needed by a writer.” What does she mean by saying that? What
actually does the author want to emphasize in the first paragraph? Do you detect
some bitterness in tone in the first paragraph? If you do, can you point out
where it lies? What is left unsaid here?
        　　2. What point does the writer make through the sardonic mention of her
Persian cat in paragraph 2?
        　　3. What metaphors are used in paragraph 3? Who is the Angel in the House?
What is her main qualities? Why did the Angel become symbolic of the emotional
trmoil Woolf experienced when trying to work ( writing reviews of men’s writing
for instance)? Who or what does the Angel represent? Why does the author take
great pains to describe the Angel and the killing of the Angel? What does the
author want to tell her audience in this paragrph? Write a dialogue between
Woolf and the Angel. Develop the connflict that leads up to the murder of the
Angel and reveals what Woolf learns during the struggle.
        　　4. In paragraph 4, Woolf asks, “What is a woman?” Explain her response to
this question and then work on your own definition. Try also to answer the
question “What is a man?” How is your definition different from your definition
of a woman? How do you explain the discrepancies?
        　　5. What problem did Woolf encounter when she moved from writing reviews to
writing novels? How does she use the analogy of the “fisherman lying sunk in
dreams” to explain the problem she was facing? Who does the fisherman represent?
The line racing through the girl’s fingers? The smash? What is the “something
hard” that the imagination smashes against?
        　　5. What conclusion does the author come to in paragraph 6?
        　　6. Note the relationship between paragraph 6 and paragraph 7. The author
might well have stopped at paragraph 6 or after the fourth sentence of paragraph
7, but she goes on and introduces something new. What is it? How is the theme
broadened and deepened at the end of the essay with the series of questions the
author raises on the rooms women occupy (or will occupy) “in the house hitherto
exclusively owned by men.” Woolf wrote “Professions for Women” in 1931; how
would you answer her questions today, from the perspective of the 1990s?
        　　7. How does the essay impress you as a whole? How does the last paragraph
impress you? Give your reasons.