Sign Up Now
Get instant access to over 1 million+ study documents
OR
Already registered? click here to login
By creating your account, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and student honor code.
She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily." These language parallels anchor the audience's attention and stress Woolf's underlying feminist message. In addition to language parallels, Woolf also uses brilliant imagery and symbolism throughout the speech to convey the central ideas.
One of the main motifs in the speech is that of the Angel in the House. The Angel in the House symbolizes the suppression of women and their perpetual oppression by men. The angel comes to life in Woolf's speech, as she describes, "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.'"
Woolf symbolically kills the Angel in the House and tells her audience that all women must take responsibility for killing her too. "Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing." Saying this empowers her audience, and Woolf achieves one of her foremost goals of the speech in informing women that they have the power to extricate themselves from patriarchy. Men are not going to consider women...
"Professions for Women" is emotional and intense and yet Woolf does not slip into hyperbole because she does not need to. Her credibility as an author is evident in her deft use of diction. Her experiences as a woman bolster what she says, and the fact that patriarchy still prevails makes Woolf's speech still relevant. Therefore, the logos or logic of Woolf's speech is embedded in the very fact that what she says is true. Women are expected to be docile and sexless.
When Woolf delivered her speech to the National Society for Women's Service, universal suffrage was a newly won political right. Modern readers will appreciate the historical context and relevance of "Professions for Women," while being reminded that women still have a long way to go before achieving total equality. The speech raises several important questions for women in the 21st century. In what ways do women continue to censor themselves? In what ways do women continue to fulfill the role of the Angel in the House? Finally, how can women around the world empower themselves so that they can kill the Angel in the House too?
Work Cited
Woolf, Virginia. "Professions for Women."
Work Cited
Woolf, Virginia. "Professions for Women."
It would take an entire paper just to explicate all of the roles that women play today and how society has changed as a result. The point is that it has changed and that women play a much different role in literature today than they did even just a century ago during Woolf's time. Woolf saw just a glimpse into the social turn that has led to the present
Virginia Wolf and "To the Lighthouse" Biographical Information Virginia Woolf is noted as one of the most influential female novelists of the twentieth century. She is often correlated to the American writer Willa Cather not because they were raised similarly or for any other reason than the style of their writing and their early feminist approach to the craft. Woolf, unlike Cather, was born to privilege, and was "ideally situated to appreciate
Mr. Forster, it seems, has a strong impulse to belong to both camps at once. He has many of the instincts and aptitudes of the pure artist (to adopt the old classification) -- an exquisite prose style, an acute sense of comedy, a power of creating characters in a few strokes which live in an atmosphere of their own; but he is at the same time highly conscious of
Virginia Woolf's "A Room of Her Own": War, Independence, and Identity "[a]s a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world" -Virginia Woolf The Chinese character for "crisis" is a combination of the words "danger" and "opportunity." It is often the case that when people are faced with hardship, they experience inward, mental, changes as a coping strategy to
Virginia Woolf to the Light House Biography of the author Virginia Woolf, the British author who made efforts towards making an original contribution to the structure of the novel, was an eminent writer of feminist essays, a critic writer in The Times Lierary Supplement and the prominent person in the Bloomsbury group. Virginia Woolf was born as the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Jackson Duckworth in London. Her father, Sir
Virginia Woolf's Final Novel -- and George Orwell Virginia Woolf's novel, Between The Acts was her final published work, and it would be reasonable for a reader who knows how she chose to end her life (by drowning herself in the River Ouse on March 28, 1941), to suspect that she committed suicide in part because she was in great despair over the frightening possibility of the Nazis being successful in