“Woolf’s “Professions for Women” was originally a speech given on 21 January 1931 to the London/ National Society for Women’s Service and later included in a shortened version in her posthumously published The Death of the Moth (1942). “Professions” has made the Victorian “angel in the house” a familiar figure, yet many readers seem to have missed the sly humor with which Woolf utilizes Coventry Patmore’s honorific image for womanhood. A mistake made early and repeated thereafter has been the assumption that Woolf succeeds in killing the angel in the house, as she claims to have done, where as her actual point is that she is indelibly stamped with the image and cannot destroy it.” (Blodgett).
So what is the Angel? What ideal is it asking women to live up to? Who is it asking them to be?
“The Angel, in short, is fully angelic: both unegotistically without pride and sexlessly without bodily desires or awareness. The Angel inhibits by reminding a writer to maintain the approved feminine image” (Blodgett).
The role of women in society was dramatically being altered during Virginia Woolf’s life time, but there were still many cultural stereotypes and limitations left over from the Victorian era and even before that inhibited women from being who they really were. These expectations are expertly explained with the use of the “Angel,” a figure from Coventry Patmore’s poem. In Woolf’s words the Angel 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 a 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, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all—I need to say it—she was pure” (Professions 2153).
What harm was the Angel? What effect would she have on Woolf that was so dramatic as to make her need to “kill” its influence?
“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” (2153).
The solution does not lie in the detection of the problem however. It is an ongoing process that can still be felt today, “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 labour be shared, the difficulties be solved” (2155).