Profesions of Women
Dreams Moving Forward If one thinks hard minded off goal, the goal will become difficult, but if one thinks easy minded of a goal, that goal can become a reality. In Virginia Wolf’s passage, “Professions for Women,” Wolf targets women to Inform them how limited they are In a population full of males. Her mall Idea Is to not let your conscious or others hold you from doing what you want to do. Wolf uses metaphors and imagery to support her concern during her controlled era.
Wolf begins by metaphorically describing a fisherman as if he was a girl alone next to a lake. She quotes, “l 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 (276). She patiently waits at the edge of the lake with a rod lined into the lake. Her goals are in the water and her rod is being used to catch her goals if she waits patiently. The fisherman is able to explore her “imagination” (276) without even thinking about it or letting anything get In her way.
Then her rod “dashed Itself against something hard” (276) and the girl was In a “dream” (276) and she was awoken. By describing owe the fisherman was a girl, Wolf Illustrates how a women could think of dreams and Inspirations, Just Like men, but then the dreams are ruined by knowing they wouldn’t come true due to the overpopulation of males during the time. She Is convinced that she would never meet her aspirations just because of the opposite sex. Women felt controlled due to the fact that men restricted women to stay and take care of the home.
At the time Wolf was too frightened to take the extra step to make her “imagination” come true. Throughout the passage, Wolf uses imagery to convey that there is an “angel” (274) in her own home. She describes the angel as “sympathetic” (274) and “pure” (274), the characteristics that women had during the Victorian time. Wolf then kills the angel, If she didn’t, the angel would have “plucked the heart out of her writing” (275). The angel symbolizes the women of this time period’s oppressive state brought on upon the strong male role In society.
The angel compelled Wolf to overcome the Limitations of being a Victorian woman. Victorian women had to put food on the table, clean, take care of their children, and stay at home while their husbands went out and worked and expected to be taken care of. Wolf wanted to reek the stereotype placed upon her; she was not an ordinary housewife. She wanted to be what others would not have expected her to be. It was part of the “occupation of a woman writer (275) to kill the angel.
If Wolf did not kill that angel, it would have come back and wouldn’t have let Wolf pursue her dreams. At the end of the passage, Wolf metaphorically conveys the “empty rooms” (277) that women can claim. Wolf quotes “though not without great labor and effort, to pay the rent” (277) she wants to challenge women to “decorate” their own room by putting things that they feel what’s right or what they have accomplished and to share” (277) their accomplishments with other but must share the room with caution and not show It to the wrong people, for Instance, a male.
Wolf wants to show that other women, like herself, can achieve so much by themselves, they should not let the use of metaphors and imagery. Wolf’s message can satisfy anyone who is going through trouble, she reveals that women during that time did not try to fight nor question what was expected from them. She has become a role model for people that need to know that they can do anything imaginable, as long as they find a way to work around their obstacles.
