Fighting the Angel: Virginia Woolf

At the time of Virginia Woolf’s writing, a modern woman was so different from women of the past that Woolf—as modern a woman as could be—felt as though her struggle against becoming a docile, passive creature like her foremothers should best be compared to a literal battle to the death. Woolf describes herself as nothing more than “a girl in a bedroom with a pen in her hand,” any ordinary woman. Her only achievement, simple as it is, has been “to move that pen from left to right—from ten o’clock to one.” In doing so, Woolf brands herself as an average woman. She is not a writer as such; she is merely a woman who occasionally writes. Still describing herself, Woolf relates the process of publication: “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.” Her becoming a writer is a series of chance decisions, then, and nothing highly intentional or artistic.

Far more difficult than writing, continues Woolf, is her discovery “that if [she] were going to review books [she] should need to do battle with a certain phantom.” This phantom, as she calls it, is the ghost of women past: quiet, unassuming women who would never dream of putting down their own ideas on paper. Woman, in popular belief, was “intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily,” and she did all of it joyfully. Any wife and mother became, automatically and without being asked, one of these women—these Angels in the House—and “every house had its Angel.” From the beginning, Woolf acknowledges that this Angel is her enemy. The Angel whispers in Woolf’s ear as she writes: “‘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.” Out of this seduction into traditional femininity, Woolf describes her reaction as “the one act for which [she] takes some credit to [herself]”: she battles the Angel, the ghost of all that society calls her to be. Writing, getting published, even buying her cat were not really acts of her own doing, but this—killing the Angel that haunts her—is.

Woolf, however, continued to be haunted by this apparition, as “Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her.” The ideal of the Angel, so deeply ingrained into people of society as to be almost indistinguishable from truth, cannot fall easily. In the conclusion to this short excerpt Woolf redefines herself, saying that “Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.” At the start—less than a page earlier—Woolf firmly characterizes herself to be a woman who writes, not a woman writer. She claims that her writing and even publication are sort of happy accidents that help her to live comfortably, but do not define her. After her battle with the Angel in the House, the fateful battle that would determine Woolf’s attitude toward modern women including herself, she defines herself anew: “a woman writer,” she says, solidly placing the word “writer” as noun and “woman” as descriptor. The one event able to turn “a girl in a bedroom with a pen in her hand” into, at last, “a woman writer,” was not writing itself: rather, it was the decision of what to do with the looming shadow, ever present, of the Angel in the House and the popular conception of femininity.