I come to post after a several month absence, and what do I bring...?

An on-the-spot essay from my British Literature midterm. Enjoy the academia.

"Above all… she was pure." This statement from Virginia Woolf's "Professions for Women" could have just been easily said by Joseph Conrad. Conrad speaks of his view of a model women when Marlow describes Kurtz's Intended in "Heart of Darkness." So also Woolf speaks of a model woman in "Professions for Women." However, she doesn't describe this as her ideal. Rather, she considers this image of a model woman, this metaphorical "Angel in the house" to be part of what holds women back from becoming successes in their own right. They are describing the same woman, but with very different intent. Conrad upholds the "Angel" in his own eyes, while Woolf tears her down.

In Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," the character Marlow describes a encounter with Kurt's Intended. She is pale, a being of almost pure white as all the light seeming to gather on her forehead. Marlow says she has a "pure brow." This sounds eerily like Woolf's "Angel." Above all, Woolf says, "she was pure." The Intended is further described as being all emotions and exclamations of selfless thought when she calls Kurtz's death a "loss to the world." If only she had been there with him at the end, she says. She thinks that she could have given him some comfort. Woolf's Angel would have felt the very same. The Angel is described as "intensely sympathetic" and she "sacrificed herself daily".

Towards the end of the scene, the Intended asks what Kurtz's last words were. Marlow wants to shield the beloved from Kurtz's true last words, "The horror! The horror!" He feels that women should be "kept out of it" so that their world would be "kept beautiful, lest ours fall." He lies instead and tells her that Kurtz's last words were her name. This again matches Woolf's description of this shadow of a model woman that hangs over her head. Woolf says this Angel disapproves of her writing, that a young woman shouldn't concern herself with such things as sex and violence. The Angel thinks that Woolf should keep out of such base subjects.

Conrad's description of pure womanhood is consistent with Woolf's description of the societal ideal. However, in their opinion of this ideal is where the two authors differ greatly. Conrad seems content with this description. It allows women to be kept pure for their men, a support to them, but still only a "trifle." Woolf would rather take an ice-pick to the eye-socket of this societal notion of Purity. Conrad says it is for their own sake that women should be kept out of it and be kept pure. Woolf knows better; she knows women are more than just a support to the men. Woolf argues that women function as a magical looking glass, magnifying men to twice their normal size. She says we would still be in the swamp and jungle, never knowing things like the 'glory of war' if there had been no women to support men. There would be no progress without the women. Conrad doesn't even consider them part of this world, saying their own "beautiful world" should be kept safe so "ours" won't fall. "Our" world is, of course, the men's world. Woolf recognizes this limitation. In "Professions for Women," Woolf comments that women have just as much potential be writers and lawyers and doctors, but these societal ideals are what hold them back, what slam them against "a hard thing" when they try to move forward. Woolf herself is an example of that. She had to 'kill her Angel before it killed her.' Conrad, on the other hand, refuses to recognize that women see "the horror" just as clearly as the men.