A Woman’s Eye
Скачать
Начало книги
“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.”
The Angel in the House spoke these words to Virginia Woolf when Woolf first tried to write for publication. The Angel was a phantasm, but its speech crystallized all the voices Woolf had heard from childhood on, telling her that women should never have a mind or wish of their own. Woolf says she struggled with this Angel for years, trying to kill it so that she could find her own voice. “She died hard,” the artist reports. “Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.”
Women have been wrestling with that Angel for many centimes. It is a difficult phantom to overpower because it speaks in so many voices and with so much authority behind it. In some cases the authority is quite specific. John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts Bay, wrote in 1645 that the poet Anne Hopkins “has fallen into a sad infirmity, the loss of her understanding and reason,… by occasion of giving herself wholly to reading and writing, and had written many books.” He added that “if she had attended her household affairs, and such things as belong to women… she had kept her wits.”