Profesions of Women
Dreams Moving Forward If one thinks hard minded of a goal, the goal will become difficult, but if one thinks easy minded of a goal, that goal can become a reality. In Virginia Woolf’s passage, “Professions for Women,” Woolf targets women to inform them how limited they are in a population full of males. Her main idea is to not let your conscious or others hold you from doing what you want to do. Woolf uses metaphors and imagery to support her concern during her controlled era. Woolf begins by metaphorically describing a fisherman as if he was a girl alone next to a lake. She quotes, “I 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 how the fisherman was a girl, Woolf 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 Woolf was too frightened to take the extra step to make her “imagination” come true. Throughout the passage, Woolf 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. Woolf then kills the angel, if she didn’t, the angel would have “plucked the heart