現(xiàn)代大學(xué)英語精讀5Lesson 4 Professions for Women

1、Professions for Women,Virginia Woolf,LOGO,The Victorian ideology of Femininity,The French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose demands for human liberty had been influential upon a number of movements for political reform, forcefully articulated some of the most restrictive tenets of what can be

2、 called the nineteenth centurys ideology of femininity. The whole education of women ought to be relative to men. To please them, to console them, and to make life sweet and agreeable to them these are the duties of women at all times, and what should be taught them from their infancy.,The Victorian

3、 ideology of Femininity,The ideal women he thus envisioned a pure, decorous, and even angelic creature was only one particularly notable representative of a standard against which every middle- and upper-class womans conduct was measured, and other writers, female as well as male, elaborated upon th

4、e virtues of such an ideal. In 1854, in a long and very popular poem, The Angle in the House, Coventry Patmore described such selflessness more extravagantly, Man must be pleased, but him to please Is womans pleasure; down the gulf Of his condoled necessities She casts her best, she flings herself.,

5、The model woman was an angel or a queen,She must appear delicate, frail, ethereal. She must look and act like a fragile creature. A good woman was essentially passionless: if men were beasts ruled by sexual desire, their pure wives and daughters knew nothing of such matters. It was generally agreed

6、that on her wedding night, the angelic virgin should in one way or another behave as Queen Victoria was said to have: close her eyes and think of England. Otherwise, a woman was in danger of becoming a fallen woman.,At 15, burned early writing because her stepmother felt that a reputation for scribb

7、ling would harm the girls marriage prospects and because she herself was early impressed with ideas that fastened degradation to this class of composition then, as now, called the novel. Evelina (1778) Explored the social development of a heroine who proves herself worthy of her well-born suitor. Ce

8、cilia; or Memoirs of an Heiress (1782) Analysized the social and economic problems of women Tried to raise the status of the novel by combining verisimilitude with instructions.,Fanny Burney (1752 1840),Aphra Behn (1640 1689),Spy and playwright, traveler and wit, Aphra Behn was Englands first profes

9、sional woman writer. In a age when many women of letters were intellectual aristocrats who claimed to write only for pleasure and fame among their friends, Behn was a middle-class widow who frankly wrote for money and public acclaim. In 1666, she entered the intelligence service of King Charles II,

10、when such public toils of state affairs were unusual with her sex. She carried out her mission remarkably well, but was never paid properly. So she ended up spending some time in 1668 in a London debtors prison, which decided her upon what was, for a woman, an unprecedented step: writing for money.

11、She became a professional and highly productive playwright.,Harriet Martineau (1802-1876),She was more rigorously and formally educated than most women of her time. She was precociously and independently interested in economic topics Her fathers death in 1826 forced her to support her mother and her

12、self by needlework and writing for the Globe on economic topics such as machinery and labor. Illustrations of Political Economy, 1832-34 Illustrations of Taxation, 1834. Society in America, 1837. Retrospect of Western Travel. Deerbrook, 1839.,Jane Austen (1775 -1817),She defined herself as a writer

13、by self-consciously satirizing not only the female tradition in literature but also its effects on the growth and development of the female imagination. She comically criticized the overvaluation of love, the miseducation of women, the subterfuges of the marriage market, the rivalry among women for

14、male approval, the female cult of weakness and dependency, the discrepancy between womens private sphere and public (male) history.,George Eliot (1819-1880),Eliot was aware that her identification with masculine achievement threatened to undermine her consciousness of herself as a woman. You may try

15、, but you cannot imagine what it is to have a mans force of genius in you, yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl., said a heroin in her novel.,Questions,What problems does the author discuss through her two experiences? What figurative devices were employed? What are the advantages for using met

16、aphors? What would left literally without the metaphors?,And while I was writing this review, I discovered that if I were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And the phantom was a woman, and when I came to know her better I called her after the heroine of a famou

17、s poem, The Angel in the House. In those days the last of Queen Victoria every house had its Angel. She slipped behind me and whispered And she made as if to guide my pen. I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, would be that I acted in self-defence. Had

18、 I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. Thus, whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard.,Killing the Angel in the House,I, a woman writer who wants t

19、o review a mans novel. I have a mind of my own. I have five hundred pounds a year so that I dont have to depend solely on charm for my living. I want to express what I think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex.,The Angel in the House, a Model woman representing the Victorian ideolog

20、y of femininity. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Above all, be pure. She never has a mind or wish of her own. These questions cannot be dealt with freely and openly by woman.,Killing the Angel in the House,Came between me and my paper. Bothered me

21、and wasted my time and tormented me Shadow of her wings fell on my page; the rustling of her skirts in the room Slipped behind me and whispered Would have killed me; would have plucked the heart out of my writing. Died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. She always crept back

22、.,I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. I acted in self-defence. I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. I dispatched her. Its far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. I flatter myself that I killed her in the end.,Do a battle with a phantom. The phantom wa

23、s a woman.the Angel in the House With this metaphor, the author invites us to look at her struggle to free herself from the Victorian ideology of femininity as a severe battle between enemies. And the enemy has complicated natures. Describing the enemy as a phantom, she allows the reader to imagine

24、the great difficulty in fighting an intangible enemy. By personifying the traditional ideology of femininity as the Angel in the house, the author left a powerful impression upon the reader, for they can feel its existence and its each and every movement.,Meaning of Arts and Cats,Arts: 1. She excell

25、ed in the difficult arts of life. 2.Use all the arts and wiles of our sex. 3.I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill. Cat: 1.But to show you how little I deserve to be called a professional woman, I went out and bough

26、t a cat a beautiful cat, a Persian cat. 2.What could be easier than to write articles and to buy Persian cats with the profits? 3.I made one pound ten and six by my first review; and I bought a Persian cat with the proceeds. Then I grew ambitious. A Persian cat is all very well, I said; but a Persia

27、n cat is not enough. I must have a motor car.,questions,What is a novelists state of mind? Why does the author use the metaphor of fishing to describe her state of mind? In what way does the image of a fisherman at a deep lake fit the situation of a woman writer? What was the problem discussed in th

28、e second experience?,The fisherman at a deep lake perfectly fits the situation the author is trying to describe. Outwardly, the lake appears deadly calm, and the fisherman sunk in dreams calm, too. Beneath the surface of the water, there are big fish as well as hard stones, hidden in darkness. The l

29、ine may go deep into the water to catch the biggest fish or, to crash on a hard rock. Inside the fisherman/writer, there are conflicting thoughts. That is, the freest imagination that, according to traditional thinking, should be held privately and not dealt with in public, as well as the awareness of the consequences of revealing the imagination to the public. Through this metaphor the reader perceives that the truth about body and p