angels and monsters

1931. Virginia Woolf has just had an epiphany in her bathtub.

I have this moment, while having my bath, conceived an entire new book – a sequel to A Room of Ones Own – about the sexual life of women: to be called Professions for Women perhaps – Lord how exciting! This sprang out of my paper to be read on Wednesday to Pippa’s society.*

The paper she mentions is an address to the London and National Society for Women’s Service. Only twelve years earlier, the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919 had opened the white-collar professions to women, easing them out of the domestic space where the Victorians had wedged them. Whereas in A Room of One’s Own, Woolf had ‘looked back on the history of women’s silences and exclusions’, as Hermione Lee puts it, in the new project Woolf was eager to begin thinking about what kind of future these professional women might have before them. She knew that in spite of this legislation, women still faced acute challenges in becoming, themselves, professionals.1 The genesis of ‘Professions for Women’ indicates she saw the women’s bodies in direct relationship to their professional lives: this intuition would illuminate her thinking about gender and power for the last decade of her life.

When she began her career as a writer, Woolf says in her speech, she experienced a kind of resistance. Not, or not only, from ‘the other sex’, but from her own, in the form of a figure she calls, famously, the Angel in the House.2 Self-sacrificing and modest, with nary a desire of her own but to serve those around her, she was ‘intensely sympathetic’, ‘immensely charming’, and ‘utterly unselfish’. She was also dangerous, slipping ideas about flattery, deception, and purity into the ear of the virginal but ambitious young writer. ‘You have got yourself into a very queer position,’ she would say. ‘[Y]ou are writing for a paper owned by men, edited by men – whose chief supporters are men; you are even reviewing a book that has been written by a man […] Therefore whatever you say let it be pleasing to men. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; […] Never disturb them with the idea that you have a mind of your own. And above all be pure.’3 The Angel is well aware of the conditions of production for a young woman: the odds are against her. She will have to curry favour and avoid giving offence, if she is to get along in the world. If you must make art, the Angel implies, make it art they’ll approve of.

Woolf was already thinking about this conflict several years earlier, as her 1927 novel To the Lighthouse attests. In the last part of the novel, the painter Lily Briscoe has returned to the Scottish isle she visited ten years earlier. In that time, several members of the family have died, including its matriarch, its angel in the house, Mrs Ramsay. Lily remembers, staring at a pattern on the tablecloth, that on her last visit she had been preoccupied with a painting – the problem of the foreground, and where to place a tree – and that she had not been able to bring it off.4 She sets up her easel, attempts to capture what eluded her then, but she can’t work with Mr Ramsay thundering about the place, out of sorts, cantankerous, a widower, like Woolf’s own father. ‘Every time he approached – he was walking up and down the terrace – ruin approached, chaos approached. She could not paint.’ His very presence alters her vision: ‘She could not see the colour; she could not see the lines; even with his back turned to her, she could only think, But he’ll be down on me in a moment, demanding – something she felt she could not give him.’5 She remembers from her youth what it is he’s after: her own ‘self-surrender’, like that which she had seen on the faces of women like Mrs Ramsay, ‘when on some occasion like this they blazed up […] into a rapture of sympathy, of delight in the reward they had, which, though the reason of it escaped her, evidently conferred on them the most supreme bliss of which human nature was capable.’6

Lily refuses to surrender, and so does Woolf. Faced with the angel’s order to be nice, she takes up the inkpot and flings it at her. It is a matter of life and death after all: ‘Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing.’

‘She died hard,’ Woolf tells us.7

* * *

Or did she?

* * *

2014. I am struck by a phrase, recognising it without knowing, exactly, what it means. A few pages into Jenny Offill’s novel-in-fragments Dept. of Speculation, a thunderbolt.

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead.8

Art monster.

Google search it.

Nothing; no original point of reference. The expression exists in French: monstre de l’art. Someone big and important and unreasonable. Male, obviously. Charismatic, an egomaniac. But in English, not at all. There are some near-rhymes in Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick (‘And I told Warren: I aim to be a female monster too’), or Angela Carter’s The Sadeian Woman (‘A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster’). ‘A woman had to be a monster to be an artist,’ said the surrealist painter and sculptor Dorothea Tanning.9 I find lots of writing about the monstrous feminine. In fact, this is the only connection I can find that associates women and monstrosity: the female monstrous, the female grotesque.

Dept. of Speculation takes a more realist tack, being a novel composed of the details of daily family life as they swamp the narrator’s sense of self. ‘[A]rt monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things,’ Offill’s narrator reflects, setting women on one side, art monsters on the other: not, or rarely, women, and if women, then women who have renounced the mundane, meaning housework, children, admin: ‘Nabokov didn’t even fold his umbrella. Véra licked his stamps for him.’10 Mother or artist, not both. You shall know the art monster by her dirty house, empty of children. Mothers who became art monsters did it by leaving or harming their offspring, through abandonment or suicide or abuse: Doris Lessing, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton.

Soon after Offill’s novel came out the phrase was everywhere, peppering the personal essays of young women contemplating whether or not they should have children, the challenge and possibly the ontological impossibility of being a mother/wife/artist/monster. Art monster was quickly becoming as popular a phrase in the feminist lexicon as the angel in the house.

It seemed to me, however, that there was more to it than the tension between being an artist and having a family. I am the mother of a young child; I am wrapped in this constraint every day. But the art monster problem, more primary, nagged at me for years before my son was born; it was more to do with having grown up a white American female at the end of the twentieth century, groomed to be appropriate, exacting, friendly and accommodating, as pretty and as small as I could make myself, yet filled with rage at not being allowed to take up more space in the world.

And I heard something else too, something I understood implicitly: how difficult it is, when you have been socialised as a woman, to allow yourself to be monstrous, but also how terrifyingly easy – how inadvertent.

* * *

When I started writing this book, I thought it was going to be about monstrosity and creativity, about how difficult it was, for a woman artist, to take up space in the world. That, at least, is what I told my publishers I was going to write about. But as I reread ‘Professions for Women’ – a revised essay version this time, which Leonard published after Woolf’s death – in the context of Offill’s term, I realised that I had overlooked an important passage, the climax of it, actually, in which Woolf compares the process of creating to casting her line into the depths of her imagination like a ‘fisherwoman’, letting it ‘sweep unchecked round every rock and cranny of the world that lies submerged in the depths of our unconscious being’. Then, as the line drifts and the thought flows, something happens, something Woolf believed ‘to be far commoner with women writers than with men’:

[T]here was a smash. There was an explosion. There was foam and confusion. The imagination had dashed itself against something hard. […] [S]he had thought of something, something about the body, about the passions which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say. […] She could write no more. The trance was over.11

This disruption becomes a parable about self-censorship – about the ways in which women’s art-making can be halted not by some external force, like a child, or a husband, but by an internalised warning: alert! alert! we are entering dangerous waters! As Woolf brings the essay to its conclusion, she returns to the double agenda she initially brought to her speech: the professional and sexual lives of women, identifying them as two of the key challenges of her life as a writer. ‘The first – killing the Angel in the House – I think I solved. She died. But the second, telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet.’

This was it: this was, perhaps, what the art monster was trying to do. She’d killed off the Angel, but there was still something stopping her. Something she was trying to say, but had been socially conditioned not to. So much of the discourse around the art monster thus far has focused on female artists’ lives, but it seems just as crucial to look at their work: at what it was that they were so bent on doing that they ran the risk of being called a monster.


Copyright © 2023 by Lauren Elkin