who is the misfit hue?

i've been asked what i mean about "turning my back on the angel". i'll try to explain briefly.

the angel is a selfless, female phantom named by Virginia Woolf in a speech called "Professions for Women" that she gave to a branch of the National Society for Women's Service in 1931.

the abbreviated portion i'm posting here describes the battle Virginia Woolf waged with the angel--a battle i myself have fought and am still fighting. unlike Virginia, i have yet to kill the angel, but i'm far stronger and far closer today than i was a mere three years ago when i stopped half heartedly arguing with her and turned to blunt force.

i not only subscribe to the killing of the angel in the house, but that a woman needs a room of her own in which to work and an income of her own to make her self-reliant. i suppose my viewpoint was greatly influenced by Virginia Woolf, as well as Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins-Gilman. there are many, many, many more, but these three played a sizable role. have you ever read "The Story of an Hour"?

for myself, killing the angel has meant following the direction of my heart, my curiosities, my passions, and not allowing my life to be defined by what i "should" do or be. you may debate me on this in any way that you like, but i felt the pressure of the angel at many points in my life. i may have left the situations, the people, the circumstances behind, but the voice? the voice comes on the breeze in the dark hours of the night to challenge and question my choices. this may never end, but my conviction grows stronger with my successes.

the best way to explain the angel is to let Virginia do it. she was ever so eloquent...

"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 famous poem, The Angel in the House. It was she who used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her. You who come of a younger and happier generation may not have heard of her--you may not know what I mean by the Angel in the House. I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it--in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all--I need not say it---she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty--her blushes, her great grace. In those days--the last of Queen Victoria--every house had its Angel. And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room. Directly, that is to say, I took my pen in my hand to review that novel by a famous man, she slipped behind me and whispered: "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. Above all, be pure." And she made as if to guide my pen. I now record the one act for which I take some credit to myself, though the credit rightly belongs to some excellent ancestors of mine who left me a certain sum of money--shall we say five hundred pounds a year?--so that it was not necessary for me to depend solely on charm for my living. I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defence. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must--to put it bluntly--tell lies if they are to succeed. 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. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping back when I thought I had despatched her. Though I flatter myself that I killed her in the end, the struggle was severe; it took much time that had better have been spent upon learning Greek grammar; or in roaming the world in search of adventures. But it was a real experience; it was an experience that was bound to befall all women writers at that time. Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer."