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| Photo courtesy of Craig Sargent |
I
want you to figure to yourselves a girl sitting with a pen in her hand, which
for minutes, and indeed for hours, she never dips into the inkpot. The image
that comes to my mind when 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. She was letting her imagination sweep unchecked round every rock and
cranny of the world that lies submerged in the depths of our unconscious being. . . . It had sought the pools, the depths, the dark places
where the largest fish slumber. And then there was a smash. There was an
explosion. There was foam and confusion. The imagination had dashed itself
against something hard. The girl was roused from her dream. She was indeed in a
state of the most acute and difficult distress. To speak without figure she had
thought of something, something about the body, about the passions which it was
unfitting for her as a woman to say. Men, her reason told her, would be
shocked. The consciousness of--what men will say of a woman who speaks the
truth about her passions had roused her from her artist's state of
unconsciousness. She could write no more.
"Professions for Women" (1931)
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