The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine

Virginia Woolf: Her Cries of Joy and Longing
Part One

Barbara Young, M.D.

Few lives have been documented as thoroughly as that of Virginia Woolf. Few people have lived who have had so much to contribute to all of us; she who goes on giving to an increasingly wide audience as the years pass. What is it she offers that is so essential that we return to her again and again?

She tells us to have courage in the face of adversity. To learn to know our own souls so that we can make sense of the strange things that we feel and do. If we persevere in the face of hopelessness, we will overcome. Her writings are guide maps that tell us how to find the way.

Her words sing with the sighing of the wind, the sea, the moaning of cows, and the antiphonal and contrapuntal choruses of the many-leveled voices in her characters’ minds; they sing metaphorically—as do Beethoven’s quartets—of the profundity of human experience.

As a child, Virginia Stephen was a diamond in the rough, tumbled to a sharp brilliance and beauty by the many stones in the stream of her busy family life. She was bruised, she was bruised permanently, but these blows seem to have deepened both her extraordinary use of words, the depth of her psychological perceptions, her joyous embracing of the natural world, and most of all, her persistent determination to overcome and rise above those bruises as much as possible.

***

Virginia absorbed the love of words from her father, Sir Leslie, an eminent literary critic and historian. She devoured the books in his library and wrote stories from the age of seven. The family summered at St. Ives in Cornwall where England reaches out into the Atlantic Ocean. During these relatively carefree days, the circle of siblings opened to include her. Within this safety, Mother Nature became her teacher; she immersed herself in the world of sun and sea.

The skill Virginia introduced into her Stephen lineage was the remarkable ability for self-observation. Henry James, a family friend, advised her, “Observe perpetually!” She followed his advice. Observations of her own most profound or most fleeting experiences became the foundation of her writing, enriching every character in her stories; these characters she created from her constant observation of others, be they her many relatives, the circle of friends gathered for tea, or a woman in the train compartment she fantasized about as she watched her over the top of her newspaper. However, neither inheritance nor example can explain her gift for words, that God-given genius which began to emerge in her writing in her mid-thirties: her ability to compose complex music out of memories, the glint of color and light, the sound of wave or footfall—or the stab of terror or hate, the pang of longing, the occasional burst of joy that broke through the cloud of despair.

Little Ginia, as her father called her, would need all the strength of her predecessors, and her unusual gifts, to survive and surmount the blows that fate had in store for her, for she had also inherited from her forebears the propensity for manic depressive illness. The traumatic circumstances of her early childhood turned this propensity into reality. After the death of her mother when she was thirteen, she suffered her first emotional breakdown.

***

Let me list the abysses Virginia Stephen had to find a plank to walk across. Her mother was inconsistently available during her early months and years, and the time she had with her was always being interrupted. There were eight children in Julia Stephen’s household, a husband much in need of her attention, ill relatives she traveled some distance to take care of, and the daily presence of visitors. She herself was at times depressed. The four youngest children were cared for by a household of maids. All of them were afflicted with anxieties. Vanessa is said to have been depressed when she was thirteen. Thoby, when at boarding school, had nightmares; walking in his sleep he was in danger of going out the window. Virginia was known for her temper outbursts, and changed from an outgoing to a nervous child at a time of family stress when she was about six. And Adrian, her younger brother, was analyzed, as an adult, because of his disturbed childhood. (He became a psychoanalyst.)

Baby Ginia found herself unwelcome in the nursery where three-year-old Vanessa had tightly bonded as “mother” to little Thoby. There was no room for an intruder. As she gradually integrated into the children’s circle, a bond was formed, but it was a bond built of contention. They took pleasure in teasing her; she in her frustration became adept at fighting back. Her feelings of rejection and rage intensified with the birth of her younger brother Adrian who was her mother’s “joy.”

The children’s contacts with their parents were limited. They took every occasion to run in and out at tea time and to cultivate those talents that would catch their mother’s and father’s attention and approval. Vanessa and Virginia would leave a copy of the Hyde Park Gate News on their mother’s chair and hide in the adjacent room, watching breathlessly. Would she notice it? Would she laugh? Would she comment to their father? Woolf describes in A Sketch of the Past, written several years before her death, “Never shall I forget my extremity of pleasure—it was like being a violin and being played upon—when I found that she had sent a story of mine to Madge Symonds.”

Virginia and her mother would tell each other stories which she began to write down when she was seven. The girls were taught by their mother, later their father and an occasional tutor for languages. Only boys were sent away to school. As an adult, she fought back at this injustice.

As a small child Virginia was molested by her half-brother Gerald Duckworth who was eighteen. In their adolescence, both she and her sister were repeatedly fondled by his older brother George. Woolf always believed that her sexual frigidity stemmed from these violations of her trust and of her body.

And last in this list of traumas are the many losses by death: her mother at thirteen, her half-sister Stella — who had taken over the mothering role — at fifteen, her father at twenty-two, and at twenty-four her brother Thoby. 
Where did Virginia find the strength to recover, over and over again, from the repeated depressions resulting from this plague of disasters? Her gift with words was life saving. By integrating her anguish into her writing she maintained an uneasy equilibrium, but was destined to live all her life with one eye on the fin of the monster rising from the sea that threatened to pull her under into paralyzing melancholy and madness.

***

Let us begin by considering the first and most fundamental trauma: the fact that her intimate relationship with her mother was repeatedly interrupted. She was weaned to a bottle at ten weeks at a time when her parents were engaged in a battle with her father’s daughter Laura who refused to be controlled. When she was twenty-two months old, Adrian completely usurped her mother’s attention. Because of these early breaks in the consistency of her mother’s investment in her, Virginia Woolf was destined to be haunted all her life by a longing that could not be fulfilled. Though her passion for men had been inhibited by the sexual molestation, with her husband Leonard she seems to have been freer from the love/hate ambivalences that tormented her in her friendships with women. When Vita Sackville-West came into Virginia’s life when she was forty, it was perhaps because of her safe anchorage to Leonard that she was able to know her passion relatively unencumbered by the urgent infantile need that would have otherwise made the relationship intolerable.

Her writing served as sublimation for the perpetual hunger: by the very act of expressing this need in writing, she had learned the invaluable skill of “feeding” herself. Throughout her work, the cries of longing can be heard. In her first novel, The Voyage Out, Rachel confesses that living and wanting are agony. In To the Lighthouse, Lily, the artist, is tormented with longing for the motherly Mrs. Ramsey. In Between the Acts—the novel she completed a month before her death by suicide—a cow has lost its calf, all the cows join in a yearning bellow, the world is filled with yearning.

As is inevitably the case when longing goes unsatisfied, Woolf’s love was joined together with a persistent rage and hate. When she was depressed, the monster turned back upon herself. When she was manic the monster surfaced; she violently attacked those she loved whom she felt had betrayed and abandoned her.

Continued
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