The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine
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Virginia Woolf: Her
Cries of Joy and Longing
Part One
(continued)
Barbara Young,
M.D.
Woolf had also to carry the consequences of the molestation by Gerald and George. Because of their intrusions she had been deprived of the gradual awakening of the pleasures of her body. In A Sketch of the Past, Woolf’s search for the source of her life-long self-consciousness and shame awakened the memory of Gerald’s exploration of her body. She concluded that the feelings stirred in her must have made her feel ashamed of or afraid of her body. Yet they had not interfered with her capacity to experience rapture with all her other senses.
***
Most fortunately for her (and for all of us) the disasters of Virginia Stephen’s childhood and the resulting inhibitions did not affect her ability to write. Her passions for reading and capturing with the written word her love of people and the world around her were her salvation. In reaching out to her mother with her stories and her newspaper, her writing took on a life of its own. I like to think that one of the well-springs of her art continued to be the pleasure her mother had taken in her stories. As Woolf walked over the moors talking to herself, gesturing with her arms, planning the course her characters would take, was she conversing with her mother and visualizing the beam of pride and pleasure in her eyes?
***
When she was thirteen her mother died. Virginia could not feel. Her loss was great, unimaginable. Her mother was gone forever. All hope was gone that her longing would be satisfied. And her rage at this final abandonment must have been so overwhelming it could not be experienced. She was frozen. Reaching out to her father who might have saved her, she was ignored for he was overcome with his own loss. The death of her mother triggered her first break with reality, which she retained little memory of.
Her father died when she was twenty-two. Although her ambivalent feelings toward him of both love and hate were more conscious, she became seriously depressed. Confined to her friend Violet Dickinson’s house, she attempted to kill herself by jumping from a window. However, recovering in Violet’s lovely home and garden, she was given the loving attention she was so much in need of. Violet was supportive of her writing and encouraged her to make writing her life’s work. The gleam in Violet’s eye buoyed up her self confidence. And she saw that Violet, living alone, flourished in her own space. Virginia looked forward to having the same for herself. She returned to London and a new home with her siblings, and to a life dedicated to her writing.
***
Her book reviews began to be accepted for publication. When she was thirty she married Leonard Woolf, a school friend of her brother Thoby. After a happy honeymoon she returned to writing her first novel. The most severe psychotic episodes of her life occurred as she anticipated its publication. The work was herself. Was the novel—was she—worthless after all? Would the novel somehow reveal her madness to the world?
Virginia learned to pace herself and began to break the intense concentration of composing a novel by writing short stories in the margins. Leonard bought a hand printing press as a diversion. Soon they were publishing a small book of his and her short stories which she helped to print. She and Leonard learned to watch for the signs of threatening illness. Work and social life would be curtailed. Headaches meant bed rest, milk, restricted diet, medicine. She once complained to a friend that she was tired of being told to take care of herself and of being taken care of. But their vigilance was rewarded; she gained twenty-one productive years.
***
How often does genius lie hidden, never to be expressed, because the years of apprenticeship have not been labored through? (It is unlikely that Beethoven would have written the late quartets if he, too, had not been forced to struggle with the agonies of his soul.) We can wonder what form Virginia Woolf’s genius would have taken if she had not suffered so profoundly, for her writing not only saved her, but her suffering empowered her writing.
Once she had mastered her craft, she could fly, and fly she did. The novels flowed forth, revealing a sublimated story of her life. In Mrs. Dalloway she portrays her social self, as well as her thoughtful, observant self contrasted with her psychotic suicidal self in the person of Septimus Warren Smith. In To the Lighthouse she gives an unvarnished picture of the parents of her childhood. (I like to think of the lighthouse light which streamed across the bedroom floor, over and over again, as symbolic of the light from her mother’s eyes that beamed and disappeared.) Orlando is her love-poem to Vita Sackville-West. In The Waves she pictures six children without parents who form a sustaining circle that keeps them from falling through into the “foaming millrace beneath.”
***
When Woolf was fifty, an episode of fainting and a “galloping” pulse made her physical health of increasing concern. Her friends were dying. The struggle to keep the depression at bay became more difficult. When she saw the fin appear again in the sea, she was uncertain: was it the devil coming after her, or an idea for a new work?
She was receiving adverse criticism in the press. In 1934 Wyndham Lewis dismissed her as insignificant, a writer no longer taken seriously. It was terrifying to realize that she had an actual enemy lying in wait to destroy her. As The Years was going to press, she was struck again by catastrophic illness, coming close to the edge of the precipice of severe depression. She finished Between the Acts a month before her death, but a new novel and short story were already underway.
In 1940, Hitler’s forces were overcoming one country after another on the continent. There was a steady drone of planes flying over their home at Rodmell. The Woolfs lived each day as though it well might be their last. Terrified of an invasion because Leonard was Jewish, they had the means at hand to take their lives.
The unrelenting strain was more than Virginia could bear. She fought back, struggling to engross herself in writing, but the voices returned; she was plummeting into the abyss of despair. Believing that this time she would not recover, and aware of the reality that their world was on the verge of destruction, on March 28, 1941, she put stones in the pocket of her coat and walked into the river. She had flourished and bloomed in the face of the ever-present threat of disaster for fifty-nine years.
References
Quentin Bell. Virginia Woolf: A
Biography. Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1972.
Louise A. DeSalvo. Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on
Her Life and Work. Beacon Press, 1989.
Hermione Lee. Virginia Woolf. Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.
Virginia Woolf. Between the Acts. Harcourt Brace & Company,
1969.
——— Moments of Being. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, c1985.
——— Mrs. Dalloway. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. c1953.
——— Orlando. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1956.
——— To the Lighthouse. Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.,
1955.
——— The Voyage Out. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1948.
——— The Waves. Harcourt, Inc., 1959.
We gratefully acknowledge to the Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf permission to use the quotations from her work.
Published: September 6, 2002