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.

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