The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine

Virginia Woolf: Her Cries of Joy and Longing
Part Two

Barbara Young, M.D.

The extraordinarily perceptive novels of Virginia Woolf came into being in spite of the gifted writer’s life-long struggle with both manic depressive illness and the haunting consequences of early childhood deprivation, the restrictions of a Victorian girlhood, and sexual molestation. Woolf was preoccupied with death all her life. As she said about her novel Mrs. Dalloway, “ I meant to write about death but life came breaking through as usual.”

What is it that keeps us alive, that sustains us, that serves as the foundation for our sense of meaning? It is love. All her life Virginia Woolf was looking for the return of the loving mother she had known for all too short a time. Both before and long after her mother’s death, when she was a child of thirteen, she had sought out the laps and arms of her sisters Stella and Vanessa for comfort. Her early passions were for the somewhat older women, Madge Symonds and Violet Dickinson. She loved her husband Leonard dearly but her passionate feelings for a man had been blocked by the sexual intrusions of her half-brothers, turning her developing desires into disgust.

As Virginia said in her farewell letter to Leonard before commiting suicide at the age of fifty-nine: with him she had found “the greatest possible happiness.” But her passion had been awakened at the age of forty by her love for Vita Sackville-West. The psychoanalyst Alma Bond has speculated that Woolf’s creative energy reached its height in part because of this relationship. How life-giving this love was for her is played out in Mrs. Dalloway. Clarissa Dalloway is struggling to find meaning in her empty life; should she jump out of the window as Septimus Warren Smith has done? Her adolescent love, Sally Seton, appears at her party, awakening the memory of their first passionate kiss. Clasping this memory to her, Clarissa turns away from the window. She turns back from death to life.

The tap root of Sally’s life-saving kiss extends down into the earth of the early loving mother; the kiss that brought each of us into life. It is along the gleam in our mother’s eye—that lighthouse beam of light sweeping fully and regularly upon us—that we grow, little by little, into our full capacity as human beings: people capable of feeling love, surviving the hate toward those we love who frustrate us; knowing sorrow and joy, the beauty of our bodies and our imaginations, the world around us, the delights of passion. If that gleam, that lighthouse light, is weak and unreliable, our own light we shine upon ourselves will flicker.

If Vita’s love fueled the exuberant flying of Woolf’s greatest works, then it is possible that Vita’s gradual withdrawal played a role in Virginia’s diminishing sense of well being. Episodes of threatening illness, both physical and emotional, increased. She struggled to get The Waves to sing. Several years passed before she began another novel. In The Years we feel the heaviness of Eleanor’s life. In the last novel, Between the Acts, the pain and futility felt by all the characters is palpable, particularly the artist LaTrobe who had lost the woman who shared her bed.

***

Are there underlying reasons that sometimes go into the decision to commit suicide beyond the obvious one that life is no longer bearable? For those who are left behind, death by suicide is felt as an act of aggression, the worst kind of punishment a child can deliver to the parents who she feels have deprived her of a full life. In killing herself, unconsciously, she may be killing off the early mother whom she believes betrayed her.

What part do murderous impulses play in Virginia Woolf’s written fantasies? The theme of longing and the love/hate struggle appear over and over again. Murderous impulses are sparse, but they are present. In To the Lighthouse six-year-old James—furious at his father for intruding on his private time with his mother and discouraging his hope for a trip to the lighthouse—“would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast.” In her novel about Elizabeth Barrett’s little dog, Flush wished to kill his enemy Mr. Browning out of jealousy. In the 1917 short story An Unwritten Novel, a woman riding in a train is fantasizing about the person sitting opposite her. She imagines that the woman is suffering because, as a child, she had been responsible for her brother’s death. In Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus is overcome with guilt and the need for punishment because he fears that his hatred for his friend Evans and his inability to feel were responsible for his death. Is it possible that little Virginia, who could not feel when her mother died, unconsciously held herself responsible for her mother’s death?

***

In contradistinction to the assumption that the person who takes her life is murdering an inadequate mother, there are those who feel that in some circumstances the person who chooses to die is hoping to reunite with her early loving mother in death, or, is preserving from her own destructive impulses the remnants of a loving mother she carries inside.

The psychoanalyst Edith Jacobson, who was imprisoned by Hitler, shared the cell with prostitutes. Though she was depressed herself, she continued her analytic work by listening to her cell mates in their despair. Most of them had had mothers who were inconsistent. The children’s love for them had been laced with rage and hate. These young women lived with images of their inadequate neglectful mothers inside them, causing their relationships with others in real life to be ambivalent and stormy.

I believe that all of us continue to be fueled by these images we carry inside which are conglomerates of our earliest body-memories enriched by the thousands of interchanges with our mothers and our fathers and all those important mentors who come after. Sometimes we hear them speaking. We cringe when we hear them shaming us. We burst with pride when we know they would have been pleased by our accomplishments. Or, if our experience was an abusive one, we are terrified that we will be punished for achieving something our parents would have been threatened by. And, most of all, they are our Thous. As I lay on the gurney awaiting an operation for what was thought to be an inoperable cancer, I heard my father’s voice, “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for Thou art with me.”

It is the earliest mother who is most crucial. We have no conscious memory of her. But it is her beam of light that we go on living by. If it was consistent, our lives have meaning. If it was not, and the pain of frustration was great, our beam is patchy or broken, and our love becomes joined with hate. Dr. Jacobson felt that her prostitutes had pieced together their internal good mothers out of fragments of being loved, and that these fragile internal mothers were the objects of hate so destructive it could not be acknowledged. Rather than face consciously how angry they were — which would have endangered their precarious internal love-objects — they would choose to die, for life without that beneficent mother would be a perpetual state of meaningless apathy.

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