The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine
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Virginia Woolf: Her
Cries of Joy and Longing
Part Two
(continued)
Barbara Young,
M.D.
***
I see Virginia Woolf’s death in the same light. Her loving relationship with Vita had cooled. Her sister Vanessa was increasingly distant. The precarious beam was fading. If she became psychotic, she would rage violently at those she loved whom she perceived as abandoning her, as had happened in her previous manic episodes. If she attacked Leonard, she might never recover the loving Leonard inside her who had sustained her. In fact, she did not believe she would recover. She preferred to die, leaving him his life to go on with. Clutching in her arms his love for her, she walked into the river.
Do I have any grounds for such speculation? When Virginia was in the process of writing Mrs. Dalloway, Vita entered her life. Did her presence determine Clarissa Dalloway’s fate? It was Woolf’s original plan for Clarissa to die. The shell-shocked veteran, Septimus, was later added to the story so that Clarissa could go on living. Did Vita serve the same function for Virginia that Sally had for Clarissa when she appeared at the party awakening memories of their early love? When Virginia was forty, did Vita’s love subdue, for the time being, the monster of depression and hate that was grubbing at her roots and reawaken her desire to live?
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Since it seems quite certain that Woolf suffered with manic depressive or bipolar illness, are these speculations about the effects of childhood events utterly irrelevant? Some would say so. On the contrary, there are those who essentially ignore the evidence of such a disease entity and attribute her illnesses to early childhood circumstances: the inadequate mothering, or the restrictions of her Victorian family. Louise DeSalvo places the primary source of her trouble onto Gerald’s exploration of her body when she was six and his brother George’s persistent fondling in her adolescence. Although these intrusions obviously had a serious effect on Virginia’s sense of vulnerability and impeded her pleasure in intimacy, I do not see the evidence that she was actually raped as DeSalvo implies. If that had been so, the consequences on her total personality would have been much more severe. Virginia Woolf suffered at least five or six bona fide manic episodes followed by suicidal depression. In between episodes, she was a normal, sociable woman with a sharp sense of humor, a deep love of nature and joy in life. She was dedicated to her work and functioned in an almost superhuman fashion in her remarkable creativity, even though the depressive feelings rumbled under the surface much of the time.
In her 1993 book Touched with Fire, psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison explores, through the lives of many artists who were manic depressive including Virginia Woolf, the close association between the artistic and the manic-depressive temperaments. The state of altered consciousness in hypomania enables the artist with creative gifts to reach areas of awareness ordinarily hidden by inhibition. There is no question that Woolf grasped in a net the moths from her mind-soaring flights and brought them back with her to sanity where she then transmuted them into art. Jamison attributes the illness to genetics, but in writing of her own manic depressive illness in An Unquiet Mind, she reveals how essential her psychiatrist was and is to her survival.
Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf’s nephew, writing in 1972 at the request of Leonard Woolf, mentions her manic depressive illness but attributes her “madness,” and the constant struggle with the threat of its return, essentially to life events. It seems Woolf would have been inclined to agree, for she says in the introduction to the First Modern Library Edition of Mrs. Dalloway, “Books are the flowers or fruit stuck here and there on a tree which has its roots deep down in the earth of our earliest life, of our first experiences.” As we have seen, some of those fruits proved to be poisonous.
***
For me, the origin of Woolf’s illness is not a question of either/or. I see manic depression as an inherited propensity. I am sure there are those who have the same genes that never become ill. But major catastrophes add their burden to a child’s vulnerability. And, if severe enough, they serve as triggers that set the manic depressive illness into full swing. The decisive event in Woolf’s life was the death of her mother when she was thirteen, a mother about whom she had always been ambivalent because of her partial unavailability when Virginia was an infant. The loss at her death could not be grieved. Virginia broke with reality. After that break, she struggled frequently with depressive feelings, but it is possible that the major episodes were likewise precipitated by events that represented the fear of abandonment.
After World War II, I worked in a veteran’s hospital. Before the days of lithium, we learned little about childhood experiences because they were so explosive. But supportive therapy, and the gradual incorporation of my voice asking why? what could have set off the attack? made progress possible. We discovered that events perceived as losses were the triggers. After lithium became available, it was somewhat safer to talk about early events. Patients suffered much less from their genetic disease when they understood the dynamics of the burdens they had carried from their early childhoods. With one man I knew from the age of twenty-three until seventy-two, the basic problem setting off his hypomania was not so much the pain of facing the sense of loss, but the terror that he would murder out of the primitive rage at feeling abandoned before he could stop himself. His solution was to keep a safe distance between himself and all others including his wife and daughter. He returned to my office in a state of hypomania for the last time at seventy-one. His body was fading. Could he tolerate the enforced intimacy of being cared for by his wife in his last days? Once this was squarely faced, his mood dropped to normal. He was even able to enjoy having his little grandbaby playing on the bed beside him.
***
Would Virginia Woolf have profited by the medication that is now available? Lithium or depakote would probably have ameliorated the mood swings and made the vigilance for the ever-present fin in the sea less necessary. But it is possible that it would have muted the song of her free-flowing writing. One of my former patients, a brilliant researcher whose discoveries are often made with the same kind of free-flying intuition, successfully took herself off lithium because of its effect on her mind.
Would Woolf have been as gifted a writer if she had not been manic depressive? Jamison would probably say no. Perhaps the liquid flow of the mind both in hypomania and in creativity arises in the same area of the brain. The gifted person, accessing that river, makes giant leaps.
Obviously it is not necessary to be “mad” to be a artist. Most writers and artists I know are far from mad. Woolf did not believe her artistic ability arose from her mental illness. On the contrary, she has told us in so many ways how her writing drove the melancholy away. However, she made the most of the fluid state of mind to write in her unique way, and she used the pain she endured as substance for her creations. According to the psychoanalyst, Phyllis Greenacre: just as the young child explores the wonders around her for the first time, the artist “has a love affair with the world.”
As for us lesser mortals, having a creative skill brings joy and the deep satisfaction of self-fulfillment. For us, also, an artistic gift can be a life-saving mechanism, as it was for Virginia Woolf. The child who can writes a poem grieving the loss of a mother she never knew, is a fortunate child.
Would psychotherapy have made Woolf’s burden easier? Painful realizations and acceptances come only when the person is ready to receive them—over a period of a lifetime. I believe Woolf was right; she had done the work of therapy in her writing. She explored herself in Mrs. Dalloway and chose to live as a result. In To the
Lighthouse, she dared to probe the depths of her parents’ characters and to examine both her own loving and critical feelings about them, concluding with the painter Lily’s realization that art was at least a temporary solution to unbearable longing. She enjoyed vicariously her wish to stride like a man and have the privileges she had been denied as she wrote of Vita’s adventures in disguise in Orlando. And, in The Waves, she clarified for herself the many persons she felt herself to be, and powerfully explored the circle of friends that had sustained her throughout her life in the face of disintegration and despair.
Virginia Woolf suffered mightily, but she loved intensely. She, like Beethoven, found her way to convert anguish into beauty.
References
Bell, Quentin, Viginia Woolf, a biography. Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, Inc., c1972.
Bond, Ph.D., Alma Halbert, Who Killed Virginia Woolf?. A psychobiography. Insight Books, Human Sciences Press, Inc., c1989.
DeSalvo, Louise A.,Virginia Woolf, The impact of childhood sexual abuse on her life and
work. Beacon Press, c1989.
Jamison, Kay Redfield, An Unquiet Mind, Vintage Books, c1995.
——— Touched by Fire, FREE PRESS PAPERBACK, C1993.
Jacobson, Edith, Depression, International Universities Press, Inc., c1971.
Lee, Hermione, Virginia Woolf. Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.
Woolf, Virginia, Between the Acts, Harcourt Brace & Company, c1969.
———The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Harcourt, Inc, c1989, 1985.
——— Flush, Harcourt, Brace and Company. c1933.
——— Mrs. Dalloway, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. c1953.
——— Orlando, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1956.
——— To the Lighthouse, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., c1955.
——— The Waves, Harcourt, Inc., c1959.
———The Years, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, c1965.
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: December 15, 2002