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.

***

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? 

***

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