The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine
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Virginia Woolf: Her
Cries of Joy and Longing
Part Three
(continued)
Barbara Young,
M.D.
***
Woolf’s writing was to serve as a life-buoy through seriously troubled seas. From her works we can see the healing process of mastery. In Mrs. Dalloway, she deals with her own love/hate struggles, her suicidal wishes, and, terrifying as it was to remember, she dares to relive her psychotic episode in the person of the shell-shocked veteran.
In To the Lighthouse, Woolf sets out to describe the complex personalities of her parents as honestly as possible. We see the loving mother, distracted from her little son by her husband, caught in a conflict between her wish to ignore him and, pulled by duty and love, the need to acquiesce to his beseechings. We see the insecure tormented father, in need of reassurance and comfort from his wife, transferring his pain and bitterness onto his little boy by hitting out with words of disappointment. When Woolf had finished the novel she was relieved as though she had been a patient in psychoanalysis. Most of her life she had been haunted by thoughts of her mother. When the novel was completed, the obsession was gone. (She had effectively banished the mother who so often abandoned her!) Picturing her father’s difficult behavior, she freed herself from her obsessive raging against him, and was left with the awareness of the love beneath the rage.
In Orlando, we see Woolf struggling to overcome her sense that sexual feelings are sordid. She realizes that something positive has come even from them. In a sublimated turn, the hairy ape-like man she had inside herself had brightened and illuminated the colors of the world with his flaming torch.
There were times when Woolf felt that her illnesses themselves had contributed to her creativity. In a letter written in June 1930, she described to her dear friend Ethel Smyth what she had been through after her marriage. “And then I married, and then my brains went up in a shower of fireworks. As an experience, madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere dribblets, as sanity does. And the six months...that I lay in bed taught me a good deal about what is called oneself.”
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It is apparent that Virginia Stephen was born with the capacity to reason things out in such a way that she learned to overcome the sense of powerlessness. In A Sketch of the Past. written two years before her death, she describes one of her first memories. Her love for the natural world was instinctive; her powers of observation, questioning, and thoughtfulness were remarkable. While she was looking at a plant, she realized that the flower and the earth around it were a part of each other. Reasoning that some day she would understand the explanation for this, she felt no longer powerless. It was a wonderful sensation, similar to the rapture she later experienced when writing. She went on to explain to her friends that when she was creating she was hardly aware of herself; she was just the container for the feeling of esctacy.
In Woolf’s diaries, she describes how she learned to see what was lying under the surface of her conscious mind by distracting herself and watching out of the corner of her eye. This ability to use her whole mind—enhancing her conscious thoughts and the happenings in the world of reality with memories and associations that stirred in the underworld of her consciousness—gave rise to her unique style of writing most vividly employed in Mrs. Dalloway.
Was it a state of hypomania that made possible these glimpses into her unconscious mind, the underground springs from which flowed her creativity? In comparing the timing of these exciting bursts of insight to the events of her life, it appears that, on the contrary, they occurred when she was particularly content and happy. In 1923 she and Leonard were traveling in Spain at the time her ideas were beginning to take form for what was to become Mrs. Dalloway. In the spring of 1925, as she planned the book about her parents, they were traveling in France. In 1929, Virginia and Leonard visited Vita in Berlin and her sister Vanessa in Cassis as she was developing the intriguingly complex plot for The Waves.
During the long grueling years of the actual writing of the novels, she drove herself hard—often too hard—bringing on headaches and the threat of depression. She suffered doubts about the value of her work and of herself. But these bursts of insight that every artist waits for, had come when she was in her most normal state of mind, and brought her great joy.
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We have been caught up in Virginia Woolf’s remarkable courage in the face of suffering, and have marveled at her use of the gift of writing to sublimate her woes and cope with despair. But we must spend a moment to celebrate the joy and beauty she found in life, whether she was strolling the streets and parks of London, or striding across the downs of Sussex entranced by the blowing grasses, the purple of the plow. To best know this entrancing and entranced Virginia Woolf, I recommend seeing her as she is portrayed in the person of Clarissa Dalloway by Vanessa Redgrave in the film Mrs. Dalloway. Here we see Virginia so vibrantly alive: attuned to, absorbing, making her own, every nuance of face and body gesture, the panoply of light and color, the cacaphony of the busy London’s streets. And the translucency of the photography mirrors the fragile beauty of Virginia Woolf, capturing on film the provocative power as well as the delicacy of her word-pictures.
***
As the war and her last depression approached, the stalwart one-year-old Ginia, the determined teenager, and the resilient woman Virginia Woolf fought with all her strength against the tidal wave of madness bearing down upon her. To the very last she followed Henry James’ advice. She would observe her aging, she would observe her own despondency, she would make the most of the time she had left. Already hearing voices and sensing that this time she would not recover, she exercised the one power left to her. She chose to die. “I will go down with my colours flying!”
References
DeSalvo, Louise
A., Virginia Woolf, The impact of childhood sexual abuse on her life and
work. Beacon Press, c1989.
Jacobson, Edith, Depression, International Universities Press, Inc., c1971.
Lee, Hermione, Virginia Woolf. Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.
Woolf, Virginia, Flush, Harcourt, Brace and Company. c1933.
———The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Volume Four, ed. by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, Harcourt Brace & Company, c1978.
——— 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., c1955.
——— The Waves, Harcourt, Inc., c1959.
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