The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine

Virginia Woolf: Her Cries of Joy and Longing
Part Three

Barbara Young, M.D.

Though I don’t know that it was Virginia Woolf’s intention, in my previous discussions I chose to use her image of the lighthouse light sweeping across the bedroom floor in her novel To the Lighthouse to represent the intermittent presence of her mother’s beneficent gaze. When the light shone, she as an infant was soothed and comforted. In its strong glow, she gradually grew into the awareness of existing as an entity separate from her mother as she absorbed the sound of the waves breaking and the “little acorn” of the blowing window blind rolling across the floor. In this state of calm and peace, little Virginia began her life-long excitement of being in love with the world.

From the close observation of infants and their mothers, child analysts have arrived at the supposition that we come into the awareness of our own existence because of the consistent investment our parents make in us after our birth. They assume that when the light of a mother’s face vanishes, the newborn ceases to exist. After some months, when the young child’s separate existence has established itself, the child experiences frustration followed by murderous rage when the mother is gone. If the absence is prolonged, the child withdraws and becomes depressed. Though we have no memory of these early times, these are experiences we all have known; experiences which we have every reason to believe Virginia Stephen and her siblings suffered to a considerable degree.

No mother can be there all the time. In fact if she were, we might not be roused to the anger that prepares us to face and deal with future disappointments; nor learn that our rage and hate are normal feelings that can be tolerated by those who love us without destroying them or their annihilating us. Over time we become aware of our mother’s separate existence, and we can recognize when we have hurt her. We feel guilty. Because we love her we are sorrowful, we become depressed at what we have done and try to modify our ways. Gradually our love ameliorates the primitiveness of our hate.

Even though Virginia was less than two years old when her little brother Adrian was born we have some grasp of her struggle to contain her jealous rage out of fear of losing her mother’s love in her graphic description of Elizabeth Barrett’s dog. In his jealousy, Flush was roused to bite Mr. Browning when he came to call. But he could not carry through, for biting him was the same as biting his mistress. His love for her stopped his actions.

Virginia remembered that her time alone with her mother was always being interrupted. As is inevitably the case when longing goes unsatisfied, Woolf’s love was joined together with a persistent rage and hate. Where there was love, hate was always in tow. Woolf tells us in the person of Clarissa Dalloway that the monster that grubbed at her roots was a hate that destroyed all pleasure. But Clarissa realized that her hate was out of all proportion to anything that her daughter’s older friend had done, and that under the hate was love. And in Orlando, her love poem to Vita Sackville-West, she sees love as having two bodies—one light, the other dark—inseparably joined.

By the time Virginia was four, her conscience was firmly established, as is apparent from an incident she described to her friends in the Memoir Club. She and her older brother Thoby were having a fist fight. The thought came to her that she was about to hurt him. She dropped her fists, overcome with sadness and depression.

***

Love and hate are the two primal sources of energy that will power us throughout our lives. How do we reconcile these opposites so they can pull together as a team, for we will need the energy from both of them to make the most of our lives? The consistent presence of those who care for us in our early months makes all this possible. An infant cut off from this nourishment for too long a time, dies of marasmus, as happened with some of the young children separated from their parents during the second world war. The prostitutes that Edith Jacobson observed were permanently damaged in their ability to love and to fully live by the sporadic presence and investment of their mothers in them as infants.

As I have previously speculated, the disruptions in little Virginia’s early bonding with her mother no doubt created an uneasy grounding that contributed to her later mood swings, and gave rise to her life-long yearning. But she was born with a strong constitution. She was resilient, she fought back. She was intelligent, gifted, and endowed with the drive to work hard and the powerful need to fulfill all of her potential. In the photograph of her in her mother’s lap when she was just one, she appears strong, solid, looking squarely at the camera with her back to her mother. It is easy to imagine her impatience at being held tight, when as an active toddler she was eager to jump down and go exploring. When she was teased in the nursery by her sister and brother, she grew red and furious, strongly defending herself.

At four, when she stopped her fight with Thoby, was her reaction of sadness and depression more than just the guilt of hurting someone she loved? Is it possible that even at that early age she sensed the consequences of this renunciation of fighting as an outlet for her aggression? Given the degree and primitiveness of her rage—which I assume is the monster lurking deep inside her—and the vulnerability to loss of control present in people who eventually develop manic depressive illness, a strong conscience was essential to little Virginia’s becoming a civilized human being. And that she did indeed become. She had a strong sense of what is right and wrong; she fought hard for the causes she espoused, primarily the rights of women to have control of their own lives and her opposition to the glorification of war, seeing it as a masculine need to assert power and control.

Virginia had succeeded in encapsulating her violent rage at her powerlessness in the face of her depressed and otherwise occupied mother, her overpowering father, her intrusive half-brothers, and her chaotic household, by turning the rage against herself. As an adult, her controlled aggression showed itself in her biting sense of humor and quarrels with her husband and friends. But during the episodes of psychosis, the primitive rage and hate she lived in constant fear of—the fin rising from the sea—burst forth in full fury toward those she loved.

***

Though the wild beast at times broke through the surface of the sea, Woolf managed to ride that beast, to use the powerhouse of aggressive energy in her writing. Her pen became her beloved weapon with which she flew across the page; with it she captured all her passions, softened at times to the most delicate touch. She was courageous. Long before she no doubt heard Henry James quote the advice his father had given William and him—“We were to convert and convert...everything that should happen to us, every contact, every impression and every experience we should know, were to form our soluble stuff...”—she had discovered how to turn her pain and rage into the power of the written word. This capacity to write served as the bridge which saved her many times from the disastrous fall into the abyss. And the five times she broke with reality, she eventually returned to sanity bearing with her raw material for her life-saving pen.

At age fifty-nine, when she saw the monster approaching once again, she tried to stave off disaster by starting a new book and a short story. This time the remedy of writing was not successful. She saved herself from the plunge into psychosis by taking her life. In her novel The Waves, she had rehearsed this final scene, “Against you I will fling myself. Unvanquished and unyielding. Oh Death!”

***

What happened to the sturdy four-year-old Virginia with her self-confidence and self assertiveness? Her biographers speak of a change in her personality at about the age of six. At least four serious events struck at this time. Her parents’ unsuccessful attempts to subdue her defiant half-sister Laura led to her being exiled from the family at age seventeen when Ginia was five. The example was right before her: if you are not obedient and good and bright, (Laura had refused to read) you can actually be abandoned! At six, after a long bout with whooping cough, the young children were sent off to their grandmother’s to recuperate. At about the same time Virginia suffered the humiliation of having her body explored by Gerald. She was left with helpless outrage, shame and guilt. And last but not least, her father suffered two work-related “breakdowns” when she was six and seven.

Virginia lost her exuberance and became a nervous, anxious child. Her ability to write came to her rescue. At age nine and ten she wrote her first novel about a Cockney couple who did not have enough to eat; the husband lived in fear that his wife would put him out of the house. Spelling out her worries helped Virginia to master her hungry yearnings and her anxiety about abandonment. She was able to catch her mother’s attention with her writing. Her love of books brought her admiration and love from her busy father and from Thoby, with whom she had long literary discussions when he was home from school.

The tragic loss of her mother toward whom she was so ambivalent when she was thirteen, followed by a household in the perpetual state of emotional chaos, led to a “breakdown” of severe anxiety attacks, temper outbursts, excitability and severe mood swings, thought by some to have been the first manic depressive illness.

Because of her illness, at the doctor’s command, her reading, her lessons, her writing were curtailed. Others were busy: her brothers away at school, Vanessa was studying art. She had no friends her own age. Her activities were reduced to accompanying her half-sister Stella on errands. How unbearable this must have been for such a bright and eager child! Her biographer Louise DeSalvo describes her lonely painful adolescence and her determined fight to save herself. “Through language, through her diary, Virginia rebuilt her life, rebuilt her psyche...painstakingly, slowly, one day at a time.” At almost sixteen, she closes the year with a determined vow: “Here is life given to each alike, & we must do our best with it. Our hand in the sword hilt — & an unuttered fervent vow!”

It was when she was recovering from the severe psychotic episode after her father’s death, at twenty-two, that she firmly embraced writing as her career, buoyed up by the encouragement of her maternal friend Violet Dickinson.

***

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.”

***

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.

***

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