Again She Had the Odd Feeling of Being Two People at the Same Time Virginia Woolf
Narrating health. Literature and medicine
Virginia Woolf: Between writing and disease
Josep Ballester-Roca (a)
Academy of Valencia, España
Noelia Ibarra-Rius (b)
University of Valencia, España
University of Valencia, España
Virginia Woolf: Between writing and disease
Mètode Science Studies Journal , vol. eight , pp. 223-229, 2018
Universitat de València
© 2012 Universitat de València
Received: 29 June 2017
Accustomed: 02 November 2017
Abstract: Here we offer an analysis of mental illness expressed in the work of a primal twentieth century: Virginia Woolf. A critical review of her literary legacy allows the states to go closer to what might be i of the almost intense literary portrayals of illness and its metaphors and, at the same time, to the representations, euphemisms, silences, and monsters depicted in the chapters of her life and in the unique phonation of this essential author.
Keywords: illness, literature, writing, Virginia Woolf, women.
Keywords: affliction, literature, writing, Virginia Woolf, women.
Introduction
Most of the pathologies nosotros suffer are often overburdened with mythology. Since ancient times, speculations about illness present it as an instrument of divine wrath or unknown obscure forces (call back, for case, about the plague that Apollo inflicted upon the Achaeans in the Iliad equally a punishment for the abduction of Chryses's girl by Agamemnon). In fact, any condition considered a mystery at a given moment is perceived as morally suspicious; the proper noun is fifty-fifty omitted in order to avert unexpected danger – the protagonist'south mother in Armance, by Stendhal, is an example of this; she avoids the term tuberculosis for fear that uttering information technology will make her son go worse. Similarly, the evil nature of the word cancer leads many people to avoid or hibernate it, so sometimes it must be understood implicitly in literature (every bit in Tolstoy's The decease of Ivan Ilyich).
In this work, we journeying through the disorders and illness of Adeline Virginia Stephen, better known as Virginia Woolf. Her fiction – simply also in her essays, diaries, and memoirs – reveals her profound ability for introspection, just too documents an insider's perspective of disease, its related states of listen, and psychological highs and lows. This information is complemented with documents from the writer's nigh intimate circle, who outline her clinical and everyday universe – which are sometimes difficult to separate.
Crises
There has been ample discussion on Virginia Woolf'south condition. Today experts think she had bipolar disorder with hypomanic dysphoria and severe depressive phases (American Psychiatric Clan, 2000; Baldessarini, 2000). She suffered the 3 major crises of her disease in the summer of 1895, May 1904, and July 1913, although she went through other severe episodes betwixt these periods. She had the first episode when she was thirteen. It left her convalescing for over six months and forced her to end writing her diary, which she had started four years before. In 1897, after an intense breakup, she says that life was very hard for her and that she would need elephant hide to endure it, which the writer certainly believed she did non accept (Woolf, 1975). The second severe episode, in 1904, was very serious and led to her first suicide endeavour. However, the most acute flow in her disorder extended from 1913 to 1915. Despite her significant instability, she married Leonard Woolf in August 1912. At the time, she had intense ups and downs, every bit reflected past her intake of 100 grams of Veronal on 9 September 1913, in another attempt to accept her ain life.
Her collapses, nightmares, and breakdowns would continue until summer 1915. Then, against all odds, she was quite well until 1936 (Woolf, 1980). In 1941 she over again felt rather down-hearted, and was agape that her disease would become worse again and she would have to go to an aviary every bit on previous occasions. In fact, she was hearing voices – the preamble to a severe crunch – and on 28 March, after writing ii farewell letters, one to Leonard and the other to her sis Vanessa, she walked into the river Ouse with her overcoat pockets full of stones. This was her last effort to take her own life, and this time she was successful. This is a fragment of her letter to Leonard:
Honey, I experience certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to exercise. Y'all accept given me the greatest possible happiness. You lot accept been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't remember 2 people could take been happier 'til this terrible affliction came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me yous could work. And y'all will I know. You run into I can't even write this properly. I can't read. (Bell, 1996, p. 226)
Picture with function of the alphabetic character Virginia Woolf left for her husband Leonard before she committed suicide.
Freud and Woolf
Sigmund Freud and Virginia Woolf did not personally meet each other until 28 January 1938 in their retirement in Hampstead, a year earlier Freud's death and 3 before she passed away. A few months before, Freud had arrived in England, weak, worn, and tired due to the jawbone cancer he had long suffered. During the visit, Virginia Woolf was excited by the analyst's sharp intelligence. But as far as we know, the author was never psychoanalysed. At that time her diagnosis was manic-depressive disorder, and the episodes were treated with sleep cures, a balanced diet, and repose environments, although she barely slept and ate fifty-fifty less.
One must wonder why she was non psychoanalysed, especially given that Leonard Woolf admired the Viennese dr. (the married couple published Freud'southward piece of work in Hogarth Printing, [i] taking both an economic chance and risking being accused of obscenity by the establishment). While Virginia was always quite unyielding to the ideas of psychoanalysis, she progressively inverse afterward visiting Freud, as we can come across from her diary entries months after the professor from Vienna passed away. On 2 September 1939, she said she had started to devour Freud's work (Woolf, 1985). She never stopped reading his books, which would be reflected in her work, every bit seen in Moments of being (Woolf, 2013). In a manner, Virginia Woolf responded to the ability that the father of psychoanalysis assigned to the past and to primitive emotions hidden under the guise of culture.
There has been aplenty give-and-take on Virginia Woolf'due south disease. Experts now think that she had bipolar disorder with hypomanic dysphoria and astringent depressive phases. Above, Virginia Woolf's portrait, painted in 1902 past George Charles Beresford.
A heavy emotional brunt
The writer's existence was marked by events acquired by an onerous emotional burden. The commencement of these loads was the result of her female parent'south passing, for which she blamed herself her entire life. She also carried the guilt of the death of her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, and of other people she was close to and who passed away during this period. In this sense, one of the key events was the death of her half-sis Stella from peritonitis while meaning. This had a severe consequence: Woolf's male parent forbade Stella's name from being uttered once more. Having to remain silent well-nigh her emotions made it impossible Woolf to take her grief. The prohibition as well explains the subsequent poor relationship between Sir Leslie Stephen and his children. Her father's death in 1904 created more feelings of guilt and she started hearing voices telling her to do insane things, until she finally jumped out of a window, albeit with no serious consequences. In 1906, her favourite brother, Thoby, died from typhoid fever while returning from a trip to Hellenic republic.
Her father's expiry in 1904 generated more feelings of guilt and she started hearing voices inciting her to do insane things. In the photograph, her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, circa 1860.
The third episode is quite well-documented, among other reasons, cheers to Leonard's detailed diary of his wife'south disorders, which includes, for example, her constant fixation of talking for days on terminate with her deceased female parent and male parent. She felt guilty and thought her distress was a deserved punishment (Figueroa, 2005; García Nieto, 2004). Similarly, some of her life experiences, like the sexual abuse she and her sister possibly suffered at the hands of their one-half-brothers – Gerald and George Duckworth – might take aggravated her disorder (DeSalvo, 1989).
Yet, most scholars attribute some of her illness to a hereditary cistron – an idiopathic root cause, because her grandfather on her father's side suffered at to the lowest degree three crises. In addition, her cousin, James Kenneth Stephen, also a author, adult a manic disorder and was bars considering of his aggressiveness; her begetter, Leslie Stephen, a preeminent intellectual, suffered astringent episodes of depression, particularly after his second wife's expiry in 1895; her mother, Julia Duckworth, went into pathological mourning subsequently the death of her first husband; even her sister, Vanessa Bell, suffered a serious depressive episode after losing a kid while pregnant, and a major crisis acquired by her tempestuous relationship with Roger Fry.
Writing every bit therapy
At many times in her writing, especially in her autobiographical piece of work, Woolf comments on the need to employ creation as an escape from illness. Every bit she said in April 1929, she considered writing to have a life of its own, and to be a witness of something real across appearances, which she could put into words, and in this transformation, they lost their power to hurt her. Writing became a mode to escape from what distressed her, what horrified her (Woolf, 2013). Faced with a feeling of vulnerability, creation gave her the protection she sought, every bit a sort of buffer confronting the passing of fourth dimension or the relationships with people she held dear, amongst others. Simply when that failed, she cruel dorsum into the pit.
Picture of Virginia and Leonard Woolf in 1912, the year they married.
In this sense, we tin read To the lighthouse (Woolf, 1996) as a psychoanalysis of sorts, with dialogues she never had, as a infinite to say everything she could not say in life. Minow-Pinkey (1987) has as well suggested that the illness of Septimus, the graphic symbol in Mrs. Dalloway, constitutes a type of exact insanity, characterised past the loss of the ability to distinguish betwixt signifier and signified, disruptive real objects and the words used to refer to them. The disconnect between words and their referents culminates with Septimus's autumn into the blackness hole of madness after being unable to feel anything for the death of his best friend, only like Virginia, faced with the death of many of her relatives and which was a frequent source of guilt for her.
At the very to the lowest degree, we must note the author's preference for water-related imagery, established in her work and her life, equally well as her conclusion to end her life with h2o. In the pages of some of her books, we observe the relationship between water and nature's apathy regarding the fate of humans, too equally the peace of death. We can come across this in Mrs. Dalloway: «while the bounding main darkens and brightens beneath him, and the waves which threaten to break, just but gently split their surface, roll and conceal and encrust as they just plow over the weeds with pearl» [2] (Woolf, 2003, p. 61).
In 1925 she wrote a text at T. South. Eliot'southward asking, «On beingness ill», to be published in New Benchmark in Jan 1926. In April, the New York magazine The Forum published a shorter revised version titled «Illness: an unexploited mine». In 1930 Virginia and Leonard recovered the original in an edition by Hogarth Press, giving u.s.a. a text total of depictions of disease and the recurrent approach to the relationship between trunk and soul. In fact, in one of the first topics, she touches on the suspicious absence of illness among the great literary leitmotifs, and she wonders why literature does not draw the everyday tragedy for body and mind when we are convalescing. She even comments on the lack of words in the English language to reflect pain:
English, which tin limited the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. It has all grown one mode. The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare, Donne, Keats to speak her heed for her; but let a sufferer try to depict a pain in his head to a doctor and linguistic communication at one time runs dry. [3] (Woolf, 2014, p. 29–30)
She besides reflects on illness and how it makes us contemplate the universe in a very dissimilar fashion, discovering aspects of reality that cannot be appreciated or examined from other perspectives: «There is, permit us confess it (and illness is the great confessional) a childish outspokenness in illness; things are said, truths blurted out, which the cautious respectability of wellness conceals. […] In illness, this make-believe ceases. [4] (Woolf, 2014, p. 35–36). Deep down, she outlines the profound loneliness of the human being existence.
We will non speculate on what her work might have been like without her illness or with handling in the context of current psychiatric advances, just without a doubt, her personal circumstances affected the mode she confronted her being and her creativity. Some of her fictional characters prove psychological symptoms that she knew very well; for instance, Septimus Smith's anxiety and delirium, which led him to commit suicide, the mode doctors – as the guardians of the norm – refer to him as insane, or the beingness of Clariss Dalloway. She often pointed to her own feel as the genesis for her fictional texts and, particularly, to her crises, during which ideas and words would flow like a volcano. During her first episode of the affliction, the author noted that she heard birds singing in Greek, a scene she would recreate years later on in Mrs. Dalloway and The years (Woolf, 1988).
In Mrs. Dalloway, possibly one of her greatest works, Virginia Woolf talks about all her concerns at the time: mental health, the patriarchal surround and the role of women in society, and experiencing suicide, among other topics. With the chronicle of i day in June 1923 in the life of Clariss Dalloway, a middle-aged woman who is busy organising a regular party with friends, she also tells the parallel story of Septimus Warren Smith, a depressive veteran and war hero. Through these two characters, Woolf shows the ebbs and flows of the mind, she brings the by and nowadays closer or moves them further abroad, she uncovers impressions, feelings of angst, memories... She suggests a subjective reality captured past the tireless torrent of sensations accumulated in the listen, of reflections, of the author's anguish, mixed with Septimus's parallel storyline and the way he considers suicide every bit his only way out. Images follow one another in a mental discourse in which words are fundamental – the words spoken, and especially the words considered, a representation of the stream of consciousness.
By fashion of conclusion
A depressive character can be observed both in her writing and in documents written by her closest allies; a sceptical and hopeless character, with recurrent suicidal thoughts and a fear of people. At the aforementioned time, she was terrified of loneliness, very self-critical, had constant feelings of guilt, suffered terrible headaches and insomnia, and was often disgusted by food. Some doctors attributed her health problems to literature. Some even recommended that she stop writing, since the major episodes she experienced, called «waves» and «horror» in the diary, frequently peaked later the great exertion writing represented for her. Virginia Woolf never listened to them and, even though her repeated and long attacks of illness affected her piece of work, preventing her from writing for long periods, she had a stiff will to create an beauteous, vast, and original torso of piece of work. Her obstinate and insightful work method surprised even Leonard, her married man and editor, equally we can run across in his diaries (Woolf, 1970). All the same, from our modernistic perspective, her artistic piece of work may have helped Woolf to endure her ordeal; in her fight against her hounding disease, literature was the plank she held onto during her constant sinking. In this sense, we tin can empathize the frequent exploration in her final pieces of piece of work of the complexities of 1's self and her assay of the characters' consciousness. How could she end learning about herself, writing about herself, and reading well-nigh herself? How could she abandon her own inner journey?
References
American Psychiatric Association. (2000). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. Washington: APA.
Baldessarini, R. J. (2000). A plea for integrity of the bipolar disorder concept. Bipolar Disorder, 2, three–7. doi: 10.1034/j.1399-5618.2000.020102.x
Bong, Q. (1996). Virginia Woolf. A biography. London: Hogarth.
DeSalvo, 50. (1989). Virginia Woolf: The touch of childhood sexual abuse on her life and work. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Figueroa, Yard. (2005). Virginia Woolf: enfermedad mental y creatividad artística. Revista Médica de Chile, 133, 1381–1388. doi: 10.4067/S0034-98872005001100015
García Nieto, R. (2004). Virginia Woolf: caso clínico. Revista de la Asociación Española de Neuropsiquiatría, 92, 3501–3519.
Minow-Pinkey, M. (1987). Virginia Woolf and the problem of the field of study. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Woolf, L. (1970). The journey not the inflow matters: An autobiography of the years 1939-1969. London: Harcourt, Dauntless & Give-and-take.
Woolf, V. (1975). The letters: Vol. I. The flight of the heed, 1888-1912. London: Chatto & Windus.
Woolf, V. (1980). The letters. Vol Half dozen. Exit the letters till were dead, 1936-1941. London: Chatto & Windus.
Woolf, V. (1985). The diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. V. London: Penguin.
Woolf, V. (1988). Els anys. Barcelona: Edhasa.
Woolf, V. (1996). Al far. Barcelona: Edicions 62.
Woolf, Five. (2003). Mrs Dalloway. Barcelona: Proa.
Woolf, V. (2013). Momentos de vida. Barcelona: Lumen.
Woolf, Five. (2014). De la enfermedad. Barcelona: Centellas.
Notes
[1] Virginia and Leonard's editorial endeavour, starting in 1917, was no joke: they not only published their ain books, only also published essential work by John Maynard Keynes, Edward M. Forster, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Katherine Mansfield, Anton Chekhov, Thomas S. Eliot, Middleton Murry, and Sigmund Freud, amongst others.
Author notes
(a) Full Professor of the Department of Language and Literature Teaching of the University of Valencia (Spain). He currently directs the Spanish Social club of Linguistic communication and Literature Education ("Sociedad Española de Didáctica de la Lengua y la Literatura", SEDLL).
(b) Tenure-track 2 professor in the Department of Linguistic communication and Literature Teaching at the University of Valencia (Spain) and vice-dean of the Faculty of Instructor Grooming. She is a fellow member of the board of the Spanish Society of Language and Literature Teaching ("Sociedad Española de Didáctica de la Lengua y la Literatura", SEDLL).
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