Of Whom Should Virginia Woolf Have Been Afraid: A Study of her Traumatic Life."
by Elizabeth Ronis
“But I don’t want to go among mad people” Alice remarked. “Oh, you
can’t help that,” said the Cat. “ We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
Alice in Wonderland; Lewis Carroll. I believe Carroll meant eccentric, not
insane. Virginia Woolf was certainly eccentric but was she insane?
Virginia Woolf holds a unique, if controversial place, in Twentieth
Century literature. During her lifetime, she was known for her novels and essays
and, posthumously, for her diaries and letters. She has become subject for endless
numbers of biographies, reminiscences, and doctoral theses.
Virginia and her husband Leonard were central figures in the Bloomsbury
Group, which took its name from an area in Northeast London. It became the
gathering place of friends who originally met at Cambridge. It included painters
such as Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, (Dora) Carrington, the art critics Roger Fry
and Clive Bell, Vanessa’s husband, the writer/ historian Lytton Strachey, his
brother James and James’ wife Alix, the translators of Freud, writers E.M.
Forster, T.S. Eliot, Saxon Sidney-Turner, and economist John Maynard Keyes and
his wife Lydia Lopokova. Most of them became leading figures in the arts,
literature, and government of that period. Writing about the Bloomsbury group
became a cottage industry.
The relationships among the members of the group were complicated,
promiscuous, involving multiple partners and often homosexual or bisexual.
Dorothy Parker said that the Bloomsbury group was comprised of pairs who had
affairs in squares. They wrote about themselves and their friends incessantly in
diaries, correspondence and later in memoirs. Virginia’s letters alone comprise
five volumes and her diaries, six. Leonard her husband also published several
volumes of memoirs. Even Vanessa Bell’s maid of fifty years kept a diary. This
was recently purchased from her family by the British museum for 40,000 pounds.
Virginia’s state of mind and health are thus, apparently, well documented.
But were they understood correctly? The description of her as ” mad” is still
questionable. Why did her family describe her this way? Why did she describe
herself thus? What did she mean by this? Was it, perhaps, because she was
convinced of this by her family and by her friends? Or was she looking for
attention, a role to play and this was open? Her husband, Leonard not only
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shared this view but promulgated it, as did Quentin Bell,” her official biographer,”
chosen by Leonard
Today, literary critics and psychoanalysts are divided into several vocal
camps. There are those who accept the received view of her husband, her family,
her doctors and Quentin Bell, and those who reject it or amend it on various
grounds.
The basis for her being called “mad” were her chronic depression, disabling
headaches, insomnia, anorexia, continual psychosomatic symptoms, and
sometimes she said, she heard birds singing to her in Greek. She also had a large
number of minor physical illnesses. Some of these symptoms can be attributed to
bipolar illness, some to migraine headaches.
In 1895 at age thirteen, she had her first episode labeled as a “breakdown”.
On March 28, 1941, at the age of 59, she drowned herself in the Ouse River near
her home in Sussex for fear of going “mad” again.
Virginia Woolf’s family history is important, both psychologically and
genetically. There were, what was described as a history of mental illness,
predominantly of mood disorders on her father’s side--generations of quiet,
gloomy men. Virginia describes her father as " Spartan, ascetic, puritan.” But
this translates as depression, not madness. Was it genetic or could it have been
the outcome of the child-rearing practices of the time, transmitted from generation
to generation, which caused depression?
Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on January 25, 1882, the
third child of Julia Stephen and Leslie Stephen. Both had been previously widowed.
Julia had been married to Herbert Duckworth, a barrister, in 1866 who died after only
four years and whom she mourned during her children’s infancy. She was left with
three small children-George, Stella, and Gerald, the latter born posthumously. They
were respectively, 14, 13 and 12 years old when Virginia was born. Leslie Stephen
had been married to the younger daughter of William M. Thackeray. When she died in
1875, he was left with five-year old Laura to raise. Leslie shut out the world when he
grieved and was totally unavailable to his young daughter. Thus, Laura who had lost
her mother was left to grieve alone and abandoned to a not too adequate nurse who
spoke only German. She was cheap and Leslie loved a bargain. He was a widower for
two years and then married Julia Stephen who he knew would take Laura off his hands.
Leslie and Julia were married in 1878. There were four children of this
marriage within four and a half years, Vanessa, May 30, 1879, Thoby, September 8,
1880, Virginia, January 25, 1882 and Adrian on October 27, 1883. Julia Stephen was
thirty-six years old when Virginia was born and Leslie Stephen was fifty.
Laura was a difficult, stubborn child. Julia, with four babies on her hand, did not
have much sympathy for Laura’s problems. Leslie found her not willing to read, not
unable to read, but not willing. The solution they came upon was to seclude her from
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the other children in the attic rooms. Shades of Jane Eyre. It was as though she didn’t
exist. When she was seventeen and Virginia was five Laura was sent to live in the
country and when she was twenty-one, she was placed in an asylum. Virginia had very
strong view on the mentally handicapped. After walking past a group of them she noted
in her diary: “They should certainly be killed.”
Quentin Bell’s official two-volume biography of Virginia was published in 1972
Bell goes into great detail of the family history on both sides going back to the 17th &
18th Centuries. However, he made no mention of Laura or of Julia and Leslie’s
treatment of her. It reads rather like a catalogue of events than a biography and I must
say, is dreadfully dull reading.
The combined family of eight children lived at 22 Hyde Park Gate in London. In
1881, Leslie bought their vacation home, Tallard House, in St.Ives, Cornwall and the
family spent each summer there through 1894. Virginia remembered her summers
there as the happiest times in her life.
Besides the eight children, there were always relatives and visitors. In addition to
this complicated household, Julia took on other responsibilities, visiting the sick and
needy. Julia’s husband was also a difficult, demanding and needy man. The care of the
children was, as customary, left primarily to the servants.
“Can I remember ever being alone with her for more than a few minutes.
Someone was always interrupting. When I think of her spontaneously she is always in
a room full of people…If I let my mind run about my mother… they are all of her in
company, of her surrounded, of her generalized; dispersed.”
In Reminiscences, Vanessa, writing to her son Julian Bell, says of her sister:
“…some six years must have passed before I knew she was my sister…already, I have
heard, she was able to care for the three little creatures who were younger than she
was…” This indicates further that Julia was not available and that her daughter, barely
six was looking after her siblings.
Leslie Stephens was a distinguished Victorian man of letters, founder and editor
of the Dictionary of National Biography, editor of Coghill Magazine, author of several
books including “The Science of Ethics” written in the year of Virginia’s birth in which
he presented a passionate argument for the morality of suicide.
“If, now, we suppose that a man, knowing that life meant for him nothing but
agony, and that moreover his life could not serve others, and was only going to give
useless pain to his attendants, and perhaps involve the sacrifice of health to his wife and
children, should commit suicide, what ought we to think of him? He would, no doubt,
be breaking the accepted moral code; but why should he not break it?”
In the Victorian era, Virginia wrote,” people who had genius were like prophets:
different, another breed. They were “ill to live with”...it never struck my father that
there was any harm in being “ill to life with. I think, he said unconsciously as he
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worked himself up into one of those violent outbursts” This is a sign of my genius.”
(From Moments of Being).
Although her brothers were sent to public schools, Vanessa and Virginia were
taught at home, mostly by their parents. This may have been due to economy- Leslie
was a man to whom money was an obsession- or to their Victorian belief that the girls
should be taught women’s’ skills and then marry, or both. Julia was not a woman
who questioned Victorian values. She once signed an anti- suffragette petition holding
that women had enough to do in their homes without the vote.
Leslie taught his daughters mathematics but he had a violent temper and little
patience with young children. He apparently terrified them so that Virginia counted on
her fingers for the rest of her life. Being schooled at home also deprived her of the
opportunity to develop friends or learn how to socialize. She says “Owing to the fact
that I was never at school, I never competed in any way with children of my own age, I
have never been able to compare my gifts and defects with other people.” Thus, she
probably never had a real sense of her intellectual endowment In middle age she
described this in a letter to Vita-Sackville West, one of her lovers, and the wife of
Harold Nicholson: “Think how I was brought up! No school; mooning about alone
among my father’s books; never any chance to pick up all that goes on in
schools—throwing balls; ragging; slang; vulgarities; scenes; jealousies!” We may
guess that she competed with her father, who was her role model, in which contest she
was not likely to come out ahead. Her father had a very large library and she read
extensively, devoured books, as he said. She may have been trying to prove to her
father that she was not like Laura to avoid being removed from the family. Also, it was
the only thing she could take in, being repulsed by food.
However, she always felt her education was inferior to that of her brothers. She
was particularly envious of Thoby’s, (and her father’s) knowledge of the Greek. In
1897, at 15, Virginia began Greek and History classes at King’s College, London that,
in addition to Latin, she then continued with tutors for several years. .
The death of Julia Stephen, who died of rheumatic fever on May 5, 1895, after
am eight-week illness was shattering: “Her death” wrote Virginia “was the greatest
disaster that could happen”.
The loss by itself was painful. In addition, with the death of his wife, Leslie Stephen
again went into a period of pathological mourning, punctuated by bellowings of grief.
As he yielded to his self-dramatizing self-pity, the children who had themselves lost
their mother were enlisted to comfort their bereaved father. At meals he sat, miserable
and bewildered often groaned and openly wished he were dead. It was, for the
children, not only tragic but also chaotic and unreal and frightening. They had just lost
their mother. Perhaps they were to lose their father as well.
Virginia’s whole world had changed. She was unable to cry at her mother’s death
and was proud that she was able to contain her emotions. All gaiety, a household
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crowded with guests, summers at the sea, all came to an end with the death of her
mother. Leslie sold the house at St. Ives that she so much loved, in 1895.
In a Sketch of the Past she wrote “the first memory. This was of red and purple
flowers on a black ground-my mother’s dress…and I was on her lap. …perhaps we
were going to St. Ives more probably, for from the light, it must have been evening, we
were coming back to London. But it is more convenient artistically to suppose that we
were going to St. Ives for that will lead to my other memory, which also seems to be my
first memory, and in fact it is the most important of all my memories…. It is of lying,
half asleep, half awake in bed in the nursery at St. Ives. It is of hearing the waves
breaking, one, two, one, two and sending a splash of water over the beach; and then
breaking one, two, one, two, behind a yellow blind. It is of hearing the blind draw its
little acorn across the floor as the wind blew the blind out. It is of lying and hearing this
splash and seeing this light, and feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here; of
feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive.”
Leslie simply assumed that Stella Duckworth, Julia’s oldest daughter, would take
over for her mother. She presented the books of household expenses, every
Wednesday after lunch. “He read the figures. Then down came his fist on the account
books. His veins filled; his face flushed. Then there was in inarticulate roar.”
He
moaned and groaned and assured her that she was driving him into bankruptcy but then,
with an ostentatiously trembling hand, he wrote out the cheque. The same scene was
repeated weekly when Vanessa had to take over after Julia’s marriage. “You must
think me, he said to me after one of these rages---….foolish. I was silent. I did not
think him foolish. I thought him brutal.” wrote Virginia.
In August of 1896, Stella agreed to marry J.W. Hills (Jack) after two earlier
refusals. Leslie Stephen was unreasonably resistant to Stella’s proposed marriage; he
needed her. He was adamant that the couple continue to live in his home. Stella
refused so they compromised. Stella and Jack moved into 24 Hyde Park Gate, just
across the street. They married on April 10, 1897.
In January of 1897, Virginia began to keep a diary. When Jack and Stella
returned from their honeymoon on April 28, 1897 Stella was ill. She was pregnant and
had peritonitis. From the time Stella was first diagnosed on April 29, Virginia records
a world full of danger…mirroring her own vivid sense of the precariousness of life and
her rage projected onto the streets of London. She records a hansom being overturned in
Piccadilly, a man being squashed by an omnibus and a stampede in the street while they
were at a confectioners ordering cakes for Stella’s wedding. The course of Stella’s
illness went much the way of her mothers- improvement, relapse and death. Stella died
on July 19, 1897, three months after her marriage. Thus, barely fifteen, Virginia had,
in the course of two years, lost two mothers.
During this painful time, Virginia’s half-brother, George appeared the
model brother for his devotion to his half-sisters. He bought them gifts, arranged treats,
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parties and excursions for them. After their mother’s death, his kindness knew no
bounds. His shoulder was there for them when their father’s, engrossed in his own
misery, was not. What started, as sympathy became sexual abuse, or as Roger Poole.
one of her biographer refers to it, "interferences." There were fondling in public when
Virginia was at her Greek lessons. He apparently came into her, (and Vanessa’s)
bedrooms at night to continue the fondling. To whom could they say anything? Who
would not be totally incredulous? Certainly not to their father. George was the model
of a Victorian gentleman, as Virginia says. He knew and obeyed all the conventions
and got by that way
Virginia’s story of the abuse of Gerald Duckworth, her other half brother is
described in her “A Sketch of the Past”. Virginia is explaining her relationship to the
mirror in Talland House at St. Ives ”There is a small looking-glass in the hall at Talland
House. It had, I remember, a ledge with a brush on it. By standing on tiptoe I could see
my face in the glass. When I was six or seven, perhaps, I got into the habit of looking at
my face on the glass. I only did this if I was sure that I was alone. I was ashamed of it.
A strong feeling of guilt seemed naturally attached to it. But why was this so?”
“At
any rate, the looking glass shame has lasted all my life…”
“I thus detect another element in the shame which I had in being caught looking
at myself in the glass in the hall. Another memory, also of the hall, may help to explain
this. There was a slab outside the dining room door for standing dishes upon. Once,
when I was very small, Gerald Duckworth lifted me onto this, and as I sat there he
began to explore my body. I can remember the feel of his hand going under my clothes;
going firmly and steadily lower and lower. I remembered how I hoped that he would
stop; how I stiffened and wriggled as his hand approached my private parts. But it did
not stop. His hand explored my private parts too. I remember resenting it, disliking itwhat is the word for so dumb and mixed a feeling. It must have been strong since I still
recall it.”
“ I dreamt that I was looking in a glass when a horrible face-the face of an
animal –suddenly showed over my shoulder. I cannot be sure if this was a dream,
or if it happened….”. The connection of the feeling of shame about her own body
with the mirror, and with Gerald Duckworth and George Duckworth was to alter
the course of her life. She said that her life was ruined before it ever began. She
lived with a sense of guilt, which she describes thusly, “This leads me to think that
my natural love for beauty was checked by some ancestral dread. Yet this did not
prevent me from feeling ecstasies and raptures spontaneously and intensely and
without any shame or the least sense of guilt, so long as they were disconnected
with my own body.”
In November 1901, she and Vanessa accompanied their father to Oxford where
he received a Hon. D. Litt. In June 1902, Leslie Stephens was created a KCB (Knight
Commander of the Bath.)
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During her life, Virginia Woolf had several intense friendships with woman,
mostly older. In 1902 she meet Violet Dickinson through the Duckworths and a close
friendship developed. Violet had only one fault according to Leslie Stephen. She was
over six feet tall. In a picture of Violet and Virginia together, it is not difficult to see
them as mother and child.
Some, like with Vita Sackville-West, a lesbian, were sexual. Vita claimed to
have gone to bed with Virginia twice. In writing to her husband, Harold Nicolson..” I
am scared to death of arousing physical feelings in her because of the madness…Also,
she has never lived with anyone except Leonard, which was a terrible failure, and was
abandoned quite soon.”
In December 1902, Leslie was operated on for cancer. Virginia nursed her father
during his final illness. During this time she writes” George would fling himself on my
bed, cuddling and kissing me in order, as he told Dr. Savage later, to comfort me for the
fatal illness of my father-who was dying three or four storey’s down of cancer. ” Leslie
died on February 12, 1904. On May 10, 1904, Virginia had another breakdown. \It
developed three months after her father’s death but also five days after the anniversary
of her mother’s death and twelve days after the anniversary of Stella’s death.
She had good reason to be depressed. She had inherited enough money from her
father to live on but she was not an heiress. She had no formal schooling and earning a
living was not a viable option for a woman of her class. She was unemployable,
disinclined to marry both temperamentally and sexually, and well on the way to being
defined as “mad” by her family and friends. The death of her father liberated her from
parental controls but, unlike her siblings, she was unprepared to make use of her
freedom. The only life with which she was familiar was the life of the literary person,
her father and his friends. Clearly, she was not willing to follow her mother’s example.
In 1904 she made a suicide attempt. She jumped from a window that was so
close to the ground that it could cause her no physical injury. How could anyone
doubt she was “mad”? She was melancholy and had attempted suicide. , She was cared
for by Dr. George Savage, her father’s friend, and three nurses. The cure was to go to
Twickenham, a sort of polite madhouse for female lunatics and undertake the WeirMitchell plan, essentially rest, and weight gain, perhaps forced feeding. Savage gave
her chloral hydrate and Veronal and may have used electrical stimulation as well. The
“cure”, therefore, depended in part on forcing food and milk at regular intervals to
achieve significant weight gain, even to the point of obesity. Complete idleness was
enforced, no friends, no reading and no writing, thus depriving her of things that gave
her joy. For Woolf whose fragile sense of self depended on productive work,
independence of mind, and close relationships, it was torture.
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When she is allowed to write again, her correspondents heard about the
tyrannical, shortsighted Savage as well as the misery of the treatment. She often writes
that she gained so and so many stones, a stone being about 14 lbs.
At the beginning of October, Vanessa, Thoby and Adrian moved to a house at 46
Gordon Square in Bloomsbury. Virginia joined them in November after she was
declared cured by her doctors. Thoby began having “Thursday evenings” which was
the start of the Bloomsbury group. One of the first of Toby’s friends to be invited to
Gordon Square was Leonard Woolf who dined with them on the eve of his departure for
Ceylon where he was a civil servant. Virginia was in London for the week. He
remembered her as being perfectly silent throughout dinner.
At the beginning of September 1906, Virginia, Vanessa, and Violet Dickinson
met Thoby and Adrian in Greece. They returned to London in October. Vanessa and
Thoby were ill. Thoby, died in November 1906 of typhoid fever, again misdiagnosed,
as malaria. The Stephens had incredibly bad judgment in doctors. Virginia had been
very close to Thoby and his death was another devastating loss.
Leonard Woolf, educated at Cambridge and at an Anglican public school, had a
promising career in the Civil Service. His father was a prominent Jewish barrister.
Leonard’s deepest desire was to shed his Jewish identity and be accepted as an English
socialist intellectual and a man of letters. He was a devout Fabian and a snob. He loved
money and the comforts it could buy.
In 1911, Leonard returned on leave from Ceylon, where he had been a very
successful administrator. Leonard was eager to marry one of the Stephen sisters. His
first choice was Vanessa but he settled for Virginia. She was close to thirty, eager to
escape the status of spinsterhood but was repelled by heterosexual or any intimacy.
Marrying Leonard, whose Jewish ness she despised and whom she could dominate with
her madness and genius seemed to solve the problem, or so she thought.
Before consenting to marry, Virginia wrote to Leonard that if they married,
Leonard would have to give up his career with the Civil Service. She was not interested
in leaving London and traveling to the outskirts of the empire. Then she bracketed
Leonard’s lust and Jewish ness both of which she experienced as alien, and abhorrent.
“ I feel angry sometimes at the strength of your desire. Possibly your being Jewish
comes in at this point. You seem so foreign. As I told you …
I feel no physical attraction in you. There are moments…when you kissed me …the
other day was one…when I feel no more that a rock”.
There were many reasons for them to marry. Love was not one of them.
Could Leonard fool himself into thinking she loved him? What she wanted was
a place in a society that had no place for singles- couples was the requirement
whether heterosexual, homosexual, or adulterous didn’t matter. What he
wanted was to cement his place in the society to which he wished to belong.
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He resigned from the colonial service in early 1912 and on August 10, 1912
they were married at St. Pancras Registry office.
Virginia was an odd person and she knew it. She had odd habits of
dressing and eating. She was frigid not only sexually but emotionally She
was determined to protect herself from being known, ether carnally or spiritually.
So she married a man who was not only culturally alien and socially inferior
but who was so consumed with his own conflicts, confusions, and prejudices that,
despite his conscious efforts, he was not capable of understanding her. Leonard’s
autocratic, self-centered personality made him an ideal husband for Virginia. In other
than background and religion, she had duplicated her father’s authoritarian personality.
When Virginia, sexually disturbed from years of abuse by her brothers, terrified of her
own body and deeply distrusting of food, returned to London in 1912 after her
honeymoon, she might have realized that she had married an adversary in the mind as
well. Leonard’s two novels, The Village in the Jungle (1913) and The Wise Virgins
(1914) demonstrate his frame of mind before his marriage to Virginia.
Both were
about crossing barriers; religious, racial, and socio-economic.
Some say that Leonard did not fully understand Virginia’s illness. But how
could he not? He had been a friend of both her brothers for several years. Is it possible
that they never mentioned it? As a disciple of G. E. Moore, the Cambridge philosopher,
Leonard believed life could be lived on a rational basis.
In The Wise Virgins, Katherine (i.e. Vanessa) tells him that her sister Camilla
(Virginia) was unable, even in childhood to separate the concept of pretend from reality.
In January of 1913, a year after their marriage, Leonard began to consult doctors about
the advisability of their having children. What his motives were is a matter of
controversy. He consulted several doctors- there was a difference of opinion. Was he
was looking for a doctor who would agree with him? He decided that although they
both wanted children, it would be too dangerous for her to have them. Virginia agreed
with him that it would pose too great a risk for her mental well-being.
However, in her social strata, she would not have been called upon to actually
raise her children. Nurses, governesses, tutors and boarding schools would take care of
all that. Deciding, or rather having it decided for her, caused her a permanent sense of
regret with which she lived the rest of her life. They had arrived at a compromise, she
denied him sex and he denied her children. **
In mid-March, 1913 Virginia’s first novel “ The Voyage Out” was accepted for
publication by Duckworth Publishers. In July, she and Leonard went on a holiday and
Virginia becomes ill on July 12. They returned top London, consulted George Savage,
who recommended she return to Twickenham promising a holiday in Cornwall if she
complies. At the beginning of September, Virginia and Leonard consulted two doctors
who both agreed that Virginia must acknowledge that she is ill and return to the nursing
home. That evening Leonard, who had been indiscreet in consulting doctors without
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the prior agreement of Dr. Savage, went to make his excuses. In his absence, Virginia
had found the unlocked case in which Leonard kept her drugs and took 100 grams of
Veronal. Dr. Geoffrey Keynes, younger brother of Maynard, who lived on the top
floor of Savage’s office, drove Leonard home and pumped out Virginia’s stomach.
They are in Cornwall by April 1914. Thus, the illness lasted just about nine months.
In 1915 she had a relapse. It again lasted nine months and coincided with the
Woolfs move from lodgings to Hogarth House. She is again admitted to a nursing
home on March 25th and released on August 11th.
At this time, Leonard began to keep short notes about her health in his diary in a
code made of Tamil and Sinhalese characters. By June, Vanessa says”…she’s really
getting better slowly but it sounds most depressing as she seems to have changed into a
most unpleasant character. She won’t see L at all and has taken against all men. She
says the most malicious and cutting things she can think of to everyone and they are so
clever that they always hurt.”
She would never be so ill again until the end of her life. She was very
productive and published eight additional novels between 1919 and 1941. As soon as
one book was finished, she began another so she was never without work.
In early 1917, Leonard and Virginia bought a printing press, which was delivered
to Hogarth House, thus Hogarth Press. The first item off the press, were Leonard’s
stories, A Mark on the Wall and Three Jews called publication #1. In 1919, they
published a small edition of Katherine Mansfield’s Prelude. Virginia’s new novel
“Night and Day” was too much for the small hand press so it was again sent to
Duckworth and published in October. What must it have felt like to submit her work
for approval to the man who had abused her sexually? In May of 1919, Hogarth
published Virginia’s short story ‘Kew Gardens” and T. S. Eliot’s Poems. Jacob’s
Room (1922) was the first of Virginia’s full -length novels published by the Hogarth
Press. This was followed by Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To The Lighthouse (1927),
Orlando (1928) The Waves (1931), The Years (1937) and Between the Acts (1941).
In June of 1920 James and Alix Strachey went to Vienna to begin their analysis
with Freud and at about this time, Virginia’s brother Adrian and his wife Karin began
medical training because Ernest Jones insisted that this was the proper route to
becoming psychoanalysts. James and Alix negotiated directly with Freud, probably
knowing that he favoured the training of non-medical psychoanalysts. Not only did
Freud take James and Alix into analysis but he also put them to work translating the
case histories that became Volume III of his collected Papers, published by Hogarth
Press in 1925.
By 1923 Adrian Stephen and his wife Karin were in their personal analysis as
well as their medical studies. Virginia said this in her diary “Adrian is altogether
broken up by psychoanalysis. His soul rent in pieces with a view to reconstruction. The
doctor (James Glover) says he is a tragedy…I doubt family life has all the power of evil
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attributed to it or, or psychoanalysis all the good.” Glover was also Karin’s analyst
until he died in 1926. Adrian then went to Ella Sharpe. Karin had a second analysis
with Clara Thompson near Baltimore.
In 1924, the Woolfs moved to to 52 Tavistock Square and installed the Hogarth
Press in the large basement. At this time, James Strachey asked the Woolfs, on behalf
of Ernest Jones, if they would publish the International Psycho-Analytical Library,
including Freud’s Collected Papers in four volumes. Volumes 1&2 of The Collected
Papers were published before the end of 1925. By October of 1924 Virginia was
reading the proofs of one of Freud’s early case histories and she wrote in disgust to a
friend “we are publishing all Dr. Freud...and yet these Germans (sic) think it proves
something-besides their own gull-like imbecility.” Reading proofs cannot be considered
reading Freud but Leonard first read Brill’s translation of Freud’s Interpretation of
Dreams in 1914. Is this not something they would discuss.?
As any writer, Virginia used her parents, her siblings, her acquaintances and
herself as the models for the characters in her novels. In Moments of Being she
writes: “when I write my so-called novels”. Is she voicing disappointment in her
novels or is she acknowledging that they are not just fiction? She had begun to
contribute to the Times Literary Supplement in 1905 and wrote upwards of 500 essays,
book reviews and short stories for various periodicals during her lifetime. She wrote
nine novels but Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) established her
reputation. The evening before the publication of Mrs. Dalloway, Leonard had James
Strachey to dinner. He wrote to Alix “Last night I dined with the Wolves (sic).
…Virginia made a more than usually ferocious onslaught upon psychoanalysis and
psychoanalysts, more particularly the latter…” This was at a time when Alix was in
Berlin in analysis with Karl Abraham.
Mrs. Dalloway formed a web of thoughts of several groups of people during the
course of a single day. Clarissa Dalloway, a wealthy London hostess, the central
character of the book, is introduced at the beginning as she goes out to do a morning’s
shopping for her party that evening. The book ends with an account of the party. In the
process, the author has given the reader a full account not only of Mrs. Dalloway’s past,
her development, her character, and her history but also of a varied group of other
people who are related to her either in that they accidentally cross her path at some
moment during the day or that she thinks of them or that they think of her. Each
character who makes contact with Mrs. Dalloway in space, (crossing her path in
London,) in time (doing the same thing at the same moment, or in memory has some
symbolic relationship either to Mrs. Dalloway or to the main theme of the book, in the
interpretation of which, the life of the character plays such an important part. As she
spends her day in London preparing for her evening party, she recalls her life before
WWI, her friendship with the unconventional Sally Seton, and her relationship with
Peter Walsh, now a colonial Civil Servant both of whom she will see that evening.
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Peter has an interesting habit-ever since she has known him, he has continuously played
with a pocketknife and still does. She gives a great deal of thought to her rejection of
Peter Walsh and her marriage to the stable but dull Richard Dalloway.
It is possible that in this way, Mrs. Dalloway, gives voice to Virginia’s
regrets about the path not taken. Throughout the book, she twines the story of
Septimus Warren-Smith, an anguished ex-soldier who suffers from delayed war
trauma, probably PTSD in present terms. Mrs. Dalloway never meets him but is
powerfully affected by his life and suicide. To Septimsus Smith, who consults
Sir William Bradshaw, Woolf gives many of the experiences of her own
breakdowns. Sir William Bradshaw is correct in that he sees at once that
Septimus is in great danger. It is the treatment- the familiar diet and rest - that
garners Woolf’s satirical scorn. When Septimus is about to be taken back to the
hospital for the rest cure, he chooses suicide and jumps out the window in front
of his horrified wife unto the spikes of the gate below. When the Bradshaws
arrive late at Mrs. Dalloway’s party, giving as an excuse the suicide of the
unnamed Septimus Smith, she thinks Bradshaw a great doctor but obscurely evil.
In this book, she got her revenge on Harley Street. Upon the death of her
ambivalently loved father, another authoritarian male, Dr. George Savage, took control
of her life. ‘To Savage, her illness were physical and exacerbated by her intellectual
activity. He was on record as being opposed to “useless book learning” for the “weaker
sex”. He said that when vulnerable girls were educated at home, solitary thinking
could lead to insanity. At previously mentioned he had sent her into weeks of isolation
in the country-first to Violet Dickinson’s house and, during later episodes to
Twickenham several times. The portrayal of Sir William is derived from George
Savage, but also from Sir Maurice Craig, who concurred with Savage’s belief in bed
rest and weight gain, (she had gained 3 stone (42 lbs.) in two years under Craig’s care.
He believed that insanity was the result of a lack of conformity with certain social
standards--his own. Another doctor who had been consulted was Dr. Hyslop who
thought that certain kinds of modern literature and art, especially the kind produced and
praised by Woolf and her circle, were in themselves evidence of insanity.
Mrs. Dalloway is based partly on Julia Stephen and partly on Virginia herself
whereas Septimus is Virginia. And just as with Septimus, ultimately the interventions
with Virginia were useless. Virginia wrote, in response to a friends comments on the
madness and suicide of Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway “…it was a subject that I
have kept cooling in my mind until I felt I could touch it without bursting into flame all
over. You can’t think what a raging furnace it is till to me-madness and doctors and
being forced. This is one of the very few occasions, except during her “episodes” when
Virginia revealed her fury at the doctors who prescribed the rest cure and, probably,
also at Leonard when he demanded a modified rest cure at home. She had been thinking
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about, and struggling with, the idea of suicide for a long time. She surely must have
read her father’s books.
In 1906, the four Stephen children decided to return to St. Ives. It had been ten
years since their last stay. To The Lighthouse is set in the Hebrides, an area very like
St. Ives.
When she looked back, Woolf says that in writing To The Lighthouse, she had
“ceased to be obsessed” by her mother. Until I was in the 40’ the presence of my
mother obsessed me… I could hear her voice, see her imagine what she would do or say
as I went about my day’s doings… of the the invisible presences …she obsessed me, in
spite of the fact” (or because of the fact) “that she died when I was thirteen. Then one
day, I made up, ….To The Lighthouse in a great, apparently involuntary rush” …I
wrote the book very quickly and when it was written, I ceased to be obsessed by my
mother.” She continues “I suppose that I did for myself what psycho-analysts do for
their patients, I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in
expressing it, I explained it and then laid it to rest.
The autobiographical To The Lighthouse explores the maternal figure, Mrs.
Ramsey who, despite her abundant domestic creativity, is essentially absent, dispersed.
Virginia’s recreation of her parents is so vivid that Vanessa writes: “… you have given
a portrait of mother which is more like her to me than anything I could ever have
conceived of as possible…You have given father too, I think as clearly, but perhaps I
may be wrong, that isn’t quite so difficult. There is more to catch hold of.”
So why did Virginia not enter psychoanalysis? Reasons that have been proposed
are many. There are the reasons that I think can readily be dispensed with. 1) There
were no psychoanalysts available in London before WWI and 2) the Woolfs did not
know of psychoanalysis in 1914. 3) Psychoanalysts did not treat psychotics.
Though psychoanalysis was not generally well known before the First World
War, by the time that Virginia had her third breakdown there were some who were well
acquainted with psychoanalysis, and these were intimates of Leonard and Virginia, and
members of the Bloomsbury Group.
She might have been afraid, that if she entered analysis, she would lose her
creativity, an idea still prevalent today. Then, there is her comment on Adrian...”he is
altogether broken up by psychoanalysis …with a view to reconstruction.” This would
be terrifying, as she has spent her life holding herself together. She must have believed
that psychoanalysis was hostile to homosexually, which it was. And that she would
have to deal with her hatred of her father. She had no love of doctors and did not
differentiate between psychoanalysts and her torturers.
Leonard, however concerned he was consciously, also did not encourage her
for several reasons I think that he was unconsciously hostile to her. How could he not
be? Theirs was a sexless marriage. Although she depended on him, she still thought of
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him as inferior and, I think, because as long as she thought she was mad, he maintained
control. Several days before she committed suicide, she did a test run. She came home
all wet and told Leonard that she had fallen into the water. He was concerned but
clearly took no preventative action.
When she was introduced to Freud, she referred to him in her diary as “a very
shrunken old man.” She was sarcastic and cutting to everyone in her diary. But she did
start to read him.
Despite all her illness, physical and emotional, she led a very full life. There was
constant travel and visiting to and from her many friends and relatives.
In 1941, the British were convinced a German invasion was imminent. The
channel is only 21 miles wide. Her house was in Rodmell, in South East Sussex, the
county closest to the channel. She and Leonard believed they were on a list to be killed
and had made a suicide plan. Perhaps, from Virginia’s point of view, why wait for the
inevitable?
She left notes on the mantel for Leonard and Vanessa. She said:” I feel
certain that I am going mad again. 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 do. You have
given me the greatest possible happiness…I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I
don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.
Her suicide, I think, was based on a multitude of fantasies. She may have been
obeying what she interpreted as her father’s instructions and thereby managing to please
him for the first time in her life. At the same time, she was unconsciously killing him
without having to openly become aware of and acknowledge her hatred of him. And of
Leonard.
And as she remembered being so happy at the seacoast perhaps she also had the
fantasy that in drowning she would be able to recapture the period in her life that was
the happiest and rejoin her mother with whom she associated with that period.
Lastly, it occurred to me that by placing stones in her pockets, she might have
given the message that, at last, she had put on enough stones to satisfy her hated
torturers, her doctors.
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