INTRODUCTION
Woolf pushed the English Language, a little further against the dark. - E.M. Forster.
Adeline Virginia Stephen (Baptized name) was born on January 25,
1882 at Hyde Park Gate, an ancestral mansion in Kensington gardens,
London. Both her mother and father had strong family associations with
literature. Virginia Woolf’s health did not permit conventional schooling,
and she was educated at home by her father and grew up at the family
home at Hyde Park Gate. A diary entry of 1853, indicates that Virginia
Woolf, who had little formal schooling and believed that “the world
[would] go on providing me with excitement whether I can use it or not”.
she had the free run of her father’s library. She was unquestionably a
master of technical method and a novelist. When she was nine, she started
a family news bulletin, The Hyde Park Gate News (1891-1895:407). Her
autobiographical novels are The Voyage Out (1915), Mrs. Dalloway
(1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). It was in 1905 that she began to write for publication in the Times Literary Supplement (viii). The art of writing was not only in her blood, but it was also a source of pleasure for her. She was an autobiographical novelist. In her autobiographical novels, she obviously presented her personal influences through her major 2 characters. She never tried to describe any of the character from outside.
She brought out what was significant in her family and around. She was closely connected with the The Bloomsbury Group which helped Virginia
Woolf a lot to become an essayist, a biographer, short story writer, a literary critic and a novelist later. Leonard Woolf was her husband.
She was one of the most important of the British women novelists, who was so closely connected with the recollections of her family members in her ‘autobiographical’ novels. Her contributions to literature are excellent. Virginia Woolf was a feminine writer and many writers regarded her as a feminist. She wanted a good status for women in the society. So in her prose work (Criticism) A Room of One’s Own, Virginia
Woolf made her famous statement: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (3). Virginia Woolf’s first two novels: The Voyage Out and Night and Day are traditional novels. Mrs.
Dalloway is an unconventional novel. To the Lighthouse is an autobiographical novel. Virginia Woolf’s novels from The Voyage Out to
Between the Acts are autobiographical in different degrees. She represents her views through her themes, characters, structure and philosophical approach in the major novels. In general; her novels disclose her psychological insight into the world of her times. 3 Britain played a significant role in the history of human civilization. From fourteenth century to nineteenth century, numerous eminent writers emerged in England like Geoffrey Chaucer, “Father of
English Poetry;” Christopher Marlowe, “Father of English Tragedy” and
creator of blank verse, William Shakespeare was called as “Big Brother”
who was a dramatist, Edmund Spenser, called as the “Poet’s Poet,” John
Milton, an epic writer and Charles Dickens, was a great novelist. The
literary activities wonderfully reached the zenith of power in the reign of
Queen Victoria. During her rule, many striking, basic changes and advances in Science, Literature, Politics, Communications, Religion and
Social Life took place. So her period is called “The Golden Age of Queen
Victoria.”
The closing years of the eighteenth century, witnessed the
appearance of a new force in English literature, by the Victorian novelists
like Lord Lytton, Benjamin Disraeli, and George Elliot. There were many others of the younger generation of thinkers like George Edward Moore
(1893 – 1958) and Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970) who were to leave their impression on the world of thought and literature. The nineteenth century women novelists were Jane Austen, Frances Trollope, Mary Russell
Milford, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Jane Bronte (1818 – 1848) and Anne
Bronte. The twentieth century women novelists were Dorothy 4 M. Richardson, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Stephen who had a brief friendship with the latter. Both were conscious of experimenting with the substance and the style of prose and fiction and Virginia Stephen appeared with the aesthetic sense. Jane Austen’s famous novels are Pride
and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion and Emma. Apart from
the thirteen members in Bloomsbury group, Virginia’s contemporaries
were Katherine Mansfield a short story writer (A Cup of Tea), T.S. Eliot
whose poems were first published in Hogarth Press and Thomas Hardy,
who was a great writer and well wisher of Virginia Stephen (Virginia had
a tea with him in 1926), James Joyce (Ireland), Marcel Proust (France),
Miss. Dorothy Richardson (England), was her women contemporary
novelists. Adeline Virginia Woolf’s literary output comprised of many
novels, short fiction, biographies, non-fiction and other miscellaneous
writings are her best works. A glimpse into her novels would help the
readers to understand and appreciate the autobiographical novelist in a
much better way. The press also commissioned the works by
contemporary artist, including Vanessa Bell.
The twentieth century is noted for its widespread literary activities.
Every branch of literature is developing to an eminent degree. Novel
reached new heights in the hands of Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Joseph
Conrad and Virginia Stephen. H.G. Wells produced scientific romances 5 while Conan Doyle developed detective fiction. Virginia Stephen was arguably the major lyrical and autobiographical novelist in the English language. Virginia’s novels are highly experimental, and personal experiences are reflected in her novels. A narrative, frequently uneventful and commonplace is refracted and sometimes almost dissolved in the characters receptive consciousness.
Adeline Virginia Stephen (Baptized name) was born on January 25,
1882 at 22 Hyde Park Gate, an ancestral mansion in Kensington Gardens,
London (Kermod “Biographical Preface” vii). Both her mother and father had strong family associations with literature. Sir Leslie Stephen, her father was best remembered as the founding editor of the Dictionary of
National Biography (Letter from Leslie Stephen and Virginia Stephen to
James Russell Lowell on 20.08.1888) reveals the above statement. He was a journalist, a biographer with historical of ideas. Although Leslie Stephen had already published his History of English Thought in the eighteenth century and The Science of Ethics, he wrote daily and methodically in his study at the top of the house, books scattered around him in a circle.
Virginia Stephen had the free run of her father’s library. She was an English novelist, critic, biographer and a miscellaneous writer.
“Virginia Stephen was unquestionably a master of technical method and a 6 true novelist” (Seymour-Smith 402). It was in 1905 that she began to write for publication in the Times Literary Supplement, which lasted more
than thirty years (Kermod “Biographical Preface” vii). She was also an
important person in the history of the development of English novels.
Definition of the novels: these are long stories telling about the events in
the life of several different characters or people. These events may span a
period of a few days, weeks or years. Many times the novel tells the story
about someone’s life, over an entire lifetime. Her industry is
extraordinary: nine highly wrought novels, ten short stories, two
biographies, ten non-fiction (x). There are many kinds of written works
that come under the category of non-fiction. Non-fiction writing is all
about real people, events and ideas. Virginia’s life was filled with her
writing, the activities of the Hogarth Press, occasional illness, and she
showed her enthusiasm with her family members and friends.
The only “interdiction” that James proposes is that “it must not
appeal on Salsa pretenses.” James, The Future of The Novel (1999),
Theory of Fiction: Henry James. ed. James E. Milk, Jr., (Lincoln, 1972,
p.340).
The proper stuff of fiction does not exist; everything is the proper
stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain
and spirit is drawn upon; no perception come amiss (Sharma 27). 7 In Virginia’s essay on “Modern Fiction” included in The Common
Reader First Series, she wrote as follows:
Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a
luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from
the beginning of consciousness to the end (Woolf, 189).
The researcher’s opinion about fiction is as follows: Fiction means, usually referring to the short story and the novel. The word ‘fiction’ refers to any narrative in prose or verse, that in wholly or in part the product of the imagination. The author creates imaginary people and events.
Sometimes he/she gets inspired by real people or happenings but mixes them with the imaginary. The reality of fiction is not a reality of circumstance or detail. It gives an illusion of reality; a convincing reading of life.
Verisimilitude in detail is means to illusion, “Willing suspension of
disbelief.” It puts before readers incredible situations, which have
“truth to reality.” Plays and poems that told a story could be
classified as fiction, folk tales, legends, allegories, satires and
romances all of which contain certain fictional elements (Pickering
and Hoeper 31).
8 Virginia was a well-known theorist of fiction and she expressed her aesthetics of fiction
ELEMENTS OF FICTION
Fiction has three main elements: plot, character, and place or
setting. Fiction includes novels, short stories, fables, fairy tales, plays,
and poems, but it now also encompasses films, comic books, and video
games. Fiction has been used for instructional purposes, such as fictional
examples used in school textbooks. There are many kinds of written
works that come under the category of non-fiction. Non-fiction writing is
all about real people, events and ideas. Fiction organizes and refines the
raw material of fact to emphasize and clarifies what is most significant in
life. The world of fiction is short, is free to exercise tremendous freedom
in their choice of subject matter and the fictional elements at their disposal
and is free to invent, select and arrange those elements so as to achieve
any one of a number of desired effects (31).
9 H.G. Wells is the Father of Science Fiction. Fiction is the experience and record of the movement of the imagination from the realms of the known to unknown. There is no limit to its capacity as a potential artistic medium for working the quarry of life. Through fiction,
Virginia brought out something finer that things convey the essence of human life to the readers. Human life is rough and coarse; to ignore that, it so deludes the reader into a falsely delicate view of the world and its people. She created a fictional world, which was not a reflection of the actual world, but only a world made in the image of her sensibilities.
Virginia had been one of the most inveterate artists in the field of fiction, and her peculiarities as a fiction writer have tended to obscure her central strength.
Fiction
Science Detective Mystery Philosophy
The DK Illustrated Oxford Dictionary defines, Autobiography –
Greek term, as autos – self + bios – life + graphier – to write. The term
‘autobiography’ was first used by Robert Southey in 1809 in the English periodical, The Quarterly Review. ‘Autobiography’ means ‘life and 10 times’ of the ‘writers.’ This is of Greek origin and signifies literally the life of a person written by him.
The researcher feels that an autobiography is one, which a person himself has written about his own life. This fascinating composition has become a common literary activity during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in English.
English autobiography may be classified into three categories: (1)
The spiritual confession, (2) The memoir and (3) The autobiographical novel.
The best example of the spiritual confession type is “The
Confession of St. Augustine of Hippo.” In it, the autobiographer describes his conversion to Christianity in detail. In this kind of writing, there is no detailed account of events and incidents but he deals mainly with inner conflicts and emotional experiences. In R.C. (Roman Catholic), the
‘spiritual confession’ means strictly confidential. Secondly, the memoir is of French origin. It originated mainly during the seventeenth century. It is of one’s life written by one’s own self. It consists of extensive letter- writing. The third type is the autobiographical novel and it begins with the novel of Charlotte Bronte Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853). 11 During the twentieth century, two autobiographies of this type are well known, namely Samuel Butler’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and
D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. Few vital authors like Joan Bennett,
David Daiches, James Henry, A.D. Mody, Herbert Marder, E.M. Forster and Deborah Newton wrote on Virginia Woolf.
In Virginia Woolf’s autobiographical novels, she obviously persuaded her personal influences in her major characters. She never tried to describe any of the characters in her novels from outside. She went on into the very center of their nature and brought out what was significant in her family and around. The researcher’s view is that Virginia Woolf’s autobiographical novels are The Voyage Out (1915), Mrs. Dalloway
(1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). The letters, diaries, and essays of
Virginia Woolf convey the essence of her life in the society. The researcher deals with it in the following chapters. Virginia created a fictional world, which was not a reflection of the actual world, but only a world made in the image of her own exquisite sensibilities; a better world, may be, but a bodiless world. Whereas Arnold Bennett and novelists of his sort create characters outside themselves, all her characters are aspects of herself. She was a great writer, but not a great novelist. She could put her self-characters into interesting situations (Hudson 300-301).
12 In the eighteenth century, the autobiographical writing had received its impulse in the hands of excellent men like David Hume, Benjamin
Franklin and Edward Gibbon. The recent publication in this field Sir
Osbert Sitwell’s autobiography entitled Left Hand and Right Hand. (1948)
In the modern age, there are many eminent brilliant autobiographers such as Viscount Morley, Viscount Haldane, Lord Asquith, W.H. Davies, G.K.
Chesterton, E.V. Lucas, J.S. Mill, Ruskin, H.G. Wells, Lloyd George,
Rudyard Kipling, Winston Churchill, and Bertrand Russell. During the reign of British in India, many autobiographies in English were written by the Indians. After introducing the study of English language by Lord
Macaulay in educational institutions, the Indians started learning the
English language as well as literature with deep enthusiasm. Thus, Indians started writing in English and autobiographical writing.
Jawaharlal Nehru, great Indian patriotic leader introduced a new system of education in his Autobiography, “opened the doors and
windows of the mind to new ideas and dynamic thoughts.” Nehru wrote
his Autobiography in 1935, while he was in jail. Another great leader and
“Father of Our Nation,” Mahatma Gandhi expresses new views on
education in his autobiography My Experiments with Truth, “Education is
the all-round development of the body, mind and spirit.” Indians became 13 acquainted with the autobiographical writings of Europeans. It created an impetus in them to write their autobiographies in English.
The origin of the Bloomsbury circle could be traced to a small group of friends at Cambridge who had started “Some reading societies for reading aloud plays, one of which met a midnight” (Bell, Old Friends
128-129). Old Bloomsbury consisted for the following people of
Vanessa, Virginia, Adrian, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell
(who married Vanessa), Maynard Kens, Duncan Grant, E.M. Forster
(novelist), Saxon Sydney Turner and Roger Fry (Virginia wrote biography on his name) who introduced the group to post-impressionist painters.
The original thirteen members of the Memoir Club were the thirteen members of Old Bloomsbury. Twenty years later the four younger persons were included in it (Woolf, Beginning 22). Its original, the
“midnight society” of Cambridge consisted of Leonard Woolf, who encouraged Virginia to write and with whom she founded the Hogarth
Press in 1917. Leonard was a tower of strength for Virginia in her endeavour in the field of creative writing. Virginia Woolf’s development owed much to Bloomsbury as well as to her married life. Bloomsbury can not be called a movement or a curt for it was more of spirit, a state of mind. Bell considers it as something “almost imparable, almost indefinable” (Bell, Bloomsbury 103). 14 The freedom and stimulus of the Bloomsbury group encouraged every artist. Roger Fry vouched, “his own method of expression in his medium.” It was this atmosphere of give and take, of unfettered enquiry that gave Virginia Woolf the impetus to free thinking. Later on it emboldened her to assert: “I write what I like writing and there is an end
on it.” This freedom for herself implied freedom for others to make judgement: “I’m to write what I like; and they are to say what they like”
(Woolf ed. Writer’s 44-45).
The Bloomsbury group helped Virginia a lot to become a biographer, an autobiographer and a novelist in the future. During the years (1912-1941), she started her career as a writer of fiction. She wished to write literary criticism and social comments. She was extraordinary in writing not only the novels but also her writing included journals and letters. Both father and daughter recognized themselves in the other.
Virginia in her last years wrote about her father in Moments of Being. He, on her ninth birthday, wrote to his wife: “she is certainly very like me” and “she will certainly be an author in time” (www.literaturepage.com).
In the words of E.M. Forster, “Woolf pushed the English language,
a little further against the dark” and her literary achievements and
creativity are influential even today. Novels are long stories telling about 15 the events in the life of several different characters or people. These events may span a period of a few days, weeks or years. Many times the novel tells the story about someone’s life, over an entire lifetime. In most of her novels, the experience of love, life and death were interwoven.
“The novel for Virginia Woolf was no longer just an entertainment or propaganda or a vehicle for some fixed idea or a social document; it is...a voyage of discovery” (Blackstone 18). She believed that by looking at men and women in their opposed ways of life and by presenting the tension between the two one may construct a new road to truth or reality.
Bayon says that “I am concurred with the fictional devices created by innovative novelists such as Dorothy researches and view to explore the internal reality of female character as they struggled to deal with these conflicts in expectations (47).
Virginia Woolf was one of the most important of the British women novelists. The complexity and originality of her thoughts and ambiguity inherent in her views of life, self and reality, are still challenges than to a fuller and richer understanding of her artistically structured novels. In the words of George Wicker, about Virginia Woolf, “her aim as a novelist was to capture, the moment with all its fleeting sensation of light, texture and color, to transfix reality that was more aesthetic than expressionistic” (Kapur 13). Every writer is a product of an age in which 16 she/he was born and bred, and in which she worked and created. Her writing expresses her age in various ways, and her works can’t be understood without an understanding of the times in which she lived.
A novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life: that to begin with, constitutes its value which is greater or less according to the intensity at all, and therefore no value, unless there is freedom to feel and say. The novel is a perfect medium for revealing to the readers, changing rainbow of one’s living relationships and the greatest relationship will always be the relationship between men and men, women and women, men and women. The novel is a branch of literature that has developed immensely in the early twenties.
According to Iris Murdoch “there are two types of modern novels- the ‘journalistic’ and the ‘crystalline.’ The ‘journalistic’ novel is a loose weaker form of the social novel of the Victorians; the “crystalline” is symbolic and doesn’t deal with social life or characters but with human conditions” (Neil 7). Virginia Woolf’s fiction belongs to the second type.
The fundamental unit of Virginia Woolf’s fiction may be defined as the dynamic confrontation of two pressures – self and the world, masculine and feminine, human and non-human, time and eternity, reality and illusion, form and structure. 17 As an individual, she was interested in life in its chaotic and fragmentary aspects, yet as an artist she felt the need to give shape, order and wholeness to life in the moments of consciousness which she reflected in her works. Virginia Woolf started writing novels in the traditional form, but by 1925, she had evolved her own novel form and had deviated philosophically and stylistically from her Edwardian predecessors, H.G. Wells, John Galsworthy, and Arnold Bennett, to take her place with innovators like T.S. Eliot and James Joyce.
Virginia Woolf’s novels reflected her attempt and success in presenting the two opposed ways of life – the flux of the sense on the outer surface of life and the being or light from the still centre on the inner plane of life. She felt the tug of war between the two conflicting vocations – one of the centrifugal pursuits of the worldly in the guise of a loved object or social quest and the other centripetal quest for the self and its coherence. Out of the opposites (centrifugal and centripetal) she represented life as the paired opposition and revealed two different kinds of experience and intelligence.
The author’s contributions to literature: novels, short stories,
biographies and non-fictions are excellent. The best of her criticism is
contained in The Common Reader First Series, and The Common Reader 18 Second Series and The Death of the Moth and The Moment. She had also left behind her a number of short stories, some of which have considerable literary merit. Novels are The Voyage Out (1915), was her first novel. It
was originally entitled as Melymbrosia. Clive Bell had suggested the
name Melymbrosia for the heroine. De Salvo published an edition of
Melymbrosia the early version of The Voyage Out, and Virginia Woolf’s
First Voyage: a novel in the making a study of the ways in which Woolf’s
changing conception of her first novel was related to her changing life
experiences (Melymbrosia ix). It was one of the wittiest and socially
satirical novels. Rachel Vinrace, the central character of the novel
embarked on a journey from London to South America; and then from
Santa Marina to the Bank of Amazon, on her father’s (Willoughby) ship
‘Euphrosyne.’ Virginia very often visited European countries with her
kith and kin. Virginia reflected herself in the character of Rachel Vinrace
in this novel. Rachel’s Aunt Helen and Uncle Mr. Ridley Ambrose were
the major characters. Rachel Vinrace was an explorer of truth. The climax
in it was dramatic. The novel had feelings, perceptions of love, loneliness,
beauty and death as the central theme of the novel. Virginia’s relation
with her sister Vanessa was very close and with her brother Thoby who
died in 1906. This sudden extinction of promise was the story of Rachel
in The Voyage Out, of Jacob in Jacob’s Room, and of Perceval in The
Waves. According to a shrewd psychoanalyst they (those who traveled in 19 ship) were all explicitly concerned with the question of the “meaning of the life” and involve the sudden, premature death of the major characters.
While her first piece of fiction The Voyage Out was published in 1915, her
first review appeared in 1904 (Guardian 20-21).
Night and Day is the realistic novel, set in London before First
World War. It explored the truth of feelings and particularly the nature of
love. The life of two friends – Katherine Hilbert and Mary Datchet forms
the central character. The novel exploited the experiences of the social life
and social problems. It “has more depth than the other,” that it is a much
more mature and finished and satisfactory book than The Voyage Out
(Tilak 22).
The novel Jacob’s Room, Virginia Woolf seemed to be revolting
against the idea of women visiting churches, and why should they be
admitted in such gorgeous clothes. She pointed out in the following
words: impropriety of permitting women into church wearing whole show
full of bright clothes seemed to her equal only to that of letting a dog
wander down the aisle (passageway). This novel centered on the life story
of the protagonist Jacob Flanders was seen through the eyes of others
rather than described directly. The main interest concentrated upon the
modes of feelings. The novel contained touches of vicious satirical wit. 20 Jacob was sitting in the British Museum along with hundreds pouring over books on numerous subjects, experiences within his mind the chain of thoughts relating to the authors and books there. Plato jostles with
Shakespeare. The British Museum Library as the novelist brilliantly said in “an enormous mind” Stone lies solid over the British Museum as bone lies cools over the visions and heat of the brain. Only here the brain is
Plato’s brain and Shakespeare’s... (Woolf, Night 107).
Mrs. Dalloway is an unconventional novel. The central character,
Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged woman of fifty, had thrown a party.
Her life was equated with Septimus Warren Smith, an ex-soldier who had
returned from the First World War. Mrs. Dalloway resembled Virginia’s
mother Julia Stephen. Mrs. Dalloway emerged as rounded figure, one of
the immortals of literature, and her character had been closely integrated
with her world, a society which was spiritually hollow, was based on false
assumptions, and which caused, and “the death of the soul.” The readers
thus give a vital picture both of Mrs. Dalloway and the upper middle class
London-world in which she lived and moved. The central theme of the
novel is “Life and Death.”
To the Lighthouse is a multiply discursive tale. It centered on the
Ramsay’s family and their visits to the Isle of Skies in Scotland between 21 1910 and 1920. It was not a conventional novel but a “stream of consciousness” novel, with a difference. The novel is divided into three parts: Part 1: Window; Part 2: Time Passes and Part 3: To the Lighthouse.
The central characters were Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe who triumphs over the “chaos of experience.” The novelist taps the treasure house of the memories regarding her father Leslie Stephen who in the novel came before the readers as Mr. Ramsay. Most critics and research scholars will agree that Lily Briscoe’s statement about Mrs. Ramsay, “one wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with she reflected .... Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with, she thought” (LH 266) is applicable to Virginia Woof as well. Trying to describe her greatness is like trying to count the colors in a floating bubble, which vanishes before one has time to begin (Kapur 13). The theme of the novel is “joy and sorrow.”
Orlando: A Biography, a fantasy novel and traced the career of the
androgynous protagonist from a masculine identity within the Elizabethan
court to a feminine identity. The work was illustrated with pictures of
Woolf’s lover, Vita Sackville – West, dressed as Orlando.
The Waves published in 1931, it is the most experimental novel of
Virginia Woolf. Its form consists of six characters in the novel: Bernard, 22 Louis, Neville, Jinny, Susan and Rhoda. Six minds engaged each according to its own character in the normal mental activity, transforming sensation into perception. The relationships had been dramatized. The author came before the readers as a “recording intelligence.’ The lies of the characters individually and collectively assume the form of waves at first. The Waves obliterated the traditional distinctions between prose and poetry, allowing the novel the flow between six not dissimilar streams of consciousness. Rhoda was the central character of the novel. She is seen alienated from common reality. The Waves and The Death of the Moth are in a way interrelated. It followed in soliloquies, the life of six persons from childhood to old age. Blackstone considers it to be a song of glory a triumph of the human will. The novel is an X-ray of the inner life, laying bare the waves of the six principal characters of the novel (Varshini 22).
Virginia Woolf’s last novel is Between the Acts. In this, Woolf held up and mirrors the humanity, and chronicles its happiness and grief very artfully. The sight of a snake eating a toad; it had half the toad in, half out, which recurs in Between the Acts. The genesis of the novel can be gathered from her diary. She wanted perpetual variety and changed from intensity to prose. It was known for a different variety of her technique, she was in search for it. This novel had been described as the most symbolical of Virginia Woolf’s novel, Daiches aptly remarked as follows: 23 The characters’ thoughts are less ‘in character’ than ‘symbolically
appropriate’, and that much of the very best in the novel has the
quality of a symbolic lyric than of dialogue in a work of fiction
(Arora 51).
However, despite all the symbolism involved, Virginia Woolf in this novel said that it appeared primarily concerned with, summarizing
(human) relations.
Virginia Woolf’s ten short stories are as follows: “A Haunted
House,” “A Society,” “Monday or Tuesday,” “An Unwritten Novel,” “The
String Quartet,” “Blue and Green,” “Kew Gardens,” “The Mark on the
Wall,” “The New Dress,” and “The Duchess and the Jeweler.” And also
Woolf’s non-fictions are The Modern Fiction, The Common Reader First
Series, A Room of One’s Own, On Being III, The London Scene, The
Common Reader Second Series, Three Guineas, The Death of the Moth and other Essays and Women and Writing.
A Room of One’s Own written with supreme irony and sarcasm over the power-balance between men and women, and it was commonly accepted that Virginia Woolf succeeded in convincingly getting her view across to the reader. It was one of the most important feminist essays of the early twentieth century. A Room of One’s Own shares many of the 24 concerns of other early twentieth century feminist tracts. In her elaborate essay “A Room of One’s Own,” she made suggestions that “both in life
and in art the values of a woman are not the values of a man” (Barret,
Women 49).
N.S. Subramanyam quotes a short phrase in his work,
If one shuts one’s eyes and thinks of the novel as a whole it would
seem to be a creation owning certain looking glass likeness to life,
though of course with simplifications and distortions innumerable.
(Arora Study 1)
Virginia made her famous statement: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (Marcus 219).
The researcher feels that, in the words of Blackstone, all the time
Mrs. Woolf was interested in the mind as in itself a creative power, not a mere instrument of sensation and classification. The art of writing was not only in her blood, but it was also a source of pleasure for her. Her own diary told the readers that writing had been absorbing ever since she was a little creature, scribbling a story in the manner of Hawthorne on the green plush sofa in the drawing room at St. Ives while the grown was dined (Woolf ed. Writer’s 309). The Diaries and Letters offer more than a glimpse into Woolf’s view of writing or personal life. Contrariness, an 25 important feature of God’s creation and of nature is also an essential
element in the artistic creations of philosophical writers like William
Blake, Robert Frost and Virginia Woolf. A similarity between these two
poets and Virginia Woolf in their treatment of contraries, led to a desire to
examine this contrariness in her novels to express her personal life in the
theme and central characters. Virginia Woolf kept her daily diary
throughout her life and wrote many thousands of letters. The first extent
journal dates from 1897 when Woolf was fourteen and the diaries
continue, with interruptions, until her suicide in 1941. In the words of
Quentin Bell; Virginia Woolf’s diaries and letters are “masterpiece”
(Sellers 109).
Virginia’s first two novels, The Voyage Out and Night and Day are
competent traditional books, intelligent and clearly through in no way
obtrusively influenced by Henry James. Virginia Woolf was more
successful in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Virginia Woolf was
a dedicated writer. A printing press was established at Hogarth House,
Richmond, where she and her husband were living (Drabble ed. “With an
Introduction Notes” ix). Virginia had been able to catch life in the flux of
time. She had been able to make the perfect mosaics of life of the
individuals. She was able to capitulate from one orbit to another. The
ordinary web of life is transmuted into a shimmering work of art. 26 In Virginia Woolf’s novels, time was an ever-present factor and in her treatment of time she had been influenced by Bergson (1859-1941),
the celebrated French Philosopher. Mrs. Dalloway, conducted a party – a
full day-time from morning eight to almost evening eight on a mid-June
Wednesday, five years after the end of the war. Mrs. Dalloway, as
Bernard Blackstone points out is an experiment of time. Time may be of
three kinds. Firstly, there is the “mechanical” or clock-time, the passing
moments or hours measured by the striking of the clock. Secondly, there
is the psychological time or inner time or what Bergson called “duree” or
inner duration, which may be a voyage from youth to age, from the present to the past, and to the future. Thirdly, there is the historic time or time in relation to national-wide and world-wide events. In Mrs.
Dalloway Mrs. Woolf had shown great skill in the manipulation both of
“clock-time,” and psychological time, while there were references to the
“historic time,” to the important historical events, such as the war which was just over, which forms the social and political background to the novel (Arora 80).
In Virginia Woolf’s first three novels, The Voyage Out, Night and
Day and Jacob’s Room there is a focus on the apparent dichotomy
between two kinds of time, the two worlds one, the world of linear time of
past, present and future, in which the readers were subject to 27 uncontrollable flux and the other, the world of mind time, an inner world of thought and imagination, in which the chaotic flow of experience derived from our life in linear time was reduced to order and unity, in
which the readers were liberated. The first three novels are dominated by
what is called in one of them, the profound and reasonless law of linear
time. In this great machine, human life is irrelevant; and against its
tyranny, the inner world of time opposes at best an escape to illusion. In
her next novel, Mrs. Woolf did offer a solution, which depended to a great
extent on the relationship between Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus
Warren Smith.
The phrase “Stream of Consciousness Novel” was first used by
William James (elder brother of Henry James) in his Principles of
Psychology in 1890 (http://narrative.georgetown.edu/). It is the technique
of revealing thoughts and feelings flowing, in perpetual soliloquy, through
the mind of the character. The method has been used by Miss. Dorothy
M. Richardson, in England James Joyce, in Ireland and Marcel Proust in
France were the chief architects of the novel of subjectivity, and Virginia
Woolf was the novelist who imparted form and discipline to it and thus made it a popularly accepted art-form. In Mrs. Dalloway and To the
Lighthouse Virginia had demonstrated the possibilities of stream of consciousness technique for the artistic portrayal of life. 28 The novelist used the stream of consciousness technique in order to reveal the inner workings of the minds of her characters by the interior monologue. There is a continual shifting from mind to mind, so that we as often perceive the impression given by one to another as the experience each receives. Certain scenes and moments are also selected to bring into prominence a certain character or certain characteristics of her personality.
The scene between Mrs. Dalloway and Doris Kilman – was one such scene – Mrs. Dalloway came before the readers as fully rounded character intimately known to the readers being reflected in the minds of her husband. The other characters like Septimus Warren Smith, Peter Walsh,
Elizabeth, and Sally Seton and several others were all included in the
“stream of consciousness technique.”
To the Lighthouse is a “stream of consciousness novel” and as such it did not have a logical sequence of events, a well-formed plot such as the readers get in a conventional novel. Still, Mrs. Woolf had tried in various ways to impart form and coherence to her material. The technique of the interior monologue had been skilfully exploited, there was constant movement to and fro both in time and space, but the novelist had skilfully patterned her chaotic material so that the novel was of interest even to
those who generally condemned the “stream of consciousness” novel.
The stream of consciousness technique altered the prevailing concept of 29 time and introduced in its place a new concept altogether. The author gives her family incidents and her personal influences in this novel.
Virginia Woolf’s characters are not directly described; she did not follow the traditional method of set description. Her characters revealed themselves by what they said or did. The readers derived their impressions from the effects they produced on the minds of other characters in the novel. Woolf’s method is cumulative, and her characters cannot be taken out of the context and judged in isolation. This was done by the use of the “stream of consciousness technique.” In this way, the characters like Mrs. Dalloway and Mrs. Ramsay, lived in the mind and enlarge the reader’s capacity for imaginative sympathy.
“Virginia Woolf had inherited ‘a fine, artistic delicacy and sensitivity’” (Sharma 18) from her mother, who had stimulated her interests and sensitivity. While Sir Leslie Stephen’s library introduced
Virginia to a choice reading, his tutelage (guidance) gave her confidence in her responses. For, as she wrote later, Sir Leslie Stephen encouraged children to read what one liked it, never to pretend to admire what one did not. A part of Leslie Stephen’s liberal education to his children was to let them think independently. Virginia Woolf candidly (frankly) noted that if freedom meant the right to think one’s own thoughts and to follow one’s 30 pursuits, wrote Mrs. Woolf referring to her father (To one or her friend’s), then no one respected and indeed insisted upon freedom more completely than he did (Woolf, CR II 258).
Virginia Woolf developed her own distinct approach to fiction which she claimed as “feminine” in essence as opposed to Drama and
Poetry, not androgynous (or a man’s way of looking at the art).
Blackstone claims that, “she is not remote from life” but finds her somehow ‘incomplete’ because “Virginia Woolf is mystic, though an incomplete one, for when brought into relation with human suffering and human cruelty it fails in the test (160). E.M. Forster said, “She felt herself to be not only a woman but a lady”. She was a snob as well, but there should be nothing particular about it as most of the English people were snobs. Feminist means people who fight for the rights of women. Feminist literary criticism primarily responded to the way, woman was presented in literature. It had two basic premises: one, ‘woman’ presented in literature by male writers from their own viewpoint and two ‘woman’, presented in the writings of female writers from their point of view. Woolf’s reputation and literary eminence was firmly established with the emergence of feminist criticism in the 1970’s. Katherine Mansfield also accepted the feminist concepts in her stories as Virginia Woolf.
31 Virginia, Joyce and Proust were the supporters of feminism. She also explained and exemplified a new kind of prose that she associated with feminine consciousness. She was known for her precise evocations of state of mind-or of mind and body; since she refused to separate the two. She structured her novels according to her protagonist’s moments of awareness, and in that way joins Proust and Joyce in their move away from the linear plots and objective descriptions of nineteenth century realism. Virginia had an additional role in modernist literary history. She was an ardent feminist who explored-directly in her essays and indirectly in her novels and short stories – the situation of women in society, the construction of gender identity, and the predicament of the woman writer.
Virginia was a woman novelist. It would be naturally being expected from her that she should be adroit in painting female characters.
Where the female experience was different from the male she depicted it fully. She could very well perceive the line which divided the female from the male sex and the traits of one which appeared in the other. Bennett states that, Virginia discerned more clearly perhaps, than any other novelist the peculiar nature of typically feminine modes of thought and apprehension, and their peculiar value as the complement of masculine modes. Virginia did a little adult – education, teaching work for female suffrage. One of the women critics on Virginia’s works says: “she 32 commented as conceded Virginia Woolf an “extraordinary fineness and delicacy of perception” (Brad 38).
According to Marcus, “the relationship between Virginia Woolf and feminism was a symbolic one.” On one hand Woolf’s feminism which includes not only her explicit feminist politics but her concern and fascination with gender identities and with women’s lives, histories and fictions – shaped her writing profoundly (Woolf’s Feminism 209).
Virginia Woolf was considered to be one of the four most
modernist/feminist, literary figures of the twentieth century. Between the great two world wars, Virginia was a significant figure in London Literary
Society. Her contemporary feminist writers gave importance to her
feminist novels. In most of her novels the experience of love, life and
death are interwoven. “The novel for Virginia Woolf is no longer just an
entertainment or propaganda or a vehicle for some fixed idea or a social
document; it is...a voyage of discovery” (Blackstone 28). She believed that by looking at men and women in their opposed ways of life and by presenting the tension between the two one may construct a new road to truth or reality. 33
To sum up, in Woolf’s select novels for the present day study, the researcher finds her characters actively involved in weaving their own web of reality, which they believed and in which they lived happily. This sociological process was rather complex but presented an interesting area, of interdisciplinary study. It reveals how the Woolfian characters reacted to the real world and shape the meaning of their own life and reality systems.
34 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
The study attempts to explore the “Autobiographical Elements” in
Virginia Woolf’s major novels. Her industry was extraordinary: nine highly wrought novels, ten short stories, two biographies, ten non-fictions that include her letters. Her life was filled with her writing, the activities of The Hogarth Press, her occasional illness, and yet she showed her enthusiasm with her family members and friends. Virginia Woolf was a
Londoner, born and bred, London was seldom absent from her novels.
Many of the small incidents that made up the texture of the novel also
found their counter-parts in real life: For example, the birthplace of
Cricket is England the game of cricket on lawn. Virginia Woolf was
known as “the demon bowler”. She and her sister Vanessa used to play the
game cricket in their garden. Virginia Woolf echoed this game in her
novels. In Mrs.Dalloway, while Evans (friend of Septimus Warren Smith)
and Rezia (wife of Septimus Warren Smith) were sitting under a tree watching the game cricket, Rezia reacted. “Look”, she implored him, pointing at a little troop of boys carrying cricket stumps,...at the music hall
(30). In To the Lighthouse, the eight children of Mr. Ramsay mocked at
Charles Tansley (student of Mr. Ramsay) particularly James Ramsay said that “He could not play cricket; he poked; he shuffled” (12).
35 The present study aims at examining in detail the author’s urge to bring out her personal impressions in her major novels. Virginia Woolf’s novel, To the Lighthouse portrayed her family incidents. She dealt with the practical affairs in her novels. Her novels are governed by her aesthetic vision: “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end” (Common Reader I 189). Like her
father Sir Leslie Stephen, Mr. Ramsay was the head of the family. The
autobiographical elements in To the Lighthouse contribute to the blurring
of boundaries between biography, autobiography and fiction. Both Sir
Leslie Stephen and Mr. Ramsay feared unkind reviewers and leaned on
women for support.
Also the study attempts to account for Virginia Woolf’s disturbed
metal poise. The breakdowns in her family led to neurotic depression, and
was represented through Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs. Dalloway.
According to Quentin Bell, in Virginia’s early stage, she was seduced by
her stepbrother, which affected her deeply (www.en.wikipedia.org).
Virginia Woolf recalls in her autobiographical essays A Sketch of the Past
(1939). The Two World Wars and too much of a strain in writing also
added to her disturbed condition.
36 PROBLEM STATEMENT
The life of Virginia Woolf (autobiographically) comes of surface in her writings all through (fiction/non-fiction) more so, in select novels of her, with little chronological, character logical and temporal (spatio- temporal) correspondence, however, inviting scrutiny.
SCOPE OF THE STUDY
Virginia Woolf presents her autobiographical novels using Stream-
of-Consciousness technique. The phrase “Stream-of-Consciousness” was first coined by William James in his Principle of Psychology in 1890. It is
the technique of revealing thoughts and feelings flowing, in perpetual
soliloquy, through the mind of the characters. Many authors have used
this technique. The present study explains the time limitation used by her.
In Virginia Woolf’s novels, time is an ever-present factor and her
treatment of time is psychological. In Mrs. Dalloway, Viriginia had shown
great skill in the manipulation of diurnal and psychological time, while
there were references to the historic time, to the important historical
events, such as the wars which was just over, forms the social and
political background to the novel.
37 OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY
Virginia Woolf presents an impressionistic view of society and human personality in her autobiographical novels. A biographic understanding of Virginia Woolf’s life is well in order for the study.
The objectives are:
1. Symbolic Interactions and world-view in the selected works of
Virginia Woolf-A critical study.
2. Virginia Woolf’s disposition as a writer.
3. Virginia Woolf - An underpesonalized ‘authority’ rather than a
writer.
4. The stream-of-consciousness techniques used by the
contemporaries of Virginia Woolf.
LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY
Virginia Woolf’s presentation of the characters in her novels represents the essence of her personal experiences in her major novels.
Her knowledge is shown in the novels through how she depicted her characters. The theme of each novel is strong and she strongly deals with the theme in 1. The Voyage Out, 2. Mrs. Dalloway 3. To the
Lighthouse; Love and death in The Voyage Out. Happiness versus Misery in Mrs. Dalloway. Joy and Sorrow in To the Lighthouse. These novels 38 have been chosen for study to find pattern in the making / shattering of characters and events to appreciate the theme of love between human beings. There are certain specific limitations (autobiographical elements only) with regard to her characters.
METHODOLOGY
First, the technique of narration is dealt with. Then the objectives are subject to the mode of autobiographical assessing, through identifying references to Virginia Woolf’s personal life. The primary sources are guttered from various libraries, journals, books, magazines and websites.
CHAPTERIZATION
The opening chapter introduction, with background of the study, definition of autobiography and the statement on autobiographical element, scope of the study, objectives, limitations, methodology and organization of the thesis, all in one. Spread out in five chapters, the general introduction shows the condition of Britain at the time of Virginia
Woolf’s birth. Her literary life is documented. How she started her writing
with the help of her father and friends especially the members of
Bloomsbury Group are put forth.
39 The second chapter explains how Virginia Woolf’s family incidents and personal life figure in her major novels. For example,
Virginia Woolf used to go for a walk with her father, She recalled how he would take his hat and stick; called for his dog and his daughter. This habit of walking through the parks and squares of London remained one
of the most persistent of Virginia Woolf’s occupation, borne in her work, in the background for her novels and as a subject in one of her most charming essays “Street haunting” (A London Adventure). She brought the same in The Voyage Out. Rachel Vinrace; who is the heroine of the novel, went on a voyage (in Euphrosyne) with her father, Willoughby Vinrace, which gave her more experiences to explore the world. Again Rachael
Vinrace said to Mrs. Dalloway that, “I love walking in the Park alone; but not...with dogs.” She finished Virginia Woolf influenced her own personality of walking in Mrs. Dalloway. She said to Hugh Whit Bred, to go by walk in Bond Street; and she herself said, “I love walking in
London, Really, it’s better than walking in the country”. Both Sir Leslie
Stephen and Mr. Ramsay were tall and gaunt; both are walkers in the novel To the Lighthouse. The characters are mirror-image other family members and her close friends, to an impressionistic extent.
Virginia Woolf’s sickness and her family member’s illness are vividly described in third chapter. The definition of each illness is also 40 given in it. Virginia Woolf brings out the same through the characters in her major novels almost pathologically. Virginia Woolf’s mother Julia
Stephen died due to influenza. In 1940; Virginia Woolf was affected by influenza and she spent three weeks in bed (http://www.literaturepage. com). She remembered same disease in the characters of Clarissa
Dalloway in Mrs. Dalloway. Her doctors said that “her heart might have been affected by influenza” (8). Virginia’s stepsister Stella Duckworth married to John Waller in April 1897 (Virginia’s letter to Thoby in 1897).
Stella went to Dr. Secton and her nurse looked after Stella, and said that she had been ill with peritonitis. She died in July 1897 (Sellers “Letters 1-
7”) Virginia Woolf echoed the same incident in her novel. To the
Lighthouse through the character of Prune, daughter of Mr. Ramsay.
“Pure died that summer in some illness connected with childbirth
(Peritonitis)” (180).
Chapter four deals with the suicide of Virginia Woolf; the reasons for her suicide and the evidences are explained if not fully analyzed in this chapter. Virginia Woolf’s brother Thoby, a brilliant scholar who died young, tried to throw himself from the window of his preparatory school in 1894. Virginia Woolf tried to commit suicide in the year 1913. In 1915,
Virginia Woolf tried to jump out of the window by killing herself.
Virginia Woolf echoed the same incident in her novel Mrs. Dalloway 41 through the character of Septimus Warren Smith. He was an ex-soldier of the army (took part in the First World War) also committed suicide by throwing himself out of the train window.
Finally, in the fifth chapter the researcher concludes that the personal element is never absent in Virginia Woolf’s novels. If it is not a re-cast of personal experience, the content of most novels are mostly fact packed in fiction. Like Sculptors and painters opting for real life models, modern playwrights fashion their characters after persons they have known in real life. In Virginia Woolf’ writing, “She expresses a desire for a freedom from the tyranny of sex.” When she was writing the novels,
Virginia Woolf thought of her parents: how her father ill-treated her mother when she was in deathbed, she leaned on Leslie Stephen immediately he jumped from the bed. The author never forgot that moment and she called it up in all her major novels. In her first novel,
Virginia Woolf depicted the character as follows; Willoughby Vinrace ill- treated his wife Theresa Vinrace. Helen Ambrose who was the sister of
Willoughby said about him: “She (Helen) suspected him of nameless atrocities with regard to his daughter as indeed she had always suspected him of bullying his wife.” To the Lighthouse is Virginia Woolf’s most widely acclaimed novel. It stands, firmly and centrally, in her work and her life, shedding light on both her past and her future, as woman and as 42 writer. It is more directly autobiographical than most of her fiction, as she herself makes plain in her comments on it in her letters and diaries. This novel is indeed an elegy for both her parents, though, interestingly, it is her father that she mentions first. The centre is father’s character, sitting in a boat reciting like Mr. Ramsay. Virginia Woolf gives another example in the same novel. “As the family magazine recorded, after describing a voyage taken to Godrevy by Thoby and Virginia “with a perfect tide and wing, “Master Adrian Stephen was much disappointed at not being allowed to go” (Hyde Park Gate News (1892). Mr. Ramsay has a habit of saying disagreeable things, but James Ramsay wants to see the lighthouse as early as possible. “But, said his father, stopping in front of the drawing- room window, “it won’t be fine” (8).” Like Adrian Stephen, James
Ramsay was also disappointed. Virginia Woolf recalls this incident in To
the Lighthouse. Thus, it may be deduced that she was an autobiographical
novelist. Her aim is a successful though inchoate presentation of
personality. She is a ruminant writer not confessional or conventional and
is an inspiration to the readers and writers modernist fiction.
If catalogued, the events of Virginia Woolf’s life and state in her
novels side-by-side, discounting the chronology of occurrence in either
time, the correspondences self-explain how depersonalization for an
author of her kind is kept at bay and the personality never goes extinct nor 43 does escape; for the ultimate reason being the author’s getting extinguished in an artistic way through a literacy. This is a kind of euthencsy: the suicide in question, in Virginia Woolf’s case, defies its etymology but adduces a new meaning of accepting life at its other extreme.
FAMILY INCIDENTS IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S MAJOR NOVELS
Virginia Woolf was a great autobiographical novelist who
advanced the frontiers of the English novels by adopting a revolutionary
technique for the expression of her vision of life and human nature. She used the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique to get close to the mind of her characters, and expressed exactly the impact of life on their personality. Her skill in the use of this technique was learnt from James
Joyce. Proust inspired in the young novelists an awareness of what was
already upon them (Kumar 11). A diary entry of 1925 clearly indicates the impact of Proust on Virginia Woolf.
Virginia Woolf happened to be the daughter of an eminent famous
Literarian, Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904). He had London schooling as well as the advantages of Cambridge University and had been the editor of
Alpine Journal, in “The Playground of Europe.” His accounts of Alpine
Journal were collected and it was popular. In his “Hours” in a library, his miscellaneous writings had been stored which were published by him here and there in some noted journals. His skeptical thoughts were stored in his “Free Thinking and Plain Speaking.” He had become an agonistic and his “Agonistics Apology” in the Fortnightly was noteworthy. He was an 45 established scholar and ex-fellow of ‘Trinity Hall,’ who were fifty at the time of Virginia Woolf’s birth, and the editor of Corn Hill Magazine
(Arora 2).
Virginia Woolf’s father Leslie Stephen was the author of critical,
biographical, philosophical essays and the friend of scholars and men of
letters during a brilliant period of English literature. Tennyson, Matthew
Arnold, George Eliot, Henry James, and Thomas Hardy (who contributed
the Corn Hill and witnessed the deed whereby Leslie Stephen renounced
Holy Orders (Sharma 17) were the frequent guests of the Stephen’s
family, when his children were young. His friendship with the literarians
helped Virginia Woolf to become an eminent writer.
She was impressed by what she knew of her father’s public and
professional life, and was probably somewhat influenced to
become a writer because writing had been one of his major public
activities (Love, Sources 24).
If family is the main channel of transmission of culture for a person
of normal circumstances in life, for Virginia Woolf, her unusual
family was the whole ocean until she transferred herself to the
world of her brother’s friends in universities and in London. 46 Family was an important influence in her life, and its connections,
significant opportunities for her career (Sharma 16).
It had been said that all Virginia Woolf’s literary works were a product of her memories, her acute sense of the past and her ties with her Victorian childhood. It was taken for granted almost from the very beginning that
Virginia Woolf would be a writer. When Virginia Woolf was nine, she started a family news bulletin, in the name of The Hyde Park Gate News
(1891 - 1895). The paper contained mostly family news, gossip and also
“some first efforts at fiction” (Holroyd 407).
Virginia Woolf travelled with her sister Vanessa to France in 1896.
She travelled widely with her friends Violet Dickinson and her sister
Vanessa in 1904, to Italy. In 1905, Virginia travelled to Spain and
Portugal. Next year to Greece Virginia Woolf travelled and with her sister
Vanessa to France in 1908, she visited Italy with Bells. In 1909, she
travelled to Florence and also to Turkey and Berlin so that the title of the
work indicated the novelist, Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, her
excursion into the realm of creative writing. At that time, she was busy
collecting her impressions and expressing them in a proper form. These
travel experiences helped her a lot to complete this novel.
47 Virginia Woolf was so closely connected with the recollections of her family members in her autobiographical novels. She used to go for a walk with her father, “she recalled, how he would take his hat and stick; called for his dog and his daughter, he would go out for a walk into
Kensington Gardens” (Gupta and Gupta 50). This habit of walking through the parks and squares of London remained one of the most persistent of Virginia Woolf’s occupations, fruitful ideas for her work, of background for her novels and the subject was one of her most charming essays, “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” (Varshini 1). She loved walking to know what was going around her and made use of her experiences in her novels. In the view of Leonard Woolf “Virginia had a great enjoyment of ordinary things of eating, walking, desultory talking, shopping, playing bowls, and reading” (Woolf, Beginning 28). Again he said that, “If you (Virginia) walk in the streets of London or any other
European city, you...ridicule (28). In the view of Leonard Woolf, about his wife: She was while sitting in a chair in front of the winter fire or going for her daily walk along the bank of the Sussex” (33). This walking habit depicts by Virginia Woolf in all her major works.
The Voyage Out was Virginia Woolf’s first traditional novel (1915) in which she never used “Stream of Consciousness Technique” but a new feature of its techniques were noticeable. “The distance in technique 48 between The Voyage Out and The Waves was almost as great as that
between the novels: Dubliners (1914) and Finnegan’s Wake of James
Joyce (www.literaturepage.com). However, the two writers travelled, formally in the same general direction, they were driven by very different sensibilities working on very different experiences. Virginia Woolf’s metaphorical (symbolic) mode was correspondingly different from
Joyce’s. The novel The Voyage Out was much more mature than many writers’ first books. This novel indicated some of this – the multiple viewpoints and emphasis placed on characters, inner lives were both the key aspects of this work. Virginia mastery of the English language; her ability was to write both the “big events” and the “every days” of life in a new and exciting way that skirts the melodrama of some of the earlier
Victorian novelists were in full flower.
Virginia Woolf went for a walk with her father to know about things happening in the world. This was shown in her respective novels.
In The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf depicted her own personality on
Rachel Vinrace; who was twenty-four years old young girl, went on a voyage with her father, Willoughby, which gave her more experiences to explore the world. Rachel Vinrace said to Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway that, “I like walking in the park alone; but not – with the dogs,” she finished.
Again the replied to Clarissa, “I shall enjoy walking with a man – is that 49 what do you mean?” (VO 55-56) said Rachel “as for Rachel, she had scarcely walked through a poor street, and always under the escort of father, maid, or aunts” (61). Virginia Woolf brought her personal influences on Rachel to explore the true life of the world. “While Rachel travelled in her father’s ship, within the few months that she spent a little port where there was a queer English colony, which helped Rachel to understand the practical meaning of life (Woolf, Times 110). As Virginia
Woolf, when Rachel Vinrace was in the ship, she gained knowledge about
the society. The people among whom she passed were brilliantly drawn by
the novelist; particularly the aunt, Helen (Willoughby’s sister) who was so
real and so baffling – the manners were so amusingly satirized.
Virginia’s mother Julia Princep Stephen (born Jackson) was born in
India to Dr. John and Maria Pattile Jackson and later moved to England
with her mother, where she served as a model for pre-Raphaelite painters
searches Edward Burne-Jones. She was equally well connected in the
novel that descended from an attendant of Marie Antoinette; she came
from a family of renowned beauties who left their mark on Victorian society as models for pre-Raphaelite (Drabble ed. “With an Introduction
Notes” vii) artists and early photographers. In the Mausoleum Book Sir
Leslie Stephen praised Julia’s beauty chiefly by saying it was expressive 50 of the qualities of her character, which he avowed had been absolutely without flaw (Love, Sources 35).
In the words of Aileen Pipptt Julia Stephen had aristocratic
connections through Duckworth. She belonged to upper middle class
family background. Julia Stephen, a strikingly beautiful girl courted and
admired by eminent artists...was chosen by Burne – Jones as the model for
his painting of the “Annunciation” (26).
Virginia Woolf’s intimate female friend: Madge Vaugh who was
the daughter of J.A. Symonds and wife of Virginia Woolf’s cousin was
the inspiration for the character of Mrs. Dalloway (www.
literaturepage.com). Mrs. Dalloway was the best known and the most popular of the novels of Virginia Woolf. She brought the beauty of Julia
Stephen Helen Ambrose on Mrs. Dalloway and on Mrs. Ramsay. Its popularity was brought out by the fact that it had been translated into a number of languages (For example French, Danish, German, Hungarian,
Italian and Spanish). In the opinion of Leonard Woolf about his wife it was easy for Virginia to show others the love she felt for them and she spoke freely to them about her feelings and she liked nice surroundings.
She (Virginia Woolf) liked and get on well with all kinds of everyday people, as soon as they got to know her well and she them. She had a 51 curious shyness with strangers which often made them uncomfortably shy
(Woolf, Beginning 28).
“Nothing exists outside us except a state of mind” (Mrs. D 63).
Virginia Woolf influenced her own personality of walking on Mrs.
Dalloway. Mrs. Dalloway said to Hugh Whitbread (both of them were
friends from their childhood) to go by walk in Bond Street and her she
said that, “I love walking in London, Really, it’s better than walking in the country” (9). Mrs. Dalloway remembered how at Burton she went out for a walk on the mornings when the air came, “like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp” (7). Clarissa had an immense zest for life and enjoyed practically everything like Virginia Woolf. She walked at
Hyde Park and said “It was a bed of tulips, now a child in a perambulator, now some absorbed little drama she made upon the spur upon the moment” (86). She walked just to show her palm and luxury and to read the minds of her old friends. Like Virginia, Clarissa liked to visit people to lunch with them, to meet them and invited them. She loved to bring people together, and loved to hear them talking. Clarissa herself had,
“divine vitality,” and she loved it in others as well: “To dance, to ride, she
had adored all that” (11).
52 To the Lighthouse was Virginia Woolf’s autobiographical novel.
The Stephen family in their London house at Hyde Park Gate must have resembled the Ramsays in the Lighthouse, with the older and younger boys and girls. It is more directly autobiographical than most of her fiction, as she herself made plain in her comments on it in both letters and diaries. To the Lighthouse is indeed an elegy – for both her parents, though interestingly, it is her father that she mentioned first; the centre is father’s character, sitting in a boat reciting. Much had been written about her relationship with both her parents, but nobody had disputed that she lived again with her parents, although some had thought the portrait of her father unfairly harsh (Drabble ed. “With an Introduction Notes” xii).
In To the Lighthouse, the first section, “The Window,” described a house party on the Island of Skye. Professor Ramsay and his wife were on a holiday with their children and some friends. They had promised to take their youngest son James (6 years old) to see a lighthouse. The father predicted unsuitable weather conditions and the journey postponed. In the second section, “Time Passes,” is about – breakup, described how during the long years of war the house was left to dust, silence and loneliness.
Death and re-birth of the house are portraits. In the third part, “To the
Lighthouse – Re-integration,” described the visit to the lighthouse after 53 the passing of the years. Indeed, Mrs. Ramsay was the centre which holds the novel together. If she was withdrawn, the novel would fall into pieces.
Virginia was happy at St. Ives, and continued all her life to love
Cornwall. These childhood holidays were for her, as her nephew and biographer Quentin Bell has said, a taste of Earthly Paradise. The entire family would take the train there for the summer, which they spent at
Talland House, on the hillside behind the station, overlooking the bay,
with a clear view of Godrevy, lighthouse. There they would be joined by
“cousins, uncles, nephews and nieces, guests and visitors in great
quantities” (Drabble ed. “With an Introduction” xiv). The same was
brought in To the Lighthouse by the author. The scene is laid in the Island
of Skye in the Herbridges, near the West coast of Scotland (Varshini 52).
Virginia echoed the same walking habit in To the Lighthouse; she
said that “the young people went off to the beach to have a walk, Mr. and
Mrs. Ramay read. Charles Tansley felt proud to walk in the company of a
beautiful woman. Mrs. Charles Tansley had the habit of walking up and
down with Mrs. Ramsay and conversed on subjects like Latin poetry,
Mathematics and Philosophy. Mr. Ramsay with his offspring, walked
down to the beach with a paper parcel to be delivered as a present from
them to the keeper of the Lighthouse. “They walked up to the street, Mrs. 54 Ramsay holding her parasol,” (LH 16) very erect and walking as if she expected to meet someone round the corner, while for the first time in
Charles Tansley’s life; he walked with a woman. He felt an extraordinary pride:
A man digging in a drain stopped digging, and looked at her, let his
arm fall down and looked at her, Charles Tansley felt an
extraordinary pride; felt the wind and the cyclamen and the violets,
for he was walking with a beautiful woman for the first time in his
life. He had hold of her bag (22).
Mr. Ramsay walked up and down in the terrace, to think about the subject of Philosophy and sent Mr. Tansley to work on his dissertation.
Tansley was sharing Mr. Ramsay’s evening walk up and down again up and down in the terrace discussed about the landing at the Lighthouse
(10). Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay went out for stroll in the garden and she was worried about Jasper’s habit of shooting birds, but he consoled her that
Jasper (adopted son) would soon get over the habit. Virginia Woolf impressed her own personality on many occasions in this novel-as she walked throughout her life time in search of the cause of life and death.
Virginia Woolf brought her walking habit in all her major three novels.
Virginia Woolf stressed that the woman Mrs. Ramsay dominated the man 55 because of her beauty. Virginia faithfully portrayed her mother Julia
Stephen on Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse.
Virginia depicted her father through the character of Mr. Ramsay.
This was not made up – it was the literal fact, “Virginia wrote in praise of
her father to Vanessa, while she was engaged on the novel. When Vanessa
read it in 1927, she wrote to her sister,” which was found in Virginia’s
diary on 16th May. For that Vanessa replied as follows:
...of the portrait of her father, the original central character,
Vanessa says merely: You have given father too I think as clearly
but perhaps, I may be wrong, that isn’t quite so difficult, Virginia
makes no reference to this response (Drabble ed. 13).
Virginia Woolf admitted her sister, Vanessa as her guardian after
the death of Juliast. In the words of Clive Bell, Virginia Woolf
recognized Vanessa as Helen Ambrose in The Voyage Out and wrote to
Virginia Woolf, “I suppose you will make Vanessa believe in herself”
(Moore 83). The author depicted her personal way of life on her heroine
Rachel Vinrace. After her mother’s (Theresa Willoughby) death, Rachel
was under the care of Helen Ambrose who was the sister of Willoughby.
Virginia Woolf echoed the same in Mrs. Dalloway. Elizabeth was the
only daughter of Mrs. and Mr. Richard Dalloway. The heroine Mrs. 56 Dalloway was busy with the party. So she appointed a Tutor by name
Miss Doris Kilman; then onwards Elizabeth came under care of the Tutor.
Virginia Woolf influenced the same in To the Lighthouse. The eight children of Mrs. Ramsay were always under the care of Lily Briscoe who is a painter in the novel.
In the opinion of Quentin Bell, the years between the ages of
thirteen and fifteen were more critical for Virginia Woolf’s sexual
development, which would have been experienced by most of the people.
From all reports, including her own, she reached the age of thirteen
relatively ignorant about sex. Both Virginia Woolf and her sister were
trained to preserve a condition of ignorant purity in sexual matters; or at
least a social façade reflecting purity. The nature of Virginia Woolf’s
sexuality was far less certain than was true for most persons of her age.
Until the death of Sir Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf was inside the house
and spent her time in her father’s library. Virginia Woolf’s ignorance and
innocence was, after all, past puberty and thus biologically matures, even
if socially and personally quite immature, especially in sexual matters.
Thus her needs, motives, and expectations of women had become more
complicated than when she was a child. Virginia Woolf was more
attached to Vanessa for long years and later she acknowledged erotic
attachment to Vanessa. Both Virginia and Vanessa had to devote their 57 afternoons and evenings to what were considered to be suitable tasks for women, made her feel that “this was an injury inflicted on her by reason of her sex” (Bell, Virginia Stephen 70). Virginia Woolf’s innocence is revealed through an event of violation or rape, where a number of critics had linked to the intrusive sexual explorations of the young Virginia
Stephen, who underwent, at he hands of her half-brother, Gerald
Duckworth, which she described in A Sketch of the Past, published for the first time in 1985 (Marcus 236). Virginia Woolf had an intimate relationship with some other persons in the Bloomsbury Group.
The author has depicted her personal way of life in her heroine
Rachel who was also innocent and ignorant till she went on a voyage.
After the death Theresa Rachael came under Helen Ambrose and maid; for example: Helen said, “She had been kept entirely ignorant as to the relations of men with women” (VO 77). She was shocked at Rachel’s ignorance of the facts of life and the nature of the Piccadilly woman
(strumpet). Helen said about Rachel, “This girl, though twenty-four had never heard that men desired women, and until I explained it, did not know how children were born” (93). Helen was Rachel’s first monitor in the school of sexuality.
58 Virginia Woolf used to give parties to her friends and she loved the society and its functions.
The idea of a party always excited her, and in practice she was very
sensitive to the actual mental and physical excitement of the party
itself, the rise of temperature of mind and body, the ferment and
fountain of noise (McNichol ed., Mrs. Dalloway’s Party 11).
This was echoed by the author, in her novel, Mrs. Dalloway. She (Mrs.
Dalloway) was occupied by the preparations for a party, she rejected her
lover, Peter Walsh, who came unexpectedly and called upon her. The
party brought together several other friends from her younger days; and
the party came out successfully. Mrs. Dalloway gave parties to bring
people together, and tried to please them and gain their goodwill. Peter
Walsh thought “Elizabeth was a queer-looking girl” (Mrs. D 62).
Mrs. Dalloway’s own daughter Elizabeth was innocent and
adolescent like Virginia and Rachael. Her father, Richard Dalloway,
mother Clarissa were very affectionate to Elizabeth. Above all tutor Miss
Doris Kilman, who would like to possess her love completely to herself,
even excluding the parents. Like Virginia Woolf, Rachel, and Elizabeth
were also ignorant of the world. When Mrs. Dalloway was preparing for
the evening party; Elizabeth was not cared for it, instead “Elizabeth really
cared for her dog most of all” (15). Elizabeth cared little for fashion and 59 prepared to spend time with her dog. She was very much worried about her dog and told her to check on it. Elizabeth was a clay doll and she was interested in pet animals. The author depicted another character by name
James Ramsay, who was disappointed to go to the Lighthouse by his father; saying that the weather was not suitable. James wanted to kill his father.
“Women are the backbone of any society.” Virginia said that “a woman is never just a wife, or a mother, or a hostess; human beings could not be defined in one word.” It is only when women are ignorant, or lazy, or angry that women are labelled as ignorant. “In the field of sexuality,
Virginia and Rachael were ignorant. In the words of Virginia Woolf,
Elizabeth was also ignorant as Virginia was thirteen. So she portrayed a character of her own in Mrs. Dalloway. She depicts a character Elizabeth who was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Dalloway, a young girl of seventeen. She was at an impressionable age, beautiful, healthy, attractive, and full of life. Her reverie was interrupted by the arrival of Elizabeth, dark, had Chinese eyes in a pale face; an oriental mystery; was gentle, considerate, still. “As a child she had, had a perfect sense of humor, but now at seventeen she had become very serious, like a hyacinth (sweet – smelling flower) sheathed in glossy green” (132). She had come to tell her mother that she was going out with Miss. Kilman (History Tutor) who 60 stood outside the door in the mackintosh in London (16). In short
Elizabeth came under the care of Miss Doris Kilman (96).
In the novel The Voyage Out, Virginia depicts the mother’s affection towards their children.
Having freed Helen’s arm from her husband, Ridley Ambrose, she
wept for their children’s absent before becoming conscious of ‘the
world which she lived in.’ She noticed the people passing by the
workers, the rich, and poor, who were haze tattered old men and
women were nodding off to sleep upon the seats (www.
literaturepage.com).
Virginia Woolf beautifully described the opening scene in her first novel.
In Mrs. Dalloway “Virginia gave a clear description about the close
relationship between Clarissa Dalloway and her daughter Elizabeth.
When she introduced Elizabeth to her ex-lover, Peter Walsh, ‘Here is my
Elizabeth’” (Mrs. D 53). These words show the possessiveness of her
daughter. Virginia has brought the same situation in To the Lighthouse.
When Mr. Ramsay said that if the weather suited, we would go to the light
house, otherwise ‘No going to the Lighthouse.’ (LH 22) immediately
James got angry; so Mrs. Ramsay, said compassionately, smoothing the
little boy’s hair, and consoled her son James (22). Again in the same 61 novel Virginia expressed the same incident as “Why, she (Mrs. Ramsay) asked, pressing her chin on James’s head, should they grow up so far?
Why should they go to school? She would have liked always to have had
a baby”(80). From the above said statements, the readers could
understand the affection of the mother towards their children.
Sir Leslie Stephen always supported his daughter Virginia to come
up in her life. After the death of her mother, she had depended on her
dominating father. In the words of Sir Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf was
a voracious reader, “Gracious child, how you gobble,” again he mumbled
to himself: “Ginia (Virginia) is devouring books, almost faster than I like”
(Woolf ed. Writer’s 151-152). Sir Leslie Stephen admired his daughter
and guided her to become an eminent writer. Like that Virginia Woolf
brought her father’s personality on Willoughby. In her novel The Voyage
Out Rachel’s father Willoughby wished to offer all his success to
Theresa’s (sister of Ridley Ambrose) feet. “He laid his success at her feet;
and was always thinking how to educate his daughter (Rachel Vinrace) so
that Theresa might be glad.” (27) He was a very ambitious man; and
although he had not been particularly kind to his wife while she lived,
now he realized and thought his wife. Helen thought he now believed that
she watched him from Heaven, and inspired what was good in him.” He
thought that “Rachel is the only thing that is left to me.” Willoughby 62 sighed. Again, he stressed that “I want to bring her up as her mother would have wished. I don’t hold with these modern views...”(84).
Richard Dalloway himself was a man of dignity if not much depth.
He had made a good and considerate husband and a good father, proud of his daughter Elizabeth. The young girl herself was much attached to the father, more to him than to her mother. In the words of Sally Seton
watched Elizabeth to her father, they were devoted to each other. Richard
Dalloway a doctor wanted to make Elizabeth was Dorie Kilman.
She liked people who were ill. And every profession is open to the
women of your generation; said Miss Kilman’s ambition was that
Elizabeth might be a doctor, or a farmer. Animals are often ill. She
might own thousand acres and have people under her. She would
go and see them in their cottages (Mrs. D 146).
In To the Lighthouse, Mr. Ramsay the head of a large family
considered that his judgement of men and things were accurate, since he
was a philosopher so he never changed an unpleasant word to please
others. This sort of attitude was resented by the children. As a father, he wanted to make the children to be aware of the worldly sufferings. He wanted that his children should have full of grasp of the realities of life and they should face facts; he did not want them to harp any kind of 63 illusions and delusions, and lived in them. Life is factual abounds in realities, and it has to be approached only in this and in no other way. He tried to impress upon the children that life is full of hazards and it needed courage truth and power to endure it. Mrs. Ramsay’s approach to life on the other hand was full of commonsense and realism. Mr. Ramsay
“Wants them to know that life is difficult, and to face it, needs courage, truth and power to endure.” “He wished Andrew could be induced to work harder. He would lose every chance of a scholarship if he didn’t.
He should be very proud of Andrew if he got a scholarship” (LH 92).
Both Mr. Lesli and Mr. Ramsay were rude to their children and wives; both were tyrants and well-known philosophers (Drabble ed. “With an
Introduction Notes” xii).
Sir Leslie Stephen, the head of the family, along with his eight children, and friends went to spend their summer in St. Ives in Cornwall.
Each summer until 1894 the whole family went on holiday to Cornwall.
Virginia Woolf personally influenced the same scene in her novel, The
The Light House too. The scene was laid in the Island of Skye in the
Hebrides, near the West coast of Scotland. The Ramsays had their summer house there and they came to it with their eight children and number of six guests. Like Sir Leslie Stephen, 64 Mr. Ramsay was the head of the family with eight children.
The Ramsays were not rich, and it was a wonder how they
managed to contrive it all. To feed eight children on
philosophy (LH 32).
The autobiographical dimensions of her novels, To the Lighthouse in particular, contribute to the blurring of boundaries between biography, autobiography and fiction in discussions of her life and work. Both Leslie
Stephen and Ramsay were tall and gaunt, both were walkers. Both could write logical, matters and both loved poetry; both could be charming at times, but both could be rude. Both disliked money matters, both were workaholics. Both feared and kind reviewers and leaned on women for support (www.literaturepage.com). This novel has a great autobiographical significance, for the characters of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are drawn to a great extent after the novelist’s parents, and she had put much of herself and sister Vanessa Bell in the character of Lily Briscoe, the painter. Both Vannesa and Lily Briscoe were the excellent painters.
When the conversation was going on between Mr. Carmichael and Lily
Briscoe; about her painting she said that, “Lily repeated turning back, reluctantly again, to her canvas. Heaven be praised for it, the...butterfly’s wing” (LH 231).
65 Virginia Woolf’s adulterous relationship was with her brother-in- law Clive Bell led her to think in other way. After the marriage of Vanessa with Clive Bell, Virginia Woolf travelled with the Bells to Rye, St. Ives,
Bath, Paris and Florence. Once she wrote to Clive Bell as follows:
When I am with you, I realize my limitations distinctly. Vanessa
had all that I should like to have, and you, besides your own
charms and exquisite fine sweetness (which I always appreciate
somehow) have her. Thus ‘I seem often to be only an erratic
external force, capable of shocks, but without any lodging in your
lives (Nicolson ed. 334).
When Woolf wrote to Clive,
Kiss Dolphin’s nose – if it isn’t too wet-and tap pony smartly on
the snout, whisper into your wife’s ear that I love her. I expect she
will scold you for tickling her” (Virginia Woolf’s Letter 1: 362).
Clive Bell replied that,
I dreamt last night that you were come, and that you had read me a
volume of short stories; then, waking, I knew that Walter Lamb
slept below.... Downstairs the beautiful grey manuscript was
awaiting me, but not, alas! The authoress by whom we are forsaken
(Moore 83).
Clive Bell and Virginia Woolf loved each other, and their friendship continued forever. Virginia influenced the same on Rachel, in The 66 Voyage Out. The relationship between Richard and Rachael was like
Clive Bell and Virginia Richard Dalloway, an older married man, gave
Rachel a kiss. Helen saw that Rachel was terrified and she tried to put the experience into perspective: Helen said that “It’s the most natural thing in
the world...” (64).
Vanessa got married with Clive Bell and she went with him.
Virginia left alone. She spoke of her father as follows: Sir Leslie
Stephen’s dominating presence and rational temperament stood out as a foil to Virginia Woolf’s hatred of men; “She could never forgive her
father for being rude to her” (Pippett Moth 26).
Sir Leslie Stephen was a difficult man, more so after his second
wife’s death (Julia Stephen). Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary,
years later: ‘If he had lived longer his life would have entirely
ended mine’ (Woolf ed. Writer’s 138).
What would have happened? No writing, no books; inconceivable.
Elsewhere: ‘that Old Wretch, my father. “But he was an adorable man, and somehow, tremendous. As a child condemning, as a woman of fity- eight understanding-I should say tolerating. Both views true?”
(www.literaturepage.com). Virginia Woolf placed the concept of hatred between daughter-father relationships as follows: Rachel hated her father and said, “I didn’t get on well with my father” (VO 64). While writing 67 the novels; Virginia Woolf always thought of her family members. So
Virginia depicted, Rachel to hate her father Willoughby. Rachael said that
her father as usual, loved his business and built his empire, so she would
be considerably bored. And this led Rachael to distress her marriage.
Virginia Woolf’s personal concern influenced on Rachel Mrs. Chailey said about the marriage of Rachel “If ever Miss. Rachel marries, Chailey, pray that she may marry a man who does not know his ABC” (25). Mrs.
Chailey said the above statement to show Rachel’s innocence and ignorance. In To the Lighthouse, Virginia echoed the same attitude over
Andrew Ramsay and James Ramsay who hated their father, Mr. Ramsay.
They hated him for coming up to them, for stopping and looking down on
them; he hated him for interrupting them: he hated him for the exaltation
and sublimity of his gestures; ...and egotism (51).
Richard Dalloway, an older married man, gave Rachel a kiss,
Helen saw that Rachel was terrified and she tried to put the experience
into perspective. Helen said that,
It’s the most natural thing in the world. Men will want to kiss you,
just as they’ll want to marry you.” The pity was to get things out
of proportion. It was like noticing the noise people make when they
eat or men spitting; or in short, any small thing that got on one’s
nerves (78). 68 Rachael was so repulsed by his passionate kiss that she was kept awake all night by terrible nightmares. He was completely taken with the
Dalloway’s and embraced by Helen’s remarks to them. Richard shared his
wives opinion of the other passengers. Mrs. Dalloway believed Richard was “morally her superior” (47-48) and felt toward him as her mother. It was unnecessary for Richard to shake Rachel by the hand. ‘Well, that’s over’, said Ridley, after a long silence, we shall never see them again.
Helen did not like boring them. Rachel followed Helen indifferently. Her mind was absorbed by Richard. ‘I like him’ said Rachel. I dreamt ‘I could not sleep’, said Rachel which showed that Rachel had falling love in
Richard. He kissed me. ‘I don’t know why?’ (63). She asked Helen.
Helen said it was the ‘most natural thing in the world.’ ‘I did like him’,
Rachel mused, and ‘Richard was lovable’ Rachel concluded. Richard talked about his childhood and ideals. Rachel was cheated by Richard in
The Voyage Out. She denied the persuasion of Richard Dalloway. She also disliked men as Virginia Woolf. “I shall never marry” (45), Rachel determined. In the words of Rachel, “Men are brutes! I hate men”... (64).
Mrs. Dalloway’s daughter Elizabeth, a beautiful young girl too hated men as she said, the young men were silly, said Elizabeth like
Virginia Woolf and Rachel Virginia Woolf introduced the characters by name Elizabeth and Lily Briscoe. “I never go to parties,” said by Miss. 69 Doris Kilman, just to keep Elizabeth from going (Mrs. D 142). And she did not want Elizabeth to love these things (52). Virginia’s Heroine Lily
Briscoe in To the Lighthouse who was like Mrs. Ramsay tried to discover reality. Lily Briscoe is a complex figure. She had a father and a home but she liked to remain aloof from everything and every body and kept strictly to herself. She had sexual awareness, but she felt that inadequate in the fulfillment of the sexual appetite.
In Virginia’s first novel, she described vividly about the love between Rachael and Richard. Rachel was bewildered and frustrated by
Richard’s conversation. She finally concluded that “I know nothing” (VO
50). Richard replied, “It’s far better that you should know nothing” (50).
Helen noticed that Rachel looked queer and flushed. There were two storms in the voyage. During the storm, Richard ran into a body that turned out to be Rachel. As if swept in by the wind, he followed her into her room. When he inquired about her ‘interests and occupations’ she replied that, she was a woman. He told her that she had an inestimable power—for good or for evil. The ship lurched and Rachel fell slightly forward. Richard “took her in his arms and kissed her...passionately, so that she felt the hardness of his body and the roughness of his cheek printed upon hers” (59). Although Richard initiated and controlled his situation, he grabbed his forehead and said that she tempted him. Surely, 70 Rachel’s behaviour could not be characterized as that of a temptress.
Rachael’s conversation with Helen over Richard Dalloway unequivocally evokes her obsession with the primordial; I felt weak you see said Rachel.
The Dallowy’s left the ship.
Virginia Woolf’s health did not permit conventional schooling, and was educated at home by her father and grew up at the family home at
Hyde Park Gate (www.literaturepage.com). Sir Leslie Stephen was an
interesting story-teller; he was also a bed time story teller. He could recite
poetry and read stories to the children so that the best lessons were
probably given out of school hours. Both the parents had strong family
associations with literature (Drabble ed. “With an Introduction Notes” vii). Virginia Woolf, who had little formal schooling and who believed that “the world (would) go on providing me with excitement whether I can use it or not” (Sharma 16). In the middle, she described this period in a letter to Vita Sackville – West (best friend of Virginia): Think how I was brought up! No school; mourning 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! Vanessa and Virginia were educated at home. The former developed the art of writing and the latter
Vanessa became a famous painter. Vanessa also studied Latin, Italian, art and architecture at King’s Ladies’ Department. On the other hand, 71 Stephen’s children were used to this atmosphere; they were free from conventional education. Leslie Stephen and his wife, Julia Duckworth
Stephen, had decided to educate their children themselves although there were governesses at home. As Quentin Bell (nephew of Virginia or son of
Vanessa) informed the readers before Virginia Woolf was seven, “Julia was trying to teach her Latin, History and French, while Leslie took the children in Mathematics” (Bell, Virginia Stephen 26-29) but neither of them was a good teacher.
Virginia Woolf learnt among other things: Greek with a teacher,
Janet Case. She could read Greek and French (Bennett ed. 152). Virginia heard the birds singing in Greek, a language in which she had acquired some competence she continued her education, partly by reading of her own choice, and partly under the tuition of Dr. Warr of King’s College
and Clara Pater, who taught her Greek and Latin respectively. She
learned history at the Ladies’ Department of King’s College, London
between 1897 and 1901, and this brought Virginia into contact with some
of the early reformers of women’s higher education (en.wikipedia.org).
She became increasingly interested in literature and music (Virginia
Woolf: Letters 8-41). Virginia’s education influenced personally on
Rachel’s education in this novel as follows: The way Rachel had been
educated, as Virginia, joined to a fine natural indolence, was of course 72 partly the reason of it, for she had been educated as the majority of well-to do girls in the last part of the nineteenth century. “Kindly doctors and gentle old professors had taught her the rudiments of about ten different branches of knowledge” (VO 27-28). The education of a motherless daughter who rigidly distressed marriage was also Woolf’s personal concern. For Virginia Woolf had never exercised for obsessive love-hate feelings for her mother (Moore 82). But this system of education had one great advantage. It did not teach anything to her except the music in which she was more interested “she became a fanatic about music.”
Rachel’s education left her abundant time for thinking.
Virginia and Vanessa learnt many things with the help of Tutors so
Virginia brought the same incident in this novel. Like that Mrs. Dalloway
appointed a history tutor (Doris Kilman) for her daughter Elizabeth, as
Virginia Woolf was educated under a Greek tutor Janet Case. Doris
Kilman, who was a German by birth, was in the Dalloway’s house to look
after Elizabeth. In the view of Richard Dalloway: “Doris Kilman had her
degree, who was a woman made her way in the world. Her knowledge of
modern history was more than respectable. Doris Kilman was a friend,
guide (in religion) well-wisher and philosopher of Elizabeth. Richard said
that “She was very able, had a really historical mind” (Mrs. D 15). Mrs.
Dalloway did not like her daughter to be so much closeted with Kilman 73 for the lesson in history – anything more nauseating. She could not conceive. Miss Kilman took her to some church in Kensington and they had tea with a clergyman. She helped her to learn many matters. “She had lent her books – law, medicine, politics, all professions were open to women of your generation, said Miss Kilman” (140). “Seeds of knowledge need a sound academic soil for germination” (Proverb). So
Elizabeth was admitted in a high school, where she played Hockey (86).
Virginia liked to watch Hockey so she portrayed the character Elizabeth to
play Hockey in this novel. Like Virginia, Elizabeth was educated in all
subjects.
In To the Lighthouse, Andrew Ramsay did not like a serious man
like Charles Tansley. He was fond of dissecting crabs and he went after
them. Virginia’s elder brother Thoby (great uncle’s name) who liked
Mathematics well. Virginia personally influenced Thoby’s love for
Mathematics upon Andrew Ramsay. He possessed an extraordinary gift
for Mathematics. “Ramsay preferred the clever son like, Andrew who was good at mathematics and neglected the less brilliant.” Even Clarissa’s husband admitted that Andrew’s gift for Mathematics was extraordinary
(LH 80). Virginia brought the same interest in Mathematics through the character on Andrew Ramsay. “Mr. Ramsay wished Andrew could be induced to work harder.” He was adventurous by nature. His father had 74 very high hopes on him. Mr. Ramsay said that rarely worked harder and
if he did not do so, there was every chance of scholarship if he did not,
said Mr. Ramsay (92). His father would feel very proud of him, if he was
to receive a scholarship.
Virginia Woolf gave equal importance and interest to music and
dance. Virginia Woolf confessed to Lytton Strachey, that Virginia had
adored a soft music at evening. So Virginia depicted Helen as follows:
Helen danced according to the tune in the hotel very beautifully and that
was appreciated by all in the voyage. “After a moment’s hesitation first
one couple, then another, leapt into mid-stream, and went round and round
in the eddies. The rhythmic swish off the dancers sounded like a swirling
pool” (VO 51). The novel thus composed would have the “power of
music, the stimulus of sight, the effect on us of the shape of trees or the
play of colour, the emotions bred in us by crowds” and it would have “the
delight of movement, the intoxication of wine” (Hungerford 229).
Virginia Woolf brought out this passion and atmosphere through
the character of Rachel Vinrace in this novel, The Voyage Out. The first
voyage from London to South America, Rachel travelled with hier aunt
Helen and uncle Ridley Ambrose along with her father Willoughby
Vinrace in the ship ‘Euphrosyne.’ “Rachel was sitting in her room, doing 75 absolutely nothing.” She was only preoccupied with her ‘Piano’ and music during her spare hours – “Her mind was in the state of an intelligent man’s in the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. She would believe practically anything she was told, invent reasons for anything she said...” (VO 28). Like Virginia Woolf, Rachel was also interested in music. By virtue of the piano and a mess of books on the floor, “Rachel considered it her room, and here she would sit for hours playing very difficult music, reading a little German or a little English when the mood took her,...(27). Virginia Woolf loved and she was very much interested in music. She brought the same musical sense on Rachel. Rachel played a
Beethoven Sonata while Terence Hewet wrote and talked: “...I can’t play a note because of you in the room interrupting me every other second”
(296). Again Virginia mentioned about Piano in her novel To the
Lighthouse; Virginia wrote as:
It was a splendid mind. For if thought is like the keyboard of a
Piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in
twenty-six letters all in order, then his (Ramsay’s) splendid mind
had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one,
firmly and accurately, until it had reached (47).
Virginia Woolf in her Memoir stressed that her father created the atmosphere of freedom in Virginia Woolf’s family life – while Sir Leslie 76 Stephen’s library introduced Virginia Woolf to a choice reading, his tutelage gave her confidence in her responses. For, as she wrote later,
Leslie encouraged children to “read what one liked because one liked, it never to pretend to admire what one did not” (Sharma 18). A part of Sir
Leslie Stephen’s liberal education to his children was to let them think independently. Virginia Woolf candidly noted that if freedom meant the right to think one’s own thoughts and to follow one’s own pursuits, “then no one respected and indeed insisted upon freedom more completely than he did” (18) and chose one’s own profession. She advised in her common reader “to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions” (Woolf ed. Writer’s 47). Sir Leslie Stephen did not like to see women smoke but the freedom given to his daughters was worth thousands of cigarettes (Varshini, “Biography” 1). Thus he was a strict moralist. Leslie’s strictness was brought by Virginia on William
Pepper in The Voyage Out.
In Virginia Woolf’s novels, The Voyage Out (Rachel Vinrace),
Mrs. Dalloway (Elizabeth Dalloway), Night and Day (Katherine Hilbery) and Jacob’s Room (Jacob Flanders), she chose the above said characters as her protagonist’s young impressionable minds reality. Though the characters were young they were given full freedom by the autobiographical novelist since the customs were in practice then. Virginia 77 Woolf received restricted freedom from her paents. In Mrs. Dalloway, she gave Elizabeth only the restricted freedom. So when Elizabeth and Doris
Kilman were going for shopping, Elizabeth stepped forward into the
omnibus in front of everybody. She took a set on top. She was very much
interested in horse-riding. Elizabeth Dalloway was very much attached
towards Doris Kilman than her parents; that showed she had been away
from her sophisticated feeling of maternal possessiveness. Neiether
Richard nor Clarissa had ever possessed Elizabeth but to Clarissa, it
seemed that Miss Kilman was devouring Elizabeth. Mrs. Dalloway didn’t
like her daughter to be with Doris Kilman. But Elizabeth spent more time
with Kilman, alone shut up in a room upstairs: Richard said that,
And there was Elizabeth closeted all this time with Doris Kilman.
Prayer at this hour with that woman…something fumbling,
something scratching at the door, they shut themselves up.
‘I suppose they’re praying’ said Mr. Richard (Mrs. D 127).
Doris Kilman thought that Clarissa “came from the most worthless of all
classes – the rich, with a smattering of culture” (133). Virginia
remembered the same situation of To the Lighthouse Minta Doyle was
under the care of Mrs. Ramsay. She went for a walk with Paul Rayley.
So Mrs. Ramsay said that “a woman had once accused her of ‘robbing her
of her daughters’ “affections” (LH 79).
78 Virginia Woolf was given the impetus to free thinking. Later on it emboldened Virginia Woolf to assert: “I write what I like writing and there’s an end on it.” This freedom for herself implied freedom for others
to make judgement: “I’m to write what I like; and they are to say what
they like” (Woolf ed. Writer’s 44-45). Virginia Woolf admired much
about her father’s frankness Virginia acknowledged that her father gave
restricted freedom. The highest services of this kind, “her believed, are
rendered by persons condemned, or should I say privileged, to live in
obscurity” (Stephen 245-246). In this way, Virginia Woolf gave the same
freedom to Rachel in The Voyage Out. Rachel could write whatever she
thought. Terence Hewet loved Rachel for she had full freedom. Terence
decided that what he loved; above Rachel what Terence like was her
‘extraordinary’ freedom. “He wanted to keep her free so that they could be
free together”(355). Even today the parents would doubt the wisdom of
allowing a girl of fifteen, who would like to have the free run of large
library. But Virginia said that her father allowed her and gave full freedom
in the field of education.
Virginia depicted her heroine Rachel also as a vast reader. “Rachel
chose modern books, and she read what she chose. Rachel was freed to
read all the literary late nineteenth century works of New Woman literature
written by men. Willoughby who helped Rachel to explore 79 True Life of the World”; while Rachel travelled in his father’s ship
within the few months that she spent a little port where there was a
queer English colony, which helped her to understand the practical
meaning of life (Majumdar and McLaurin ed. 50).
Here, Virginia’s personal influence is very well obviously shown. In particular, Rachel’s aunt Helen (Bohemian lady) gave her, George
Meredith’s novel, Diana of the Crossways and Henrik Ibsen’s play, The
Dolls House. Rachel’s identification with their heroines is total, creating in her “some sort of change,” yet Rachel later found that the experiences of love they delineate had little connection with her own (Marcus 215).
Virginia Woolf had the habit of writing the diaries and letters.
Quentin Bell, in his introduction to the Mature Diaries, describes that
Virginia Woolf’s diaries and letters were the “masterpiece” (Sellers 109).
She kept the daily diary throughout her life and wrote many thousands of
letters. When Woolf was fourteen, the habit of writing diary started and
the diaries continue with interpretation, until her suicide in 1941 (109).
Virginia Woolf made her heroine, Rachel Vinrace, in this novel to the habit of writing diary daily and letters to others (example) Rachel herself said that, “...I own, than I should be of writing Keats and Shelley into the bargain!” (VO 61) While she was writing she asked herself: “Would there ever be a time when the world was one and indivisible?” (300). In To the 80 Lighthouse Virginia influenced her habit of writing letters on Mrs.
Ramsay (LH 216). Virginia’s diaries gave an unparalleled insight into
Woolf’s development and methods as a writer. We are given plans for her
various novels, her thoughts as she worked at them, the compositional
problems she encountered and her reactions to them once they are
finished. She described the rapture of inspiration and the torture of revision (Sellers 110). One of Woolf’s purposes in keeping a diary was a training ground for her art (111). Virginia Woolf’s diaries are in short- hand script (112). Virginia Woolf did not intend her diaries or correspondence for full-scale publication it can also be argued that her portrayals are the products of frustration rather than an unwarranted annihilation of the other. In To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay sat and wrote letters by a rock. He wrote and wrote she was sitting under the rock, with a pad on her knee writing letters and wrote innumerable letters, and some times the wind took them and she Charles Tanslay just saved the pages from the sea (LH 216-217).
In Virginia’s family, her parents used to call their children with surnames: Nessa alias Vanessa. Leslie Stephen called his daughter
Virginia with nick name, ‘Ginia.’ The girl’s name ‘Ginia’ is Virginia,
Virgo (Latin), and the meaning of ‘Ginia’ is maiden. There was a
magnificent and monumental simplicity in Thoby which earned him his 81 nick name as ‘The Goth.’ Virginia remembered in her novel, she personally called the character Rachel as ‘Cynthis.’ Virginia wrote a
letter to Vanessa Bell on 04.08.1908:
I can get on with my writings, and I sit in an upper room and look
into glass case of Black Theology; and Cynthia (the character who
became Rachel Vinrace in The Voyage Out) will not speak and my
ship is likely sink (Nicolson 340)
In The Voyage Out, Rachel began her fictional life as Cynthia, only after
four months and several letters were received by Clive Bell and Vanessa
Bell, so Virginia changed the name ‘Cynthia’ as ‘Rachel.’ Likewise
Virginia first introduced her characters with their surnames and suddenly
referring to them by their Christian names (for example: Dalloway alias
Clarissa Dalloway). The character Clarissa Dalloway would be mentioned in the coming chapter “Mrs. Dalloway.” In To the Lighthouse, Ramsay’s children were called by William Bankes (who was a Botanist) after the kings and queens of England, Cam was addressed as the wicked, James the Ruthless, Andrew the just, pure the fair. Whereas Mr. Ramsay thought that Andrew was the master brain (LH 32).
Virginia used repeated words in all her major novels. Because after the death of Julia Stephen, the girls heard Sir Leslie Stephen passing their room, talking to himself: “I wish I were dead – I wish I were dead, I 82 wish my whiskers would grow” (www.literaturepage.com). Virginia was influenced by the same words through the characters in all of her selected novels. In The Voyage Out, Terence Hewet said to Rachel Vinrace,
‘God, Rachel, you do read trash!’ he exclaimed. ‘And you’re
behind the times too my dear. No one dreams of reading this kind
of thing now-antiquated problem plays, harrowing descriptions of
life in the east end-oh, no, we’ve exploded all that. Read poetry,
Rachel, poetry, poetry, poetry!’ (297).
In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia echoed the same repeated words.
Mrs. Dalloway introduced Richard to everybody as Wick ham (68). At
last he said “My name is Dalloway!” – That was his first view of Richard
– a fair young man rather awkward, sitting on a deck – chair, and blurting
out “My name is Dalloway!”; “Sally got hold of it; always after that she
called him” and “My name is Dalloway!” (68). Mr. Ramsay recited aloud
to himself the lines of Tennyson, “Someone had blundered, someone had
blundered” (LH 43) who had the mania of shouting aloud like Sir Leslie
Stephen (116).
In Virginia Woolf’s words, Sir Leslie Stephen was interested in
reading books; she influenced the same on Mr. Ridley Ambrose who was
also a vast reader and a philosopher (VO 71). He sat hour after hour
among white-leaved books, alone like an idol in an empty church, still 83 except for the passage of his hand from one side of the sheet to another, silent save for an occasional choke, which drove him to extend his pipe a moment in the air.
As he worked his way further and further into the heart of the poet,
his chair became more and more deeply encircled by books, which
lay open on the floor, and could only by crossed by a careful
process of stepping, so delicate that his visitors generally stopped
and addressed him from the outskirts (171).
Virginia depicted her father on Mr. William Pepper in The Voyage Out, like her father Mr. Pepper also knew about many things – about
Mathematics, History, Greek, Zoology, Economics and the Icelandic
Sagas. Like Leslie Stephen; Mr. Ridley, Ambrose and Mr. Ramsay were also vast readers, Philosophers and thinkers. Mr. Ramsay always had a book in a pocket (LH 228). He was reading a little shiny book with covers mottled like a plover’s egg (247).
Sir James used his felicity for words in law and public
administration (Love, Sources 25). Sir James Fitzjames (Virginia’s uncle)
was a great lawyer and the writer of laws (Drabble ed. “With an
Introduction Notes” vii). Virginia remembered his uncle in Mrs.
Dalloway through the character of Sir James Buckhurst Missers. Hooper
(Mrs. D 21) and Grateley, Lawyers and Solicitors (52). Peter Walsh had 84 come after a long interval, which was in love with Daisy, the wife of an
Indian Army Major and he had come to arrange for her divorce (51).
Peter Walsh was Clarissa’s ex-lover who returned from India after five
years break to consult the above said lawyers.
Many of these small incidents that made up the texture of the novel
also found their counter parts in real life: the birthplace of cricket is
England. The game of cricket on lawn, Virginia Woolf was known as ‘the
demon bowler’ (Drabble ed. “With an Introduction Notes” xv). She and
her sister Vanessa used to play the game cricket in their garden. Virginia
Woolf loved playing cricket, so she echoed this game in the major novels.
For example in Mrs. Dalloway, in words of Rezia, Look, “she implored
him, pointing at a little troop of boys carrying cricket stumps, and one
shuffled, spun round on his heel and shuffled, as if he were acting a clown
at the music hall” (30). Again Virginia wrote about cricket in Mrs.
Dalloway as follows: While she was walking in the London street, she
heard the beating of bat’s noise, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of
cricket bats and so on. Virginia Woolf created Peter Walsh to involve in
cricket in the novel and he said that “But cricket was no mere game.
Cricket was important. He could never help reading about cricket” (174).
Virginia Woolf introduced Mr. Charles Tanslay in To the Lighthouse, as
an atheist in the hands of Mr. Ramsay’s children. Tansley heard the sound 85 of the children playing cricket. He made James full of disappointments.
So he regarded Tanslay as a miserable specimen. “He couldn’t play cricket; he pocked; he shuffled. He was a sarcastic brute, Andrew said.”
He would watch the children playing cricket (LH 12, 54, 267). The atheist, “they called him; the little atheist.” Rose mocked him; Prue mocked him; Andrew, Jasper, Roger mocked him (10). Mrs. Ramsay extended sympathy to Mr. Ramsay: he should put implicit, faith in Mrs.
Ramsay and everything would be alright and nothing would harm him.
Mr. Ramsay was satisfied with what she said and went out to watch the children who play the game of cricket. Virginia Woolf was rambunctious and a little rowdy at times, and she enjoyed sharing this kind of energy with her friends. Making noise, cheering at a football game or even getting into a friendly fight all seemed like a good time to her. In fact,
Virginia Woolf needed to do these things or otherwise she gets short- tempered.
86 Sir James Stephen held a professorship at Cambridge for a time
(Love, Sources 25). Virginia Woolf’s Grandfather, Clive Bell (Vanessa’s husband) and her son Quinton Bell were the eminent professors in various subjects in Virginia’s family. Virginia personally portrayed her family incidents through the characters of her novels. Mr. Ridley Ambrose and
St. John Hirst were the professors in The Voyage Out. Mr. Ramsay and
Charles Tansley were also the professors in philosophy in To the
Lighthouse. Mr. Ramsay with his male ambitions longed to survive as a great philosopher, as an impressive entry in the Dictionary of National
Biography.
Virginia Woolf’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen (18321904), was like
Mr. Ramsay a well-known philosopher not of the first rank, but unlike Mr.
Ramsay Leslie Stephen was also a literary critic and biographer (Drabble ed. “With an Introduction Notes” xii). Mr. Ridley Ambrose, was a philosopher (VO 71). Mr. Grice, St. John Hirst (156) and Mr. William
Pepper were also philosophers in the novel (20). In the view of Virginia about her father, she was probably influenced to become a writer because writing had been one of his major public activities. Likewise Virginia personally influenced her father’s personality on Mr. Ramsay that he was an eminent intellectual, a reputed scholar, philosopher who had earned reputation as a thinker and a writer. “Ramsay is one of those men who do 87 their best work before they are forty” (LH 34). Mr. Ramsay had a book in
his pocket (228). He had made a definite contribution to philosophy in one
little book when he was only five and twenty; what came after was more or less amplification, repetition. Ramsay’s student Charles Tansley was
also a ‘little atheist’ apprentice philosopher (32-34).
Virginia Woolf’s grandfather was Sir James Stephen, who was a
historian and a professor of Cambridge University (Drabble ed. “With an
Introduction Notes” vii). Sir Leslie Stephen was also a historian of ideas
wrote History of the English Thought in the eighteenth century (vii). In the same way, Virginia portrayed Mr. Ramsay in Mrs. Dalloway, Richard planned to write the history of the Great British military family, the
Burtons who were already part of the past. Richard planned to write a history of Lady Bruton’s family, and she told him that the papers were all in order to write the history of the Labour Party which would came into power later (120). Richard reminded Lady Burton about Clarissa’s party.
Lady Burton invited Whitbread Hugh as well as Richard Dalloway to lunch (35), because to help her to draft a letter to The Times. Lady Burton preferred Richard because he possessed much finer material (112).
Sir Leslie Stephen J.K. Stephen (Virginia cousin), Virginia Woolf,
Julian Bell (Nephew of Virginia) were the poets in Virginia’s family. 88 Julian Bell was a writer and poet; who was also became interested in left wing politics. J.K. Stephen had early success with his poems, Lapsus
Calami – Slips of the pen are his famous poems in literature. In the opinion of Leonard Woolf, Virginia was a great poetess. For example
Rupert Brooke and Leonard were friends. Once Rupert began to write a poem, his method being to put the last word of each line of rhyming quatrains down the sheet of paper and then complete the lines and the poem. At one moment he said: “Virginia, What is the brightest thing you can think of?” “A leaf with the light on it,” was Virginia’s instant reply,
and it completed the poem (Woolf, Beginning 19). Virginia loved poetry,
quoted it constantly, was acutely sensitive to its music and emulous of the
poet’s command of words, and she uses the word poetry to define certain
effects in prose fiction that transcend the particular character or scene
(Bennett ed. 153). Her own personal influence put on Mr. Grice as a poet
in The Voyage Out. Mr. Grice was a philosopher and poet. While
Willoughby and Mrs. Dalloway were taking in the ship; she asked “I’ve
had the most interesting talk of my life!” She exclaimed, taking her seat
beside Willoughby. “Do you realize that one of your men is a philosopher
and a poet?” (VO 50). Mr. Ridley Ambrose was shut up in his room with
his books as he had “...worked his way further and further into the heart of
the poet,”... (171). In Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus Warren Smith was a poet.
He read Shakespeare’s plays wrote romantic poetry, and hopelessly in 89 love with Miss. Isabel Pole. Mr. Ramsay and Augustus Carmichael
(mathematician) were the poets in To the Lighthouse. When the First
World War broke out Mr. Carmichael brought out a volume of poems
which had an unexpected success. The war had revived people’s interest in poetry. People said that his poetry was so beautiful. They went and
published things he had written forty years ago. There was a famous man now called Carmichael (LH 262). Virginia Woolf brought her family talents in the characters of her major novels.
Julian Bell, the elder son of Clive and Vanessa Bell, was not only a writer, poet, but also interested in left wing politics. Likewise, Virginia brought Ridley Ambrose in The Voyage Out as an egocentric politician
(ex-parliamentarian). He discussed more of politics to Rachel so that she got bored very much. Virginia introduced Mr. Richard Dalloway, as a politician in Mrs. Dalloway, who was the husband of Clarissa Dalloway. He was a parliamentarian and his first duty was to work for his country and belonged to labour government (120).
Mr. Dalloway “never gave Clarissa present, except a bracelet two or three years ago. He was a good husband to his wife and presented rose bouquets when he returned from the lunch” (123, 127).
90 Leonard’s sister was Bella, who had married R.H. Lock, The
Assistant Director of the Peradeniya Botnical Gardens (Woolf, Beginning
15). Virginia echoed the same job in her novel To the Lighthouse, a
character by name Mr. William Bankes who was a widower, a botanist,
smells of soap (Drabble ed. “With an Introduction Notes” xv). William
Bankes was a bit of faddist, who had in him the qualities of sincerity and
kind-heartedness. He holds Lily Briscoe in high esteem for her devotion to
work, her commonsense and poverty. Mrs. Ramsay, a match maker,
thought that they would be tide in a wedlock (Gupta and Gupta 145).
Virginia rejected Lytton Strachey like that her heroin Lily Briscoe was
also rejected, the proposal of William Bankes.
Even though Virginia married a writer Leonard Woolf in 1912
(www.en.wikipedia.org). She had close contact with other women like
Vanessa Bell, Violet Dickinson, Vita Sackville-West and Ethel Smyth. In
1922, Virginia Woolf met and fell in love with Vita Sackville-West. After
a tentative start they began an affair that lasted through most of the
1920’s. In 1928, Woolf presented Sackville-West with Orlando, a
fantastical biography in which the eponymous hero’s life spans three
centuries and both genders. It had been edited by Nigel Nicholson, Vita
Sackville-West’s son, “the longest and most charming love-letter in
literature.” After their affair ended, the two women remained friends until 91 Woolf’s death in 1941. Virginia also remained close to her surviving siblings, Ethel Smyth and Vita Sackville-West’s were given a character in
The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf.
A recent collection of essays were focused on the “lesbian aspects” of Woolf’s fictions. Critics had also examined Virginia Woolf in tandem with a female other: Vanessa and Virginia Woolf, Vita and Virginia
Woolf. In the opinion of Laura Marcus, Virginia Woolf’s lesbian was an open secret (Marcus 234). Vanessa’s and Virginia Woolf’s lesbian was the crucial relationship (235). Ethel Smyth, suffrage activist, writer and composer to whom Woolf became close later in her life. Virginia Woolf brought her own personality on Mrs. Dalloway. When Clarissa was young, she was much attached to Sally Seton, who almost made love to her, leaving it opens for a charge of Lesbian love. Virginia Woolf depicted a character by name Sally Seton in Mrs. Dalloway. As a girl, Sally Seton was gifted with extraordinary charm; so much so that Mrs. Dalloway
could not take away her eyes off her face when she first came home, at
Burton. She had, “an extraordinary beauty of the kind; she (Clarissa) most admired, Sally’s “dark, large-eyed with that quality which, since she had not got it herself” (Mrs. D 38). She always evinced, sort abandonment, as if she could say anything, a quality much commoner in foreigners than in English men. Recalling her own precious moments of 92 love for Sally, Clarissa refuses to interfere with her daughter Elizabeth’s
“failing in love” with Miss Kilman: “It proves she has a heart” (Henke,
“Mrs. Dalloway: the Communion of Saints” 136).
Mrs. Dalloway could not help liking Sally Seton. One day there came the most exquisite moment of her life; passing a stone urn with flowers in it, Sally stopped; picked a flower; presented it to her and kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside and down
(Mrs. D 40-41). Clarissa loved Sally Seton with the same intensity and
passion as a man loved a woman. Her girlish friendship was for she had
almost homo-sexual. Often she would stand in her bedroom at the top of
the house and say to herself, Virginia spoke about Sally with Marie
Antoinette since her other Julia Stephen had close association Marie
Antoinette. Sally Seton always said she had French blood in her veins; an ancestor had been with Marie Antoinette. “She (Sally) is beneath this
roof...she is beneath this roof” (38-39). Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway was a
lesbian, so she doubted that Elizabeth had a lesbian relationship with
Doris Kilman in this novel.
Lytton Strachey (18791932) was a historian, essayist, and
biographer a close friend of Virginia Woolf and central figure in the
Bloomsbury. In 1918, Lytton Strachey achieved overnight success with 93 the publication of a collection of satirical, biographical essays called
Eminent Victorians. In a letter to Virginia Woolf about this novel, The
Voyage Out Lytton Strachey said, “the handling of the detail always seemed to me divine,” at the end, “I felt cut short by the death of Rachel.”
Clive Bell twice proposed his love to Vanessa, she rejected it. Virginia
Woolf did the same with Leonard and finally married him. In the same
way, “Lytton Strachey who once, proposed marriage to Virginia but she
refused his proposal” (Drabble ed. “With an Introduction Notes” viii), because she was cautious and serious about love and really desired deep, genuine, lashing relationship. Virginia Woolf brought the same incident in The Voyage Out through the character of Mr. William Pepper (19) and she brought in Mrs. Dalloway, Peter Walsh proposed his love to Mrs.
Dalloway but she rejected it and married Richard Dalloway.
Virginia Woolf wanted to share her philosophy and ideals with her love partners like Lytton, and Clive Bell. In a letter to Lytton in 1922, she admitted: “Of course you put your infallible finger upon the spot— romanticism.” Virginia Woolf continued her friendship with Sir Lytton
Strachey till her death. “If a writer would enter the heart of an event, or assimilate the full value of an experience, he must respond to it with the whole of his mind. But to get a complete hold of the human mind is not an ordinary feat; for it is an “odd thing...so capricious, faithless, and 94 infinitely shying at shadows” (Woolf ed. Writer’s 29). Polygamy,
Androgamy, Homosexual, Lesbian, and Heterosexual – all prevailed in
the English society. So Virginia depicted all the above said relations in her
major novels.
Lytton Strachey (Proposed) Virginia Woolf Leonard Woolf (Married)
Richard Dalloway (he loved) Rachel Vinrace Terence Hewet (both loved each other)
Clarissa Dalloway Peter Walsh (Proposed) Richard Dalloway (Married)
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries men could marry any woman; in the same way women could marry any man. From this, readers come to know how the people followed the androgamy and polygamy customs. So, Virginia Woolf brought her characters throughout her novels. Now-a-days, abroad, people in particular most of girls follow the Indian traditional marriage. If girls wish to live with one man
throughout their life, it is admissible. For example at present the ruling
Queen Elizabeth II is living with her husband Duke of Edinborough from the beginning till today. Whereas Future Prince Charles divorced Diana and married a lady called Camilla and as the statement goes like this:
“Your children and my children are playing with our children.” For 95 example Sir Leslie Stephen’s family consisted of three marriages.
‘Androgamy’ means “custom of having more than one husband at the same time.” ‘Polygamy’ means “custom of having more than one wife at the same time.” The term ‘androgyny’ is a derivation of two Greek words andro and gyn meaning male and female respectively.
The story of the novel, Mrs. Dalloway is quite simple and could be told in a few words. Like Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, rejected the proposal of Peter Walsh who lived in the town of Burton. The rejection was because Peter was too possessive and not allowed to live independently, whereas Richard gave her the full freedom – the spiritual privacy that attic room which craved for. Richard loved her and married her. Mrs. Dalloway had the capacity to enjoy the life which was a significant aspect of a character. She found beauty in everything in the world. The love of Peter Walsh was a part and parcel of her life. Virginia
Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925), presented a day mid June (1923) in the life of Clarissa Dalloway an upper class English middle aged woman over fifty. She was the central figure in the novel, wife of Richard
Dalloway, who was a conservative member of parliament.
Mr. Richard loved his daughter Elizabeth immensely and said, “If he’d had a boy he’d have said, Work. But he had his Elizabeth: he adored his
Elizabeth” (Mrs. D 123). Elizabeth was ‘Daddy’s girl’, she had been 96 influenced by her mother more than she realized. And it is she who will carry on the tradition of sorority and compassion handed down from mother to daughter (Henke, “Mrs. Dalloway: the Communion of Saints”
138).
Leonard Woolf proposed Virginia many times. He said as follows:
On December 4, I went into residence and from that moment began
to see Virginia continually. We often lunched or dined together,
we went together to Gordon Square to see Vanessa or have a meal
there, we walked in the country, and we went to the theatre or to
the Russian Ballet (Woolf, Beginning 52).
The novelist Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf talked about their engagement. Virginia Stephen married the writer Leonard Woolf in 1912.
Despite his low material status (Virginia referring to Leonard during their engagement as a “penniless Jew”) the couple shared a close bond. Indeed, in 1937, Woolf wrote in her diary: “Love-making – after twenty-five years can’t bear to be separate...you see it is enormous pleasure being wanted: a wife. And our marriage so completed.” After their marriage both Leonard and Virginia Woolf sailed on a boat and discussed their future. Leonard
Woolf asked Virginia about their marriage, and said that
I wired to Virginia asking whether I could see her next day. Next
day I went up to London and asked her to marry me. She said she 97 did not know and must have time – indefinite time – to see more of
me before she could make up her mind (53).
Leonard Woolf remembered the past and said that,
On May 29 I had lunch with Virginia in her room and we sat
talking afterwards, when suddenly Virginia told me that she loved
me and would marry me. It was a wonderful summer afternoon
and we felt that we must get away from London for a time. We
took the train to Maidenhead and I hired a boat and rowed up the
river to Marlow and then we came back and dined at the riverside
restaurant in Maidenhead.
Virginia and I were married on Saturday, August 10, 1912, at
St. Pancras Register Officer in a room which, in those days, looked
down into a cemetery (69).
But in The Voyage Out, Virginia made her heroin Rachel to die in the middle of her age twenty-four.
Virginia echoed the same incident on Terence Hewet. The biographical reference between Clive Bell and Terence Hewet are numerous and exact. First, simply in terms of appearance, photographs show Clive Bell as overweight and blond. Virgina introduced Terence
Hewet as being clean shaven with a ‘complexion rosy,’ and then described 98 him as the young man who was inclined to be stout (Moore 84). Rachel and Terence discussed their engagement like Virginia Woolf and Leonard
Woolf. Terence Hewet wrote a letter to Helen, inviting Rachel and Helen for the magnificent place, Terence arranged for a picnic. In that letter
Hewet said, it would give me a great pleasure if you and Miss. Vinrace would concern to be of the party. Terence and Rachel went for a walk.
Helen told to St. John Hirst about Terence that Terence would be a ‘great man.’ “You’ll be a great man, I’m certain” (VO 209). Rachel appreciated the Helen’s statement. Terence and Rachel discussed what their lives would be like as married couple. Terence was writing a book titled
‘Silence.’ He knew it would not be the same story after they got married.
Terence was serious about his writing a novel and had ideas about the novel, author which reflected Virginia Woolf’s own ideas about novel:
All you read a novel for is to see what sort of person the writer is,
and, if you know him, which of his friends he’s put in. As for the
novel itself, the whole conception, the way one’s seen the thing,
felt about it, made it stand in relation to other things, felt about it,
made it stand in relation to other things, not one in a million cares
for that. And yet I sometimes wonder whether there’s anything else
in the whole world worth doing (220-221). 99 Though he was a male writer who has expressed such an idea about writing it was fairly certain Mrs. Woolf must had felt in a similar vein, despite Terence here being a male, presenting his androgynous view.
Virginia used to portray her personal opinions on her characters in her novels. Virginia Woolf visited almost all the European countries along with her family members and friends. So she had close contact with the people, habits, customs, and society and so on. She brought the same incidents through the characters in her major novels. Leonard Woolf
(husband of Virginia) went to Colombo (India) to take up a post in the civil service in 1904, when he was a young man. Leonard said that the climate of India gave a quite different colour to the face of Tamil. My life in Ceylon in Jaffna, Kandy and Hambantota suddenly vanished into unreality (Woolf, Beginning 16). After their marriage (1912), they came up to Ceylon. In her novel, The Voyage Out she influenced her past thought through the character of Mr. Pepper. He said that, with his arms encircling his knees, he looked like the image of Budha. Buddhism was born in India. When Leonard went for lunch he met a peculiar man by name Riginald Farrer. “I was much amused to meet him again in such very different circumstances. For the last time I had seen him when he appeared as an English Buddhist in Kandy” (73). Mr. Pepper was not married for the sufficient reason that he had never met a woman who 100 commanded his respect. Condemned to pass the susceptible years of youth in a railway station in Bombay, he had seen only coloured women, military women, official women and his ideal were a woman who could
read Greek. Virginia Woolf’s own nephew, Julian Bell, made a trip to
China in 1935. While he was there, Virginia was in constant
correspondence with him. So Virginia describes China in The Voyage
Out.
Leonard Woolf went to India to work in civil service post. Both of
them visited up of Jaffna after their marriage. His life in India was
depicted by Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway – a character by name Peter
Walsh who occupied an important place in this novel. He was a middle
aged man of over fifty and returned from India after an absence of five
years; after five years. A whole French family could live on what an
English cook throws always. She liked any old timer lady of India felt
strongly against coffee which the English consume in good quantities.
When Clarissa heard that, Peter Walsh had impulsively married a woman
going on a boat towards India which was not liked by Clarissa. Peter
Walsh himself mentioned that he was in love with a girl in India by name
Daisy. Peter Walsh was speaking dryly to Clarissa Dalloway; in love with
a girl in India. In a huff, feeling his rejection by Clarissa going in the boat
towards India, he fell for a lady in the ship and married her. He had 101 married a woman when he met on the boat going to India. In a similar way after her death, he had just fallen into a second affair, with wife of an
Indian Army Major, Daisy a young woman of twenty-four with two children. In the novel, To the Lighthouse, Virginia brought back the
Indian memory once again. Jasper (adopted son) presented an Opal necklace to Rose. The gold necklace, “which uncle James had brought her from India” (109-110).
Sir James Stephen insisted his religious faith upon others. He was a member of the Claphan Sect., a middle class, hard working but belonged to prosperous group. He remained within the “Anglican church.” The
Claphan became known for their Evangelism. Leslie did not accept his father’s religious policy. Sir Leslie Stephen followed the policy of “Broad church,” middle of the road, Anglican variety. He believed that, whatever pleasure and satisfactions God may have intended for him (Love, Sources
28). Although the Stephen’s children were not baptized, they had
‘sponsors,’ of whom James Russell Lowell, the poet and critic and
American Minister in London 1880-1885 was Virginia’s honorary god father (Letter to James Russell Lowel from Sir Leslie Stephen and
Virginia Stephen on 20.8.1888). Julia and Sir Leslie Stephen educated their children in the field of religion. Sir Leslie Stephen was a Puritan:
Virginia Woolf too followed the Puritanism. It was a tribute for Virginia 102 Woolf, since she was aware of other divisions of Christianity. It is obviously shown that Virginia Woolf had religious toleration. So, The
Voyage Out described about religion as,
The transition from Catholic to Protestant worship had been
bridged by a time of disuse, when there were no services, and the
place was used for storing jars of oil, liquor, and deck-chairs; the
hotel flourishing, some religious body had taken place in hand, and
it was now fitted out with a number of glazed yellow benches,
claret-coloured footstools; it had a small pulpit, and a brass eagle
carrying the Bible on its back (230).
In the view of Sir Leslie Stephen’s powerful and aesthetic personality, one was inclined to agree with Michael Holroyd that the
Stephen’s children did suffer “grievously under the meanness and dogmatic Puritanism of his household” (Holroyd 401). In contrary,
Virginia Woolf gave full freedom to her character Rachel to follow
Christianity in this novel. Here was an example, Rachel attended a mass
in Santa Marina and participated in the choir. In many occasions, Virginia
spoke of “Roman Catholicism” in the novel, The Voyage Out.
The researcher feels that all Virginia Woolf’s dislike for religion
was poured into the mould of Doris Kilman also with pity. Virginia was a 103 caricature a satire portrait of a religious style. In Mrs. Dalloway Virginia
was criticized through Miss. Doris Kilman of all too common religious
type: to which, she believed, not only frustrated women like Doris Kilman
belonged, but also a good number of clergy men. Mrs. Dalloway laughed
at Doris Kilman for her physical appearance. When Doris Kilman walked
down in Victoria Street the laugh of Mrs. Dalloway gave her much pain.
She prayed to God. She could not afford to buy pretty clothes (Mrs. D
138). Doris Kilman thought that it was a wonderful opportunity, to get
hold of Elizabeth’s soul (her face body were so beautiful) and brought it
to God. Miss. Kilman did not want Elizabeth to love parties. “I never go
to parties,” said Miss. Kilman. Just to keep Elizabeth from going (142).
She wanted to capture her for God and kept her with her in the cage, she
had constructed. Being an agnostic like her father Virginia Woolf was not
concerned with religious reforms. In the words of Mr. Richard, Elizabeth,
his own daughter and Doris Kilman were inseparable; always sitting in a
stuffy bedroom with prayer book and went to communion. Her, “Life was
tissue of vanity deceit. Yet Doris Kilman had been overcome” (138)
Virginia expressed her own religious view in The Voyage Out that the Sunday for the English man was no more than “the mute block ghost or penitent spirit of the busy weak day” (VO 229). Church-going for the
English men was a ritual without any moral or spiritual significance. One 104 day’s worship of God against six days worship Mammon meant only the wearing of the best clothes so that no lady could sit-down without bending a clean starched petticoat, and no gentleman could breathe without a sudden crackle from a stiff shirt-front (230). Through Doris Kilman,
Virginia Woolf had poured all her indignation at corrupt religiosity and
possessive love. Doris symbolized all that was worst in religion, the evils
of religious fanaticism, intolerance and bigotry.
Virginia Woolf autobiographically brings Rachel in The Voyage
Out. Richard suddenly states in a jocular (humour) tone of voice, “I’m
sure Miss Vinrace, and now has secret leanings towards Catholicism”
(52). Rachel attended the church at the hotel. As the congregation entered
the chapel, the sound of harmonium spreads through the chapel as the
rings of water spread from a fallen stone. Rachel and the Spanish maid
attended the Sunday mass. Rachel became disillusioned with church as
she realized that the people around her were pretending to feel. The
chapel was the old chapel of monks.
The transition from Catholic to protestant worship had been
bridged by a time of disuse, when there were no services, and the
place was used for storing jars of oil, fitted out with a number of
glazed yellow benches, claret-coloured footstools; it had small
pulpit, and a brass eagle carrying the Bible on its back, while the 105 piety of different women had supplied ugly squares of carpet, and
long strips embroidery heavily wrought with monograms in gold
(230).
Rachel said, they believe in God she meant that the people in the crowd believed in Him; for she remembered the crosses with bleeding plaster figures that stood where foot-paths joined, and the inexplicable mystery of a service in a Roman Catholic Church. Grice, the steward, said that “I’m not exactly a protestant, and I’m not a Catholic, but I could almost pray for the days of popper to come again-because of the fasts” (49).
Leonard Woolf said that Leslie, his brother Sir James Fitzjames and two sisters whom I knew personally. Virginia wrote a letter to Thoby on 14.5.1897. In which she informed him that,
I must tell you that our respected Aunt Miss. Stephen the Quaker
was the Principal at Cambridge, and Emily Caroline Stephen, who
was a nun (www.literaturepage.com).
Virginia Woolf depicted her aunt’s character on Mrs. Dalloway. When she returned from the flower shop; Mrs. Dalloway felt as a ‘Nun’ returned to her attic room. She felt
Like a Nun withdrawing, or a child exploring a tower. She went
upstairs, paused at the window, and came to the bathroom. There 106 was emptiness about the heart of life: an attic room (Mrs. D 34,
36).
She thought back to her old best friend Sally Seton, the Nun – like isolation of Clarissa’s attic room, emblematic of Virginia Woolf solitude.
Clarissa was both Virgin and mother.
Virginia Woolf’s love of London stemmed from her traditional association with it, being born bred up in the great world metropolis. Her father Leslie Stephen had his residence in Bloomsbury Square, and she herself continued to reside in that genteel suburb. In her brilliant essay,
“Street Haunting,” she describes the city of London as follows: how beautiful a London street is with its Islands of light, and its long groves of darkness...of a train in the valley. Dorothy Brewster in her small but interesting study: Virginia Woolf’s London (Allen and Unwin: 1959) brings this common love of London of these two great artists of the modern novel into proper focus with this remark:
But however one defines the special charm London held for each of
these artists, they both, in James’s words, plucked from her streets
‘the ripe round fruit of perambulation,’ and heard the deep notes
thrown out from ‘their vast vague murmur’ (Woolf, CR 1 183).
107 Virginia Woolf was a Londoner born and bred and so London was seldom absent from her novels. Dorothy Brewster had analyzed with enough evidence. Mrs. Woolf’s use of London was the locale of almost all her novels. The Voyage Out, her first novel was partially concerned with London. Ridley and Helen Ambrose walked along the river,
“Thames in London.” Terence and Rachel’s return to the hotel signals the
anomalies of their coming marriage. For Terence now saw Rachel with
the eyes of the Londoner, rather than through the romantic lens of the
traveller playing primitive. “God, Rachel, you do read trash!” (VO 297).
Virginia described about London in The Voyage Out as follows:
There were the lights of the great theatres, the lights of the long
streets, lights that indicated huge squares of domestic comfort,
lights that hung high in air. No darkness would ever settle upon
those lamps, as no darkness has settled upon them for hundreds of
years. It seemed dreadful that the town should blaze for ever in the
same spot; dreadful at least to people going away to adventure
upon the sea, and beholding it as a circumscribed mound, eternally
burnt, eternally scarred. From the deck of the ship the great city
appeared a crouched and cowardly figure, a sedentary miser (12).
If one novel was more completely the London book than any other it was
The Years, which came late in the series. All her last published writings, 108 except posthumously brought out, Between the Acts were concerned with life in London seen from different points of view. Therefore, London became the crowded universe of Virginia Woolf and in her novels. Life and in the busy city so far as a common weather individual it was Clarissa
Dalloway, Katherine Hilbery were concerned, particularly the impressions he or she carried, was the theme. Virginia Woolf loved her country
‘London’ very much so she made Elizabeth to say that she too loved the country (London).
Virginia Woolf belonged to an educated and cultured family. She
dedicated her life for literature. London was a collection of noises,
colours, smells, and people and Clarissa could walk amidst them, could
savor them, and yet not had to merge with them, even though Clarissa
loved London life. Virginia Woolf mentioned almost all the important
places in London for example Waterloo Trafalgar all the important streets, peaks, square in Westminster since she was a Londoner. While Clarissa walked in the morning she observed many things happened along the streets. This reflection revealed in an unobtrusive way the type of life in
London soon after the war. Mrs. Woolf managed to give so much information about environment in which the fifty year old, well married and comfortably settled Clarissa Dalloway lived in London, not through the description from outside her personality, but through her own 109 reflections from within the consciousness. Septimus returned to London after the war with his young wife Italian Lucrezia and got a good lift in his office. Mrs. Dalloway purchased Mulberry flowers in a flower shop in
London for her party.
The characters in Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway, Richard
Dalloway, Peter Walsh, Septimus Warren Smith and Rezia Smith and others, walked the same main thorough fares that were the hub of
London’s political economic and residential life were vividly described by the novelist. All familiar names (Corner, Bond Street, Harley Street and son on) even to those who had not visited the British metropolis so far could see it clearly. Mrs. Dalloway sliced like a knife though everything; at the same time was outside, looking on as mentioned in the novel itself.
Richard Dalloway returned outer from his lunch at Lady Bruton’s, crossed the busy Piccadilly Square and found it difficult to cross the unceasing movement the vehicular traffic scenes from Streets of London were numerous in her writings. If the main theme in her writings was concerned with the consciousness of the character, then the partial axis was provided by the streets, parks and houses in London. Peter Walsh in Mrs. Dalloway
newly arrived in London after the interval of five years stayed at the hotel
in Bloomsbury. London seemed to be more important than the streaming 110 of impressions with the consciousness of individuals in the last novel published during her life time.
The autobiographical novelist loved and married Leonard Woolf.
“I’ve got a confession to make; I’m going to marry Leonard Woolf. Who was aged thirty one, and spent seven years in London (A Letter to Violet
Dickens on 4.6.1912). But before their issues Virginia Woolf passed
away. In the same way, in To the Lighthouse Mrs. Ramsay wished that
Minta Doyle would marry the young man Paul Rayley who was not so
brilliant. Mrs. Ramsay found Paul and Minta in each other’s arms and
kissing behind a rock. It meant they were engaged and married. For the
first time that Paul had used the word “we” for Minta and himself. Mrs.
Ramsay felt happy. She did a good job of matchmaking. But before
Minta and Paul’s issues Minta passed away like Virginia Woolf. Virginia
Woolf personally portrayed her half – Sister Stella Duckworth on Prue
Ramsay in the novel To The Lighthouse. Virginia Woolf’s half – Sister
Stella Duckworth married Jack Hills on 10th April 1897. In To the
Lighthouse Prue a perfect angel with the others, at night especially, she
took once breath away with her beauty. Prue Ramsay leaning on her
father’s arm was given in marriage that May. What, people said, could
have been more fitting? And, they added, how beautiful she looked! (LH
179) Stella Hills died in London on 19th July when she was expecting a 111 baby (A Letter by Virginia Woolf to Thoby dated Monday 27th
September 1897). Likewise Prue Ramsay died that summer in some
illness connected with childbirth, which was indeed a tragedy, people
said. They said nobody deserved happiness more (180).
After Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf’s marriage within few months, Leonard said that,
I became more and more uneasy about one thing. Both of them
wanted to have children, but the more I saw the dangerous effect of
any strain or stress upon her, the more I began to doubt whether she
would be able to stand the strain and stress of childbearing. I went
and consulted Sir George Savage; he brushed my doubts aside
(Woolf, Beginning 82).
Doctor advised Leonard, not to have a child, because Virginia Woolf was going mad. Virginia Woolf remembered the same situation in the characters of Septimus and Rezia in Mrs. Dalloway. When the young
Rezia approached the doctor (Holmes) to have a male child, the doctor replied: (Septimus was going mad). But, Rezia said, she must have children. They had been married five years she must have a son like
Septimus she said
...one cannot bring children into world like this. One cannot
perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, 112 who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities,
eddying them now this way, now that (Mrs. D 97).
One could have felt as though this statement was coming from Mrs.
Woolf herself. Only Virginia had put this feeling and conviction through a man, in spite of her professed feminine view. Septimus Warren Smith used to read Shakespeare again and again. In the view of Septimus how
Shakespeare loathed humanity – “the putting on of clothes, the getting of
children, the sordidly of the mouth and belly.” Septimus refused to have
children, though they had now been married for five years and Rezia
wanted a son. In the closed circuit represented by this diagram:
The following three-fold problem leads to a state of nihilistic
despair, and this leads back into, and reinforces, the second stage of
the problem, the conviction that the world is really meaningless and
hostile (Poole, unknown 188).
inability world moral justification for to feel without meaning having children
nihilistic despair
Nihilism (from the Latin nothing) is the philosophical doctrine
suggesting the negation of one or more meaningful aspects of life. Most
commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism which 113 argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value.
For more details refer this (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/nihilism).
In The Voyage Out Woolf brought out the beauty of Julia Stephen
on Helen Ambrose, in the following
Tall, large-eyed, draped in purple shawls, Mrs. Ambrose was
romantic and beautiful; not perhaps sympathetic, for her eyes
looked straight and considered what they saw her face was much
warmer than a Greek face; on the other hand it was much bolder
than the face of the usual pretty Englishwoman (VO 8).
Again, Virginia Woolf portrayed Julia Stephen on Helen Ambrose as:
“Helen lifting her eyes in distress to ‘the arches of Waterloo Edge and the
carts moving across them, like the line of animals in a shooting gallery.’
Virginia Woolf compared her mother’s beauty in Mrs. Dalloway. Though
Mrs. Dalloway was over fifty, she had not lost the capacity to enjoy the
life. She enjoyed the beauty of morning and still charming having “A
touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue, green, light, vivacious” (Mrs.
D 8).
Hugh Whitbread assured that, “she might be a girl of eighteen”
(10). She had a divine vitality which she loved. “To dance, to ride, she
had adored all that” (11). Virginia idolized her mother Julia represented 114 for her everything that was beautiful, life-giving, spontaneous, intuitive, loving and natural. She watched her father impose upon her mother again and again, smiting mercilessly down at her with his ‘beak of brass,’ the arid scimitar of the male. Like Julia, Mrs. Ramsay was a woman of great physical charms. There were references to her beauty throughout the novel. She was also paid compliments for her physical charms, as for example, “the happiest Helen for our times.” All her guests admired her beauty and even women were attracted towards her. In the same way Prue regarded her mother to be the most beautiful woman in the world. There was none to compete with her, so incomparable she was. She felt proud of her when she saw her descending down the stairs. She felt that all worlds should take a look at her and admire her, she reflected. Lily
Briscoe admired Mrs. Ramsay’s beauty as follows: Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with, she thought (LH 266).
There was no doubt that Julia, herself a famous pre-Raphaelite beauty, was the model for the generous, hospitable and kind-hearted
Virginia portrayed the same on Mrs. Ramsay (whose Christian name is never divulged) (Drabble ed. “With an Introduction Notes” xiii).
Virginia’s older sister Vanessa Bell at once acknowledged this, in a letter dated 11 may 1927, in which she wrote: 115 you have given a portrait of mother which was more like her to me
than anything. I could ever have conceived of as possible. It was
almost painful to have her so raised from the dead. You have made
one feel the extraordinary beauty of her character.... It was like
meeting her again with oneself grown up and on equal terms.
Professor Blackstone said there was no more living character in fiction than Mrs. Ramsay. Mrs. Ramsay’s heart flowed with the milk of human kindness and she was considerate to the poor and the unfortunate. In her consideration for the poor boy of the lighthouse – keeper she established complete sense of kinship between him and her son James. She had the greatest consideration even for small children.
Julia Stephen played a sincere role to his husband as a good wife whenever he approached her she consoled him. She played a good mother and a teacher towards her children. The whole family responsibilities fell on Julia’s shoulder till her death. In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia depicted
Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway as a good mother to Elizabeth for she controlled
her daughter’s wrong doing. Mrs. Dalloway introduced proudly Elizabeth
to Peter Walsh: ‘Here is my Elizabeth,’ said Clarissa, emotionally,
historically, perhaps (Mrs. D 53). In the same way, Mrs. Ramsay was
kind to her eight children and sincere to her husband. She was like the
Hindu Ideal of a mother in the family. Mrs. Ramsay felt that her children 116 should not grow, they should eternally be children with all their mischief
and she would be delighted to be always holding up a child in her arms:
“Why she asked, pressing her chin on James’s head, should they grow up
so fast? ? Why should they go to school? She would have liked always to
have had a baby” (LH 80) from this the readers could understand how the
mothers were affectionate to their children.
Mrs. Ramsay was middle-aged lady and a mother of eight children.
In the same way Julia was a kind mother to eight children and a sincere
wife to her husband. Leslie had little feeling for the visual arts, but Julia
came from a family with many artistic connections, had modeled for
Burne – Jones, and had received proposals of marriage from Holman Hunt
and sculptor Thomas Woolner; like Mrs. Ramsay, she watched with a
semi-professional interests as Sunday painters set their easels for views of
the harbour and the bay. An informal artists club was founded in 1888
and no doubt the fictitious and trend-setting Mr. Paunceforte (who
worried Lily by seeing everything as ‘pale, elegant, semi-transparent’)
would have been an associate member (Drabble ed. “With an Introduction
Notes” xvi).
Virginia unresolved fear about her mother’s love is also an important biographical referent in the novel In Moments of Being. Woolf 117 repeatedly discussed her mother’s preference for male children in the family. For the others, she was a more general and distant presence: all her devotion was given to George Duckworth who was like his father; and her care was for Gerald Duckworth who was very delicate. She was hard on Stella Duckworth because she felt Stella, “part of herself” (Moore 85).
For Woolf had never exercised her obsessive love-hate feelings for her mother. Nor had she ever truly grieved for her. Throughout her life she tried to reincarnate her in Vanessa, in Violet Dickinson, Vita-Sackville-
West – even her doctor Octavia Wilberforce. But, Vanessa had actually assumed the maternal duties after Julia Stephen’s death. Woolf’s affection for her never disappeared. Once in a letter to Vanessa, Virginia cried out,
“Why did you bring me into this world?”(82). Virginia was always uncertain about her mother’s affection, this was echoed in the earliest version of The Voyage Out this fear was apparent in Virginia Woolf’s fictional depiction of the absent Theresa (84). Theresa was ill for eight years (84).
In the earliest extent version, Virginia Woolf emphasized Rachel’s memory of her mother, like Virginia for it was her mother’s presence which hovers over the voyage (Earliest extant version of The Voyage Out: p.15, Berks Collection, New York Public Library) and seemed to be the
mysterious force which Rachel would decipher as she journeyed out into 118 maturity and simultaneously attempts an inner voyage home. Rachel was an only child and had spent a curious life, like some restless amphibious creature. Rachel’s mother, a great voluptuous woman, the daughter of a parson in the North Country, had wished of course to breed sons, whom she figured as bold defenders and besiegers, rough stalwart men, who were to express for her by their excessive vigour and scorn of feminity her own spite against the restrictions of her sex (Moore 84-85), still Mrs.
Theresa Vinrace, who was the sister of Ridley Ambrose. She was too generous a nature to stint her affections voluntarily; and in time she had as passionate a feeling for her daughter, but it was more jealous, more easily on the defensive, as any that she might have had for her sons. But she died; and left as legacy to her child a number of speculations which as her mother would never answer them, might be considered with the utmost of candour from very different points of view.
Julia Duckworth’s daughter, Stella Duckworth was always present in Leslie Stephen’s family. Julia couldn’t be away from her daughter
Stella. (Virginia’s parents had each been married previously and been widowed). Virginia portrayed on Helen’s alienation of her children which shows the motherly affection towards her children. When Helen received the news of her children’s return, she felt very happy. “The children are well,” Helen exclaimed, in the novel (VO 86). Virginia Woolf was 119 thirteen, at the time of Julia Stephen’s death, have wiped Virginia Woolf’s young world of grace, loveliness, fineness, and warmth (Sharma 18).
From then onwards she had to depend on her dominating father, or on her own resources. Virginia Woolf said that her father was mainly responsible for the early death of Julia Stephen and by the eleven years of her father’s
widowhood affected Virginia deeply (20). After her parent’s death,
Virginia Woolf was brought up by her half-sister Stella and Vanessa.
Virginia Woolf depicted her personal influence on her heroine, Rachel, in
the same way after the death of her mother (Theresa). Rachel came under
the guidance of maiden and her aunt Helen, when she was eleven.
Virginia Woolf loved her mother so much after Julia’s death; her life was
an offering to her parents, especially to her mother, Virginia Woolf
brought the same in Mrs. Dalloway.
Clarissa longed to bring both parents back from the death. Her
unique allusion to her dead mother heightens the symbolic
importance of the memory. After the loss of her mother, Clarissa
felt it incumbent (present) on her to recreate the beatific (innocent)
communion shattered by Mrs. Parris death. Mrs. Dalloway offered
a scathing indictment of the British class system and a strong
critique of patriarchy (Henke, “Mrs. Dalloway: the Communion of
Saints” 125-126).
120 According to Leonard Woolf,
Vanessa was, I think, usually more beautiful than Virginia. Like
Virginia and Vanessa, Lily Briscoe was also a beautiful woman.
She had a puckered face with Chinese eyes. She wore good shoes
Mrs. Ramsay said cheerfully, “Ah, but what beautiful boots you
wear!” (LH 207-208).
“Lily’s eyes, an august shape, the shape of a dome” – this was what the novelist said about her physical features. Francis Spalding’s excellent biography, recorded the liberated life at 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury.
Virginia portrayed a character in To the Lighthouse by name Lily Briscoe as a painter like Vanessa. Through out the novel, the novelist pictures out the possibility of marriage between Lily Briscoe and William Bankes, but it does not actually take place.
Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) was an artist and best known as the sister of Virginia Woolf. She was a talented artist in her own right
(Virginia Woolf’s Letters 1-7). Though, they were educated at home, both were encouraged to develop their individual talents. Vanessa started drawing lessons, and in 1899 she entered into the Royal Academy.
Following her mother’s death, Vanessa took on the role of house keeper for the family. Her father was a dominating character due to which
Vanessa struggled to balance the domestic role to develop her artistic 121 interests. Her father died, so she was liberated from the responsibilities.
In the painting field like Vanessa, Lily Briscoe was a middle aged (thirty five years old) painter, who was exclusively and sincerely dedicated to art like Vanessa. She had been painting her picture for the last ten years. Lily
Briscoe thought that marriage and love would be a hindrance to her object as an artist.
Virginia portrays a character – Lily Briscoe as herself. She did this in the figure of Lily, who to some extent must reflect her own character and whose vision at the end of the book embraced both Mr. and Mrs.
Ramsay. After the death of Virginia’s mother her main function in the
Stephen’s household was to pacify the violent self-distress and self disappointment of Sir Leslie Stephen. He was a self pitying personality who depended on his wife throughout his life. In The Voyage Out, Mr.
William Pepper said “A man without wife is painful.” The same family incidents occurred in To the Lighthouse. Mrs. Ramsay was one of those characters of Virginia Woolf who could create harmony between people and break down their isolation. Mrs. Ramsay was an example of the proverb: “An action of love can destroy a Galaxy of sins.” She was a woman who by the exercise of love for people in general, endeavours to make life happy and comfortable for them; for the poor by her exercise of philanthropy, for the children by fostering their talents, for her husband by 122 sympathy and reassurance. “He (Mr. Ramsey) wanted sympathy. He was a failure and he said that Mrs. Ramsay flashed here needles” (LH 52).
The single observation by Lily Briscoe of Mrs. Ramsay sorting out, arranging, directing her dinner table of fractious male children in the
Lighthouse. She was independent by nature and she played the role of an
onlooker. Mr. Tanslay whispered in her ear that, “Women cannot paint,
women cannot write...” (67). The image of Mr. Ramsay in Lily Briscoe’s mind was like a scrubbed kitchen table, lodged at the movement in the fork of a pear tree (33). Like Virginia after Mrs. Ramsay’s death Lily
Briscoe was in charge of the whole household duty. Virginia adored her
mother, who was the center of the family, its soother and refresher. Lily
Briscoe, at the end of To the Lighthouse, cried out to the departed spirit of
Mrs. Ramsay, gave the kind of level at which the mother Julia was missed
after she died.
William Bankes was undoubtedly attracted towards Lily Briscoe
because he appreciated her artistic activity. He liked her and could talk
openly to her and came under the spell of her pair of eyes. Mrs. Ramsay
admired Lily’s beauty and said: she said, thinking that Lily’s charm was
her Chinese eyes, aslant in her white, puckered little face (37). She too
had some kind of love for him “then when she turned to William Bankes,
smiling it was, as if the ship had turned and the sun had struck its sails 123 again. Her resolved to live again was done through the pitying William
Bankes.” Like Vanessa and Virginia, she did not long for marriage. But
till the end she never married. Lily Briscoe’s idea of Professor Ramsay’s
work was rather ironical:
He had made a definite contribution to philosophy in one little
book when he was only five and twenty; what came after was more
or less amplification, repetition (34).
Through the voice of Lily Briscoe, a painter in To the Lighthouse,
Virginia Woolf brings out the male egotism: James said that “He
(Ramsay) is intolerably egotistical. Worst of all he is a tyrant” (256). Lily
Briscoe watched the marital drama of the Ramsay’s, felt the tug of Mr.
Ramsay’s and Tansley’s male egotism and their need for help and
sympathy, and struggled against Tansley’s mocking verdict that “women
could not do anything in the field of Literature” (67). Mr. Ramsay was
angry or harsh towards his children after the death of Mrs. Ramsay. The
children shouted which was not liked by Mr. Ramsay. Cam was not ready
and James was not ready and Nancy had forgotten to order the sandwiches
and Mr. Ramsay had lost his temper and banged out of the room.
What’s the use of going now? ‘He had stormed.’ Sitting in the boat
he bowed, he crouched himself, acting instantly his part – the part
of a desolate man, widowed, bereft; and so called up before him in 124 hosts people sympathizing with him; staged for himself as he sat in
the boat, a little drama; which required of him decrepitude and
exhaustion (224-225).
The passage at the end of this novel gives the impression of the man exactly at Virginia had experienced it in 1903-1904 “when Virginia’s father lay dying at Hyde Park Gate so that the mournful words were heard quite clearly by the children.” In the same way Virginia maid cam, the little girl to feel and said that cam half started on her seat. “It shocked her it outraged her.” “But I beneath a rougher sea was whelmed in deeper gulfs than he” (Mr. Ramsay murmured) (225). Woolf’s mournful words were heard quite clearly by them all.
Virginia and others believed that Sir Leslie was more narrow and rigid in bringing up his own children, then his father had been with him
(Love, Sources 27) He was a tryant. According to Laura Marcus that
Leslie Stephen believed that a father’s duty was to control his children’s
lives, by planning their future and dominating their present, with little
regard for their talents, predilections, and interests. Latin was Leslie’s was
most favourite subject and he studied it (33). But his son Thoby, who
liked mathematics, should definitely not study that subject at Cambridge;
but Leslie compelled Thoby to study some other subjects. Like that
Virginia, who had an almost endlessly creative imagination and who had 125 problems with empirical thought should write history, whereas she wanted to become a famous writer. Thus Leslie compelled his wishes upon the children. He was occasionally tyrannical, short-tempered, and unpredictable grew impatient with guests and groaned with boredom at the dinner table, precise and hated the female habit of exaggeration; he longed for praise and admiration. Leslie was a deaf man, and melancholic with excessive emotionalism. Virginia influenced the same quality on Mr.
Ramsay in To the Lighthouse.
Virginia Woolf remembered her father’s harsh treatment towards her mother Julia Stephen. Once Leslie Stephen reached Julia’s death bed, she put out her hand to him. He rejected it and hurried on. The scene was imprinted on Virginia’s memory forever. “But in her mind’s eye, she could still see the tyrannical old Lear who had run her mother into an early grave” (Poole, unknown 17). It was especially so in case of Virginia
Woolf who could never forgive her father for being rude to her mother
(Pippett, Moth 26). Virginia was writing the novel The Voyage Out, she thought of her father Leslie’s attitude towards the family members. She made Helen as the mouthpiece of Virginia Woolf. When Theresa with
Willoughby – he was harsh towards his wife “Theresa was perhaps one woman Helen called friend” (VO 19). When Theresa was alive
Willoughby was harsh towards his wife. Helen wondered, “Why Theresa 126 had married Willoughby?” Willoughby was also a dominating character and harsh towards his wife. “Helen suspected him of nameless atrocities with regard to his wife, as indeed she had always suspected him of bullying his wife” (19). Virginia characterized Mr. Ramsay as follows.
He was a ruthless realist, a hard intellectualist, egoist and a tyrant. The children, particularly James complained that his father was a tyrant (LH
35). Leslie wanted “a great deal on one subject,’ and wanted it in “regular
order.” Latin was his favourite subject because he thought it more boyish
than other subjects. Likewise, Mr. Ramsay knew that he himself was not
of the first rank. His philosophic studies saw a large scrubbed kitchen
table said Lily Briscoe. This was because Andrew Ramsay had thus
described Mr. Ramsay’s work to her: his books Andrew had told Lily
were about subject and object and the nature of reality, and he had tried to
explain this to Lily (33). Mr. Ramsay had written a number of books some of which were quite popular. His chief vocation was reading, writing and philosophy, more than any other subject was his chief object of pursuit.
Sir Leslie Stephen was the distinguished Victorian. He had been portrayed by his own daughter. Virginia Woolf influenced the same on the character of Mr. Ridley Ambrose, who was a scholar in The Voyage Out.
Virginia depicted her father’s view on Mr. Ridley as conservative. Sir 127 Leslie Stephen was a short-tempered personality, in the same way Mr.
Ridley Ambrose was also a short-tempered man, in this novel. For example Helen could not bear the alienation of their children (girl, ten years and boy, six years old), so she started weeping on the banks of the
Thames River holding the railings, before boarding on the ship. Virginia
Woolf depicted him in this novel as follows:
Mr. Ambrose attempted consolation; he patted her shoulder; but
she showed no signs of admitting him and feeling it awkward to
stand beside a grief that was greater than his, he crossed his arms
behind him and took a turn along the pavement (VO 4).
Leslie Stephen’s household contained the children of three
marriages. They had seven servants for the whole family. One among
them was Sophie (The Letters of Virginia Woolf 1-7). Another servant,
The Swiss maid Pauline at Hyde Park Gate (Letter Number 4 to Thoby
Stephen) Adrian, Virginia, Mayanard Keynes and Duncan Grant took a
large four storied house in Brunswick Square. Virginia occupied the third
floor. They had a wonderful old family cook inherited from the
nineteenth century, Sophie. The letter from Sophie to Virginia, written in
1936, showed in an interesting way the curious psychology of these
devoted female servants to the families for whom they worked.
128 Virginia, she portrayed the same servants in her novels. Like
Virginia, the central character Rachel had servants and she quoted thus about her servants:
The way servants treat flowers!” She drew a green vase with a
crinkled lip towards her, and began pulling out the tight little
chrysanthemums which she laid on the table-cloth, arranging them
fastidiously side-by-side (VO 9)
Mrs. Ambrose said, “I have had servants,” concentrating her gaze.
At this moment I have a nurse. She’s a good woman as they go,
but she’s determined to make my children pray. So far, owing to
great care, on my part, they think of God as a kind of walrus; but
now that my back’s turned – Ridley, she demanded, swinging
round upon her husband, “what shall we do if we do find them
saying the Lord’s Prayer when we get home gain? (21).
Rachel had another servant by name Mrs. Chailey. Helen Ambrose and
Rachel were given equal importance in this novel as a comparison to her
niece Angelica in her own internal voyage.
Virginia remembered her servants in her novels. Mrs. Dalloway
alone went to the flower shop for the purchase of flowers. As the maid
servant Lucy was very busy with the arrangements of a party. When Mrs. 129 Dalloway returned from the flower shop she saw the hall of the house was cool as a vault.
Mrs. Dalloway raised her hand to her eyes, and, as the maid shut
the door to, she heard the swish of Lucy’s skirts, she felt like a nun
who has left the world and felt fold round her the familiar veils and
response to old devotions (Mrs. D 34).
Lucy informed her that Richard would lunch out that day with Lady
Burton. Mrs. Dalloway supervised the party arrangements and said “she knew that all her servants liked her, loved and wanted to be helpful” (44).
This was so because she herself was gentle, generous and large-hearted, always ready extend a helping hand to those in trouble like Virginia how she helped Sophie by sending cheque – which incident was brought by
Virginia on her novel Mrs. Dalloway.
Mrs. Virginia Woolf tried to live up to the standards of her own expectations and followed her own practice in her works. She had
provided in her novels the very sensation of living, the experience of life
as it was lived. In To the Lighthouse, Virginia introduced some servants
for Mrs. Ramsay. The books in the library got mildewed (musty). The
wall papers in the summer-house came loose from the walls. A cup in the
kitchen occasionally trembled and broken into pieces by Mrs. Mc Nab,
who periodically visited the house for cleaning and repairing it. Her gaze 130 fell on a warm clock in a closet and she wished that it belonged to her.
The war eventually ended and Mrs. Mc. Nab (Scottish name) received a telegram asking her to put the house in order. She, with the help of two other cleaning women namely Mildred and Mrs. Bast, worked hard for several days, and on arrival of the Ramsay, after a lapse of ten years, the cottage was in order once again. Jasper was a servant Mr. and Mrs.
Ramsay (VO 189, 191). The house contained rooms for visitors, who could come and stay with them. The doors were closed at night and windows were to be kept open, but none else kept the windows of her room open except Marie, the Swiss maid. This led Mrs. Ramsay to think over maid’s father, to save whom from death nothing could be done. The words of the maid,
“there was no hope, no hope” ring through Mrs. Ramsay’s ears.
Marie, the Swiss girl regarded the mountains as beautiful, “so
beautiful.” She spoke of this weeping as her father was suffering
from ailments (39).
In the same novel she has pictured out the character Septimus
Warren Smith who was a poet. He is a young man, aged about thirty, pale-faced wearing shabby overcoat came from Italy, who did his job as a
clerk. He fell in love with Miss. Isabel Pole lecturing in the waterloo road
about “Shakespeare.” In order to escape his loneliness, he married the 131 beautiful Lucrezia alias Rezia, the daughter of a hat-maker of Milan
(Italy). The anxiety and agonizing loneliness of life in a big city are all brought out by novels like Mrs. Dalloway. Into the veins of Mrs. Ramsay flowed the blood of an Italian family. She was full of wit and always cheerful and gain. Another character Doris Kilman was the history tutor for Elizabeth who was a German (Mrs. D 132-135)
Clive Bell said that, the Stephen family at that time was on the rise, it was upwardly mobile moving from lower middle to upper middle class
(Love, Sources 26). They had a large number of children who required penny for feeding and educating them properly, since he belonged to middle class-family. Virginia Woolf depicted her father on Mr. Ramsay.
He wrote books on philosophy, but his writings could not be a source of great income to him. Virginia Woolf’s range, no doubt, was limited in various other ways also. For example, she could paint only upper middle class life, and only certain types of characters. Virginia Woolf, like all other novelists could communicate the experiences of her own influences to a limited number of human types. For central characters, she limited herself to one large social class – those who had large income or earn salaries. Her chief characters were all drawn from the upper – middle class. She herself belonged to this class and so had intimate, first hand knowledge of it. Virginia’s work was criticized for epitomizing the 132 narrow world of the upper middle class English intelligentsia people with delicate, but ultimately trivial, self-entered, and overly introspective
individuals. For example, Mrs. Dalloway centered on Clarissa Dalloway,
a middle aged society women’s efforts to organize a party even as her life
was equated with Septimus Warren Smith, a solider who had returned
from the First World War bearing Psychological Scars. The Dalloway and
their circle all belonged to this class. Virginia Woolf also rose from the
middle class to upper-middle class. Sir Leslie Stephen was a writer;
through his writings he maintained the family. Virginia Woolf resumed
periodical writing, partly, for financial reasons; between 1916 and 1922,
151 reviews and essays published in Times Library Supplement, twenty
five in Athenaeum and New Statesmen. Most of these are uncollected;
after 1922 she wrote less for periodicals, and most of her essays have been
collected in The Common Reader First Series and Second Series and in
the four volumes edited since her death by Leonard Woolf. After the
death of Sir Leslie Stephen the life wrought a change because of the move
from the middle class domesticity to highbrow Bohemianism change of
life influenced Virginia to bring out the differences between upper-middle
class and middle class in Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf also strived to illustrate
the vain artificiality of Clarissa’s life and her involvement in it. The detail
given and though provoked in one dayof a woman’s preparation for a 133 party, a simple social event, exposed the flimsy life style of England’s upper classes at the time of the novel.
In the beginning of the twentieth century, writers and criticized the very basic of the existing social, economic and moral system. When Sir
Leslie Stephen died, the children broken away from the society in which
they were born, that society consisted of the upper levels of the
professional middle class and country families, interpenetrated to a certain
extent by the aristocracy (Woolf, Beginning 74). Virginia and her family members were affected by the class division so Virginia echoed on the
character of Mrs. Dalloway who belonged to the upper middle class society. Clarissa Dalloway was more interested in giving parties to aristocratic friends and highly placed persons and influenced acquaintance. She did not care to invite even her cousin, because she was a little absorbed in appearance and not so high placed in life. Here the novelist criticized the upper middle class through the character of Mrs.
Dalloway.
Virginia Woolf found similarly her personal influence upon Rachel in The Voyage Out. Thoby (brother of Virginia Woolf) studied in the
Cambridge and became the friend of Leonard. So Virginia Woolf brought upon the same incidents in her novel, Terence Hewet and his brilliant 134 friend St. John Hirst were from the Cambridge University. They too travelled in Euphrosyne. The ship was described as a ‘lonely little island.’
The group arrived in Santa Marina. Clive Bell and Vanessa Bell were the models for Terence Hewet and Helen Ambrose. Clive Bell, in fact, recognized Vanessa as Helen Ambrose and wrote to Virginia Woolf, “I suppose you will make Vanessa believe in herself” (Bell, Virginia Stephen
200). In Virginia Woolf’s opinion, Clive Bell was sincere to his family.
Here Virginia Woolf has depicted Clive Bell’s character on Terence
Hewet as the latter lived with sincerity after Rachel’s death. Evelyn went on saying “Why should these things happen? Why should people suffer? I honestly believe” she went on, lowering her voice slightly, “that Rachel’s in Heaven, but Terence...” (VO 360).
Sir Leslie Stephen was a tyrannical man. Sir Leslie Stephen’s disregard of conventional values was not, however, carried into his belief about women’s social position. Theoretically, he granted women their rights, yet family life was of great importance to him, and for a family to be well-knit and smoothly operative, women had to stay at home. “The
highest services of this kind,” he believed, “are rendered by persons condemned, or should I say privileged, to live in obscurity” (Stephen,
245-246). In the same way Virginia portrayed Mr. Ramsay was also a 135 self-dramatizing domestic tyrant. He was a detached and lonely philosopher. Like Leslie he was also a tyrant (LH 34-35).
Leslie Stephen longed for the contact of his wife and children.
No doubt our strongest idea of him derived from the character of
Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse; for a less impressionistic portrait
which conveyed a strong sense of his centrality in the intellectual
life of the time, one could consult Noel Annan’s Leslie Stephen
(Drabble ed. “With an Introduction Notes” vii).
One of the Virginia Woolf’s biographers has told the readers that they could build up a picture of close knit of Stephen’s family. No wonder that she recollected and reproduced that her childhood memories in her novels forever (Guardian 97). She continued to be closely associated with the Bloomsbury Group (thirteen members) among whose popular members were Lytton Strachey, who had been Thoby’s friend at
Cambridge, Roger Fry, and G.E. Moore and so on. Virginia Woolf was probably somewhat influenced to become a writer because writing had been one of her major public activities. “The publication of Virginia
Woolf’s diary and her letters has brought her intentions, objectives and methods as a writer into a clearer perspective” (Pippett Moth 26).
136 FAMILY TREE
Sir James Stephen (1789 – 1859) m. Jane Catherine Venn (alias) Jane Venn Stephen (d. 1875)
Herbert James Fitzjames Leslie Stephen Caroline Emelia (1822 – 1846) (1829 – 1894) (1832 – 1904) (1834 – 1909) (Nun)
Harriet Marion Julia Stephen (Second Wife) (First Wife of Leslie) (1846 – 1895) Widow of Herbert (1840 – 1875) Duckworth
Daughter Laura George Gerald Stella (1870 – 1945) (1868 – 1884) (1869 – 1897) (1870 – 1937)
Venessa (m). Clive Thoby Adeline Virginia Adrian (1879 – 1961) (1880 – 1906) (1882 – 1941) (1883 – 1948)
Julian Quentin (Father Angelica (1908 – 1937) Duncan Grant) (b. 1918) (b. 1910)
In this chapter Virginia Woolf’s family incidents are very well portrayed through the characters in the major novels namely: The Voyage Out, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. VIRGINIA WOOLF’S FAMILY DISEASES IN HER SELECT NOVELS
“Health is Wealth” – this proverb is applicable to all human beings in the world. All duties can be performed through a healthy body.
Thirumoolar, one of the Saints and Siddhars of Tamil Nadu (India) has exhorted that one should keep his body fit. The worldly wealth is not a constant and permanent factor. It may be your companion today, but the
other it may vanish. The real wealth is health. We can find a healthy mind
in a healthy body.
Virginia Woolf’s family history is important, psychologically and
genetically. Most of Virginia Woolf’s literary works are the product of her family history and family background. “There was a family history of mental illness, predominantly of mood disorders.” On her mother’s side
there are long histories of mildly eccentric and very active women; on her
father’s side generations of quiet gloomy men. Quentin Bell, the great
grandson of Sir James Stephen (1773-1879) had written that, James
Stephen was a shy, gloomy, pessimistic, self-mortifying man who had a fanatic commitment to duty and hard work and he was “terrified of being comfortable” (Love, Sources 24-25). Jenn Venn Stephen died in 1875
mother of Leslie Stephen protected her nervous, sensitive husband and
supported him emotionally made much of his work possible. Jenn Venn 138 Stephen was unable to keep her husband from neurotically over working himself, but she was an ideal wife and mother. Sir James Stephen, like his son was said to have a restless and fiery temperament. Leslie and others
were said to have that new of Sir James inordinately “thin-skinned” or
sensitive new of Sir James. Maitland, who was close to Leslie’s family;
wrote that Leslie’s father was a “mosaic” of “scarcely compatible”
qualities both were talented writers (25).
Sir James Stephen published many articles in the Edinburgh
Review. He had wanted to be a “true man of letters”. Leslie Stephen
thought, “His father should have been a writer” (26). But it was more
likely that Leslie learned to be like his father through association with
him, especially since he was told repeatedly that he like his father was an irascible genius.” But Leslie disliked and disdained his father. Ironically, he criticized Sir James for some of the very tendencies and petty habits they had in common – for example, his practice of forcing Leslie to walk with him, only to treat him to dull conversation and “lugubrious silence”
(26). Sir James Stephen was a civil servant, one of the great colonial administrators (25). He had at least three breakdowns. He was advised to retire prematurely, but didn’t accept it and he was ill. Virginia Woolf was also had many breakdowns. She felt unappreciated, and was gloomy-each tick of his clocks, she wrote, which “Sounds like a knell”. 139
James Stephen married Jane Catherine Venn alias Jenn Venn
Stephen. They had three sons namely Herbert, Leslie Stephen, James
Fitzjames and two daughters. She was a good wife to James Stephen and sincere mother to all children especially to Leslie Stephen, who was the
‘mother’s darling (28). In a letter to John Morley, Leslie Stephen said that
Jenn Venn Stephen was the “healthiest minded person” he had ever
known. Quentin Bell concluded from his research that she was strong,
amiable, given to optimism, and “as sane a woman as ever breathed.” Her
strength was apparently strong physically as well as mentally. Leslie said
in a letter to Liver Wendell Holmes that his robust elder brother Fitzjames
had inherited their mother’s good health and Leslie said that he had not
inherited (29).
J.K. Stephen, Virginia’s cousin was the toast of Eton for his
prowess at the wall game. He had an early success with his poems, “Laps
us Calami-Slips” of the Pen. After a brilliant Cambridge undergraduate
career, great things were expected of him. For a time he tutored the Duke
of Clarence at Cambridge. In his twenties he developed fits of wild
excitement and depression as Virginia Woolf had fits: There were violent
scenes. Virginia Woolf recalled him charging into the nursery and
skewering a loaf with a sword stick. The committee of his club had to 140 post a policeman at the door to prevent him entering. Sir George Savage, the specialist who was later to treat Virginia, arranged for his confinement in a mental hospital, where he starved himself to death in 1892. Like
Laura Stephen, the brilliant, young J.K. Stephen developed mania and died in an asylum.
Jenn Venn Stephen commented on her son as follows: during
Leslie’s childhood, he broke a piece of pottery and threw the pieces at his mother (32). Likewise Laura, Leslie’s daughter behaved oddly-once she threw scissors into the fire. Whenever Leslie failed in his attempts he
“cried mostly loudly.” “Nervousness” and excessive “sensitivity” were recurrent and prophetic themes in Jenn Venn Stephen’s dairy entries about
Leslie Stephen. Like her father Virginia Woolf was affected by the same nervousness. When Leslie was “naughty” his mother said, his behaviour seemed to result from nervous irritability and was not true “naughtiness.”
According to Jane Venn Stephen evidently there was a bit of the moralist
in him even as a young child. He also reacted emotionally to accounts of
“suffering and sorrow, a tendency still present later in his life, which combined with an active imagination to produce almost hallucinatory effects. From his mother’s diaries, Maitland showed about Leslie’s nervousness – which leads to slightly illness to Leslie (31-32).
141 Sir Leslie Stephen fist married the daughter of William Makepeace
Thackerary. Thackeray’s wife had puerperal psychosis. the Allied
Chambers Dictionary explains Pueraperal Psychosis (or archaic mania) a mental illness. Sometimes occurring after child birth (Puerpera a woman in Labour from puera a child and parera to bear). After Mrs. Thackeray gave birth to a female child by name Harriet Marion alias Minne, was not recovered from puerperal psychosis. For Leslie Stephen and Minnie,
Laura was born. Laura Makepeace Stephen (1872-1945) was born abnormal child. The family attempted to teach her at home. Leslie
Stephen in particular was reluctant to admit his daughter Laura in a
hospital because she was mentally handicapped. During her childhood she had nervous tics (meaning uncontrolled twitching of the muscles) speech difficulties, were violent she had attacks of wild howling, and was sluggish and disobedient Virginia also had tics. She was declared mentally disabled and lived with them until she was institutionalized in 1891. She
spent her adult life in institutions, which was unknown to Virginia but
Leonard Woolf came to know all about Laura. She died in a York hospital
in 1945 at the age of seventy-five (www. Literaturepage.com).
The second marriage of Leslie Stephen (1832-1904) and Julia
Duckworth (widow of Duckworth) lasted and indeed was fiendishly
strong in spite of strains and frictions and in spite of times when Julia’s 142 passion for nursing and other charitable work. Both used words well and
were talented writers. James Stephen and Leslie Stephen were hard
workers. The tendency to work too hard was present crises because Leslie
Stephen was over diligent while editing the Dictionary of National
Biography (Love, Sources 29). He had emotional problems like his father and Virginia too had the same temperament (for example: Virginia Woolf wrote her first novel The Voyage Out five times in her own hand-writing).
Virginia echoed the incidents in the character of Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs. Dalloway. Septimus was a hard worker.
Leslie’s mother concluded that he was not an intellectual prodigy, through bright and quick and so imitative that his brothers called him “the mocking bird” (33). Leslie Stephen’s family believed that he had inherited his sensitivity from his father and therefore could do nothing to change it (25). Leslie was histrionic in grief and in his rages. He was an eccentric man with a depressive personality. His daughter thought he consciously modelled his tantrums – his ‘berserker fits’ – on Thomas
Carlyle, believing such outbursts befitted a man of letters wishing to play the great Victorian. Sir Leslie was ill in 1888, and again two years later – won out by his work on the great Dictionary of National Biography. He suffered from insomnia. The disease defined by DK Oxford Illustrated
Dictionary defines habitual sleeplessness inability to sleep. The author 143 brought this ‘fits of horrors’ in her novel, Mrs. Dalloway on the character of Septimus Warren Smith. He cried loudly when he happened to see the body of Evans and said that “’For God’s sake doesn’t come.” Septimus cried out, for he could not look upon the dead (77).
Virginia remembered her family diseases in her major novels. Sir
Leslie Stephen developed cancer of the bowls in 1902 (Love, Sources 24).
He died due to stomach cancer (Poole, unknown 14). The DK Oxford
Illustrated Dictionary ‘Stomach Cancer’ means malignant tumour from an
abnormal and uncontrolled division of the stomach. Also the
medicinenet.com depicts stomach is a muscular bag with a capacity of
about 1 liter or quart. It lies along the digestive tract between the
esophagus and the small intestine. The stomach serves as a reservoir for
food eaten during meals and begins the process of digestion. The tumor
tends to spread through the wall of the stomach and from there into the
adjoining organs (pancreas and spleen) and lymph nodes. This Stomach
Cancer was brought by Virginia Woolf in her novel The Voyage Out
through the characters of Terence Hewet and John Hirst. They discussed
the disease. “For goodness’ sake, Hirst,” Hewet protested; “one might
think you were an old cripple of eighty. If it comes to that, I had an aunt
who died of cancer myself, but I put a bold face on it” (204).
144 The DK Illustrated Oxford Dictionary explains the throat cancer which affects head and neck, cancer a group of biologically similar cancers originating from the upper aero digestive tract, including the lip, oral cavity (mouth), nasal cavity, Para nasal, sinuses, pharynx and larynx.
Virginia spoke about the throat cancer in her novel To the Lighthouse as
follows: “Marie’s, the Swiss girl, who would rather go without a bath than
without fresh air, but then at home, she said, ‘the mountains are so
beautiful’ (39) she had said that last night looking out of the window with
tears in her eyes. Her father was dying there, Mrs. Ramsay knew.
Marie’s father ‘had cancer of throat’ (40).
Virginia’s mother Julia Stephen suffered from rheumatic fever. It is
a non-infectious fever with inflammation and pair in the joints. She died
of rheumatic fever. The term rheumatology originates from the Greek
word rheuma. The rheumatic fever is an inflammatory disease
(en.wikipedia.org). It is believed to be caused by antibody cross-reactivity
that can involve the heart, joints, skin, and brain, the illness typically
develops two to three weeks after a streptococcal infection.
Virginia Woolf explained the rheumatic fever disease in The
Voyage Out through the character of Helen Ambrose. 145 “You are still rheumatic?” asked Helen. Her voice was low and seductive, though she spoke absently enough, the sight of town and river
being still present to her mind.
“Once rheumatic, always rheumatic, I fear,” he replied. “To some
extent it depends on the weather, though not so much as people are apt to
think.”
One does not die of it, at any rate,” said Helen.
“As a general ruleno,” said Mr. Pepper (9). The voyage started,
Helen thought of Rachel’s mother Theresa. The discussion was going on
about the inequalities between the men and women. Mr. Ridley Ambrose
was angry about the condition of the ship. “Did I come on this voyage in
order to catch rheumatism and pneumonia?” (24) Pneumonia means a
serious illness affecting one or both lungs that makes breathing difficult
by the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. And also expresses by The
Chambers Dictionary Pneumonia – Pneumococcosis a bacterium in the
respiratory tract which a causative agent of pneumonia – any of various
disease caused by habitually inhaling mineral or metallic dust – as in coal
mining.
Virginia injected humorous irony as Ridley Ambrose ended his
child – like tantrum with ... “I suppose that I can face it like a man” (VO
24). Virginia depicted the rheumatic through the character of John Hirst. 146 “Excuse me,” said Hirst, rising from his chair directly he had sat down.
He went into the drawing room, and returned with a cushion which he placed carefully upon his seat. “Rheumatism,” he remarked, as he sat down for the second time. John Hirst was affected due to the dance of
Helen. She required, “Whenever I get at all run down I tend to be rheumatic.” Hirst stated. He bent his wrist back sharply, “I hear little
pieces of chalk grinding together” (200). During the dance programmer
Mr. John Hirst rose from his chair directly he had sat down. He went into
the drawing room, and returned with a cushion which he placed carefully
upon his seat. “Rheumatism,” he remarked, as he sat down for the second
time. “Whenever I get it all run down I tend to be rheumatic,” Hirst stated
(200). Further, Hirst said that “I’ve never weighted more than ten stones
in my life, he daresay that accounts for the rheumatism.” “My mother’s a chronic invalid, and I’m always expecting to be told that I’ve got heart disease myself. Rheumatism always goes to the heart in the end” (204).
Virginia’s mother Julia Stephen was a less vivid personality. She occupied herself greatly with good works and published in 1883 a book on the management of sick rooms, later to be reprinted by the Hogarth Press.
She died due to influenza, at the age of forty-nine (Poole, unknown 13).
In 1940, Virginia was also affected by influenza and spent the first three weeks in bed. Such attacks were not uncommon over the last twenty years 147 of her life. She had common cold, headache, aggravated by Bronchitis.
She went for the diagnosis of ‘influenza.’ Thoby, Virginia’s brother was
also attacked by Influenza (en.wikisource.org).
Virginia remembered the disease influenza on Mrs. Dalloway in her novel. Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; suspense but that might be her heart, affected, doctors said, that she was affected by influenza (8). Mrs. Dalloway was over fifty and rather white after recent attack of influenza. Still she was a charming woman. A victim of influenza and heart disease, she felt like
Lazarus Rose from the grave (this is from the Bible) (Henke, “Mrs.
Dalloway: the Communion of Saints” 133). Clarissa’s doctors said that
“her heart might have been affected by influenza.” And had to been taken
to the sea side to recover from influenza (Mrs. D 115). Again Virgina
spoke about the disease in Mrs. Dalloway, through the character of Hugh
Whitbread, he sand Clarissa (they were childhood friends). Clarissa met
Evelyn Whitbread, (wife of Whitbread) in the nursing home. When she
met Whitbread Clarissa asked was Evelyn ill again? Hugh said that his
wife had some internal ailment, nothing serious to Clarissa (10).
Influenza is a highly contagious virus infection characterized by
headache, fever, muscular aches and pains and inflamtion of the
respiratory passages explained by The Chambers Dictionary. 148
Leonard Woolf said that, his wife Virginia had great nervous breakdown and threat of mental depression played a major role in her life and it was the reason of her death. The nature of her illness was obviously explained in medical terms as neurasthenia (www.en.wikipedia.org) and she suffered from through out her life. In the thirty years of Leonard and
Virginia’s married life, they consulted a number of nerve and mental specialists in and around Harley Street, but the doctors never knew the nature of the disease. Instead they simply labelled as neuralgis or rheumatism which covered a multitude of signs, symptoms and miseries
(Woolf, Beginning 75-76). The DK Illustrated Oxford Dictionary defines neuralgia is an intense intermittent pain along the course of a nerve especially in the head or face. The pain is usually brief but may be severe.
It often feels as if it is shooting along the course of the affected nerve.
Like that, Septimus Warren Smith’s diseases were not diagnosed by the two doctors in the novel Mrs. Dalloway. Already the researcher has discussed about rheumatism.
In Virginia Woolf’s family, her uncle Herbert died due to typhoid in 1846. Typhoid is an infectious bacterial fever with an eruption of red spots on the chest and abdomen and severe intestinal irritation. Her brother, Thoby suffered from typhoid fever and died at the age twenty-six in 1906 while he was in Greece during the holidays (The Letters of V.W. 149 L.no.301:248). Thoby (1880-1906) was a brilliant scholar. He studied in school, Trinity and Cambridge University. Once he tried to throw himself from the window of his preparatory school in 1894. Like that in 1915,
Virginia tried to jump out of the window by killing herself (www.uv.es/- fores). Virginia echoed the same incident in her novel Mrs. Dalloway
through the character of Septimus Warren Smith who threw himself out of
the train window and died. It might be possible, his thought, looking at
England from the train window, as they left Newhaven; it might be
possible that the world itself is without meaning” Poole, unknown 187).
Leslie’s son Adrian (1883-1948) too suffered from a variety of nervous
disorders. He was “prone to suicidal despair.” He died due to nervous
disorder. He was a psychoanalyst.
Virginia depicted the same disease in her novel The Voyage Out
the group arrived in Santa Marina and William Pepper informed all in the
ship “If you all die of Typhoid I won’t be responsible!” he snapped. “If
you die of dullness, neither will I,” Helen echoed in her heart (91).
Through Julia Princep and Herbert Duckworth three children were
born namely Gerald Duckworth, Stella Duckworth and George
Duckworth. Stella Duckworth married to John Waller (a) Jack Hills on 10
April 1897, (Virginia’s Letter to Thoby on 1 February 1897). On 14 May
1897 Stella went out for the first time in a bath chair. Dr. Seton and her 150 nurse looked after Stella. Since the end of April, Stella hills had been ill with peritonitis at her new home 24, Hyde Park Gate, Opposite no.22,
Stella Hills had died in London on 19 July 1897, when she was expecting a baby she suffered from peritonitis only three months after her marriage to Jack Hills (Virginia Letters 1-7).
“Peritonitis is an inflammation of the peritoneum, the serous membrane which lines part of the abdominal cavity and viscera. The main manifestations of peritonitis are acute abdominal pain. The presence of these signs in a patient is sometimes referred to as peritonitis. Peritonitis is an example of an acute abdomen (www.en.wikipedia.org).
In the same way Virginia Woolf has portrayed in the character of
Prue Ramsay the fair; one of the eight children of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay in
the novel, To the Lighthouse. Prue Ramsay was married. She looked very
beautiful. “What, people said, could have been more fitting and, they
added, how beautiful she looked (179). She died the next summer of
child-birth (peritonitis) which was a great tragedy to the people and
nobody was happy. Prue Ramsay...child birth; the sudden death of Prue
Ramsay so soon after marriage echoed that of Virginia Woolf’s half-sister
Stella Duckworth, who had married solicitor Jack Hills and died a few
months later due to peritonitis. 151
Virginia brought the disease cholera is an infectious and after fatal disease of the small intestine caused by a mainly water bacterium Vibrio cholerae, resulting in severe vomiting and diarrhea. Cholera in her novel, when Mr. and Mrs. Dalloway travelled on the continent for some weeks, chiefly with a view to broadening Mr. Dalloway’s mind. Unable for a season, by one of the accidents of political life, to serve his country in
Parliament, Mr. Dalloway was doing the best he could to serve it out of
Parliament. For that purpose the Latin countries did very well, although the East, of course, would have done better.
Expect to hear of me next in Petersburg or Teheran, he had said,
turning to wave a farewell from the steps of the Traveler’s. But a
disease had broken out in the East, there was cholera in Russia, and
he was heard of, not so romantically in Lisbon (Mrs. D 33).
Virginia in her next novel Mrs. Dalloway, she influenced the disease cholera, “All India lay behind him; plains, mountains; epidemics of cholera; a district twice as big as Ireland” (54).
Seasickness a form of motion sickness characterized by a feeling of nausea and, in extreme cases, vertigo experienced after spending time on a craft on water in the sea. (www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/seasickness).
When Virginia travelled to many European countries, she had seasickness.
She was very well brought the seasickness in her novel The Voyage Out 152 Mr. Richard said to Helen “I hear you’ve been very good to my wife, “he said, “She’s had an awful time of it. You came in and fed her with
champagne. Where you among the saved yourself?” he asked. (23).
Again he said that “I? O, I have not been sick for twenty yearssea-
sick, I mean” (70). Mrs. Dalloway; the first of the two storms in the
novel broke out. Clarissa became terribly seasick and took her to her bed.
Strangely, it was Helen who nursed Clarissa. Due to the hailstorm, the
ship was driven back by the salt Atlantic Gale. Helen on the other hand,
staggered to Mrs. Dalloway’s door, knocked could not be heard for the
slamming of doors and the battering of wind and entered. There were
basins, of course. Mrs. Dalloway lay half-raised on a pillow, and did not
open her eyes. Then she murmured,
“Oh, Dick is that you?” Helen shouted – for she was thrown
against the washstand – “How are you?”
Clarissa opened one eye. It gave her an incredibly dissipated
appearance. “Awful!” She gasped. Her lips were white inside (67-
68).
Description of the disease Plague: It is a serious and sometimes
fatal of infection of rodents caused by Yesinia pestis and accidentally transmitted to humans by the bite of an infected rate flea (especially 153 bubonic plague) (www.freshwap.net). Virginia described the disease in her The Voyage Out the action took place on the Island of Santa Marina.
Even though Helen Ambrose was forty she danced according to the tune.
In the middle, Helen and Mrs. Eliot discussed politics. Mrs. Eliot talked
about the Empire in a less abstract form,
“I hear there are dreadful accounts from England about the rats,”
she said. “A sister-in-law, who lives at Norwich, tells me it has
been quite unsafe to order poultry. The plague – you see. It attacks
the rats, and through them other creatures” (158).
Sir Leslie Stephen was a mountain climber or mountaineer. The
DK Illustrated Oxford Dictionary describes the meaning for mountaineer, a person skilled in mountain climbing, a person living in an area of high mountains. He was a leader of men, a great walker, and a climber of mountain peaks (Drabble ed. “With an Introduction Notes” xvi).
Mountain sickness means nausea and shortness of breath experienced by mountain climbers above ten thousand feet (www.emedicinehealth.com).
Virginia knew very well all about the diseases. She explains thus:
“For instance, here are two women you have never seen. Suppose
one of them suffers from mountain-sickness, as my sister does, and
the other”
“Oh, the women are for you,” Hewet interrupted (VO 125-126). 154 Sir Leslie Stephen was a mountain climber and sportsman. Virginia
Woolf influenced the same talent in Mrs. Dalloway. Richard was also a
sportsman too (201). Mr. Ramsay was a sportsman and a climber of mountain peaks in To the Lighthouse.
There was no one who suffered from tuberculosis in Virginia’s family, yet she brought a disease by name Tuberculosis in To the
Lighthouse through the character of a poor boy. Then he (Ramsay) said he had a particular reason for wanting to go to the Lighthouse. His wife used to send the men things. There was a poor boy with a tuberculosis hip, the light keeper’s son. He sighed profoundly. He sighed significantly.
Mr. Ramsay considered that such expeditions were “very painful.” They
were very exhausting, intending to convey by this phase that the path of
truth was painful and exhausting, and the Lighthouse was a giver of
inspiration to Lily (205).
Tropical diseases are diseases that are prevalent in or unique to
tropical and subtropical regions. The diseases are less prevalent in
temperate climates, due in part to the occurrence of a cold season, which
controls the insect population by forcing hibernation. Insects such as
mosquitoes and flies are by far the most common disease carrier, or
vector. These insects may carry a parasite, bacterium or virus that is 155 infectious to the humans and animals (www.en.wikipedia.org). When
Virginia travelled to European countries, she was slightly affected by tropical disease. This is echoed in The Voyage Out through the character
of Rachael Vinrace. Terence and Rachel Maneuver around each other.
Rachel became ill with a tropical fever and died.
Virginia thought of her family deaths here: “Virginia’s nephew
Julian Bell (1908-1937) elder son of Clive and Vanessa Bell, who was a
writer and also served as an ambulance driver and died in Spanish Civil
War,” in 1937 while serving as an ambulance driver in the War, during
the First World War. The same incident was remembered in To the
Lighthouse, through the character of Andrew Ramsay, the brain.
He participated in the First World War. Andrew Ramsay, who had
enlisted died in France in a shell explosion. He died
instantaneously. Nature went on as usual indifferent to the human
tragedy (181).
Virginia personally portrayed the same accident in Mrs. Dalloway,
The First World War was over, except for someone like Mrs.
Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that
nice boy was killed. Lady Boxborough who opened a bazaar, they
said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed; but
it was over; thank Heaven – over (8). 156
Virginia Woolf had inherited her grandfather’s and father’s diseases especially sorrow tics and mental disorder. Virginia was affected to a greater extent and unhappy by the private man and also her relationship with family members had more tough time. Virginia Woolf
wrote a letter to Violet Dickinson on 13 November 1906. In it Virginia
mentions about Vanessa’s health. Doctor says, “Nessa is doing
wonderfully well and look, smiles better already. Weight satisfactory”
But “I should think” – said Virginia. Virginia Woolf had four major
breakdowns in her life: when she had adulterous relationship with her half
brother Gerald Duckworth - she met out the first breakdown. In her work,
De Salvo wrote to Woolf “carved out a way to tell her story...and that of
other childhood victims of abuse and neglect” (De Salvo, Impact 302).
In Virginia’s ‘Memoir,’ she described vividly Julia’s death and its
effects on the family. When she suffered more than two years, from the
loss of her mother, the next breakdown occurred which was Stella’s death.
Her father’s death in 1904, due to insomnia and cancer brought on an
acute emotional and mental illness to Virginia. As a result, she was much
more vulnerable and much more susceptible to emotional and mental
disorder and she was briefly institutionalized. A major cause of Virginia’s
increased instability: Quentin Bell had noted, was the new, terrifying and 157 erosive way of thinking about herself that her first madness had forced upon her, after the period of “nothingness” and of “positive death” (Bell’s terms for Virginia’s first breakdown), “she knew that she had been mad and might be mad again” (Love, Matters 278). Her breakdowns and
subsequent recurring depressive periods, modern scholars have asserted,
were also induced by the sexual abuse she and Vanessa were subject to by
their half-brothers George and Gerald.
The causes for Virginia’s mental illness are as follows: Virginia
sent almost daily letters to Violet Dickinson following her brother
Thoby’s death in which she maintains the fiction of his recovery from
Typhoid so as to speed Dickinson’s own convalescence (V.W. Letter 1:
207). All these led Virginia to a mental illness, which are technically
called manic-depressive. The DK Illustrated Oxford Dictionary says
‘manic-depressive’ means affected by or relating to a mental disorder with
alternating periods of elation and depression. Manic depressive refers to
mood swings from overly “high” (manic) to overly “low” (depressed).
Another name for manic-depressive illness is bipolar disorder. Bipolar
disorder is a brain disorder that causes unusual changes in the person’s
mood, energy, and ability to function. Virginia was affected by manic-
depressive illness or bipolar disorder which affects both men and women.
Although it can start at any age, it usually begins in late adolescence. 158 Bipolar disorder is found among people of all ages, races, ethnic groups, and social classes. It appears to have a genetic link and tends to run in families.
Quentin Bell was a writer, artist, and a historian who said that “All that summer she was mad.” The death of her close brother Thoby
Stephen, from typhoid fever in November 1906 had a similar effect on
Woolf, to such a degree that he would later be re-imagined as Jacob in her
first experimental novel Jacob’s Room and later as Percival in The Waves.
These were the first of her many mental collapses that would sporadically
occur throughout her life, until her death in March 1941. Though Woolf’s
mental illness was periodic and recurrent, as Lee explains, she “was a sane
woman who had an illness.” Her “madness” was provoked by life-
altering events, notably family deaths, her marriage, or the publication of
a novel. According to Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf’s symptoms
conformed to the profile of a maniac-depressive illness, or bipolar
disorder. Sir Leonard, who was her dedicated lifelong companion,
documented her illness with scrupulousness. He categorized her
breakdowns into two distinct stages:
In the manic stage she was extremely excited; the mind race; she
talked volubly and, at the height of the attack, incoherently, she had
delusions and heard voices...she was violent with her nurses. In her 159 third attack, which began in 1914, this stage lasted for several
months and ended by her falling into coma for two days. During
the depressive stage all her thoughts and emotions were the exact
opposite of what they had been in the manic stage. She was in the
depths of melancholia and despair; she scarcely spoke; refused to
eat; refused to believe that she was ill and insisted that her
condition was due to her own guilt (Woolf, Beginning 77).
Virginia was often ill with depression and anorexia, and in 1913 attempted suicide (Kermode, “Biographical Preface” ix). The DK
Illustrated Oxford Dictionary describes the meaning of ‘Anorexia’ is a lack or less of appetite for food – a psychological illness characterized by an obsessive desire to loss of weight by refusing to eat. Also the wikipedia organization describes the meaning for ‘Anorexia’ weight loss due to anorexia may be temporary or may continue at a life-threatening pace if the patient continues to consume inadequate energy to sustain bodyweight
(www.en.wikipedia.org).
According to Leonard Woolf about Virginia, her health seemed to be settling down after about of violent madness. Her husband and their close friends compare her period of insanity to a manic-depression.
Virginia Woolf explained and vividly described the same manic depression on Septimus Warren Smith. Virginia also included 160 frustratingly impersonal doctor type in Bradshaw and Holmes that
reflected doctors she had visited throughout her life. Virginia Woolf’s
same mental depression was very well brought in Mrs. Dalloway, through
the character of Septimus Warren Smith.
Septimus Warren Smith was aged about thirty, pale faced man
wearing a shabby overcoat. He represented the other or seamy side of
contemporary civilization. The war had ended, but it did not end for
people like Septimus Warren Smith, who were its victims. He had been
portrayed by the novelist as a victim of war. The war had taken away
from Lucrezia alias Rezia who was an Italian girl, had large eyes in a
sallow pointed face and left her only a piece of love. Lucrezia Warren
Smith, sitting by her husband’s side on a seat in Regent’s Park in the
Broad Walk, looked up. “Look, look, Septimus!” she cried. For Dr.
Holmes had told Rezia to make her husband (who had nothing whatever seriously the matter with him but was a little out of sorts) to take an interest in things outside himself. (Mrs. D 26). His malady had made him exquisitely, abnormally sensitive to sounds and colour. Dr. Holmes had advised Lucrezia to make her husband take an interest in things outside him. Smith’s confidence in the world of men, in civilization in human affection, had been shattered by the wars. He had lost the capacity of find 161 delight in the familiar and beautiful scenes and sights of nature. His harassed mental condition had been reported to the doctors.
Virginia’s major breakdowns (family deaths) led to neurotic depression which was brought to Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway. He (Evans) had seemed a nice quiet man; a great friend of Septimus’s, and he had been killed in the war (73). Evans his fastest friend was killed before his very eyes, but he could not feel for his death. Septimus suppressed his feelings and coolly dismissed the loss of his friend Evans. In an effort to diminish pain, he was forced to exorcise the ability to feel. Consummate indifference in the midst of chaos proved a wartime survival strategy.
Septimus learned his lesson too well. Adopting a ‘manly’ posture of detached rationality, he embraced the widespread, socially acceptable madness of modern society (Henke, “Mrs. Dalloway: the Communion of
Saints” 139). He could escape death, but his nerves were shattered. He could feel nothing. He could not bear loneliness. When alone, he would hear voices and see visions like Virginia Woolf. In order to escape this loneliness, he married the beautiful Lucrezia, the daughter of a hat-maker.
His meeting with Lucrezia at the end of the War, his marriage with her and the gradual onset of “neurotic depression” in him was an unforgettable one.
162 Virginia was terribly affected by the two major wars and she has brought the same incidents in the character of Septimus. The war which had disturbed his brain resulted in many diseases. He suffered from neurosis and madness or nervous breakdown. The DK Illustrated Oxford
Dictionary says neurosis a relatively mental illness involving symptoms of stress. It was through him that the novelist had brought home the dire consequences of war, and she had satirized the contemporary pride in the superficial aspects of civilization. The novelist had adopted the method of direct description to sketch his character. Virginia Woolf through Mrs.
Dalloway had brilliantly dealt with a case of mental disorder the Septimus
Warren Smith episode. Rezia sent Agnes running for
Dr. Holmes. Her husband, she said, was mad. He scarcely knew her
(102).
According to Woolf most people have had the experience of going to bed dead tired and they could not sleep because their mind was racing.
With an ordinary person the fatigue and symptoms disappear as soon as he takes a night’s rest. Virginia differed from the ordinary person because the symptoms of fatigue appeared much more easily, were much more severe, and required, not a night’s rest but a week’s rest to get rid of them
(Beginning 77). Like Virginia, due to severe headache, Rachel went to bed lay in the dark. Virginia remembered the two Great World Wars and 163 the loss of precious lives in it were brought before the readers sympathetically. It was with Virginia and Leonard Woolf returned to
London. In 1940, many of the familiar Bloomsbury houses had been destroyed or badly damaged by bombs. Thereafter her mental condition deteriorated alarmingly. For Virginia Woolf’s sensitive nature war was a horrible and nerve shattering experience. She was weak and sickly, and suffered from constant fits of depression like her father.
Most people working from dawn to dusk might have the experience of going to bed “dead tired” (77). With an ordinary person the fatigue and symptoms disappear as soon as he has had a night’s rest. Virginia differed from the ordinary person only because the symptoms of fatigue appeared much more easily, were much more severe, and required, not a night’s rest, but a week’s rest to get rid of them. They differed, therefore, from the ordinary person’s symptoms in degree rather than in kind. And this is
true also in most respects of the symptoms in the late stages of an attack,
even when she had passed from sanity to insanity; they differed mainly
from the initial symptoms by becoming much more violent and severe.
Even the delusions, the volubility, and the incoherence were exaggerations
of the “racing thoughts” (77-78). In the view of Leonard Woolf, Virginia
differed from ordinary ‘sane’ person only because, when she had a
‘breakdown,’ there was a great increase in the degree of intensity and 164 duration of symptoms which occurred in her when she was ‘sane’ and occur in all other people; ‘sane’ or ‘insane.’ The researcher thinks that this view is not correct. For nearly thirty years one has to study Virginia’s mind with the greatest intensity, for it was only by recognizing the first, most tenuous mental symptoms of fatigue that we can take in time the steps to prevent a serious breakdown. “I am sure that, when she had a breakdown, there was a moment when she passed from what can be rightly called sanity to insanity”(78).
Virginia remembered the war and brought through the character of
Septimus Warren Smith. The war had disturbed his brain. He suffered from neurosis and madness or breakdown. It was through him that the novelist had brought home the dire consequences of war, and she had satirized the contemporary pride in the superficial aspects of civilization.
The author had adopted the method of direct description to sketch his character in Mrs. Dalloway. She has brilliantly dealt with a case of mental disorder in the Septimus Warren Smith episode. Virginia’s approach to the mind was based on her own personal analysis from minute took only the most routine aspects. Virginia had not drawn anything from the clinical analysis of the even in the case of Septimus Warren Smith. She simply used her own mind and its faculty of imagination to reconstruct the reality “schizophrenic” experienced by some other mind. He left home 165 and came to London because he could see no future for a poet in his native
town of Stroud. He might have been a clerk sometime. He did well in the office, and earned much appreciation. But he was weak and sickly. He
went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of
Shakespeare’s plays.
Sir James Stephen and Leslie Stephen were hard working
personalities. So Jenn Venn Stephen advised and compelled both of them to take rest but it was in vain. The doctors advised Virginia, that she should take complete rest and sleep but she did not do it. Virginia echoed the same incident in the character of Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway. Dr.
Holmes asked Septimus Warren Smith to take rest. But the frenzy in
Smith increased day-by-day and within five years of the end of the War, he had become a hopeless case of “shellshock” and “suffering from acute paranoid-obsessions.” A specialist Sir William Bradshaw was consulted by Lucrezia and he could only think of sending him alone without his
young wife to a special asylum down in Surrey.
Virginia Woolf’s cousin J.K. Stephen passed away in the asylum; she influenced the same upon Septimus. According to Doctors Septimus
Warren Smith was sent to asylum without Lucrezia since he was suffered from mental depression. 166 Both Dr. Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw said excitement was
the worst thing for him, and waved his hands and cried out that he
knew the truth! He knew everything! That man, his friend who
was killed, Evans, had come, he said. He was singing behind the
screen. She wrote it down just as he spoke it. Some things were
very beautiful: others sheer nonsense (Mrs. D. 150).
A young man had killed himself. And they talked of it at her party-
the Bradshaws talked of death. He had killed himself-but how?
Always her body went through it, when she was told, first,
suddenly, of an accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt. He had
thrown himself from a train window. Up had flashed the ground;
through him blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes.
But this young man who had killed himself-had he plunged holding
his treasure” ‘If it were now to die, were now to be most happy,’
she had said to herself once, coming down, in white. (196-197).
During her life, Woolf consulted at least twelve doctors, and consequently experienced, from the Victorial era to the shell shock, the
First World War, the emerging medical trends for treating the insane. She described the impact of War on supplied in 1980 (Diary 1,100). Like
Virginia, her heroine Rachel was attended by many doctors when she was ill in The Voyage Out. Woolf frequently heard the medical jargon used 167 for a “nervous breakdown,” and incorporated the language of medicine, degeneracy, and eugenics into Mrs. Dalloway. With the character
Septimus Warren Smith, Woolf combined her doctor’s terminology with her own unstable states of mind. When Woolf prepared to write Mrs.
Dalloway, she envisioned the novel as a “study of insanity and suicide; the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side.” When she was editing the manuscript, she changed her depiction of Septimus from what read like a record of her own experience as a “mental patient” into a more abstracted character and narrative. However, she kept the “exasperation,” which she noted, should be the “dominant theme” of Septimus’s encounters with doctors.
The so-called experts were not able to find out the root causes of the ‘symptoms’ of Septimus’s case. Before introducing the figures of
Septimus and Rezia in her novel, Virginia took a calculated risk. She
decided to ‘exorcise’ her parents and she problems of her childhood by
writing To the Lighthouse. So Virginia seriously said to herself to
exorcise in Mrs. Dalloway, the horror and the terror of the months which
followed her marriage with Leonard Woolf. Septimus was the first to
volunteer who went to France to save his country. His affection to his
officers Evans by name was sincere but he witnessed his officer’s death in
the war. He had inability to face the war. “It might be possible, Septimus 168 thought, looking at England from the train window, as they left
Newhaven: it might be possible that the world itself is without meaning
(Mrs. D 189). Doctors from the time of Chaucer to the time of Virginia
Woolf had often been the target of criticism; and had been subjected to
satirical attacks. Her attacks on the two doctors are equally virulent, and
satirical. This satirical on the two doctors in Mrs. Dalloway, Dr. Holmes
and Sir Williams Bradshaw, were clearly a projection of Virginia’s own
experience of doctors (155). Virginia brought her own mental disorder
through the character on Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs. Dalloway. He
developed manliness in the trenches, was promoted, became friendly with
his officer Evans.
Virginia Woolf had, in her symbolic character Septimus Smith,
reconstituted exactly the structure of problems she herself had when she
was examined by two neurologists on 9 September 1913 and sent to
Dalingridge place. The inability to feel was her greatest problem. This
led inevitably to a developed Weltschmerz in which her own actions, and
those of others, seemed ridiculous and meaningless. The inadequacies of
an approach which would attempt to intervene in a state-of-mind which
was more theological or philosophical than neurological or physiological,
were made of Virginia’s scorn in the novel. “You served with great
distinction in the War?” “The patient repeated the word ‘war’ 169 interrogatively. He was attaching meanings to words of a symbolical kind. A serious symptom to be noted on the card”(104). Both Septimus and Virginia Woolf were judged to be ‘very, very ill.’ Septimus suffered from psychiatric expertise. It was the same with Virginia in the year 1915.
Septimus was in despair like Virgiia.
Virginia Woolf had suffered from recurrent attacks of mental
illness in the early part of her short life. She had been put under the
treatment of various doctors but without much benefit to her. Even her
husband, Leonard Woolf, had expressed his discontentment with the
doctors who had attended upon Virginia Woolf; and she herself had begun
to feel disgusted with them and with their treatment. Virginia echoed this
same event on Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs. Dalloway.
A headache is pain anywhere in the region of the head and or neck.
The Chambers Dictionary says head-ache means pain in the head: a source of worry. And also Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of
Current English expresses ‘head-ache’ means a continuous pain in the head: to suffer from head-ache.
In the opinion of Woolf,
If Virginia was tired, she was subjected to any severe physical,
mental, or emotional strain, symptoms at once appeared which in 170 ordinary person are negligible and transient, but with her were
serious danger signals. The first symptoms were a peculiar
‘headache’ low down at the back of the head, insomnia, and a
tendency for the thoughts to race (Beginning 76).
Virginia Woolf brought her personal disease (headache) on Rachel
Vinrace in The Voyage Out.
Terence was reading Milton aloud, because he said the words of
Milton had substance and shape, so that it was not necessary to
understand what he was saying; one could merely listen to his
words; one could almost handle them (329).
When Terence read “Comus” by Milton to Rachel she developed headache and decided to go to bed. She was ill. Rachel drifted in and out
of normalcy with fever.
Rachel at any rate could not keep her attention fixed upon them,
but went off upon curious trains of thought suggested by words
such us “curb” and “locrine” and “brute” which brought unpleasant
sights before her eyes, independently of their meaning (329).
Rachel felt much about her health but she did not like to disturb Terence
study. So she waited and said “very calmly that her head ached” (329).
Dr. Rodriguez was unable to treat her successfully. Helen demanded that
they send for another doctor; St. John was sent to find one. Terence
begins to feel that there was no hope, when even Helen, who had always 171 been so strong, began to cry. Rachel regained one brief moment of lucidness and then she died. Terence was beside himself with grief.
According to Woolf’s view, whenever Virginia suffered from headache, she should immediately take remedy to get ride of it. If she
ignored the symptoms and went on working and walking and again
attending the parties and late to bed in the nights, then at once the
headache, the sleeplessness the reading thoughts would become intense
and it might be several weeks before she could begin to a live a normal
life. Again Virginia’s husband watched her closely and said that four
times in her life the symptoms would not go and she passed across the
border which decides what we call insanity from sanity. During her
maniac – depression due her major breakdowns – in the manic stage she was extremely excited; the mind race; she talked volubly and at the height of the attack, in wherently did everything which was not normal in her daily life.
When Virginia got a severe headache and insomnia and had to go for a time to a nursing home in Twickenham and rest there. Her doctor was Sir George Savage, a mental specialist at the head of his profession advised her to take complete rest (Woolf, Beginning 82). Like Leonard
Woolf, Terence Hewet (lover of Rachael Vinrace) consulted Rodriguez 172 was understood to say that there were well-known varieties of this illness.
Rodriguez appeared to think that they were treating the illness with undue anxiety. His visits were always marked by the same show of confidence,
and in his interviews with Terence he always waved aside his anxious and
minute questions with a kind of flourist which seemed to indicate that they
were all taking it much too seriously. Terence asked him, “Is she very ill?”
Helen asked St. John Hirst to bring another doctor to look after Rachael.
“Dr. Lesage was gone, leaving explicit directions, and promising another
visit in a few hours’ time; but, unfortunately, the rise of their spirits led
them to talk more than usual, and in talking they quarreled” (VO 345).
Woolf had the opinion about Virginia that,
If Virginia lived a quiet, vegetative life, eating well, going to bed
early, and not tiring herself mentally or physically, she remained
perfectly well. But if she tired herself in any way, if she was
subjected to any severe physical, mental, or emotional strain,
symptoms at once appeared which in the ordinary person are
negligible and transient, but with her were serious danger signals.
The first symptoms were a peculiar ‘headache’ low down at the
back of the head, insomnia, and a tendency for the thoughts to race.
If she went to bed and lay doing nothing in a darkened room,
drinking large quantities of milk and eating well, the symptoms 173 would slowly disappear and in a week or ten days she would be
well again (Beginning 76).
One of the most troublesome symptoms of her breakdowns was a refusal to eat. In the worst period of the depressive stage, for weeks almost at every meal one had to sit, often for an hour or more, trying to induce her to eat a mouthful. It was always extremely difficult to induce her to eat enough food to keep her well. Every doctor whom she consulted told her that to eat well and drink two or three glasses of milk everyday was essential if she was to remain well. She ate extraordinarily little and it was with greatest difficulty that she could be induced to regular life was the opinion of Woolf. Again he said about his wife that: If Virginia was tired, she was subjected to any severe physical, mental, or emotional strain, symptoms at once appeared which in ordinary person are negligible and transient, but with her were serious danger signals. Virginia echoed the same signal and her sufferings in The Voyage Out on the character
Rachael Vinrace.
Rachel fell in love with Terence Hewet while Terence read
“Comus” to Rachel; she developed headache. She decided to go to bed.
She was ill (VO 112). Rachel suffered from ‘high temperature’ “and her head almost certainly head ached” (329). 174 Rachel decided that she would wait until he came to the end of the
stanza, and if by that time she had turned her head this way and
that, and it ached in every position undoubtedly, she would say
very calmly that her ached (329).
To stop or drop the book, instantly Helen came to know about Rachel’s headache and compelled her to go to bed. Rachel went to bed; “she lay in the dark.” Instant “your head aches? He repeated (330). Finally they came to the conclusion that the headache was due to the heat.
‘It makes one awfully queer, don’t you find?’ he complained.
‘These trees get on one’s nerves - it’s all so crazy. God’s
undoubtedly mad. What sane person could have conceived a
wilderness like this, and peopled it with apes and alligators? I
should go mad if I lived here-raving mad’ (280).
A nightmare is a very distressing dream which usually forces at least partial awakening. The dreamer may feel any number of disturbing emotions in a nightmare, such as anger, guilt, sadness or depression, but the most common feelings are fear and anxiety. Night terrors are something quite different. Nightmares tend to occur after several hours of sleep, screaming or moving about is very uncommon, the dream is usually elaborate and intense, and the dreamer realizes soon after wakening that he or she has had a dream (www.nightmare.metal.com). 175
When Leonard was staying with Virginia in her ‘Fire Villa,’ they walked over the Ouse Valley. They found an extraordinary Romantic house. They saw barns behind the house and the shepherd’s cottage. Its name was Asham house. Both Leonard and Virginia enquired and found that Asham and the whole form belonged to the solicitor’s grand daughter who lived in Rugby. From her Virginia got a five-year lease of Asham and left ‘Fire Villa.’ Leonard said that Asham was a strange house. The country people on the farm were convinced that it was haunted, that there was treasure buried in the cellar, and no one would stay the night in it. It was true that at night one often heard extraordinary noises both in the cellars and in the attic. It sounded as if two people were walking from room to room, opening and shutting doors, sighing, whispering. It was, no doubt, the wind probably rats in the cellar or the attic. Leonard had never known a house which had such a strong character, personality of its won romantic, gentle, melancholy, lovely. It was Asham and its ghostly footsteps and whisperings which gave Virginia that idea for A Haunted
House.
Leonard gives a clear description about the Asham house. “One day when Virginia was ill in London, after we were married, I had to go down by myself to Asham to get something or make some arrangements.
I arrived late, in the evening of an early summer day and spent the night 176 there, sleeping outside on a mattress. In the night there was not a sound –
I might have been miles from any other human being. Suddenly in the
early morning there burst out a tremendous chorus around the house.
When Virginia was quite well, she would discuss her illness; she would recognize that she had been mad, that she had delusions, heard voices which did not exist, lived for weeks or months in a nightmare world of frenzy, despair, and violence. When she was like that, she was obviously well and sane. But even then she was not well and sane in the way in which the vast majority of human beings are well and sane. If, when she was well, any situation or argument arose which was closely connected with her breakdowns or the causes of them, there would sometimes rise to the surface of her mind traces or echoes of the nightmares and delusions of her madness, so that it seemed as if deep down in her mind she was never completely sane (Beginning 79).
Virginia Woolf’s nightmare was reflected in her novels especially in The Voyage Out. Richard kissed Rachel in the ship – which was an
unexpected incident. Richard said to Rachael, “You tempt me” (73).
Surely Rachel’s behaviour could not be characterized as that of a
temptress:
... until she broke the agony by tossing herself across the bed, and
woke crying “Oh!” Light showed her the familiar things; her 177 clothes, fallen off the chair; the water jug gleaming white; but the
horror did not go at once. She felt herself pursued, so that she got
up and actually locked her door. A voice moaned for her; eyes
desired her. All night long barbarian men harassed the ship; they
came scuffling down the passages, and stopped to snuffle at her
door. She could not sleep again (74).
About nightmare in The Voyage Out, Virginia again referred,
The strain of listening and the effort of making practical
arrangements and seeing that things worked smoothly, absorbed all
Terence’s power. Involved in this long dreary nightmare, he did
not attempt to think what it amounted to. Rachel was ill; (337).
Rachel drifted in and out of normalcy with fever. Dr. Rodriguez said to
Terence Hewet. “It is not serious. I assure you. You are overanxious. The
young lady is not seriously ill, and I am a doctor. The lady of course is
frightened,” he sneered. “I understand that perfectly” (341).
Nightmare filled her tormented dreams. In Mrs. Dalloway,
Virginia influenced the character Septimus as a victim to nightmare. The most poignant episode in the novel was that of Septimus and Lucrezia
Warren Smith. The life that they were made to lead was full of nightmare.
Their suffering was not created by poverty and exploitation, but by the inexorable effects of the Great War. Septimus Smith was a hard working 178 young man employed as a clerk in London. A big metropolis like London has always had millions of such young men, working very hard, trying to
build a career – “London swallowed up many millions of young men
called Smith.” The nightmare vision of entrapment and monstrosity –
‘alone with a little deformed man who squatted on the floor gibbering’
(Mrs. D 74) that both follows Richard Dalloway’s sexual advances to
Rachel and accompanies her fatal illness forges the link between sex and
death in the novel. Virginia’s imaginations extended up to the ghost.
Virginia imagines Helen as the embodiment of Theresa Vinrace’s ghost
come back to haunt Rachel. For Helen, as the vehicle of Rachel’s dead
mother, embodies the contradictions of an English patriarchal society to
such an extreme degree that the resolution she triggers has about it the
inevitability of Greek tragedy. One night, Rachel and Helen walked to the
island hotel and eavesdrop outside the windows. Helen recognized
Hughling Elliot, Terence Hewet and Susan Warrington as they played
cards. Hirst was the person who caught the two eavesdropped. The ladies
ran back to the villa after they realized someone, unseen by the window,
had heard them.
In order to understand Virginia first two ‘madness’ as Quentin Bell
called them, it was necessary to study the relation of Virginia to each of
her symbolic parents. After the death of Leslie, Virginia Woolf was freed 179 from the constraints she had been leaving under ever since her mother’s death. Virginia’s major breakdowns and her much more vulnerable, and much more susceptible to emotional and mental disorder, and therefore in the future it took less external stress to bring on disaster. She tried to overcome the fact of her mother’s death by imaging that her mother was still with her. Even though that defense might have helped to take the immediate edge off Virginia’s grief, ultimately it solved nothing. Her half- sister Stella Hills died in 1897. On 20.11.1906, (The Letters of V.W. vol.1. Virginia’s Letter No.8:9). Thoby passed away. Virginia said also that the fact of Thoby’s death retroactively affected her memories of him and of the time when his death was not anticipated. She saw no way to prevent this kind of distortion and was obviously fascinated by it since she developed it into the dialectic confrontation of present, past, and future expressed in her novel (Woolf, The Waves 107). Her half-brother George
Duckworth died in 1944. Her adulterous relationship with her brother-in- law, loneliness, above all her lesbian habits where also responsible for her major breakdown.
In the words of Woolf,
I am quite sure that Virginia’s genius was closely connected with
what manifested itself as mental instability and insanity. The
creative imagination in his novels, her ability ‘to leave the ground’ 180 in conversation, and the voluble delusions of the breakdowns all
came from the same place in her mind-she ‘stumbled after her own
voice’ and followed the ‘the voices that fly ahead.’ And that in
itself was the crux of her life, the tragedy of genius. I was mental or
physical strain and fatigue which endangered mental stability
(Beginning 80).
James Stephen, Leslie Stephen and Virginia were advised by the doctors that they should take complete rest and sleep. Especially Virginia’s doctors always advised her to take rest to avoid the danger signals.
Sometimes she put the whole of herself into the writing and the thinking.
Even with a review, she would writes and rewrite The Voyage Out and
rewrite it again from end to end five or six times, and she once opened a
cupboard and found in it (and burnt) a whole lot. Leonard Woolf said
that “it was The Voyage Out which she had rewritten (I think) five times
from beginning to end (Woolf, Beginning 81). Thus the connection
between her madness and her writing was close and complicated, and it is
significant that, whenever she finished a book, she was in a state of mental
exhaustion and for weeks in danger of a breakdown. Then, Leonard
consulted many doctors regarding the health of Virginia, since she had
severe headache like Rachel.
181 Virginia had herself documented the reasons for her own mental extreme pain, and very intelligently ‘exorcised’ certain key persons and
passages from her conscious or unconscious life by writing them fully out.
The novels were an account of the mental distress: how it had been
caused, how it manifested itself, and how it was overcome (Love, Sources
3). The author Roger Poole said “I had formed my theory when, in 1976,
Jeanne Schulkind’s collection, “Moments of Being,” came to confirm a
part of it. In the three pieces in that collection, “A Sketch of the Past,” 22
Hyde Park Gate, and “Old Bloomsbury,” Roger Poole found that confirmation, in Virginia own hand, for the theory that I had myself derived from reading the novels, the theory about the influence in the
‘madness’ of 1913 and 1915 of Gerald and George Duckworth. This theory was now given explicit documentation by the only person who could ever have confirmed it (Love, Sources 3).
Again Virginia Woolf’s husband said about her as follows:
“Virginia has a definite line between sanity and insanity.” Normally she
was sane, but four times in her life passed over the line which divided the
sane from the insane. He said that this was partly true and partly untrue.
Leonard said that in the course of his “Autobiography spoke of his wife in
terms of her ‘insanity’ which was otherwise known as mind.” The term
mad was often used in Virginia Woolf: “A Biography.” As Woolf’s 182 letters and diaries appeared, the editors, like Nicholson, Trautmann and
Bel implicit accepted the view of Virginia put forward by Leonard Woolf and Quentin Bell in their commentary to Virginia madness. Virginia described it in her diary how she worked the last pages of The Waves,
I recognize the same mental process: On Saturday, February 7,
Here in the few minutes that remain, I must record Heaven be
praised, the end of The Waves. I wrote the words O Death fifteen
minutes ago, having reeled across the last ten pages with some
moments of such intensity and intoxication that I seemed only to
stumble after my own voice, or almost after some sort of speaker
(as when I was mad) I was almost afraid, remembering the voices
that used to fly ahead (Woolf ed. Writer’s 169).
Quentin Bell’s interpretation is used as if it were canonical (Poole, unknown 1). One might be inclined to say that ‘insanity’ of the kind which was a perpetual menace and terrifying curse in Virginia’s life is solely a matter of degree, the degree of duration or violence of mental states which habitually, in certain circumstances, occurs in everyone. In that case everyone is slightly and incipiently insane, and Virginia differed from ordinary ‘sane’ persons only because, when she had a ‘breakdown,’ there was a great increase in the degree of intensity and duration of symptoms which occurred in her when she was sane and occur in all other people, ‘sane’ or ‘insane.’ “I am sure that, when she had a breakdown, 183 there was a moment when she passed from what can be rightly called sanity to insanity” (Woolf, Beginning 79). Leonard was quite sure that
Virginia’s genius was closely connected with what manifested itself as mental instability and insanity.
Virginia remembered the same condition in her character Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway as follows:
Septimus is sane in this insanity, lucid in his vision. Despite the
growing pressure of hallucination, he was a clear recognition of the
enemies that seek to curtail his freedom and lock him up as a
prisoner down in Surrey. He refuses to submit to the demonian
authority represented by Holmes and Bradshaw. Despising the
emissaries of patriarchal institutions, he abjures the responsibility
of fatherhood and will not collude in the perpetuation of a corrupt
and brutal society. He abdicates his ‘mainly’ role as husband and
father by a sexual rejection of his wife (Henke, “Mrs. Dalloway:
the Communion of Saints” 140).
Rezia treasured the Mediterranean ideal of home and family and desperately wanted ‘a son like Septimus.’
Dally spoke about the novelist as follows:
Virginia Woolf had no shortage of chroniclers, many who knew far
more about literature than they did about mental illness. Her 184 childhood traumas, sexual frigidity, and lesbian flirtations might
have been the stuff of Freudian psychodrama, but it was the storm
and fury of manic depression that truly governed her life. In any
event, only one biography appeared to have tackled her madness
head on (“The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” 154).
According to Dally, who was a psychiatrist?
Virginia’s need to write was, among other things, to make sense
out of mental chaos and gain control of madness? Through her
novels she made her inner world less frightening. Writing was
often agony but it provided the ‘strongest pleasure’ she knew.
In the opinion of Dally, in full flight of madness,
birds spoke to her in Greek; her dead mother materialized and
harangued her, voices called her to do wild things. She refused
nourishment. Trusted companions like her husband Leonard and
her sister Vanessa became enemies and were abused and
assaulted.... (www.mcmanweb.com).
The Bloomsbury crowd and the literary highlife fed her hypomanic
surges, but it was from the depths of depression that she seemed to dredge
up her best inspiration. When she started a novel, according to Dally,
she was excited but relaxed and stable, only succumbing to
exhaustion and depression in the revision stages. Her husband, 185 Leonard Woolf described her early stages of mania: ‘She talked
almost without stopping for two or three days, paying no attention
to anyone in the room or anything said to her... Then gradually it
became completely incoherent, a mere jumble of dissociated
words.
Virginia’s husband Leonard acted as her protector, seeing her through the depressions and nipping some of her manic surges in the bud:
‘I am alive; rather energetic,’ Virginia wrote in her diary. ‘But half
the horror is that (Leonard) instead of being, as I gathered,
sympathetic has the old rigid obstacle – my health. Her friends and
family took care of her, by 1935, when she was working on “The
Years.” The constant cycle of mania and depression was beginning
to overtake her. The revision was particularly difficult, and in 1936
she wrote to a friend as follows; ... never trust a letter of mine not
to exaggerate that’s written after a night lying awake looking at a
bottle of chloral and saying, No, no, you shall not take it. It’s odd
how sleeplessness, even of a modified kind, has the power to
frighten me. It’s connected I think–with these awful times when I
couldn’t control myself (www.mcmanweb.com).
186 She took time off to ride out the depression, only to throw herself into her next work, Three Guineas, which “pressed and spurted out...like a physical volcano.” There would be one more novel to finish, Between the
Acts, then the writing would cease. Husband Leonard was struggling with his own depression, leaving Virginia to fend for her. The timing could not have been worse. England at the time was on the losing end of the Second
World War, and Virginia was isolated in the South of England, away from her usual circle of friends (www.mcmanweb.com). It was clear that by the end of the novel that through Septimus Warren Smith, Virginia Woolf intended to present madness and violent death, love and break, the ruin of a career. It had been pointed out that the character of Septimus had been necessary for the exposition of theory of good and evil which it had been her purpose in the novel. He was a fugitive from the war, a basely cringing fellow who escaped from Holmes and Bradshaw and he was one of those fellows who wish to possess what was not their own to violate the inviolate. In the end, it was necessary to point out that Septimus Warren
Smith had been introduced into the novel as the double self of Mrs.
Dalloway. Septimus Warren Smith the unfortunate distinguished soldier of the World War and his wife Lucrezia and to Doris Kilman, the history tutor to Elizabeth Dalloway.
187 The gradual onset of the shell-shock disease in Smith was a masterly achievement. Combat stress reaction, in the past commonly known as shell shock or battle fatigue, was a military term used to categorize a range of behaviours resulting from the stress of battle which
decrease the combatant’s fighting efficiency. The most common symptoms were fatigue, slower reaction times, indecision, disconnection from one’s surroundings, and inability to prioritize. Combat stress reaction was generally short-term and should not be confused with acute stress disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, or other long-term disorders attributable to combat stress, although any of these may commence as a combat stress reaction. Sir William Bradshaw assures Mrs. Warren Smith that her husband was ‘very, very ill,’ even though Dr. Holmes equally unperceptive, had assured her many times that there was nothing with her husband. The reality of Septimus’s mental condition felt between these two judgements, one falsely clinical, and the other clinically false (Poole, unknown 185).
No doubt Virginia possessed extreme sensitivity, a nervous tension and mental instability from her father. In her fathers’ case the tyranny was pervasive; it occurred in the more positive aspects of his relationship with Virginia and in the most negative, in both subtitle and flagrant forms
(Love, Sources 28). Virginia’s life was filled with her writing, the 188 activities of Hogarth Press, was Virginia sane? or insane?
(www.medical.siemens.com). Sane is an English word meaning ‘of sound mind’ the researcher’s opinion is that this is partly true, sometimes partly untrue. Whenever Virginia started writing a novel, she was sane; and whenever she finished a novel she become insane. The word insane means characterized by insanity or the utmost folly; Chimerical unpractical; as, an in sane plan, attempt, etc. Used by, or appropriated to,
insane hospital; causing insanity or madness. It was due to her hard work
continuously without taking proper rest; over work to her brain and so on.
For example, when she finished her first novel The Voyage Out she found
in her cupboard; five copies of those novels which were burnt
immediately.
The strong opinion of the researcher is that this third chapter deals
with Virginia’s family diseases which had an impact on the characters of
her major novels in a suitable manner.
THE SUICIDE OF VIRGINIA WOOLF REFLECTED IN HER MAJOR NOVELS
The word “suicide” is derived from Latin (Suicidium, from Sui caedere, to kill oneself). The DK Illustrated Oxford Dictionary describes
‘suicide’ is the intentional killing of oneself; self destructive action of course. Suicide is the term used for the deliberate self-destruction of a human being, by causing their body to cease life function. Such actions are typically characterized as being made out of despair, or attributed to some underlying mental disorder which includes depression, bipolar disorder (Virginia Woolf suffered from depression and bipolar disorder) schizophrenia, alcoholism and drug abuse. Financial difficulties, interpersonal relationships and other undesirable situations play a significant role. Suicide is the act of killing yourself; “it is a crime to commit suicide.” Medically assisted suicide (euthanasia, or the right to die) is currently a controversial ethical issue involving people who are terminally ill, in extreme pain, or have minimal quality of life through injury or illness (www.google.co.in/).
Virginia recorded her views on suicide as follows: while she was in good health and when she was in the thirties, she had correspondence with the composer of Ethel Smyth, one of the best friends among whom she confided about her past illnesses. When Virginia and Ethel Smyth were 190 talking about suicide; Virginia wrote: “By the way, what are the arguments against suicide? You know what a flibberti-gibbet I am: well there suddenly comes in a thunder clap a sense of the complete uselessness of my life. It’s like suddenly running one’s head against a
wall at the end of a blind alley. Now what are the arguments against that sense – “Oh it would be better to end it”? Asked Virginia.
For Virginia Woolf, suicide was an ever-interesting topic, and she could regard it with cool detachment when she was well. She allowed herself to believe that her past attempt was reasonable and altruistic
(www.en.wikisource.org). Virginia brought the suicidal inner thoughts in her novels. For example in Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus Warren Smith committed suicide by throwing himself out of the train window (Poole, unknown 187). So he committed suicide and Mrs. Dalloway pitied over his death. In To the Lighthouse, Minta Doyle committed suicide. Virginia remembered her suicidal concept through the character of Minta Doyle in
To the Lighthouse. The tragedy of mind had been shown through the character of Minta Doyle, who was possessed of a tendency to commit suicide. She suffered from the malady of neurosis, as a result of which,
“she would jump straight into a stream.” She would kill herself in some idiotic way” (Gupta and Gupta, 103). She seemed to be afraid of nothing except bulls. She was afraid, for she had lost her grandmother’s brooch. 191 “I lost my brooch—my grandmother’s brooch” (LH 132). Minta Doyle was really shocked for the loss of her treasured chastity which is nothing but her grandmother’s brooch.
Virginia Woolf dealt more with death in her novels because from
1895-1937 in Virginia’s family six deaths occurred which affected her
mood, which led to mental depression. Julia Stephen died of rheumatic
fever and due to “influenza” in 1895. Virginia Woolf was also affected by
influenza in February 1940. Virginia Woolf’s half-sister Stella Hills died
due to her first delivery in 1987. Sir Leslie Stephen passed away in 1904.
Her own brother Thoby died (passed away) at the age of twenty-six in
1906. Her half-brother George Duckworth passed away in 1934. Julian
Bell (son of Vanessa Bell) died in 1937. The close and beloved relative’s deaths seriously affected Virginia’s brain which let her to mental depression. It is taken from the family tree which is given in chapter II
(p.136).
Virginia Woolf preferred suicide to death. As for death, Virginia’s adolescence was so replete with deaths of parents and siblings that for the rest of her life she felt the presence of the dead, and their memory, as strongly as that of the living, to the extent that her sense of reality was sometimes disturbed by the vividness of the past 192 (www.en.wikisource.org). The autobiographical novelist said that the event of death was deliberately distanced: not only narrated in brackets
but the syntax of the sentence removed it further from direct impact upon
the reader, telling of the death not in a main clause or with a finite verb at all, but in a ‘participial absolute’ construction, unrelated grammatically to
the rest of the sentence, and referring to the event retrospectively.
Because of this distancing her death appeared as an illustration of the
apparent meaninglessness of life in face of the wild destructive force of
nature. Virginia mentioned in her diary, “Death will be very dull,” Woolf
confided to her diary, “there are no letters in the grave” (Sellers 113).
Another entry in her diary (October 2), which Leonard Woolf
reprinted in A Writer’s Diary (353) gave vividly her mood that
autumn, a kind of quietism and open-eyed contemplation of death.
Death was no longer, as it is for all human beings. The end of life,
seen always a long way off, unreal, through the wrong end of the
telescope of life, but now it was something immediate,
extraordinarily near and real (Woolf, Journey 72).
Here it is necessary to think of Emily Dickinson, who was considered one of greatest poets born in America. Her poetry is characteristic of the secluded life she led within her family circle. Certain of her poems express a state of mental breakdown and despair. Her view is different from Virginia. According to Emily Dickinson “Death is not something to 193 be dreaded. Death is compared to a love who is inviting his sweetheart for a pleasant ride. They are not disturbed by others and their destination is immortality.” This is taken from Emily Dickinson’s poem, “Because I
could not stop for death.”
Virginia Woolf was interested in writing and reading habits which
induced Virginia’s mental depression. She was very much interested in
reading letters; so she charged Ethel Smyth, as follows “never see a pillar
box without dropping a letter in” (Sellers 112) and urged her nephew
Quentin Bell, “Please write a full and indiscreet account of your amorous
adventures... or I shall be forced to invent one” (Sellers 113). Woolf also
enjoyed other people’s correspondence. Again she said that “Letters and
memoirs are my delight.” She wrote to Violet Dickinson, and she advised
Ethel Smyth to quote letters in her work as “they often shed a whole cutler
fish bag of suggestion” (Sellers, 113). So Virginia echoed the writing of
letters on the character of Mrs. Dalloway. In The Voyage Out and Mrs.
Dalloway wrote with the help of the pen to her friend’s (VO 14). In To
the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay wrote many letters (217).
In the opinion of Woolf,
The fact that she had twice tried to commit suicide—and had
almost succeeded—and the knowledge that terrible desperation of 194 depression might at any moment overwhelm her mind again meant
that death was never far from her thoughts (Journey 74).
Virginia’s attitude towards death was very different. It was always present to her. So she made almost all the characters to die in the middle of their life itself in her novels. Example: Rachel Vinrace died in her middle age of twenty-four. “Terence was filled with resentment, not against Rachel, but against the forces outside them which was separating them” (VO 334). “As she lies dying, Terence takes her hand and feels in an ecstatic manner” but when we are together we’re perfectly happy”
(118). Virginia Woolf talks about Septimus as follows: “The voice which now communicated with him who was the greatest of mandkind,
Septimus, lately taken from life to Death” (Mrs. D 30). Virginia Woolf wanted Mrs. Dalloway to be “a study of insanity and suicide: the world seen by the sane and insane side by side – something like that” (Woolf ed.
Writer’s 52).
The novelist very often influenced her personal matters in all of her novels. For example in Mrs. Dalloway, she mentioned that at first Mrs.
Dalloway resented Sir Bradshaw’s having mentioned a death at her party which was a gay affair, but then she felt overwhelmed by her thoughts about death. It seemed to her that death was defiance that death was attempted to communicate, and there was an embrace in death. She 195 reflected that the world was full of corruptions and lies. “The young man had done well by killing himself” (Mrs. D 196). His suicide reminded her of an occasion in the past when she had said to herself: “if it were now to die, ‘were now to be most happy’” (197). Then she felt that there was, in the depths of her heart, an awful fear. But the emotional support which her husband provided to her, she ought to have perished. She had escaped death while the young man had killed himself. Mrs. Woolf had put various events within the body of the novel—death, a very tragic death, that of Septimus Warren Smith. Although Septimus was dead, the
revelation of Clarissa of her identity with him paradoxically emphasized
life and calms her fears of death. In Virginia Woolf’s novels, the climax
of Mrs. Dalloway was an integrating epiphany that brings together many
of the important themes and characters. This climax served the specific
purpose of revealing the triumph of life and the value of love and human relationships.
Virginia Woolf selected only the beautiful aspects and the ugly
ones ignored, or they were introduced merely to provide a contrast. When
aesthetic experience flags the capacity to enjoy beautiful flags, life
becomes meaningless for her characters, sadness then assaults the spirit.
Like Keats she loved the principle of beauty in all things. Virginia Woolf
is among those poets whom Keats admires, who have “no palpable design 196 upon us.” Yet the poet is not less, but more conscious of the world about him than the average man: therefore to him “the miseries of the world, are misery, and will not let him rest.” Like Keats, Virginia also felt (Arora
161). Mrs. Virginia Woolf was an aesthete, a great lover of the beautiful, and it is this love of beauty which influences her selection, and ordering of reality. Only the beautiful aspects are selected and the ugly ones ignored,
or they are introduced merely to provide a contrast. When aesthetic
experience flags the capacity to enjoy beauty flags, life become
meaningless for her characters, sadness then assaults the spirit. Like
Keats she loves the principle of beauty in all things (Varshini 44).
Keats and Virginia had the same views about death. “A thing of
beauty is a joy forever.” said Keats. In the view of Virginia, life is
presented in Mrs. Dalloway as mystery which was difficult to solve, but in her later novels there was an attempt to tear that veil of mystery and she
offered an explanation for it. There might be another life more beautiful
and permanent beneath and beyond this life. In To the Lighthouse it is conveyed that beneath the visible and the palpable aspects of life there is the principle of beauty which was a permanent nature. Death was a phenomenon accompanied with a welcome process of renewal. “Life is beautiful and lonely, but beneath it, it was elusive and sad.” Virginia influences her theory of death again in To the Lighthouse the boy, James 197 Ramsay finds himself incapable bearing the burden of life. Mrs. Ramsay too feels the burden of life and craved for death in the manner of Keats.
He must lay himself down and die before morning comes...so he “squares his shoulders and stands very uprightly by the urn” (LH 50). Ramsay’s idea of death is poetic like that of Keats who longed to die a mid night
death.
Virginia Woolf’s delight in beauty made her acutely conscious of
the frailty and transience of life. “Life is fleeting and changing like a
cloud, and this fact brings sadness and bewilderment.” Like Keats she
was oppressed by the melancholy which dwells with beauty. “Beauty that
must die,” and “Joy whose hand is ever at his lips bidding adieu.” “The
fact of Beauty on the one hand, the fact of mutability, on the other, these
are the two poles on which her panorama of human experience revolves”
(Gupta and Gupta 30). In Mrs. Dalloway, life is represented as an
insoluble mystery, but in Virginia’s later novels, there is an attempt to
pierce through this mystery and provide an explanation. She suggested in
To the Lighthouse, there is a permanent principle of ‘Beauty’ at work in the universe behind the visible and the palpable. Death is thus seen as a process of renewal to the welcomed. However, the vision which permeates her books was that of a life so beautiful yet so sad, and as 198 elusive, as a shred of mist. Mrs. Dalloway and Mrs. Ramsay and loves of beauty, which is described by the author on many occasions in her novels.
The death of Mrs. Ramsay, which was in one way, the central event of book, the marriage, and death of Prue, the death of Andrew, was conveyed briefly in brackets, as if they were mere incidentals. Careful reading made it clear that those events were seen here as illustrations of universal patterns, rather than having significance in themselves. Hence the marriage of Prue was presented as a single manifestation of the universal cycle of the seasons, and her death of the inevitable sorrows of mankind. More significant for the novel as a whole, the death of Mrs.
Ramsay was death with in a similar way. James Ramsay, in To the
Lighthouse found himself incapable of bearing the burden of life. Mrs.
Ramsay too felt the burden of life and craved for death in the manner of
Keats, “He must lay himself down and die before morning comes, death stole upon him paling the colour of the eyes. Time really intensified the tragedy of human living.” In the opinion of James Ramsay, “Had there been an axe handy, a poker, or any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it” (LH 8).
What symptoms and events preceded Virginia’s death? For how long had she been depressed? Some forty years later, her husband, 199 Leonard Woolf, described her last years and suicide in one of the volumes of his autobiography. “Feminist” critics have been suspicious of his
motives, but he was a pedantically accurate man who kept brief but
detailed daily records of his activities throughout the marriage. His
account was, at the very least, chronologically accurate, as he had access
to these diaries, and to his wife’s lengthier journals, both made at the time
of the events (www.en.wikisource.org). In the view of Virginia Woolf
Feminist means “people who fight for the right of women.” Feminist
literary criticism primarily responds to the way, woman is presented in
literature. It has two basic premises one, ‘woman,’ presented in the
writings of female writers from their point of view.
John Stuart Mill summed up, “I should say that feminist criticism is
concerned” with “woman as the producer of textual meanings with the
history, themes, genres and structures of literature by women.” Many
feminist writers who had seized upon Woolf, like Sylvia Plath (American
Poetess) who also killed herself, and presented her as a victim of male
oppression. But Virginia committed suicide due to mental depression.
Virginia Woolf herself wrote in her diary, how she had finished the
last pages of The Waves. For example in her diary she mentioned in it as
follows: 200 In the concluding words of The Waves as her epitaph of ‘Against
you I will flying myself, unanguished and unyielding, O Death!’
From these words the readers could understand how Virginia
Woolf gave a warm welcome for her death (Woolf ed. Writer’s
169).
There were many causes for Virginia Woolf’s suicide: one among them was Virginia’s loss of control over her mind, the depression and despair which ended in her death, began only a month or two before her suicide. Though the strains and stresses of life in London and Sussex in the eight months between April 1940 and January 1941 were for her, as for everyone living in that tormented area, terrific, she was happier for the most part and her mind more tranquil than usual. The entry in her diary for May 13, already published in A Writer’s Diary, gave the atmosphere of those violent days and the ambivalence of her mood and mind (Woolf,
Journey 44-45). Modern diagnostic techniques had led to her being regarded as having suffered from bipolar disorder, an illness which colored her work and life, and eventually it led to her suicide. For
Virginia Woolf little treatment was available at that time and she took her won life. She believed that she was given wrong treatments by the doctors. So Virginia Woolf portrayed the same in her major novels 201 through the characters of Rachel Vinrace, Mrs. Dalloway and Mrs.
Ramsay.
In The Voyage Out Terrence Hewet was angry because he had
come to depend upon her for happiness and now she was ill. He was
angry with her, but with “the force outside them.” Dr. Rodriguez was
unable to treat her successfully (114). Helen demanded that they send for
another doctor: St. John is sent to find one. He was riding to the town in
the scorching heat in search of a doctor (114). Terence began to feel that
there is no hope, when even Helen, who had always been so strong, began
to cry. Rachel regained one brief moment of lucidness and then she dies.
Terence was beside himself with grief. Septimus Warren Smith’s view
was that he was also given wrong treatment by the doctors named William
Bradhsaw (psychiatrist) and Dr. Homes.
There were so many causes for Virginia’s mental instability a
major cause of Virginia’s increase instability was noted by Quentin Bell.
She had reached the age of thirteen with few conceptions of self, but after
the period of “nothingness” and of “positive death” (Bell’s terms for
Virginia’s first breakdown), “she knew that she had been mad and might
be mad again” (Love, Sources 278). For Virginia which was the new 202 terrifying and erosive way of thinking about herself that her first madness had forced upon her. Again Bell said further,
To know that you have had cancer in your body and to know that it
may return must be very horrible; but a cancer of the mind, a
corruption of the spirit striking one at the age of thirteen and for the
rest of one’s life working away somewhere, always in suspense, a
Dionysian (sic) sword above one’s head-this must be almost
unendurable. So unendurable that in the end, when the voices of
insanity spoke to her in 1941, she took the only remedy that
remained, the cure of death (Bloomsbury 279).
The Lesbian relationship was one of the most important causes for her mental disturbances. It would be easier to trace the long and complicated history of her past attack both serious and mild. For example in 1922, Virginia Woolf met and fell in love with Vita Sackville-West.
After a tentative start, they began an affair that lasted through most of the
1920. In 1928, Woolf presented Vita Sackville-West with Orlando, a fantastical biography in which the eponymous hero’s life spans three centuries and both genders. It has been called by Nigel Nicholson, Vita
Sackville-West’s son, “the longest and most charming love letter in literature” (www.literaturepage.com). The author echoed lesbian habits in
Mrs. Dalloway. She and Sally Seton had the lesbian relationship. 203 The world wars upset the whole nation. In the words of Woolf about the world wars which was horrible to human beings. So he said as follows:
There had been wars and we still prayed automatically on Sundays
to a very anachronistic God to deliver us from ‘battle’ as from
murder and sudden death, from the ‘crafts and assaults of the devil’
and from ‘fornication, and all other deadly sins;’ but the wars were
local or without hearing the dreams and trampling of any conquest,
or had had the remotest change of standing ‘on the perilous edge of
battle’ (Journey 9).
The increasing threat of a Second World War unnerved her. When Great
Britain finally declared war on Germany in 1939, both Virginia and
Leonard Woolf made plans to kill themselves. She remembered this in her novel through the character of Septimus who said to his wife, “Let us kill ourself.” again he said to his wife “Let us kill ourselves” in Mrs.
Dalloway (Tilak 70). If Germany successfully invaded England fearing how the Nazis would treat a Jewish intellectual and his wife. To escape the German bombs dropping on London, the couple moved out to Monk’s
House. It was a wise choice – the Blitz destroyed their London home and
Hogarth Offices (www.shmoop.com). Virginia echoed in Mrs. Dalloway
through the voice of Septimus and Rezia had planned to kill themselves in
order to escape form the life. 204 The impact of two great World Wars which affected the mind of
Virginia Woolf could not be ignored by the readers. She remembered the two wars and the loss of precious human being’s lives led her to madness.
The above mentioned wars proved a tremendous impact on Virginia
Woolf.
One morning she was having breakfast in bed and I was sitting by
the bedside talking with her. She was calm, well, perfectly sane.
Suddenly she became violently excited, thought her mother was in
the room, and began talking to her. That was the beginning of the
long second stage in a complete mental breakdown (Woolf,
Journey 79-80).
It was due to the First World War.
Woolf said about Virginia’s mental conditions in the following lines.
I think it must have been about the middle of January that I began
to be uneasy about Virginia and consulted Octavia Wilberforce.
Octavia was a remarkable character. Her ancestors were the
famous Wilberforce of the antislavery movement; their portraits
hung on her walls and she had inherited their beautiful furniture
and their fine library of eighteenth-century books. Her family was 205 closely connected with Virginia’s both having their roots in the
Clapham Sect (Journey 80).
The World War II broke out in September 1939. With her sensitive awareness of the horrors and devastation of these global conflicts she chould not certainly have squeezed life into the convention of comedy without an outrageous falsification of the contemporary social reality.
Jane Austen and Scott had managed to do so earlier because the
Napoleonic Wars did not affect them and their country directly. Their vision of life remained undisturbed by the events in France. The writing about them in Virginia’s essay “The Leaning Tower” (Marcus 223).
Virginia Woolf says,
Scott never saw the sailors drowning at Trafalgar, Jane Austen
never heard the roar at Waterloo. Neither of them heard
Napoleon’s voice as we hear Hitler’s voice as we sit at home of an
evening (Woolf, Collected 2: 164).
In May and June 1940, Leonard, Virginia and others had discussed between themselves and with friends what action they would take in the event of a German invasion.
There were German planes over Rodmell one day and Virginia and
I were standing in the garden when we heard the swishing of 206 bombs through the air overhead and then the dull thuds of
explosions towards the River Ouse (Woolf, Journey 34).
They had no illusions about the way in which a politically active, intellectual Jew and his wife would be treated by the Nazis. “We agreed that if the time came we would shut the garage door and commit suicide.”
Leonard wrote, in June, 1940, Adrian Stephen, her psychoanalyst brother, provided the Woolf’s with lethal doses of morphine to use in the event of a German invasion. The period between April 1940 and January 1941 was stressful for everyone, especially in Southern England, with air-raids and the mounting threat of invasion,
The first sight of German planes which we saw was very odd. The
real air war began for us in August 1940. on Sunday, August 18,
Virginia and I had just sat down to eat our lunch when there was a
tremendous roar and we were just in time to see two planes fly a
few feet above the church spire, over the garden, and over our roof,
and looking up as they passed above the window we saw the
swastika on them. They fired and hit a cottage in the village and
fired another shot into a house in Northease (32).
The German’s bombs were aimed at and missed the cement works, but one or two of them hit and breached the river bank (34). In the same year that is, 1940, the Woolf’s London Home in Mecklenburgh Square was bombed in August and their country home, Monks House in Rodmell East 207 Sussex which was their permanent residence. This attack was a great mental torture for Virginia.
For Virginia Woolf’s sensitive soul, war was horrible and nerve shattering experience. She was weak and sickly, and due to war she suffered from constant fits of depression. However, she continued to work and work hard like her grandfather and father. She was living in
London, and as the wife of Leonard Woolf and the daughter of Leslie
Stephen, as by virtue of her own attainments, she was highly honoured in the Bloomsbury circle whose other members were among the greatest men of letters of the day. Association with this literary club was an enriching experience and a constant source of inspiration for her. It did much to stimulate her to creative activities-finally it was inevitable to avoid suicide. The outbreak of the World War II destroyed Virginia’s will to live. Virginia’s London Monk’s house was bombed and she lived until her death in Monk’s House. She brought the same incident on the character of Septimus Warren Smith. He had no faith in human nature and with no will to live like Virginia Woolf.
Virginia Woolf echoed the effects of the wars in Mrs. Dalloway
through the character of Septimus Warren Smith. He participated in the
first world war, where he met his officer Evans, his fastest friend, was 208 killed before his very eyes, but he could not feel for his death. He could escape death, but his nerves were shattered. He could feel nothing. He could not bear loneliness. In order to escape this loneliness he married
Lucrezia who was only twenty-four, without any friend in Britain, left
Italy for the sack of her husband. The death of Evans led him to mental disorder. The war had ended, but it not ends for people like Septimus
Warren Smith who were its victims. He suffered from neurosis or nerves breakdown which induced by horrors of life in the trenches. Again and again he said to his wife, “Let us kill ourselves” (Tilak 85). Before committing suicide he was very kind and affectionate to his wife Rezia.
Virginia Woolf was very kind and considerate towards his husband before her suicide. It was clear that Septimus Warren Smith was novelist’s representation of the evil effects of war, of the nervous and madness tragedy and suffering caused by it. Sir William Bradshaw, the psychiatrist a portrait inspired by the novelist’s malice and hatred of those who dominated others, specially under cover of humanity. Once Septimus, told her wife, “I will kill myself” (Mrs. D 20). “The whole world was clamoring: kill yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes. But why should he kill himself for their sake?” (100).
The last novel of Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts was written under the direct shadow of the Second World War. The even tenor of 209 London life was seriously disturbed by wanton bombings and Virginia
Woolf was compelled to shift from the city to the country. But she carried on her creative work even in the midst of the booming of guns and the
shrill of sirens. In her diary we find a vivid reflection of the anguish of
her mind. They spent night after night waiting for something dreadful to
happen with their gas masks ready at hand (Singh 55). In the view of
Leonard, In fact, Virginia was working very hard. Like Virginia,
“‘Septimus has been working too hard’ – that was all she said to her
mother” (Mrs. D 27). Virginia had begun both Roger Fry and Between
the Acts in the first half of the 1938 and still writing them all through
1939. She enjoyed writing Between the Acts, but the life of Roger became a burden to her. When Virginia was writing the biography of Roger Fry, it was far more concerned with the facts and determined by facts than a novel-it was fact not a fiction: “When I (Leonard Woolf) first read it, he thought that there was a fact in it” (Woolf ed. Writer’s 328). After completing the manuscript of her last (posthumously published) novel,
Between the Acts, Woolf fell victim to a depression similar to that which she had earlier experienced.
The onset of World War II, the destruction of her London home during the Blitz, and the cool reception given to her biography of her late friend Roger Fry all worsened her condition until she was unable to work. 210 Between depressive periods, Woolf was very creative and productive. In early 1913, she completed her first novel, The Voyage Out. But by July of that year, she was re-admitted to a nursing home, where she was given the
barbiturate Vernal to help her sleep. She returned home soon after but
then attempted suicide by overdosing on Vernal. She did not recover
from this episode until late September 1914.
During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in
London Literary Society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her
most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the
Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay
A Room of One’s Own (1929), and Virginia Woolf, The London Scene: Six
Essays on London Life (London) it is a gorgeous little book, but the
content proved a disappointment. It was written as a series of bi-monthly
columns for the British edition of Good Housekeeping in 1931 and,
perhaps constrained by the intended audience; Woolf was not at her
essayist best here. There were memorable turns of phrase but these essays
rarely rise above clever description; they simply didn’t have the wit and
whimsy, in short the magic, of the best of Woolf’s essays. The one
exception in this book is the essay titled “Great Men’s Houses.” On its
own, it’s not worth the price of the book, but it’s certainly well worth
seeking out and reading. 211 Virginia brought the same situation in her novel. Mrs. Ramsay’s death came all of a sudden while she was in London. Mrs. MacNab touched the grey clock, which she wore when she was busy with gardening. “The garden wore a weary look,” as everything in it is utter confusion and disorder she remembered that Mrs. Ramsay, wearing her clock stood there with one of the children near her. Her Boots and shoes, a brush and a comb were lying on the table, as if she thought that she would come there the next morning. She talked to her in a sweet and pleasant manner. But she was now dead and would not come back again.
As an artist, she looked at the world not through the eyes of the blind
Tires as but through the intuition of the wise Mrs. Ramsay; as a critic, she was interested in the sensibility not of “the women (who) come and go/talking of Michaelangelo” but of the poor Mrs. Brown who travels in the corner of a railway carriage (Sharma 34). The whole family was in a state of gloom, as if a tragedy had overtaken them. Andrew and Prue were also dead. Mrs. MacNab’s heart was filled with the many acts of kindness of Mrs. Ramsay and she imagined her clearly moving about and talking as she used to do when alive. “Mr. Ramsay stumbling along a passage starched his arms out one dark morning. But Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, he stretched his arms out in vain. They remained empty” (LH 203) Here Mrs. Woolf’s detachment 212 seems a little strained, and, in transitional part of the book is strongest part
(Majumdar and McLaurin 194).
Leonard Woolf said that Virginia had finally finished Between the
Acts and had given it to Leonard to read. He saw at once now the
ominous symptoms and became again very uneasy. After the entry in her
diary on February 26, quoted above, there were only two entries before
she committed suicide one on March 28, another one on March 8, of
which 24 was important. Leonard then gave the unpublished portion of
the March 8, entry and the final entry of March 24, since they showed,
Leonard thought, very clearly the state of her mind in those last days. It
was only in the first day of 1941 that the deep disturbance in her mind
began to show itself clearly. Leonard should continue to quote from her
diary because her own words were more revealing and authentic than
Leonard’s memory. The entry for January 9 was again strange, showing
her preoccupation with death.
Virginia was always thinking about death and her thoughts went on
line an imaginary world like Utopia by Thomas Moore. “A blank all
frost. Still frost, Burning white, Burning blue, The elms red. I did not
mean to describe, once more, the downs in snow, but it came. And I can’t
help even now turning to look at Asheam Down, red, purple, dove blue 213 grey, with the cross so melo dramatically against it (The stone cross on the
Rodmell church is visible form the window of our sitting – room silhouetted against the down).
What is the phrase I always remember – or forget? Look you last
on all things lovely. Yesterday Mrs. Dedman was buried upside
down. A mishap. Such a heavy woman, as Louie put it, feasting
spontaneously upon the grave. Today she buries the Aunt whose
husband saw the vision at Seaford. Their home was bombed by the
bomb we heard early one morning last week. And someone is
lecturing and arranging the room. Are these the things that are
interesting? That recall: that say Stop, you are so fair? Well, all life
is so fair at my age. I mean, without much more of it
I suppose to follow. And other side of the hill there’ll be no rosy
blue red snow (Woolf, Journey 78).
The above said lines are the best example of Virginia’s mental
disturbances. Really she was going mad. From these accounts an
accurate diagnosis of her final illness could be made. From the suicide
not alone, most psychiatrists would make a confident diagnosis of severe
depression. She said that she is not only depressed, but going ‘mad’ again;
she was beginning to hear voices (Virginia influenced upon Septimus the
same situation). She couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t read or write. She showed self-blame, believing that she was spoiling her husband’s life. 214 She felt hopeless, couldn’t went on any longer. She believed suicide was the best course.
Next proof for Virginia’s madness was Dr. Peter Dally, who was a psychiatrist: “Virginia’s need to write was, among other things, to make sense out of mental chaos and gain control of madness
(www.suiteidi.com). Though her novels she made her inner world less frightening. Writing was often agony but it provided the ‘strongest pleasure’ she knew. Again Dr. Peter Dally said that, if she had been alive today, Woolf’s condition could have been treated with Lithium, Prozac and therapy. By analyzing records, Mr. Dally has identified a pattern of depression occurring every January and February, followed by a “high” in the summer.
Virginia tried four times to commit suicide. In 1904, she had another breakdown and was confined to a nursing home for rest and solitude. During this episode, she heard voices and threw herself out of a window like her brother Adrian. She also experienced major attacks of mental illness between 1910 and 1912. Once Virginia jumped through the window to kill her in 1915 and her brother Adrian who was prone to suicidal despair, also threw him from the window when he was in school.
She influenced the same incidents in her novel, through the character of 215 Septimus Warren Smith. He heard the World telling him to kill himself like Virginia heard the Bird’s Voice. According to Virginia Woolf, the meaning of death is given in Mrs. Dalloway,
When Clarissa party was over she heard through Sir William
Bradshaw the callous mental specialist, that a young man Septimus
has committed suicide by throwing himself over the parapet, she
realizes the essential meaning of death. A young man had killed
himself, and.... He had thrown himself from a window (196).
Virginia Woolf had indicated that Septimus was intended as a
“double” for Clarissa herself; originally the two characters were merged in
her mind. Virginia made both Clarissa and Septimus had literary talent in
their youth. But Clarissa was outwardly successful, while Septimus was
tormented and miserable. He had threatened suicide and is under treatment
at present for a nervous breakdown. But the bluff general practitioner Dr.
Holmes who attended him had little comprehension of his mental
predicament and told him jovially that there was nothing wrong with him.
Did Virginia Woolf really commit suicide? (www.chasingthefrog.com).
The researcher strongly supports Virginia’s suicide. Yes, Virginia truly
committed suicide. There were so many evidences for her suicide
Leonard found Virginia’s walking stick and hat on the bank of the
river. 216 Some children found the body in the river and informed to
Leonard.
After suicide Virginia’s body was in the mortuary in a decaying
condition.
Virginia’s suicide letters.
Though Virginia belonged to Clapham (evangelism) Christian sect,
she was not given a place in the church yard for burial because she
committed suicide. Virginia was cremated like non Christians.
Before her death, Virginia Woolf wrote three letters; one of which was addressed to her sister, Vanessa, the other two to her husband,
Leonard. Here they had the final one, discovered at their home by Leonard on the 28 March 1941, just days after he had found his wife returning home soaking wet following what he later believed to be a failed suicide attempt. The second time however, Woolf succeeded in her efforts to escape a lifetime of mental illness, and three weeks later. Virginia’s body was found in the River Ouse, her coat’s pockets were filled with heavy pebbles (www.chasingthe.frog.com).
Virginia Woolf left two similar notes for her husband and another one to her sister. In these letters, she admitted to “go mad again” and expressed the belief that she would not recover this time 217 (www.en.wikisource.org). One letter was found in her house which was written ten days earlier, before a previous unsuccessful attempt, where she returned home from a walk soaking wet, saying that she had fallen in
River Ouse. Around noon on March 28, 1941, at the age of fifty-nine, she walked down to the River Ouse, near her weekend house in Sussex.
Leaving her hat and waking stick on the riverbank, she placed some heavy stones in her coat pocket and drowned herself. Her body was found on
April 18, and the coroner declared the death a suicide. Virginia Woolf
commit suicide on 28 March 1941 (www.en.wikisource.org)
Leonard Woolf could not find Virginia anywhere in the house or
garden, he felt sure that she had gone down to the river. He ran across the fields down to river and almost immediately found her walking-stick
(cane) and hat lying upon the bank. He searched for some time and then went back to the house and informed the police. It was three weeks before her body was found when some children saw it floating in the river. The horrible business of the identification and inquest took place in the
Newhaven Mortuary on the 18th and 19th April. Virginia was cremated in
Brighton on Monday, 21st April. On March (Friday) 28th Leonard went
for lunch. But Virginia was not there. He found the following letter on
the sitting room mantle piece (Journey 93).
218 The other letter was found in her house which was written ten days earlier, before a previous unsuccessful attempt where she returned home from the river soaking wet, where she had fallen. Around noon on March
28, 1941 at the age of fifty-nine, she walked down to the River Ouse, near her weekend house in Sussex... She placed some heavy stones in her coat pocket and drowned herself in the river. Virginia Woolf became very cross if she lacked vigorous physical activity. Virginia Woolf felt her best if she frequently “does battle” on the tennis or racquetball court (or engages in another form of competitive sport). Her own feelings and emotions were something of an enigma (puzzle) to Virginia, and it is often difficult for her to waves proves that she gave great importance to this flow. The significance of life and death is her central theme. It was in life as men and women experience it that the readers found out only the magnificence of life but also its ugliness and chaos. She showed that while Mrs. Dalloway loved to create order by overwhelmed by the horror and chaos of life and courts death.
Virginia’s husband, Leonard Woolf described her early stages of mania: “she talked almost without stopping for two or three days, paying no attention to anyone in the room or anything said to Her... Then gradually it became completely incoherent, a mere jumble of dissociate words.” “In full flight of madness,” according to Dally, “birds spoke to 219 her in Greek; her dead mother materialized and harangued her, voices called her to ‘do wild things.”
Virginia’s letter follows in her own manuscript given below:
220 Monday April 21. On March (Friday) 28, Leonard went for lunch but Virginia was not there. He found the following letter on the sitting room mantelpiece.
You will find Roger’s letters to Mauro in writing table drawer in
Lodge. Will you destroy all my papers?. These words were written in the margin of her second suicide letter to Leonard. This is the last words of
Virginia Woolf wrote by her.
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. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know.
You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read what I want to say is
I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.
Virginia 221 Virginia wrote another letter to her sister Vanessa
Sunday
Dearest,
You can’t think how I loved your letter. But I feel that I have gone too far this time to come back again. I am certain now that I am going mad again. It is just as it was the first time, I am always hearing voices, and I know I shan’t get over it now. All I want to say is that Leonard has been so astonishingly good every day, always; I can’t imagine that anyone could have done more for me than he has. We have been perfectly happy until the last few weeks, when this horror began. Will you assure him of this? I feel he has so much to do that he will go on, better without me, and you will help him. I can hardly think clearly any more. If I could I would tell you what you and the children have meant to me. I think you know. I have fought against it, but I can’t any longer.
Virginia.
Virginia Woolf clearly expressed her reasons for committing suicide in her last letter to husband.
After writing this note Virginia left Monk’s House, Rodmell – her home – at 11.30 a.m., and walking half – mile taking her walking stick, and crossed the water meadows to the River Ouse. Virginia Woolf wore 222 an old tweed coat with stones stuffed in the pockets. Her body was not recovered until the 18 April, when it was discovered by children a short
way downstream. Her husband identified the body, and an inquest was
held the following day at new heaven. The verdict in the standard phrase
of the time was “suicide while the balance of her mind was disturbed.”
She was cremated privately at Brighton on 21 April, and her ashes
scattered less than one of the pair of elms at Monk’s House.
Virginia Woolf’s Grave, Monk’s house
People from all walks of life paid homage to the memory tomb of
Virginia Woolf. Leonard buried Virginia’s ashes at the foot of the great
elm tree on the bank of the great lawn in the garden, called the Croft,
which looks out over the field and the water meadows. There were two 223 great elms with boughs interlaced which they always called Leonard and
Virginia. The first week of January 1943, in a great gale one of the elms
blown down. There were so many other evidences for Virginia’s suicide.
Lehman who was in charge of Hogarth Press said that,
...in the next few days Lehman read the draft of the novel Between
the Acts, ‘the first thing I noticed was that the typing – her own
typing – and the spelling were more eccentric, more irregular than
in any typescript of hers I had seen before. Each page was
splashed with corrections, in a way that suggested that the hand
that had made them had been governed by high voltage electric
current (www.en.wikisource.org).
Lehman then received a letter from Virginia saying the silly and
trivial and could not be published, with a covering letter from Leonard saying that she was on the verge of a breakdown. Both were probably written the day before her death. “By the time they reached me it was all
over.... I was aware...of an undertow of sadness, melancholy, of great fear,
but the main impression was of creature of laughter and movement.”
Lehman’s memoir showed that her self-criticism was quite unjustified,
exemplified by her low opinion of her novel which she had thought well 224 off few months earlier. Reassurances about the book and her recovery had been frequent and unavailing.
Kapur quotes on John Lehman: To examine Virginia’s novels in
the light of contraries as seen in the vision and structure of her novels.
John Lehman says: “The full richness and significance of what she had
already given to the world is yet to be understood...” (14). This study has
attempted yet another mode of approach to the rich and varied mental and
emotional experience of the artist.
Another witness washer general practitioner, Dr. Octavia
Wilberforce, a descendant of William Wilberfore. At that time she was
also running a diary farm near at hand, and for some months had kept the
Woolf’s supplied with extra butter and cream in that time of shortages.
She had visited Monks House frequently from January 1941 on, but a
formal consultation did not take place until 17 March. Three days earlier
Virginia had discussed one of her last short stories with Doctor
Wilberforce and told her that it had left her “desperate-depressed to the
lowest depths.” At Leonard’s request she examined Virginia on the 26
March, the day before her death. The doctor was ill with influenza and
rose from her sick-bed for the consultation. Virginia told her that it was
“quiet unnecessary to have come” and did not answer her questions 225 frankly. She was generally ‘resistive,’ and demanded a promise that she would not be ordered to have a rest cure, - that is, an admission to a psychiatric nursing home – before she would submit to a physical examination. When examined by Dr. Wilberforce the day before her death, she had at first refused to discuss her symptoms or to admit that there was anything wrong. Each of these symptoms was typical of severe depression. The only typical item in the letter was her clear admission that she was ill – that she was going mad and has a “terrible disease.”
Virginia Woolf and her madness was a worst disease.
Fortunately, her friends and family tolerated her and took care of
Virginia... Her husband Leonard acted as her protector, seeing her through the depressions and nipping some of her manic surges in the bud: “I am alive; rather energetic,” “Virginia wrote in her diary.” “But half the horror is that (Leonard) instead of being, as I gathered, sympathetic has the old rigid obstacle – my health.”
When Virginia’s suicide was declared hundreds of people sent their condolences to Virginia’s husband and her sister Vanessa Bell. Her suicide was both tragic and shocking even to a nation in the turmoil of the
Second World War. For the first time these personal and often intimate letters, are stored in the Special Collections of the University of Sussex’s 226 Library for more than 30 years, recently it have been published. They included messages from eminent intellectuals and writers of her contemporizes, like E.M. Forster, H.G. Wells and T.S. Eliot, as well as students, reformers, refugees, devoted readers and the Woolf’s close circle of Sussex friends and relatives. Afterwards, Letters on the Death of
Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh University, £17.99) is edited by Sybil Old-
Field, a Research Reader in English at the University of Sussex, who spent five years tracing the writers and their surviving relatives to seek permission to publish as many as possible of the 250 letters in full.
This is the end of the story of her life, but the letters also give us a
fresh perspective on what was thought about Virginia Woolf by her
contemporaries, especially her personal relationships, “Says Old-Field.”
During her life she was accused of being aloof and sarcastic, but it is obvious from many of these letters that people felt supported by her and sensitively understood.
Virginia’s childhood housekeeper Sophie Farrell, who was living at
Sharpstone in Sussex, wrote: “She was always so sweet and good to me, I
could never forget” her. Her former lover, who was living at Sharp stone,
the writer Vita Sackville-West described “a loss that can never diminish.”
Her Brighton doctor, Octavia Wilberforce, was deeply affected by the news. 227 Andrea Powell, who is a research scholar on Virginia Woolf, says this comment on web.
Studying Virginia Woolf’s life and works has been, for me, both a
depressing experience and a source of inspiration. Her life was one
of many horrific experiences, and in her writing, she seems to find
no real meaning in living. On the other hand, she does reach
profound smaller, more indefinite conclusions about several issues,
including gender, sexuality, grief, and madness. Furthermore, she
paved the way for acceptance of women writers, of which I am
(www.en.wikisource.org).
It is a great tragedy the Victorian society that did not accept
Virginia’s extraordinary intelligence simply because she was a female writer. Virginia used the term death in many of her novels. She thought that ‘Death’ is the only way to escape from the worldly miseries. In the middle of the novels she kills the characters for example Septimus Warren
Smith’s suicide from the train. From this one could understand that
Virginia’s mental condition. According Belle’s view on Virginia Woolf that Virginia was a famous British writer. She was not only a prolific author, she also wrote letters personal diaries throughout her life; which have been published by the Bloomsbury Group and her close friends and relatives (Woolf and Bell). 228 To conclude this chapter Virginia Woolf had a history of mental illness on both sides of her family. Many people (including her husband) believe that Virginia Woolf suffered from manic depression, also called bipolar disorder. Unfortunately, little treatment was available to her at the time, and she eventually took her own life at the age of fifty-nine.
The researcher is delighted to say that every year the world is celebratig the abolition of Suicider’s Day on September 14. Human
beings, whether man or woman, sometimes take a wrong decision to
commit suicide due to foolishness, cowardly, etc. which is a very pathetic
condition. From 1960, every year the world is celebrating this day to
abolish ‘the suiciders.’ And to create the awareness to the people.
Virginia and her husband Leonard. SUMMING UP
The personal element is never absent in Virginia Woolf’s novels.
If it is not a re-cast of personal experience, the content of most novels are mostly part fact and part fiction. Like sculptures and painters opting for real life models, modern playwrights fashion their characters after persons they have known in a real life. In an autobiography the author writes the story of his/her own life and achievements. Their aim is a successful presentation of personality. Its congenial defect is that it can never be completes. From the psychological point of view; one can know what motives, prompted him at decisive movement. What his/her secret hopes and ambitions were and how far his careers fulfilled his real aspiration.
Autobiographical dement is the product of first hand experience. Virginia
Woolf’ is an aesthetic and her purpose is to convey her own joy in the beauty of life, her own sense the pleasure of living. Always she selects the beautiful aspects of life, and ugliness is brought in only by way contrast.
The aspects same in it is Mrs. Dalloway and Doris Kilman in her novel
Mrs. Dalloway.
Woolf experienced her personal, family and social life and she creates an aesthetic vision of these opposites as they co-exist in a state of tension in her novels. Because her imagination progressed 230 characteristically by contraries it is possible to find the contraries in her treatment.
The artist or the writer has the primary job of mastering craftsmanship and manipulating her skill in the presentation of the deep aspect of reality. The novelist, Virginia Woolf writes that it “has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of reality”. Virginia
Woolf is a “pure artist,” and not a philosopher or moralist. Whereas Jenn
Venn Stephen say’s about Leslie that there was “a bit of the moralist in him (Leslie Stephen) even as a young child. And Virginia’s works represent a shift from the outer to the liner. She was a ‘naturalist’ as well as a ‘contemplative.’ Bernard Blackstone says that, “she observes new fact and old facts in a new way; but she also combines them, through the
contemplative act, into new and strange patterns is absorbed into the inner
life” (166). Virginia Woolf is not a preacher but a pure artist and she
makes it a point to see that the outer is not only related to it but it is absorbed into the inner life. It is interesting to recall that in one of her essays on the writings of E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf has made a classification between the preachers and the pure artists.
Virginia Woolf is not simply an artist who can be viewed undimensionally but a manifold presence who continues to give rise to new impulses and interpretation and quite different responses. 231 Literature has been traditionally a male domain although it claims to be universal, for it describes mostly male perceptions, experiences and opinion. This one sidedness of literature gave rise to the need for women to speak for themselves and write their own literature which describes
contrarily their own particular experiences and perceptions. Her chief aim
had been to convey the female characters through monologue technique.
Her technique had been altogether different and search is chiefly aimed at
probing the levels of the feminine psyche.
Moody talks about Virginia Woolf, What Virginia Woolf achieves
in her novels, at their deepest levels is the objectification of her experience
as an artist. They are the transformation of an artistic personality into a personal work of art (78)
The novel has been described as the one bright book of life, a work of art that throbs with vitality. This aesthetic or artistic vitality pervades the entire work of Virginia Woolf, through the vitality of life as revealed
in her works is more on the mental plane than on the physical plane of
life. Virginia Woolf is one of the most original of women novelist, a
skillful examiner of consciousness and a successful experimenter in techniques, who gives a poetic apprehension of life in a novelistic form of
her own. Her novels are an attempt to achieve an artistic solution to life
with emphasis on moods, tones and state of mind. There are the 232 traditionalists like H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and Galsworthy is interested in new ideas and opens out new vistas to the human mind.
They are still following the Victorian tradition as far as the technique of the novel is concerned. Virginia Woolf, revolutionsed the technique of the novel with their probing into the sub-conscious. Virginia tried to create a verbal vision of the life that transcends both time and space. Her novels reveal the changing rainbow living relationships between man and woman and man and nature. She worked out the myriad impressions of sensitive life and developed a network of poetic imagery and style to
suggest the luminous halo of consciousness.
As Kelly says,
...her early novels tend to stress the isolation and aimlessness of
modern people. The novels of the middle period put less emphasis
on generalized separation and try to refine vision while defining the
factual world. Her last three novels work towards final vision that
in the face to facts can offer solace to a world threatened by chaos
and disaster.
Virginia Woolf belongs to a great line of modern novelists who are
also theoreticians of the novel such as Henry James, Marcel Proust, D.H.
Lawrence, E.M. Forster and James Joyce. She wrote almost entirely by
intuition though she was one of the most conscious and intellectual writers 233 of her time. Her novels attempt to reveal the silent regions of the human psyche, the inward history of man as opposed to the outward reality of man and society that was revealed by the Edwardian novelists. One can find the real actions of her novels are confined to the mental rather than physical plane.
Virginia Woolf’s novels from The Voyage Out to Between the Acts
reveal the fact that her way of seeing reality was dual and this contrariety
of vision that she held. She represents through her themes, characters, structure and philosophical approach. Her novels reveal her many sided genius. Though her fictional world is small with intellectuals and sensitive artists and her characters limited, what she does with this small world is important. She succeeds in bringing various elements together and arranges beings in characteristic attitudes so as to weave thoughts and feelings into a firm recognizable poetic pattern that contains the contraries of life.
Blackstone remarks that: Her characters like her incidents and her intuitions are unfinished, spreading as the ripples of a lake spread in the sunlight, for personality is like that she thought.
Virginia Woolf wants a good status in the society. So she depicted her characters in her novels as a status lover in the society. Like Rachel 234 Vinrace (VO), Mrs. Dalloway (Mrs. D) and James Ramsay (LH). All these characters envisage a change in the social values. They are also conscious of their role in the society and so they actively take part in reshaping the society on the basis of their progressive ideas. The realistic approach of the novelist brings out the inherent nature of the society responding to the changes. They limit themselves to certain areas and within that limited arena they visualize the possibility of a change of attitude values. For example, Virginia Woolf’s novels are about upper middle class people, while the scenes of Virginia Woolf’s novels revolve around London. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway takes place within a day in London.
Virginia Woolf speaks about the class division in hr novel Mrs.
Dalloway: There is a class of people who seems to be far removed from ordinary people like Septimus Warren Smith and Doris Kilman. Richard
Dalloway moves along with people who wield power with the sole aim of getting a berth in the power structure. His friends include Lady Bruton,
Hugh Whitbread, and Peter Walsh who are in one way or other associated
with political life. Their chief concern is to keep themselves at the helm.
Hence the casual dismissal of the news of the death of Septimus Warren
Smith the kind of attitude is born of a life which is power – centered. The
epiphany technique reveals the momentary glimpses of the individual. It 235 exposes one’s capabilities and comprehensive power. Virginia Woolf uses this in her major novels. In Mrs. Dalloway, the epiphanies of
Clarrisa Dalloway reveal her innermost thoughts and the outer.
Virginia Woolf’s focus has been mainly on women who need more exposure and whose inherent talents are to be explored. The novelists succinctly place women with all their weaknesses and disadvantages which are made use of by men to exercise control over them. Tansley is of the view that “women can’t write, women can’t paint” and his general opinion on women shows his skewed thinking. He thinks that women “did nothing but talk, talk, talk, eat, eat, eat”. So also Mrs. Ramsay’s intellectual arrogance makes him incapable of understanding his own wife. In order to assert his superiority, he complains that Mrs. Ramsay is
“heartless” and “she never told him that she loved him”. Further, woman characters like Clarrisa Dalloway and Mrs. Ramsay seen to submit themselves to their male counterparts. But in their innermost selves, they seek freedom by indulging in their private worlds. For instance, Mrs.
Ramsay spends her time with her children, reading them fairy tales.
In real life, Virginia’s father, dominated his wife Julia Stephen.
Virginia remembers the same in her novels, for example Willoughby
dominated his wife Theresa, Mrs. Ramsay dominated his wife Mrs.
Ramsay. Virginia Woolf’s focus is on women hemmed in by the wall of 236 male authority. So she envisages the need for a liberal attitude towards one another particularly towards women who all along led their limited
existence in the shadow of their male counterparts. Virginia Woolf sees
male authority taking its strength in exercising unlimited control over women. In this connection, it is worth citing of her own statement in
A Room of One’s Own “the history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself”. Leslie Stephen gave limited freedom to women in his family. Virginia echoed this restricted freedom in her novels, Mrs.
Ramsay and Peter Walsh respectively. Man creates an environment with offers women limited role. Thus women remain solely under the control of men. This age-old conception of women is held with utmost sanctimony.
Kumar states that it is perhaps noteworthy to recall the fact that it is her female characters who can act as transparent media for transmitting the living spark of intuition. Her female protagonists make the most of every moment and their creative efforts which introduce the affirmative note from the thesis which has to encounter the facts which form the antithesis. On the contrary, most of her male characters are symbols of pure intellect – William Bankes, the Botanist, Charles Tansley who traces the influence of something on somebody, William Rodney who reads a 237 paper on Shakespeare’s imagery; William Pepper who knew a great many things about Mathematics, History, Greek, Zoology, Economics. Mr.
Ridley Ambrose who “spends his life in digging up manuscripts which nobody wants,’ Prof. Brierly who knows everything in the world about
Milton, and Mr. Ramsay, the greatest metaphysician of his time. She demonstrates the fact that women are more receptive to humanitarian
appeals. The conflict between thesis and antithesis between creative
illusions and fact is her major theme.
To the Lighthouse had a tripartite structure: part one presented the
Victorian family life, the second part covers a ten-year period, and the
third part is a long account of morning in which ghosts are laid to rest.
The central figure in the novel, Mrs. Ramsay, was based on Woolf’s
mother. Also other characters in the book were drawn from Woolf’s
family memories. The important another character Lily Briscoe thought
that a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball.
In To the Lighthouse, James Ramsay outbursts against his father
wanes with the lapse of time and his boyhood hope materializes bringing
him close to his father and cementing a bond of strong filial relationship.
In The Waves, all the six characters draw sustenance from the central
character Percival. Bernard, the phrase-maker acknowledges Percival as 238 his leader. But after Percival’s death, he consoles himself with the birth of his son which coincides with Percival’s death. Even his incessant effort at phrase-making symbolizes his incorrigible optimism.
Virginia Woolf in her three novels, Mrs. Dalloway, To the
Lighthouse and The Waves, has taken care to see that the story does not
obtrude at all, thus implementing the Bloomsbury idea that the novel
should not be weighed down by the story. E.M. Forster suggests that it is
the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source.
Regarding characters, they have been given too much prominence because
the story has dominated. A story is always the story of a character, his
relationship with others.
In Mrs. Dalloway, the whole external duration is from 8.00 a.m. to
about 8.00 p.m., an interval of twelve hours, but during this day time,
Peter Walsh, Clarissa Dalloway Sally Seton, Hugh Whitbread, Septimus
Warren Smith and Rezia Smith, Elizabeth Dalloway, Doris Kilman and
even the Prime Minister of England have been brought into focus. The
minds of the principal human beings move easily back and forth on the
time scale stretching even the mythical times, bringing out extraordinary
impressions of past life and the life humanity general. Within this “day-
time, there is and Kaleidoscopic variety of human experience and 239 passion—the gruesome tragedy of Septimus Warren Smith and Rezia
Smith. The irony of Sir William Bradshaw’s specialization on human suffering and his affluence built on callousness, the superficiality of the upper socialist like Lady Bruton. All these different streams of reality are knitting together the incongruous separating friends, and making nonsense of emotions. In a single day, a lifetime may be lived through.
The professional class, which speaks light of human values, is yet another force to be fought against. In Mrs. Dalloway, Dr. Holmes treats
Septimus Warren Smith without making the least attempt to understand the root cause of his ‘madness’ when Septimus Warren Smith needs human understanding. Dr. Holmes simply dismisses his case as one of madness without taking into account his mental anguish. Septimus
Warren Smith the ex-soldier has borne the shock of seeking his close friend die before his eyes. The doctors instead of treating his illness have aggravated it. In this novel the novelist has succeeded in rendering the inner life, the very shimmerness of experience and has yet retained order, clarity and discipline. According to Bernard Blackstone, for technical mastery, the novel is unparallel in English fiction.
According to Quentin Bell, Virginia was the gayest human being
he had known. Her talk was scintillating and she delighted in flights of 240 imagination and fancy. Her company is described by David Garnet, in the following words: Virginia holding a cigarette would lean forward before speaking and clear her throat with a motion like that of a noble bird of prey. Virginia Woolf has frequent emotional outburst due to her fiery temper and emotional irresponsibility. Leonard Woolf expresses herself very directly and honestly and no one has to guess what her true feelings
are. However, Virginia Woolf dislikes showing any personal weakness or her need for support, comfort and development. She is often impatient with herself and others Virginia abhors emotional dependency and dislikes “complainers.”
Virginia Woolf wants to write throughout her life who expresses this ambition to her friend as follows: “In a letter to Madge Vaughan in
June 1906,” Virginia, speaking of her dream-like world, professes that she would like to “write of the things I do feel, than to dabble in things I frankly don’t understand in the least.” Virginia wrote Mrs. Dalloway and The Common Reader First Series simultaneously: “my fiction before lunch and then essays after tea, when she got tired of the novel, or when she came to a difficulty that she could not immediately resolve.”
To conclude this chapter, it is interesting to recall that in one of
Virginia’s essays on the writings of E.M. Forster. Virginia Woolf has 241 made a classification between the preachers and pure artists. Blackstone remarks, it is easy to see that Virginia Woolf is not a preacher, and that she is a pure artist and a very good autobiographical artist.
The researcher has selected only three novels of Virginia Woolf
namely The Voyage Out, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. In these
novels Virginia’s own personal life is brought through the characters of
the novels. She also influenced and included her family members in many
of the occasions. Again the researcher gives special respect and reverence
to Virginia Woolf, who is a devotee of English Literature and pays
homage to her immortal Literature. Virginia Woolf is the greatest
visionary of the cosmos and the biggest source of inspiration to the
readers and the writers of the world.