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12. Virginia Woolf's Moments of Being the Silence Within

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12. Virginia Woolf's Moments of Being the Silence Within 12. Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Being The Silence Within But how describe the world seen without a self? There are no words. Virginia Woolf: The Waves (1931) There is little doubt that Virginia Woolf’s (1882-1941) mental illness, her manic depression, was a key factor in her disordered life. In 1964, her husband, Leonard Woolf, said as much: … suddenly the headache, the sleeplessness, the racing thoughts would become intense and it might be several weeks before she could begin again to live a normal life. But four times in her life the symptoms would not go and she passed across the border which divides what we call insanity from sanity. She had a minor breakdown in her childhood, she had a major breakdown after her mother’s death in 1895, another in 1914, and a fourth in 1940. In all these cases of breakdown there were two distinct stages which are technically called manic- depressive. In the manic stage she was extremely excited; the mind raced; she talked volubly and, at the height of the attack, incoherently; she had delusions and heard voices, for instance she told me that in her second attack she heard the birds in the garden outside her window talking Greek; she was violent with the nurses. In her third attack, which began in 1914, this stage lasted for several months and ended by her falling into a 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 scarecely spoke; refused to eat; refused to believe that she was ill and insisted that her condition was due to her own guilt; at the height of this stage she tried to commit suicide, in the 1895 attack by jumping out a window, in 1915 by taking an overdose of veronal; in 1941 she drowned herself in the river Ouse.1 That Virginia Woolf’s depressions should have been triggered by stressful outside events such as a death in the family or war is typical for the manic depressive personality. We might add here that her father’s death in 1904 and her favorite brother Thoby’s death from typhoid fever in 1906 – a brother whose psychological profile also fits the manic depressive type – all had a traumatic impact on her fragile consciousness. Her half sister Laura (1870-1945) spent her last fifty-two years of life in an asylum. Caramagno has been very clear about the genetic sweep of depression in the whole 1 Quoted in Thomas C. Caramagno, The Flight of the Mind. Virginia Woolf’s Art and Manic-Depressive Illness (Berkeley et al.: University of California Press, 1992), p. 34. 116 The Time before Death family. For example, Virginia’s father Leslie Stephen suffered from cyclothymia which is a milder form of manic depreession.2 In Caramagno’s words: Leslie’s second wife, Julia, herself exhibited chronic depressive symptoms… and their children were also afflicted with varying levels of affective disorder. Both Virginia’s brothers, Adrian and Thoby, had episodes of depression, as did her only full sister, Vanessa. In 1894 Thoby reportedly attempted suicide during delirium induced by influenza; … Adrian’s much longer life gives us a more complete picture of chronic, nonpsychotic depression. … Vanessa was intermittently crippled by severe depressions, “different in effect but not perhaps unrelated to Virginia’s instability,” and her only daughter , Angelica, was hospitalized for severe depression. Across the generations, then, we find five depressives, two nonspecific psychotics, two manic-depressives and one cyclothymic: an impressive display of familial pattern.3 Other traumatic events in Virginia Woolf’s life were her love-hate relationship with her tyrannical father,4 and being sexually abused by her half brother George Duckworth. As Hermione Lee puts it in her exceptional biography of Virginia Woolf: There is no way of knowing whether the teenage Virginia Stephen was fucked or forced to have oral sex or buggered. Nor is it possible to say with certainty that these events, any more than Gerald Duckworth’s interference with the child Virginia, drove her mad. But Virginia Woolf herself thought that what had been done to her was very damaging. And to an extent, her life was what she thought her life was. She used George as an explanation for her terrifyingly volatile and vulnerable mental states, for her inability to feel properly, for her sexual inhibition. And yet she also violently resisted simplistic Freudian explanations of a life through childhood traumas and would have been horrified by interpretations of her work which reduced it to a coded expression of neurotic symptoms.5 Though Virginia Woolf suffered from mental illness, Lee has put the emphasis on Virginia’s relentless struggle to remain sane in order to be able to write, and to write in order to be able to fend off the disease. Writing, for Virginia Woolf, was indeed a therapeutic and healing process. Lee writes: 2 Caramagno, The Flight of the Mind., pp. 313-14, fn. 15. 3 Ibid., p. 111. 4 See Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London et al.: Vintage Random House, 1997), p. 149. 5 Ibid., pp. 158-59. .
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