Virginia Woolf Holds a Unique, If Controversial Place in Twentieth
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Of Whom Should Virginia Woolf Have Been Afraid: A Study of her Traumatic Life." by Elizabeth Ronis “But I don’t want to go among mad people” Alice remarked. “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat. “ We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.” Alice in Wonderland; Lewis Carroll. I believe Carroll meant eccentric, not insane. Virginia Woolf was certainly eccentric but was she insane? Virginia Woolf holds a unique, if controversial place, in Twentieth Century literature. During her lifetime, she was known for her novels and essays and, posthumously, for her diaries and letters. She has become subject for endless numbers of biographies, reminiscences, and doctoral theses. Virginia and her husband Leonard were central figures in the Bloomsbury Group, which took its name from an area in Northeast London. It became the gathering place of friends who originally met at Cambridge. It included painters such as Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, (Dora) Carrington, the art critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell, Vanessa’s husband, the writer/ historian Lytton Strachey, his brother James and James’ wife Alix, the translators of Freud, writers E.M. Forster, T.S. Eliot, Saxon Sidney-Turner, and economist John Maynard Keyes and his wife Lydia Lopokova. Most of them became leading figures in the arts, literature, and government of that period. Writing about the Bloomsbury group became a cottage industry. The relationships among the members of the group were complicated, promiscuous, involving multiple partners and often homosexual or bisexual. Dorothy Parker said that the Bloomsbury group was comprised of pairs who had affairs in squares. They wrote about themselves and their friends incessantly in diaries, correspondence and later in memoirs. Virginia’s letters alone comprise five volumes and her diaries, six. Leonard her husband also published several volumes of memoirs. Even Vanessa Bell’s maid of fifty years kept a diary. This was recently purchased from her family by the British museum for 40,000 pounds. Virginia’s state of mind and health are thus, apparently, well documented. But were they understood correctly? The description of her as ” mad” is still questionable. Why did her family describe her this way? Why did she describe herself thus? What did she mean by this? Was it, perhaps, because she was convinced of this by her family and by her friends? Or was she looking for attention, a role to play and this was open? Her husband, Leonard not only 1 shared this view but promulgated it, as did Quentin Bell,” her official biographer,” chosen by Leonard Today, literary critics and psychoanalysts are divided into several vocal camps. There are those who accept the received view of her husband, her family, her doctors and Quentin Bell, and those who reject it or amend it on various grounds. The basis for her being called “mad” were her chronic depression, disabling headaches, insomnia, anorexia, continual psychosomatic symptoms, and sometimes she said, she heard birds singing to her in Greek. She also had a large number of minor physical illnesses. Some of these symptoms can be attributed to bipolar illness, some to migraine headaches. In 1895 at age thirteen, she had her first episode labeled as a “breakdown”. On March 28, 1941, at the age of 59, she drowned herself in the Ouse River near her home in Sussex for fear of going “mad” again. Virginia Woolf’s family history is important, both psychologically and genetically. There were, what was described as a history of mental illness, predominantly of mood disorders on her father’s side--generations of quiet, gloomy men. Virginia describes her father as " Spartan, ascetic, puritan.” But this translates as depression, not madness. Was it genetic or could it have been the outcome of the child-rearing practices of the time, transmitted from generation to generation, which caused depression? Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on January 25, 1882, the third child of Julia Stephen and Leslie Stephen. Both had been previously widowed. Julia had been married to Herbert Duckworth, a barrister, in 1866 who died after only four years and whom she mourned during her children’s infancy. She was left with three small children-George, Stella, and Gerald, the latter born posthumously. They were respectively, 14, 13 and 12 years old when Virginia was born. Leslie Stephen had been married to the younger daughter of William M. Thackeray. When she died in 1875, he was left with five-year old Laura to raise. Leslie shut out the world when he grieved and was totally unavailable to his young daughter. Thus, Laura who had lost her mother was left to grieve alone and abandoned to a not too adequate nurse who spoke only German. She was cheap and Leslie loved a bargain. He was a widower for two years and then married Julia Stephen who he knew would take Laura off his hands. Leslie and Julia were married in 1878. There were four children of this marriage within four and a half years, Vanessa, May 30, 1879, Thoby, September 8, 1880, Virginia, January 25, 1882 and Adrian on October 27, 1883. Julia Stephen was thirty-six years old when Virginia was born and Leslie Stephen was fifty. Laura was a difficult, stubborn child. Julia, with four babies on her hand, did not have much sympathy for Laura’s problems. Leslie found her not willing to read, not unable to read, but not willing. The solution they came upon was to seclude her from 2 the other children in the attic rooms. Shades of Jane Eyre. It was as though she didn’t exist. When she was seventeen and Virginia was five Laura was sent to live in the country and when she was twenty-one, she was placed in an asylum. Virginia had very strong view on the mentally handicapped. After walking past a group of them she noted in her diary: “They should certainly be killed.” Quentin Bell’s official two-volume biography of Virginia was published in 1972 Bell goes into great detail of the family history on both sides going back to the 17th & 18th Centuries. However, he made no mention of Laura or of Julia and Leslie’s treatment of her. It reads rather like a catalogue of events than a biography and I must say, is dreadfully dull reading. The combined family of eight children lived at 22 Hyde Park Gate in London. In 1881, Leslie bought their vacation home, Tallard House, in St.Ives, Cornwall and the family spent each summer there through 1894. Virginia remembered her summers there as the happiest times in her life. Besides the eight children, there were always relatives and visitors. In addition to this complicated household, Julia took on other responsibilities, visiting the sick and needy. Julia’s husband was also a difficult, demanding and needy man. The care of the children was, as customary, left primarily to the servants. “Can I remember ever being alone with her for more than a few minutes. Someone was always interrupting. When I think of her spontaneously she is always in a room full of people…If I let my mind run about my mother… they are all of her in company, of her surrounded, of her generalized; dispersed.” In Reminiscences, Vanessa, writing to her son Julian Bell, says of her sister: “…some six years must have passed before I knew she was my sister…already, I have heard, she was able to care for the three little creatures who were younger than she was…” This indicates further that Julia was not available and that her daughter, barely six was looking after her siblings. Leslie Stephens was a distinguished Victorian man of letters, founder and editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, editor of Coghill Magazine, author of several books including “The Science of Ethics” written in the year of Virginia’s birth in which he presented a passionate argument for the morality of suicide. “If, now, we suppose that a man, knowing that life meant for him nothing but agony, and that moreover his life could not serve others, and was only going to give useless pain to his attendants, and perhaps involve the sacrifice of health to his wife and children, should commit suicide, what ought we to think of him? He would, no doubt, be breaking the accepted moral code; but why should he not break it?” In the Victorian era, Virginia wrote,” people who had genius were like prophets: different, another breed. They were “ill to live with”...it never struck my father that there was any harm in being “ill to life with. I think, he said unconsciously as he 3 worked himself up into one of those violent outbursts” This is a sign of my genius.” (From Moments of Being). Although her brothers were sent to public schools, Vanessa and Virginia were taught at home, mostly by their parents. This may have been due to economy- Leslie was a man to whom money was an obsession- or to their Victorian belief that the girls should be taught women’s’ skills and then marry, or both. Julia was not a woman who questioned Victorian values. She once signed an anti- suffragette petition holding that women had enough to do in their homes without the vote. Leslie taught his daughters mathematics but he had a violent temper and little patience with young children. He apparently terrified them so that Virginia counted on her fingers for the rest of her life. Being schooled at home also deprived her of the opportunity to develop friends or learn how to socialize. She says “Owing to the fact that I was never at school, I never competed in any way with children of my own age, I have never been able to compare my gifts and defects with other people.” Thus, she probably never had a real sense of her intellectual endowment In middle age she described this in a letter to Vita-Sackville West, one of her lovers, and the wife of Harold Nicholson: “Think how I was brought up! No school; mooning about alone among my father’s books; never any chance to pick up all that goes on in schools—throwing balls; ragging; slang; vulgarities; scenes; jealousies!” We may guess that she competed with her father, who was her role model, in which contest she was not likely to come out ahead.