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The Madness of Virginia Woolf
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Nicole Ward Jouve |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Virginia Woolf's life holds a fascination for admirers of English literature, not least because of her suicide in 1941. Daughter of the pre-eminent Victorian Leslie Stephen, the history of her mental health provides insights which go beyond her work, into the culture and society of which she was a product. In this extract from The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, Nicole Ward Jouve looks at the concept of psychoanalysis in relation to Woolf's madness. |
 igmund Freud was almost twenty-six and about to become engaged when Virginia Woolf was born, in 1882. She was two when he went to Paris to study hysteria under Charcot, thirteen when her mother died and Freud co-published the Studies in Hysteria (1895). She was close to Dora's age when in 1900 a young hysterical woman called 'Dora' was taken to Freud by her father to be analysed, and when The Interpretation of Dreams came out. By 1912, when she married Leonard Woolf, Freud had published much, founded the Psychoanalytic Society, and his ideas were becoming internationally known. |
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| Virginia Woolf: her life was contemporary with the birth and development of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic science and practice. | |
This may be no more than a coincidence of dates: one could establish such parallels with any of Woolf's contemporaries. But it is relevant to how Freud's initiation of psychoanalysis and Woolf's own madness have been perceived and interpreted by recent Western feminisms. They have repeatedly stressed that psychoanalysis was born from work on hysteria--that the hysteric's symptoms spoke of repressed trauma. The hysterics that Freud saw being treated by Charcot were all female. Dora, the young woman whom he attempted to treat by means of the talking cure in 1900, had been traumatised by a complex family situation--sexually pursued by a family friend of her father's age whilst her father was having an affair with the friend's wife. Alice Miller, in Thou Shalt Not Be Aware (1986, pp. 109--20), points out that in 1896 Freud had posited that at the bottom of all cases of hysteria he had studied there were occurrences of premature sexual experiences, generally incest, often seduction by the father. Later on, however, being unwilling to believe so many perverted acts had been committed by respectable family men, Freud abandoned the seduction theory and replaced it with the drive theory, the idea that it was the child's own unconscious desire for the parent that led to the delusion of seduction. In Woolf's time the latter view had been accepted; her own sister-in-law Karin Stephen held it. |
Incest and intrigue
Throughout the 1980s in the west awareness has grown of the extent to which children were sexually abused, often by a close member of the family, in incestuous situations. What Florence Rush had called 'the best-kept secret' ceased to be a secret, and one scandal after another erupted, especially in the USA, and in Great Britain as the scale of the problem became clear (F. Rush, The Best Kept Secret: Sexual Abuse of Children, 1980). Some forms of psychotherapy even came to rest on the idea that sexual abuse was at the core of any psychic disturbance evinced by young women, and that recalling the abuse could constitute the cure. Freud was seen as the man who had first of all come to perceive this (the seduction theory) but who, with the drive theory, had betrayed the 'truth' and his female patients with it. In this perspective, Freudian-based psychoanalysis came to be seen as a new form of repression, resisted by former analysts like Alice Miller, who denounced a parental conspiracy to prevent children from being 'aware'. |
There are diverging versions of the severity, frequency and nature of Woolf's mental illness, and even of what the diagnosis should be: manic depression? Cyclothymia (i.e., periodic breakdowns interspersed by long periods of sanity)? Hysteria? Schizophrenia? Should words like 'madness' or 'insanity' be used or are they crude and inappropriate? In her vigorous biography, in what is clearly a rebuff to hard terminology or the search for single causes, Hermione Lee states: 'Virginia Woolf was a sane woman who had an illness ... Her illness is attributable to genetic, environmental and biological factors. It was periodic, and recurrent' (H. Lee, Virginia Woolf, 1996, p. 175). The rest of her 'Madness' chapter is devoted to a rich description of the intricacies of the case. That it was a major element of Woolf's life, and a component of her talent is difficult to dispute. Virginia Woolf had her first bout of insanity after her mother's death when she was thirteen in 1895. She broke down again after her father's death in 1904, then in 1910 after years filled with family trouble (including her brother Thoby's death), after she had been working on her first novel, The Voyage Out. And then again after a year of marriage to Leonard Woolf. Further breakdowns followed, which have often been linked with the strain of working on, or completing, a work of fiction, but not always and not only. In almost all of these attacks, she tried to kill herself. They are dramatically signalled by periodic interruptions in the Diaries. There is no clear evidence to connect them with any one cause. Hermione Lee states that the illness: 'was precipitated, but not indubitably caused, by the things which happened to her' (Virginia Woolf, p. 175). This statement (which is not open to more subtle psychoanalytic interpretations) together with the accounts of history of mental disturbance in the Stephen family and the manifold pressures and miseries the Stephen children had to survive, are offered by Hermione Lee as correctives to a psychoanalysis-inspired version of Woolf that has been influential: Louise DeSalvo's. |
Louise DeSalvo made a powerful effort to trace the attacks back to abuse which Virginia would have been subjected to as early as when she was six. The whole context of post-1980s discovery of the societal extent of childhood sexual abuse, and its damaging consequences, as well as new feminist research initiated in the United States under Jane Marcus's impact are relevant to her thesis. Hers is the major study, using psychoanalytic concepts and resisting them at the same time, to place Woolf's madness centre-stage and to interpret it in terms of the incestuous advances she suffered at the hands of her two step-brothers, Gerald and George Duckworth. DeSalvo very much counters earlier rosy accounts of the Stephen family, stressing instead the patterns of repression, neglect and even cruelty that made it up. Witness, she argues, the family's pitilessness to Leslie Stephen's daughter from his first marriage, Laura, punished for her 'perverse' behaviour, locked away in the home and eventually sent to an asylum. Or Leslie's exploitation of Stella Duckworth, Julia Stephen's daughter by her first marriage: he used her as a replacement mother to his children after his wife Julia's death. She died early, and then Vanessa, Virginia's other sister, was exploited in her turn. DeSalvo also adduces the violent intrusive visits of a mad cousin, J. K. Stephen, in pursuit of Stella and allowed to roam the house, and the general neediness and predatoriness of the men in the Stephen circle (L. DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf: the Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on her Life and Works, 1991, ch. 2). She points out that Woolf herself had stressed the importance of the abuse she had suffered, and had been prompted to do so by her initial encounter with psychoanalytic notions. In November 1920 she read a paper to the Freudian-inspired Memoir Club: she called it '22 Hyde Park Gate', which was the address at which the Stephen family had been living when she was a child and evoked George Duckworth's 'malefactions', his visits to her bed which lasted through the many years of her adolescence and young womanhood, which she felt 'had spoilt her life for her before it had fairly begun' (DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf, pp. 3, 5, 100, 121). But in 1939, when Woolf began to write her autobiography, 'A Sketch of the Past', she went deeper and further back. She embarked upon what she called her 'autoanalysis'--a kind of catharsis through writing--and attempted to recall her feelings as well as tell what had happened. |
Autobiography
In 'A Sketch of the Past' she came to connect her appalling moments of depression, the sense which she had earlier described as being 'exposed on a high ledge in full light' with a childhood experience: she was six or seven and recovering from a bad bout of 'flu when her step-brother Gerald Duckworth lifted her up 'on a ledge' usually used for stacking dishes and explored her body, down to her 'private parts' (ibid., pp. 99, 110, 104). Louise DeSalvo connects Woolf's writing of 'A Sketch of the Past' which induced, or was unable to lighten, a growingly unbearable burden of feelings, with her recent encounter with Freud. She reads Woolf's diary remark that Freud reduced her 'to a whirlpool' as the feeling that she was being yet further repressed: since Freud had ended up denying the seduction theory, he would have been invalidating the memories she was recapturing (ibid., p. 129). This denial, combined with terror of a (bodily) invasion of England by the Nazis, contributed to her suicide. Whilst I would agree with DeSalvo that Woolf's treatment at the hands of her step-brothers and the feelings of rage and outrage that must as a result have been simmering deep inside may well have been one of the determining factors in her psychic illness, I feel one must refrain from laying Woolf's suicide at Freud's door, as DeSalvo almost does. It was Moses and Monotheism that Woolf is known to have been reading around 1939, not the Dora Case or the Studies in Hysteria. |
DeSalvo's case may be excessive, and has been questioned, especially in the USA, in a variety of ways but especially on the grounds of simplistic psychoanalytic interpretations. Her readings are one-sided, unsympathetic to the various men in Woolf's life (for what damage had the Duckworth brothers themselves suffered as children, what models of adult behaviour had they been given for them to be so abusive of their half-siblings? Could one not lay Leslie Stephen's neurotic and selfish behaviour at the door of his own 'mad' father?). Damage in families travels in many directions. The French child analyst Françoise Dolto claims that it takes three generations of neurotics to produce one psychotic child: it would be fascinating to apply what she describes in the conclusion to Le Cas Dominique (1985, p. 246) about parents and grandparents to Virginia's parents and grandparents. One must balk at seeing women, especially young girls, as the necessary victims of exploitative or predatory men. Family dynamics are infinitely complex, and human resourcefulness paradoxical and immense. This is not to deny the awfulness of what was done to her: but if one looks at the lives they were able to construct for themselves, Virginia Woolf was much more powerful than her step-brothers. |
Yet DeSalvo's case has unquestionable merits: it produces some insightful readings, it corrects other biographical versions that ignore or downplay a crucial element in Woolf's life. It also illuminates a number of metaphors and anchors some of Woolf's characters in her own experience, and our own readings may well be changed as a result. Rose in The Years has been traumatised by a childhood experience; in The Voyage Out Rachel's father is suspected by Helen Ambrose of 'nameless atrocities with regard to his daughter'. Depressive Rhoda in The Waves can also be read as bearing the marks of acute past trauma. Are the Pargiter siblings evoking their creator's childhood when Martin says: '"What awful lives children live! ... Don't they Rose?" "Yes", Rose replies: "And they can't tell anybody".' At this point 'There was another gust and the sound of glass crashing' (The Years, 1958, p. 171). |
The 'talking cure'
But by the 1920s there was the means to 'tell', the 'talking cure': means that would have brought glass crashing in a liberating way, enabled the then mature woman to escape from her bell-jar. '22 Hyde Park Gate' had been a first step: why did the Woolfs not consult an analyst? The main reason may well have been Virginia Woolf's own suspicion of psychoanalysis, and her downright hostility to its practitioners. According to Alix Strachey, it was feared that psychoanalysis might endanger Woolf's creativity: this reasoning is attributed to Leonard Woolf. Frances Partridge told Hermione Lee that it was then regarded as 'dangerous and counterproductive for anyone who had had a major breakdown or attempted suicide' (Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 197). Jane Marcus provides an additional useful set of answers. Out of the twelve or so doctors who were consulted at one time or at another by the various relatives, especially Leonard Woolf, she picks out the major influence, Dr Savage. She contrasts Virginia Woolf's sister-in-law Karin Stephen's humane Psychoanalysis and Medicine (1935) with Dr Savage's Insanity and the Allied Neuroses (1884), thereby contrasting the humaneness of psychoanalysis and the lack of it in the psychiatrists and doctors consulted by Virginia's immediate circle. Dr Savage it was who had been called upon by the Stephen family after Virginia had tried to kill herself after long nursing of her father on his deathbed (Jane Marcus, Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy, 1987, p. 101). Savage saw heredity as a primary cause: James Stephen, Virginia's paternal grandfather, had suffered from bouts of madness similar to hers; there was Laura; there was J. K. Stephen, the cousin, also suicidal. Savage had recommended force-feeding, rest, forbade reading: Virginia was to replace her book with a spade. Like the American Dr Weir whose 'rest-and-be-treated-as-a-child' treatment was denounced by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her autobiographical story The Yellow Wallpaper, Savage thought that education and exercise of the intellect was bad for women (and for working men). |
Woolf's attacks on psychiatrists (Holmes and Bradshaw in Mrs Dalloway) has been connected with her experiences at the hands of Dr Savage and his colleague Sir William Gull by Jane Marcus as well as by Elaine Showalter in The Female Malady (1987). Marcus's answer to why the Woolf family did not consult a Freudian analyst is persuasive, especially when added to those already outlined: by the time psychoanalytic help might have been available there had been built at the hand of doctors like Savage such a pattern of belief in hereditary insanity and the connection between insanity and genius, as well as belief in a physical treatment of 'food, rest and no mental work' that other forms of help were not even envisaged (Showalter, The Female Malady, p. 100). In the debate, as so often in the twentieth century when breakdown occurs, psychiatry goes to war with psychoanalysis. Without wanting to deny the help that psychiatry can give nor exclude genetic elements nor the insights that can be gained through an investigation of childhood abuse, I own that I prefer the more complex version of events that psychoanalysis produces: through seeing the psyche as made through dynamic interaction with others, as acting as well as acted upon, and the seat of unknown submerged and at times strangely emerging forces. It leaves more room for freedom. What has been made psychically, through relationships, can be repaired psychically, through relationship to the analyst or a source of therapeutic help, in ways that call for all the resources of the self rather than put it at the mercy of specialists or blame it on others. Or it can be turned to fruitful uses, aesthetic, moral, spiritual. I admire the manifold ways in which Woolf created out of the tremendous tensions and pressures that were in her, and that at times flooded her, as well as the courage with which she undertook her own autoanalysis towards the end of her life. She wrote in Moments of Being, with reference to her writing To The Lighthouse where she felt she had exorcised her parents at last, especially her mother's shade: 'I suppose I did for myself what psycho-analysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest' (Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, ed. J. Schulkind, 1982, p. 94). |
Whether Woolf's madness could have been cured or made tolerable at the hands of anyone is of course a matter for speculation. One can dream that her meeting with Melanie Klein, whom she liked, in early 1939 might have encouraged her to seek for treatment. Could relief have come at the hands of Marion Milner, a Woolf admirer who successfully treated a young schizophrenic woman over a period of twenty years, as she recounts in The Hands of the Living God? (1969). For the presence of a loving and supportive 'mother' figure at times of stress (Violet Dickinson in 1910, Ethel Smyth in the late years) seems to have made a difference. But no talking cure was attempted, probably none ever thought of. What matters, it seems to me, is not to talk away the importance of Woolf's illness, whatever name it be given and whatever cause may be given for it. There are links that are too evident between the childhood traumas and the insanity, between the insanity and the sensibility, the particular vibration of Woolf's genius for the madness to be ignored as some kind of regrettable element in her make-up. In 1924, writing critically about the Stephens, their 'cold fingers, so fastidious, so critical, such taste', she adds: 'My madness has saved me' (Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1975-80, vol. 3, p. 92). In 1930 she wrote in her Diary 'I believe these illnesses are in my case--how shall I express it?--partly mystical' (Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 192). 'On Being Ill' described the 'astonishing' spiritual changes she experienced. 'Undiscovered countries' are revealed 'when the lights of health go down'. Only a 'lion tamer' would have the strength 'to look these things squarely in the face'. 'There is a virgin forest in each' (in The Moments and Other Essays, 1948, p. 10). One must, I think, equally beware of romanticising the illness, of not seeing how much alchemical hard work and determination enabled her to transform the material of madness into the material of art. Left to itself, the madness would only have produced scribbles, as Septimus Warren Smith's does: 'If dreams become too widely divorced from truth they develop into an insanity which in literature is generally an evasion on the part of the artist' (Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 195). Woolf was not one for evasion. |
It must be pointed out, however, that no full-scale analytic study of Woolf has been attempted. There certainly is room for one. Given the amount of documentation that exists about the Stephen family, it would be fascinating to see.
This ia an extract from pages 246-52 of "Virginia Woolf and Psychoanalysis" by Nicole Ward Jouve, in The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, edited by Sue Roe and Susan Sellers, published by Cambridge University Press. Copyright Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Image of Virginia Woolf used with permission of the of the National Portrait Gallery, London. (www.npg.org.uk) |
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