psyco

BENEATH A ROUGHER SEA

Virginia Woolf's Psychiatric History

...But misery still delights to trace

Its semblance in another's case.

No voice divine the storm allayed,

No light propitious shone,

When, snatched from all effectual aid,

We perished, each alone:

But I beneath a rougher sea,

And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.

William Cowper, The Castaway, 1799

INTRODUCTION

Virginia Woolf holds a unique, if controversial, place in twentieth century literature. She won acclaim during her life as a novelist and essayist; posthumously she is perhaps more admired as a diarist and letter writer, and as a subject for biographies,
reminiscences and doctoral theses - the so-called Bloomsbury industry. In the United States she figures prominently in feminist studies.

She and her husband were central figures in the Bloomsbury Group, which included writers like Lytton Strachey, artists like her
sister Vanessa and Duncan Grant, the art critic Clive Bell, and even an economist, Maynard Keynes, married to a ballet dancer.
She came from a distinguished family on both sides. Her father's first wife was a daughter of Thackeray. Her father Sir Leslie
Stephen was the founder and editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, an important man of letters, and a well-known
alpinist. Her sister was an artist, a cousin one of the first English psychoanalysts. Her husband Leonard, a respected left-wing
political journalist and novelist, was not overshadowed by her success. Together they founded the Hogarth Press, whose
publications included TS Eliot and the first complete English translation of Freud's works.

The Bloomsbury set was said, by Dorothy Parker, to comprise pairs who had affairs in squares. Their relationships were
complicated, promiscuous, and frequently homosexual or bisexual. They wrote about themselves and their friends at inordinate
length, first in their diaries and correspondence, and later in their memoirs. Virginia Woolf herself was a prolific correspondent and diarist for most of her life, and her husband published several volumes of memoirs.

As a result, her state of mind and her health over the 59 years of her life are remarkably well documented. Yet 'Was she mad?'is a question that preoccupies many of her present-day literary critics. She certainly thought so. In her letters and diary she often uses the word, writing matter-of-factly: 'When I was mad'. It was a view shared by her husband Leonard, her family, and her nephew and official biographer Quentin Bell. Contemporaries, friends and relatives, knew about, and recorded her instability, and her past illnesses and serious overdose were not closely guarded secrets in her lifetime, or immediately after her suicide. The most senior London specialists were consulted often, examined and treated her, and were in no doubt that she was mentally ill.

And yet today literary critics are divided into two vocal camps. There are those who accept the received view of her, her family, and her doctors, set out by Quentin Bell, her nephew, in the two volumes of his 'official' biography; and those who reject it. This other group comprises critics with various axes to grind, who believe that by a study of her life and work they can 'understand' her symptoms. Having done so to their satisfaction, they believe that they have explained away her madness. They believe that someone whose symptoms - or at least their content - can be 'understood' cannot be mad. In Karl Jasper's terms they confuse Verstehen and Erklarung; failing to realise that understanding the content of a psychiatric symptom or illness does not explain the form of the illness.

Much of this 'understanding' relates to her history of sexual abuse in childhood, and attempts to relate it to her adult illnesses.
Others, with more knowledge of literature than life or psychiatry, assert that she was not 'really' ill at all.
Few qualified psychiatrists have commented on her psychiatric history, perhaps because they find little to disagree with in the
orthodox view that she suffered from manic-depressive psychosis. And yet, although some of the events are now almost a century old, the unparallelled documentation available from the patient alone, combined with her intelligence, and her ability to convey subtleties of feeling, illuminate the relationship between mood and creativity.

Original sources will be quoted extensively. It seems sensible to trust records or comments made at the time. To take but one
example - her husband Leonard Woolf, during her long and severe illness in 1915 made brief, cryptic, but daily entries about her symptoms and progress. In a court of law such a record, made at the time, would carry great weight. But not to some critics, who argue that her husband's comments must be treated with suspicion because of masculine bias, and his desire, conscious or otherwise, to dominate his wife. Her husband's and other contemporary records can be compared, and their consistency assessed.

There is no disputing her suicide. It will prove useful to begin at the end of her life, then move back in time to review the major
illnesses of her life. Later, her childhood, personality, and family history will be examined, to explore their relevance to her record of illness.