A Woolf for All Seasons
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing A WOOLF FOR ALL SEASONS By Phoebe Pettingell There have been a number of Virginia Woolfs presented to the public over the last three decades. Back in the 1960s, she was...
...We can't dismiss it, because Woolf thought it had colored her whole life...
...Nobody makes this symbiotic partnership between writer and reader more explicit than Woolf "I can see already that no one else has ever known her as I know her," she writes of George Eliot...
...Lee documents the enduring affection between Virginia and Leonard...
...This biography returns us to the writer...
...Woolf remarked of Shelley, "There are some stories which have to be retold by each generation, not that we have anything new to add to them, but because of some queer quality in them which makes them not only Shelley's story but our own...
...Similarly, the issues of sexual orientation and marriage have been complicated by overtendentious interpretations...
...Ultimately the biography concludes that we cannot diagnose her problems, or treat her as our patient...
...Woolf's own discussions of her illness are heavily nuanced...
...By the time I entered college, the burgeoning feminist movement had made A Room of One s Own one of its sacred texts, and a new, angrier portrait of her began to push out the earlier one...
...When she was in the throes of them, birds and strange...
...We learn what it might feel like to be an adult Modernist with a Victorian inner child...
...At the center of Woolf's story are those episodes of emotional breakdown...
...Probably this is why many of Woolf's biographers project so much upon her character...
...It may well be that her extreme apprehension of the reviews of her novels is partly a fear of being thought crazy rather than brilliant...
...An essayist's thoughts, a novelist's characters, a poet's impressions allow us the chance to see and feel through another human being's senses for a while, and thus broaden our own experience...
...However I always think this when I read—don't you...
...He and her sister, Vanessa Bell, were the only people she trusted fully...
...Reading Virginia Woolf was so emotionally absorbing that I found myself wondering where the hours had gone once I put the book down...
...Books like Jacob's Room, To The Lighthouse and The Waves reveal the lives of characters through their thoughts, feelings and mannerisms, as if we were privy to their interiors...
...They may be transmuting their own readings of her evocative novels...
...These include the nature of the female voice in writing, the issue of creativity and sanity, the ambivalence of sexual identity, even the character of the Modernist movement...
...By the time we finish Lee's study, we better understand some of the qualities that made this so...
...That work made excuses, reinterpreted or dismissed unflattering aspects as passing shadows over the essential radiance of the subject...
...She even makes us hear those voices in the head that helped Woolf write when she was sane, but that could, on occasion, drive her over the brink into madness...
...But this does not mean she eschewed closeness to others...
...Then, in the early 1970s, a biography by her nephew Quentin Bell portrayed her as a toughminded Modernist, part of a movement that revolutionized the way we read and look at paintings...
...Today, we see that aspect of her most clearly from her Common Reader pieces, where she continues to share her thoughts and feelings with vulnerability and grace...
...they were the fault of a nervous system too tightly strung, we were told...
...Lee points out that this interpretation ignores the disconcerting truth that their sister was actually quite fond of George, and sincerely mourned his passing...
...At the same time, friendships with women were vital to her...
...to live surrounded by people full of brilliant new ideas and creative experiments, yet to recognize that the circle teetered on the edge of overstimulation and breakdown...
...Certain of her symptoms suggest what would now be called bipolar disorder...
...She knows that there is a risky connection between originality and incoherence...
...Sometimes her descriptions—like the birds who sang to her in ancient Greek—sound rather literary...
...The voices she hears in her head create a new kind of fictional language...
...After her death, T. S. Eliot wrote that "she was a kind of pin which held a lot of people together, and gave them a sense of belonging, of meaning...
...These outbreaks were more than mere "nerves...
...My view overlays with, just touches hers...
...We can only listen to what she tells us, and realize the way her self-perception shaped the way she chose to craft her novels...
...Like the saints of old, poised between interpretations of their voices as demonic and misleading or as true and angelic, there is always the fear that their 'map of the world' is going to be quite unbelievable and unacceptable...
...Back in the 1960s, she was often depicted as a kind of Edwardian Jane Austen—a delicate, impressionist observer who tried to capture in her books interior lives and thoughts as well as objective appearences...
...By the 1980s, books on Woolf began to concentrate on her psychology, and on possible links between episodes of madness and the abuse she had suffered...
...dreamlike creatures mocked her in terrifying hallucinations...
...to have "an angel in the house" for a mother, and an impossible paterfamilias whose emotional neediness drew one's love yet also smothered one...
...In particular, they have stressed her snobbism, the malicious tales she spread about people who considered her a friend, and her repellent anti-Semitism—all the more distasteful since her husband, Leonard, was Jewish...
...Lee chooses to draw us into a compassionate understanding of Woolf, faults and all, by bringing out some of the texture of her life...
...and Dame Edith Smyth, the composer (best known these days for the overture to her opera, The Wreckers, and as "Quaint Irene" in E. F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia stories...
...Again, though, we have no way of sorting out fact from fantasy, at this remove...
...Certain biographers have painted the Duckworth brothers—Virginia's half-siblings on her mother's side—as pedophiles and rapists...
...Some of the treatments she received may have created the more extreme symptoms...
...Emotionally fragile, she avoided the romantic entanglements most denizens of Bloomsbury lived for...
...There is a relation between illness and modernism in Virginia Woolf's writing life...
...Lee observes that "The fear of incomprehensibility links madness and writing...
...the former sometimes passed up trips because she could not bear to part from him even after decades of marriage...
...All these are definitely Postmodern concerns, and Lee makes no bones about being firmly planted in our own time...
...Certainly, Lee manages to make us think we're glimpsing things through her subject's eyes...
...Recalling Eliot's remark about her ability to hold a group together and give it meaning, she was obviously capable of relating strongly to people, of offering and receiving friendship...
...Lee notes that many of the issues Woolf's biography presents are at the forefront of contemporary intellectual concerns...
...At the same time, another part of the Bloomsbury industry was reviving interest in Vita SackvilleWest, and a lesbian Woolf emerged from the story of their "affair" and the gender-bending novel, Orlando, which the relationship inspired...
...Their biographies crowned her queen of the victims...
...Bell evoked the unconventional nature of whole Bloomsbury crowd, inadvertently creating an audience more fascinated by their complicated emotional lives and amours than by their novels or artworks...
...She doesn't strive for the kind of apologetics Lyndall Gordan's 1985 Virginia Woolf A Writer's Life provided...
...In Virginia Woolf(Knopf, 893 pp., $39.95), Hermione Lee points out that this emphasis turned attention toward her subject's mental state...
...Her sister's family made much of Aunt Virginia's nuttiness— this was a way of pigeonholing eccentric, but not necessarily psychotic aspects of her personality that made them nervous...
...Bell provided details from family records of her breakdowns...
...Her collapse into madness and ultimate suicide were touched on only briefly...
...Both women were in love with her, but Woolf kept retreating back into her marriage...
...However, crucial evidence is lacking...
...Since Bloomsbury obsessively speculated about the erotic carryings-on of its members, it didn't take long for researchers to ferret out Virginia's putative aversion to marital relations...
...the waves break upon the shore...
...Twice she formed close attachments with lesbians: the aristocratic popular novelist Vita Sackville-West...
...He also revealed episodes of sexual interference by her half-brothers when she was a girl and teenager...
...Lee observes that all these portraits, pro and con, took readers further and further away from the novels, except as fodder for personal and political revelations...
...Lee approaches the issue of sexual abuse in the same way...
...She leaves us with a vignette of her standing in the yard of Virginia Woolf's childhood home at the seaside: "I can allow myself to suppose that I am seeing something of what she saw...
...As a novelist, Woolf worked "to get inside other people...
...Leonard was the guardian of her health, the person who gave her peace in which to write...
...In fact, as Lee notes, "That confident enjoyment of intimacy which comes from reading is one of the main sources of happiness in Virginia Woolf's life...
...The couple developed a private language of endearment, and though Woolf didn't care for conventional sexual relations, the bond nevertheless maintained a strong physical aspect expressed in cuddling...
...Deep down, under all the sophisticated layers of deconstructionism, there always remains a child willing to suspend disbelief and give in to the illusion of being somebody else for an hour or two...
...Yet part of her wants just a bit more...
...The lighthouse beam strikes round...
...Before critical analysis schools us to notice all the externals in a text—to detach ourselves from it so as to make ironic observations about its various layers—this sense of total immersion is the way we read, till the voice speaking on the page becomes our own...
...The biographer points out that, at this remove, it is impossible to know exactly what was medically wrong...
...However, just as the fanatical adulation of the "Janeites" drove haters of Jane Austen to vent their spleen aloud, a chorus of dissents began to play up Woolfs disagreeable qualities...
...In the same way, Lee shows us her subject through her actions and prose, as well as through the words of others...
...This was, after all, the era of popular novels about such "mad" artists as Michelangelo, Gauguin and Van Gogh—not such farfetched comparisons for a writer as painterly as Woolf...
Vol. 80 • June 1997 • No. 11
