The day before yesterday I finished Virginian Woolf's 1928 classic Orlando, the first time I had read it. This novel (subtitled "a biography") follows the life of its eponymous hero from his or her boyhood in Elizabethan England up to the time Woolf finished writing it, the 11th of October 1928. Orlando goes through many phases in his life; in fact partway through the novel he changes gender, from a man into a woman. Orlando is a comic Phantasy or Burlesque, a work of powerful intelligence and of penetrating psychological insight, that takes as its main subjects love, life, letters and identity; it is characteristic of the comic tone of the novel that no-one seems to notice that Orlando lives for close to four hundred years and, when he switches gender, everyone accept it basically without reservation.
I thought I would write a little about Woolf in today's post. As usual I will cite my sources. My information comes from her wikipedia page, the little that I have picked up about her life over the years, and the two novels I have read by her, Orlando and Mrs Dalloway, the later having been read back in 2010.
Those who have only a superficial understanding of Virginia Woolf might associate her with two derogatory terms: 'lesbian' and 'mad'. The reason for the first descriptor is that Woolf had a documented affair with a woman, Vita Sackville-West, in the 'twenties: Orlando is, in fact, dedicated to Vtia. The reason for the second descriptor is that Woolf had a number of documented 'nervous break-downs' during her life, the first being in 1897 when she was just fifteen, the last right before her death. When Woolf drowned herself, in 1941, her suicide note to her husband reads in part "Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do." Her 'illness' was a pivotal part of her life. I wish to tackle these two subjects, her bisexuality and her madness, because they interest me, in this post and in that order.
When I was younger, and stupid, I though Woolf must have been a closet lesbian, a lesbian who had married a man (I now know Leonard Woolf in 1912) to conform to Edwardian notions of respectability. There is a problem with this reading of her life though: in Mrs Dalloway, Woolf candidly describes a woman who has had a lesbian relationship in her youth but is now middle aged and has been comfortably married to a man for some time. One would expect a 'closet lesbian' to hide her experiences rather than talk about them. (I shall return to Mrs Dalloway later.) And of course Woolf was married to a man most of her life, from 1912 until her death in 1941. Some have argued that Leonard exacerbated her 'illness' but I feel (admittedly without much evidence) that this is untrue. In this context a small digression may be interesting. In her letters Woolf shows some pronounced indications of anti-semitism. This was common at the time: it sometimes seems that everyone in Europe (with the notable exception of James Joyce) was anti-semitic then. And yet Leonard was himself Jewish and Woolf would often refer to him lovingly as "my Jew". Woolf was a complicated creature to be sure.
According to letters Sackville-West wrote, her relationship with Woolf in the 'twenties was only consummated twice. In the context of a lesbian relationship, I am unsure what "consummated" means. But it does suggest that 'lesbian' might be too strong a word.
Whatever Woolf's sexuality, we would expect to learn something about it from her books and perhaps Orlando might be informative. Viriginia Woolf was very good at describing sexual attraction, from both a man's and a woman's perspective. She was aware, moreover, that social norms of male and female beauty change over time and took delight in mocking it. We should know now, of course, that these norms change. In the nineteen-sixties, the era of Twiggy, beautiful women were supposed to be skinny; today, though, the ideal of female beauty is far more voluptuous (think Kim Kardashian or Scarlett Johansen). In the Elizabethan era, during which period the first part of Orlando is set, when men wore tights, women were attracted to men's legs in the same way that, now, they are attracted to a well-defined set of abdominal muscles. Orlando contains a running gag, in the early part when the hero is a man, about Orlando's possession of an extraordinary comely pair of legs. It comes up several times to great comic effect. When Orlando leaves Britain for Constantinople, in the second half of the seventeenth century, for instance, Nell Gwyn offers the following comment. " 'Twas a thousand pities, that amorous lady sighed, that such a pair of legs should leave the country."
There are many passages in Orlando worth quoting but I shall restrict myself to one, the moment Orlando, then a man, meets his first great love, the Russian Princess Sasha. It is quite long so I shall sadly not quote in it full.
"He had indeed just brought his feet together about six in the evening the of the seventh of January at the finish of some such quadrille or minuet when he beheld, coming from the pavilion of the Muscovite Embassy, a figure, which, whether boy's or woman's, for the loose tunic and trousers of the Russian fashion served to disguise the sex, filled him the highest curiosity. The person, whatever the name or sex, was about middle height, very slenderly fashioned, and dressed entirely in oyster-coloured velvet, trimmed with some unfamiliar greenish colored fur. But these details were obscured by the extraordinary seductiveness which issued from the whole person […] When the boy, for alas, it must be – no woman could skate with such speed and vigor – swept almost on tiptoes past him, Orlando was ready to tear his hair with vexation that the person was of his own sex, and thus all embraces were out of the question. But the skater came closer. Legs, hands, carriage, were a boy's, but no boy ever had a mouth like that; no boy had those breasts; no boy had eyes which looked as if they had been fished from the bottom of the sea. Finally, coming to a stop and sweeping a curtsey with the utmost grace to the King, who was shuffling past on the arms of some Lord-in-waiting, the unknown skater came to a standstill. She was not a handbreadth off. She was a woman. Orlando stared; trembled; turned hot; turned cold; longed to hurl himself through the summer air; to crush acorns beneath his feet; to toss his arms with the beech trees and oaks […]"
In this passage, Woolf captures perfectly the attraction a tomboyish girl can induce upon a man (the French word for this quality being 'gamine'). It is an example of Woolf's wonderful perspicacity. It is a thing that impresses me so much about Woolf, her incredible ability to write from perspectives not her own, including from a man's. Orlando contains passages proposing that suggest that everyone contains a masculine and feminine aspect, an idea quite Jungian. Is it true? Alas, I cannot draw any firm conclusions about Woolfe's sexuality from Orlando and the little else I have read but I hope that these observations suggest something to the reader. There are perhaps those who can go further.
I would now like to turn to the second subject I wish to discuss, her 'illness'. This is, of course, quite central to any discussion of her life. Modern scholars have suggested Woolfe had 'manic-depression' (what we now call 'bi-polar') but, in fact, and despite what I used to think, the line between bi-polar disorder and schizophrenia is actually quite hard to draw; it is arguable that Woolf in fact had schizophrenia (if we concede, as we should, that schizophrenia is an episodic rather than continuing condition). The evidence for this is in Mrs Dalloway. Mrs Dalloway follows two protagonists over the course of day: not only Mrs Dalloway herself as she prepares for a party that evening but also a character called Septimus who has returned home from the First World War with shell-shock. The novel employs a Joycean stream of consciousness, writing from both character's perspectives, and it is plain, from how Septimus thinks, that he is utterly psychotic. When I read Mrs Dalloway, in 2010, I was struck by the accuracy, the authenticity, with which she described what it is like to endure a psychotic episode, from the inside; it was an accuracy that could not have been born from imaginative empathy but only from actual experience. Woolf could not have written this unless she genuinely knew what psychosis was like from her own life. There is a second aspect of Mrs Dalloway that seems especially significant to me. Woolf had experience both of a homosexual relationship and of madness but, in Mrs Dalloway she separates out these two parts of herself. Mrs Dalloway is a completely sane woman who participated in a lesbian relationship during her youth but has been respectably and happily married to a man for some time; Septimus is a completely straight man who has developed schizophrenia as the result of his war experiences. Often writers want to make political points in their writings and it seems to me that Woolf is doing just that: she is saying, in Mrs Dalloway, that sexual confusion and madness are two separate things. This is something that modern psychiatrists would be well advised to remember.
One question that occupies us today and has occupied us for time immemorial is this: is identity fixed or fluid? Many people today assume that identity is fixed - an example I would adduce to show this is the truly horrible song Same Love by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis with its refrain "I can't change/ Even if I try". Woolf by contrast thought identity was fluid, explored this idea in her books and demonstrated it through her own life. So, which position is right? I don't know… but I would be inclined to trust Virginia Woolf over Macklemore and Lewis.
One final point… It may seem from a cursory understanding of Woolf's life that she might indeed have possessed an 'organic illness' as modern psychiatrists say. As I have argued before, I don't think mental 'illness' is indeed an organic disease. I feel I need to point out that you could make the case that she was driven to bouts of madness by her experiences and by the world in which she lived. Arguably, one of the things that worsened her condition was her interactions with the medical fraternity. (This idea is defended by Stephen Trombley). If she never recovered from her condition, as John Nash arguably did, it can only be because the problems in her life that had caused the 'illness' in the first place were never addressed and never resolved.
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