What was happening to Virginia Woolf?

Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882 and died in Lewes in 1941. He committed suicide by jumping into the River Ouse, near his country house, with his coat full of stones in his pockets.. Before, she wrote a letter to her husband, Leonard Woolf, expressing her anguish in these words:

Virginia Woolf grew up in an environment frequented by writers, artists and intellectuals.. Her sister Vanessa became a famous painter and together with her husband and other intellectuals such as the economist JM Keynes and the philosophers Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, what would be known as the Bloomsbury group was created.

This enlightened, Victorian and cultured environment could not prevent Virginia Woolf’s mind from telling her a bitter existence. For this reason we ask ourselves what was happening to Virgina Woolf in this article and we analyze her life, her work and her illness.

What was happening to Virginia Woolf?

Referring to his psychiatric history, Virginia Woolf suffered from manic-depressive psychosis, which today would be called bipolar disorder. At that time, no treatment for this disorder had yet been developed. Therefore, the evolution of her illness followed its natural course and many data can be inferred through the numerous diaries, the observations that her husband wrote down, and her own work.

In the years following his death, lithium appeared as an indicated treatment for bipolar disorder as well as psychological therapies that have very good results. Among the therapies are psychoeducation, family-marital therapy or cognitive-behavioral therapy.

There was a history of mental illness in his family.so the genetic hypothesis in her case is probable, but it was in her that the symptoms manifested themselves more accentuated due to several aspects of her life:

It was a girl I didn’t want.Her mother and father died when she was still a teenager.meaning an early loss of attachment figures. The lack of communication in the family caused any expression of pain to have to be repressed.The sexual abuse to which she was subjected by a stepbrother.The relationship of emotional dependence on his sister throughout life, full of jealousy and rivalryAmbivalence in the relationship with his father.Resorting to fantasy throughout life as a defense mechanism regarding the incoherent family reality, which fostered the double bind. An incessant internal dialogue that ended up degenerating into an inability to discern between what is real and what is imaginary. The social context between wars. unbearable guilt for all the misfortunes that occurred in his family and that dragged on throughout his life.

His illness and his work… madness and literature

We cannot know if without this mental disorder, Virginia Woolf’s work would have been just as prolific and fascinating.. In this type of disorder, language appears as one of the causes of its course being so distressing. In the case of Virginia, a writer with manic episodes in which words and ideas manifested themselves incessantly, it seems to be something significant.

It seems that some of the symptoms of the disease, especially the flight of ideas, facilitated Virginia’s creativity. Other symptoms of mania populate his diaries and books: thought flight (thought goes faster than words), tachypsychia (speed of thoughts). Sometimes the thoughts even appeared in the form of voices and Virginia interacted with them.

His work, his symptoms and his family past

But all these symptoms that were reflected in his work evoked past family events.. Regarding child abuse, it does not necessarily have to be traumatic if the boy or girl can verbalize what happened and be able to integrate it emotionally…if they repress it, this integration will be more painful and delayed.

In the writer’s context, it was impossible to verbalize feelings and pain due to the hermetic nature of her family members. and this inability and helplessness of not being able to tell anything is reflected in some phrases in his works such as “End of trip“, alluding to the sexual abuse suffered:

His unbearable relationship with words

The true catastrophe of Woolf’s novels does not occur when the protagonists die, but when the words fail. and only the brutality of the objects remains. In these circumstances, the characters are like helpless children without the refuge of phrases.

His diary entries from the late 1940s show that Language had become a source of suffering for Virginia. Similar experiences have been described by other writers such as Sartre in “Nausea”: “I am in the midst of Unnameable Things. I find myself alone, without defenses, surrounded by them…”

This approach is masterfully captured in the film “Las Horas”: We understand that Virginia’s stormy relationship with words is the prelude to her end, as she cannot stop that internal monologue that had characterized her works but that now did not cease to exist in her mind. She no longer appeared in a creative way, but rather tortuous and unbearable.

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