My Madness Saved Me

The Madness and Marriage of Virginia Woolf

Thomas Szasz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351503976
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Psychiatry & Mental Health

"The vast literature on Virginia Woolf's life, work, and marriage falls into two groups. A large majority is certain that she was mentally ill, and a small minority is equally certain that she was not mentally ill but was misdiagnosed by psychiatrists. In this daring exploration of Woolf's life and work, Thomas Szasz--famed for his radical critique of psychiatric concepts, coercions, and excuses--examines the evidence and rejects both views. Instead, he looks at how Virginia Woolf, as well as her husband Leonard, used the concept of madness and the profession of psychiatry to manage and manipulate their own and each other's lives.Do we explain achievement when we attribute it to the fictitious entity we call ""genius""? Do we explain failure when we attribute it to the fictitious entity we call ""madness""? Or do we deceive ourselves the same way that the person deceives himself when he attributes the easy ignition of hydrogen to its being ""flammable""? Szasz interprets Virginia Woolf's life and work as expressions of her character, and her character as the ""product"" of her free will. He offers this view as a corrective against the prevailing, ostensibly scientific view that attributes both her ""madness"" and her ""genius"" to biological-genetic causes. We tend to attribute exceptional achievement to genius, and exceptional failure to madness. Both, says Szasz, are fictitious entities."

1

“Whatever we are to call it”

1

Adeline Virginia Stephen was born in 1882, into a distinguished Victorian family. Her paternal great grandfather, James Stephen (1758–1832), a self-made man, was a lawyer, fervent abolitionist, and friend of the famed English abolitionist William Wilberforce (1759–1833), whose sister he married after his first wife’s death. He had three sons, all of whom became successful lawyers.

Virginia’s paternal grandfather, Sir James Stephen (1789–1859), was a civil servant and one of the great British colonial administrators. Also a committed abolitionist, he drafted the bill (1833) that abolished slavery in the British Empire.¹ He had several “break-downs,” which helped create the belief that the Stephen family was tainted by “hereditary madness.”

Virginia’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), a biographer and essayist, was the founder and first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. He attended Eton, was ordained deacon by the archbishop of York in 1855, and became a priest in 1859. However, he lost his faith, or rather, as he said, “discovered that he never had any.”² In 1864, he declared that he was an agnostic and lost his tutorship at Cambridge. In 1867, Stephen married Harriet Marian, a younger daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray, the novelist. She died in 1875. In 1878, Leslie Stephen married Julia Prinsep Jackson, widow of Herbert Duckworth and the youngest daughter of Dr. John Jackson, a physician, and his wife Maria Pattle (1846–1895), a legendary beauty and published writer. In addition to her two sons whom she brought to the marriage, she had four children by Leslie: Vanessa (1879–1961), Julian Thoby (1880–1906), Adeline Virginia (1882–1941), and Adrian Leslie (1883–1948).

2

In 1895, when Virginia was thirteen, she became depressed following the death of her mother. Her family interpreted this perfectly reasonable and understandable behavior as a “symptom” of a (nervous) “breakdown.”³ Tellingly, Quentin Bell, her nephew and biographer, calls it her “‘first breakdown’ or whatever we are to call it.”⁴ What Virginia’s family and the doctors they consulted called “it” was crucial for determining how they thought about “it,” how they related to Virginia, and how Virginia shaped the rest of her life.

Bell continues: “From now on, she knew that she had been mad and might be mad again.”⁵ Right away, we see how calling Virginia’s emotional reaction to her mother’s death a “(nervous) breakdown” shaped Bell’s understanding of his aunt: To him, it meant that she was mad and destined to always be mad. These interpretations—by Virginia’s family when she was thirteen and by Bell when he wrote a biography of her—went a long way toward shaping how subsequent biographers and commentators analyzed and explained Virginia’s life. Obviously, Virginia could not have “known” that “she had been mad and might be mad again.” She was told that she was mad, others defined her as “mad.” No one at age thirteen has the information or power necessary to rebut such a “diagnosis,” to reject the mad role. Tragically, she never made a serious attempt to do so. On the contrary, she embraced the role and made playing it an integral part of her life strategy—to her profit as well as her peril.

Virginia was perfectly well until her father died in 1904. The four grown Stephen children—Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, and Adrian-were now freed of parental control. Before assuming their new, independent lives, they went traveling in Europe. On the Continent, Virginia had “tantrums.” After returning home, she jumped from a window so close to the ground that the leap caused no physical injury. Bell’s verdict was: “All that summer she was mad,”⁶ reprising his earlier obtuse interpretation of Virginia’s mourning a beloved parent as a mental illness, and omitting that, unlike her siblings, Virginia was very close to her father. She loved him dearly: He was her teacher and companion, and she was his favorite child.⁷

Bell’s account of the Stephen sisters’ differing reactions to their father’s death reflects the different ways we tend to view happy and unhappy behavior. He presents Vanessa’s happiness at becoming an independent adult as motivated by her relief at becoming her own master. In contrast, he presents Virginia’s unhappiness at finding herself free but unprepared for independence as caused by her mental illness. The role-casting is complete, once and for all: Vanessa is sane, Virginia, insane.

Virginia had good reasons to feel depressed and despairing. While she had inherited money from her father sufficient to live on, she was not wealthy enough to be considered an heiress. Educated at home, she had no formal schooling. In any event, earning a living was not a serious option for a young woman of her class. Unem-ployable, sexually and temperamentally disinclined to marry, and well on her way to being defined as crazy by her family and friends, Virginia viewed her future as a void she had no idea how to fill. The death of her father liberated her from parental controls, but she was woefully unprepared to make use of her freedom. Chronologically, legally, and physically, she was an adult, a beautiful, young woman, member of a distinguished, upper-class English family. Existentially, she was an uneducated, unhappy, confused adolescent. What was she to do with her life? She was familiar with the life of the literary person, her father, and decided to embark on the voyage of such a life. She spent the next eight years preparing herself to become a writer. Her leap from a window in 1904 was not a suicide attempt. In 1904, Virginia was an intelligent, twenty-two-year-old woman. She knew how people who want to die kill themselves, for example, by jumping from a high building or ingesting an overdose of sleeping pills. She did not want to die. She wanted to live, but needed a break, time-out to grow up and prepare herself for a meaningful life.

Virginia’s siblings were better prepared to deal with their liberation from a domineering father. Thoby, educated at Cambridge, did not have to face the problem of becoming an independent adult: He died of typhoid fever, aged twenty-four, not long after his father’s death. Adrian, also educated at Cambridge, became a physician, trained as a psychoanalyst, and married a fellow physician and psychoanalyst. Vanessa attended art school, married, had children and lovers, and became a recognized painter: “[She] had got what she wanted—her freedom,” writes Bell. “Her happiness in being delivered from the care and the ill-temper of her father was shockingly evident.”⁸

Virginia’s family and friends belonged to the privileged class. Highly educated—some became psychoanalysts—they could have attuned themselves to her needs. But they were unable or unwilling to put themselves in her shoes. They failed to see her as a young woman faced with an empty and useless life, terrified by the challenges of sex and adulthood. They chose to misinterpret the nonverbal dramatization of her dilemma and despair as evidence of the recurrence of a medical malady, madness, from which she was doomed to suffer the rest of her life. Henceforth, Virginia’s leap from a low window was transformed into a legendary bona fide suicide attempt and transmitted from family member to family member, friend to friend, learned article and book to more learned articles and more books. Who could ever doubt that she was mad? She bore the classic stigmata of insanity: melancholia and attempted self-murder.

Eight years pass. In 1912, Virginia was thirty years old, on the brink of becoming an “old maid.” If she expected to marry, she could not wait much longer. She was eager to escape the status of spinsterhood. At the same time, she felt repelled by heterosexual, or indeed any, intimacy. Nor was she willing to submit to a husband in a traditional, male-dominated marriage. This precluded marriage to a man above her social rank or superior to her in accomplishment. Marrying Leonard Woolf—whose Jewishness she despised and whom she could dominate with her madness and genius—solved the problem of spinsterhood, and created a host of new problems.

3

Leonard Woolf, the son of a successful Jewish barrister, was educated at Cambridge, and had a promising career in the Civil Service. His deepest desire was to shed his Jewish identity and be accepted as an English socialist intellectual and man of letters. A devout Fabian and snob, he loved money and the comforts it could buy.

At Cambridge, Leonard met John Maynard Keynes, Lytton and James Strachey, and Thoby Stephen. He became a member of the Apostles and of a small band that was to form the Bloomsbury group. Other famous members of this group were the poet Rupert Brooke, the painter Duncan Grant, the author Edward Morgan Forster, the journalist Desmond MacCarthy, and the author Gwendolen Raverat.

It was through Thoby that he met the Stephen sisters. Virginia’s first impression of Leonard rested on a report by Thoby: “And then Thoby…would switch off to tell me about another astonishing fellow—a man who trembled perpetually all over… He was a Jew. When I asked why he trembled, Thoby somehow made me feel that it was part of his nature—he was so violent, so savage; he so despised the whole human race.”⁹ This is an uncannily accurate mini-portrait of Leonard Woolf, a man so consumed with hatred that his whole body trembled. Often his hands shook so violently that he was unable to sign his name. One night, in a sort of somnambulistic fury, he dislocated his thumb. He told Thoby that he “dreamt he was throttling a man and dreamt with such violence that when he woke up he had pulled his own thumb out of joint.”¹⁰ This was the man who viewed himself as a dedicated social reformer, the benefactor of mankind, and lifelong nurse to a “sick” wife. I shall say more about Leonard later. Here it is enough to mention that, during World War I, he was rejected from military service as mentally unfit, a deferment then granted very rarely.

Leonard was eager to marry one of the Stephen sisters. His first choice was Vanessa, who was not interested in him. He settled for Virginia. Before consenting to marrying Leonard, she wrote him a remarkable letter, warning him of the difficulties that would await them. Yet, she expressed her willingness to take him as her husband. The letter is a fearfully forthright document, articulating every one of the problems destined to cause them misery.

On May 1, 1912, Virginia wrote: “It seems to me that I am giving you a great deal of pain…and therefore I ought to be as plain with you as I can…”¹¹ The theme of Virginia’s “giving pain” to Leonard recurs throughout the marriage and the words, “I am giving you a great deal of pain” are repeated, almost verbatim, twenty-nine years later in the suicide note she leaves him. This has not prevented writers from viewing Virginia as Leonard’s helpless victim, the weak and helpless wife tyrannized and abused by the domineering-misogynist husband.

Virginia’s letter begins by her remarking that, if they married, Leonard would have to give up his promising career with the Colonial Service. For seven hard years, Leonard had served the Empire, which he loathed, and risen to a high position, ruling the Ceylonese (now Sri Lankans). Virginia’s joining him in a conventional marriage—giving up her cosseted life in London for that of the wife of a high-raking Colonial officer in some far off place in the Empire—was obviously not an option.

Next, Virginia bracketed Leonard’s lust and Jewishness, both of which she experienced as alien, alienating, and abhorrent: “I feel angry sometimes at the strength of your desire. Possibly your being Jewish comes in also at this point. You seem so foreign…. As I told you brutally the other day, I feel no physical attraction in you. There are moments—when you kissed me the other day was one—when I feel no more than a rock.”¹²

Even her nephew and loyal hagiographer, Bell, acknowledges that Virginia was put off by Leonard’s Jewishness, a feeling she must have acquired as effortlessly as she acquired the accent of her class. Virginia felt repelled by Leonard, both as a person and as a potential lover. It is important to note that, in this letter, Virginia articulated many of the conflicts that the couple were no longer willing to acknowledge after they married.

From this moment on, the “sane” Virginia averted her eyes from the bitter truths of her marriage. She denied that she was, literally, mad (angry) at Leonard. At the same time, during her “breakdowns,” Virginia displayed “symptoms” that expressed precisely this painful reality. In turn, those around her defined these communications as the delusions of her sick mind; after she “recovered,” Virginia agreed with this face- and marriage-saving interpretation; and, after Virginia died, virtually all contributors to the vast Woolf literature bought this fable.

On August 10, 1912, Virginia Stephen and Leonard Woolf were married at St. Pancras Registry Office. They had many reasons to marry, but loving each other was not one of them. Nor was having sex or children. Virginia wanted to occupy the social role of a married woman. She aspired to what American women in the postwar years often called the “MRS. degree.” Leonard, too, was eager to wed and willing to marry her on whatever terms she set. She married down, taking as her husband an odd outsider, a Jew with no personal distinction or family wealth, an ordinary man who had to work for a living or depend on his wife’s money. He married up, taking as his wife a “mad” member of the English intellectual and social elite, a woman repelled by Jews and male sexuality.

Admittedly, Virginia was an odd person, and she knew it. The epitome of what men used to call a “frigid woman,” she had odd habits of dressing and eating. She was frigid not only sexually but also existentially: She was determined to protect herself from being “known,” carnally or spiritually. Yet, she wanted to marry. Thus, she chose to marry a man who was not only culturally alien and socially inferior to her, but who was so consumed with his own conflicts, confusions, and prejudices that he was neither interested in or capable of understanding her, or anyone else for that matter. Keynes biographer Roy Harrod offers this pertinent observation about Leonard’s personality: “When I told him [Leonard Woolf] that I could not regard [G. E.] Moore’s philosophy (as distinct from his personality) with respect, he seemed deeply offended and began to take up the attitude of a headmaster. I felt I was in serious danger of corporal punishment…. Unfortunately, I knew a great deal more about philosophy than Woolf; his defense was quite trivial. I hastily changed the subject.”¹³

Leonard’s autocratic, self-centered personality made him an ideal husband for Virginia. She could shut him out of her life—genitally, verbally, spiritually—and he would accept ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Chronology
• Dramatis Personae
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• 1. “Whatever we are to call it”
• 2. “In the head you know”
• 3. “He shut people up”
• 4. “My madness saved me”
• 5. “A screwed up shrunk very old man”
• 6. “He will go on, better without me”
• 7. “He’s got a finger in my mind”
• Appendix I: Virginia Woolf, Mad Genius
• Appendix II: The Mad Genius Problem
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index