In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Postmortem Diagnoses of Virginia Woolf's "Madness": The Precarious Quest for Truth Nancy Topping Bazin The reputation of British writer Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is now well established. Her brilliance as a writer is seldom contested, and her place in the literary canon is assured. Whether interested in literary traditions, textual studies, applied feminism, or postmodern theory, most scholars and critics admire what she had to say and how she said it. The variety, volume, and quality of her writings are impressive; her skill as a writer is seen not only in her eight novels but also in her essays, diaries, letters, short stories, biographies and nonfictional works A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas. A principal area of scholarly discussion and controversy in recent years has centered, however, on what she and her husband, Leonard Woolf, referred to as her periods of "madness." These scholarly discussions have been characterized by imprecise use of language, difficulties stemming from the lack of real knowledge (as opposed to guesswork) that prevails still in psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis, and a desire to say the cause of her mental illness was predominantly this or that when it could have been any number of causes. Since no accurate diagnosis was made while she was alive due to the ignorance and/or biases of the doctors who attended her, the truth has probably slipped away. Therefore, it is important not to oversimplify and to admit that we can only speculate upon the various factors that caused her breakdowns, her suicide attempts, and finally her death. The causes overlapped and intertwined until it is probably impossible to isolate, to any meaningful extent, one from another. Furthermore, although the trauma of incest or bereavement may well have caused her mental illness, the bipolarity prominent in her aesthetic vision and philosophy could as easily have come from genetic factors. Certainly, bipolarity, characteristic of the manic-depressive experience and the larger category of bipolar disorders, does match with 133 134 Dionysus in Literature her perceptions of her parents' personalities (described in her autobiographical novel To the Lighthouse) and with her own ways of conceptualizing both life and art. Roger Poole stated that his purpose in writing The Unknown Virginia Woolf was "to show that the words 'mad,' 'insane,' 'lunacy' must be withdrawn, since Virginia's behaviour throughout her life is...explicable in terms of cause and effect" (3). He prefers the terms "nervous collapse" or "a temporary lack of control, or some kind of breakdown" (22). In All That Summer She Was Mad, Stephen Trombley insists "the image of Virginia as a bedridden lunatic is one that ought to be dispelled"; instead he says she had "breakdowns," all explicable in terms of the traumatic events and pressures that preceded them (9). The preference of both Poole and Trombley for the word "breakdown" seemingly has more to do with connotations than denotations, for Evelyn Stone's American Psychiatric Clossary defines "nervous breakdown" as "a nonmedical, nonspecific euphemism for a mental disorder." In a quote featured on the dust jacket of louise DeSalvo's fascinating book Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work, May Sarton claims that after reading DeSalvo's book "no one will ever again believe that [Virginia Woolf] was mad." These rejections of "madness" as the proper word to describe Woolf's "breakdowns" are put forth without defining "madness" or acknowledging that "madness" is a general, lay word similar to the slightly more precise term "psychosis." A psychosis is "any mental disorder in which the personality is very seriously disorganized." There are two kinds of psychoses: "(a) functional (characterized by lack of apparent organic cause, and principally of a schizophrenic or manic-depressive type), and (b) organic (characterized by a pathological organic condition, such as general paresis, brain tumor, alcoholism, etc.)." "Madness" and "insanity" are frequently used interchangeably. The general definition of "insanity" includes "mental illness or derangement" (Webster's). In light of these definitions, was Virginia Woolf at times "mad," "psychotic" or "insane"? And if scholars can show specific causes for her breakdowns, does that mean, as Trombley concludes, that she was none of these? Or if the primary cause of her periods of mental illness was incest, as DeSalvo says, or her inability to grieve, as Spilka says in Virginia Woolf's Quarrel with Crieving, does that mean she was not periodically "mad"? And if Woolf was sometimes psychotic or, in that sense, "mad" (for at times she required...

Share