On the Asylum Road with Woolf and Mew

What can disability theory bring to modernist studies?

Let’s start with an infamous entry in the 1915 journal of Virginia Woolf, which reports a chance encounter with “a long line of imbeciles” on a towpath near Kingston. “It was perfectly horrible,” she writes. “They should certainly be killed.”¹

Woolf critics haven’t known quite what to do with this violent speech act. Read it as an endorsement of eugenics activism? Soften it into an early symptom of Woolf’s impending breakdown? Accord it the protected status of an uncensored private musing? Frame it in a list of Woolf’s worst offences? Accept it as an unsurprising manifestation of Woolf’s benighted political individualism?² None of these responses is particularly satisfying, given the wild disjunction between the brutality of Woolf’s declaration, on the one hand, and on the other its inoffensive targets, who are simply taking a group walk along a tow path on the Thames. Indeed, it is telling that none of the commentary takes much account of those anonymous “imbeciles,” who, though fingered for death, are more or less backgrounded as imprecise emblems of a bygone era of alienists and asylums. It is as if, to this day, no one quite sees those people. I will be turning presently to a fuller excerpt from Woolf’s entry to ask what it is that she sees. But my preliminary interest here lies in the image of the recorded event itself: Virginia Woolf’s encounter with a line of asylum inmates in a London suburb in 1915, which is rendered in language so assured and so extreme as to suggest that History itself “flashes up”—to use Benjamin’s phrase—in the journal passage.³ I take this flashing up as an irresistible invitation to try to take hold of this image at this moment, which comprises at once the English national “problem” of mental deficiency (to use the argot of the time), modernism’s experimental investigations of consciousness, the contested political realm of visibility, and the affective conditions for shock. I will trace these confluent provocations through a handful of writings by Virginia Woolf and her contemporary Charlotte Mew, which I will view primarily from a perspective afforded by disability theory. I take it as an uncontroversial proposition that modernist aesthetics, with its emphasis on disproportion, fracture, and incompleteness, shares with disability theory a foundational contestation of the category of “the normal.”

It has been suggested recently by the philosopher Licia Carlson that mental disability may be the philosopher’s “worst nightmare” because it renders reason irrelevant and poses questions that are alien to those that philosophy is equipped to answer.⁴ Given modernism’s insistent experimental forays into territories beyond reason and its languages, beyond the proscriptive discourses of the symbolic realm, beyond normative models of subjectivity, we might expect to find the figure of mental deficiency somewhere along those frontiers. Such a figure might, for instance, offer a ready site of modernist engagement along the lines of what Henri Bergson, in his critique of the tautologies produced by philosophical analysis, famously called “intuition”: the anti-positivist effort to encounter alterity on its own terms, through a “sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it.”⁵ If the mentally “deficient” subject, whose mind is presumed to defy any theory of mind, were taken as both a modernist subject and as a modernist “object of thought,” what insights might an effort of sympathetic intuition yield about its unique interiority and about compositions of interiority more generally?

The question is complicated no less by the fungibility of the concept of “modernism” than by the culturally induced ignorance surrounding mental disability and by the medico-legal discourses of aberrancy in early twentieth-century England, which materialized in, among other institutions, its burgeoning asylum system. With this overdetermined difficulty in view, I’ll begin with a look at that legal terrain, in order to provide a context for a discussion of works by Woolf and Mew. Both...