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WHY DID VIRGINIA WOOLF COMMIT SUICIDE ?


This was the question hitting  everybody's mind when it was declared publicly, that Woolf is no more, she drowned herself into the river Ouse near her house and committed suicide on 28 March, 1941.

The above is the news in The New York Times regarding Virginia, who was missing from her house. Sources were saying that she already planned to kill herself because she did not find any charm in her life. Still she neither informed anybody nor she shared it with her husband. Eventually people of her area found her clothes in the river then everyone came to know about the sad demise of her.

WHY SHE CHOSE RIVER ONLY ?

"Virginia Woolf"(CC BY -SA 2.0) by Wolf Gang

Now the question is again unanswered that if she was enjoying her  life with her husband, everything seems to be happy and gay then why she took this decision? Even if she decided to kill herself then why she chose river to be the option ? Why not any other ways to do it? Does she not like her existence anymore that is why swept away herself so that nobody can find her anymore for three whole weeks. Her lovers were just praying that, even if she has drowned herself, they would never wish to see her body found in the river. So that this last hope of her existence may always remain exist in them. 

REASON OF UNHAPPINESS ?

The reason is psychological problem which haunted Woolf throughout her life. There was a great darkness in her past life. when she suffered from her first mental breakdown; she used to talk to herself continuously which lasted for several days. She was lost to all around her. The mental disease led to her depression, despair and eventually her death instinct. This is also related to her teenage sufferings. It’s been there when she was still very young. She was taken care of by her step brother, but suffered from his sexual invasion at the same times. Eventually she chose death as a remedy to overcome her problems.

WAS DEATH ONLY THE SOLUTION ?

Death instinct can be said as theory of Thanatos, in which the person feels that he or she can get rid of all his or her sorrows only by death. This urge for death exists in every person’s inner consciousness. Many people feel that there is no death instinct in their personality because somewhere their life instinct is very strong. It used to happen sometimes person has more desire for death than life. Unfortunately, here Woolf probably chose to go with the death instinct. 


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  1. Jean Fairbairn20 April 2019 at 03:40

    The observations here are very pertinent, but obviously written by an American; I say this not to denigrate , but to point out that at the time of her suicide, VW and husband , Leonard (who of course was Jewish) had learnt that they were two of the many artists, Socialists, intellectuals and prominent Jews , to be found in the Fuhrer's, "Little Black Book", ie those to be arrested, tortured and eliminated after Operation Sea Lion had been executed successfully and England invaded.

    It is not true to suggest that Leonard did not know of her state of mind, as they had a suicide pact that they would gas themselves in the garage with car exhaust fumes when the Germans landed and indeed he kept enough spare petrol in a can in their Rodmell house to be able to do this. All of this is written up in Leonard Woolf's autobiography which is a great source of facts about VW's life which is usually overlooked, but let's not forget, that Monk's House at Rodmell was on the South
    Coast, only a few miles from the port of Newhaven with its ferries to Dieppe, France and from Dover also, with its ferry service to Calais......and when it is not misty, the French coast, occupied by the Nazis, is visible from the English coast where the Woolfs were living at this time, having been bombed out of London by the nightly visits from Hitler's bombers during the Autumn, Winter and Spring of 1940-1941 and indeed which completely shattered many nerves, let alone someone as sensitive to neurological imbalanceJ as VW!

    The Battle of Britain and the Luftwaffe's nightly sorties of 100s of Bombers heading for London to crush the only European country not under their jackboot, was a sight that folk living in the South of England were used to seeing, as were the dog-fights between the invaders and the RAF Spitfires and Hurricanes.....feelings of imminent invasion were real and it was only the narrow stretch of water known as the English Channel that saved the English from the fate of France, and the Low countries. The 2 houses occupied by VW and Leonard in Bloomsbury, London were both bombed out, (one housed the Hogarth Press), which was why all sensible people had moved out of the cities , into the countryside - including "evacuated" children.

    My point, to sum up, is that the effects of the London Blitz and fear of Hitler's Gestapo (being married to a Jew was perceived to be as culpable and as deserving of elimination as being one) and a certain war-weariness, (her favourite nephew, Julian who she had treated like a son having been killed fighting Franco's Spanish Fascists a few years earlier), was too much of an overload and triggered those factors that the earlier commentator has accurately pointed out and that until Pearl Harbour was attacked a year later, WW2 and the flattening of the UKs' cities, did not figure much in the American psyche, where it dominates and haunts the UK's!

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