VIRGINIA WOOLF HAS SCHIZOPHRENIA ?

"Fame: Schizophrenia" (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by Isabelle Anne

INTRODUCTION

“She talked almost without stopping for two or three days, paying no attention to any in the room or anything said to her...then gradually it became completely incoherent a mere jumble of dissociated words”.

(Manamy)

The above lines have been mentioned Virginia’s early stages of mania by her husband Leonard Woolf. Before describing her manic depressive psychosis and her tragic end, it is essential to know that why this illness was bound to come upon her? Is this natural or occurred due to terrible consequences of life? What has happened in her life? Why she has not met the natural death and committed suicide by leaving a suicidal note to her husband.

These questions can only be justified when one can read her life through the lens of Psychoanalysis. This post deals with the scenarios and conditions which influenced and made Woolf’s mind to use the lens of Psychoanalysis in her novels.

VIRGINIA'S DISEASE OF SCHIZOPHRENIA

“Psychoanalysis, after all, is primarily a narrative art, concerned with the recovery of memory and desire."

(Abel 1)

Every great artist has his vision of life, with the help of which he or she poeticizes or philosophises life, but some artists are content to portray life’s realities. Woolf simply wanted to paint a picture of real life as she saw but as life to her was not a fairy tale or some love affair, reconciliations, marriages etc. Virginia was suffering from psychological disorder called schizophrenia. Throughout her life span she was severely haunted by mental instability that she had no control over and ended her life in the form of committing suicide. But somewhere this psychological disease has helped Virginia’s unique style of writing to perceive people and society with the lens of psychoanalysis. Due to this aspect her purpose of the novel has changed. For her the novel was to render the service of an X-ray to reveal the innermost thoughts and feelings of man, to show what the semi-transparent envelope of human soul contained inside.

REJECTED CONVENTIONAL STYLE OF WRITING

Virginia was therefore, depicted the myriad impression of human consciousness, to reflect vividly the consciousness of a person. For this purpose the older conventions of narration were unfit. Consequently these novelists of the school of the stream of consciousness rejected these conventions and dubbed them as false and artificial.

In her novels there are no sequences or connected series of events, leading to a climax, and there is no knot to be unraveled. There are events but they are not the immediate cause or consequences of other events in the book. Evaluation of the importance of events and scenes in her novels is made on the basis of their effect on the consciousness of her characters, and not upon their function in the plot. There are no catastrophes and no denouements in her novels. These sequences of events are ordered by their emotional connection with each other, rather than by their logical interrelation. The action moves backwards and forwards in memory.

Her characters are absorbed in thought. But their thoughts are not nebulous and chaotic; their mind does not move at random from idea to idea or from present to past and vice versa. As in her story so in her characterisation, the emphasis is on continuity and fluidity of experience rather than its definition or fixity. Externals of character are avoided, there is no description of their physical appearance etc., but their consciousness is presented.

SENSE OF REALITY

It has been mentioned in above lines that her communication has a sense of reality. But her conception of reality differed fundamentally from the realism of such novelist such as Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy. She persuaded that reality as distinct from realism is an inward subjective awareness, and that to communicate a sense of it, the novelist must abandon the attempt to construct an external world, brick by brick and devote him to the building up of character through the complex consciousness.

Bibliography:

Abel, Elizabeth. Virginia Woolf and the Fiction of Psychoanalysis. London: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Print
Manamy, John Mc. "Virginia Woolf and Her Madness." McMan's Depression and Bipolar. Mc man web. Com. 2001. Web. 04 Mar. 2015.

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