Virginia Woolf’s Beautiful Mind

In Virginia Woolf: Becoming a Writer, psychologist Katherine Dalsimer explores the relationship between mental illness and artistic genius by putting Virgina Woolf on a psychiatric “couch.” The link between madness and genius has recently become a topic of national attention, especially as this year’s Oscar race focuses on A Beautiful Mind, the story of the schizophrenic, Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash.

Much of the fascination with the connection between mental illness and genius, whether mathematic or artistic, seems to focus on the idea that geniuses can channel their illnesses into a creative power and that their extraordinary capabilities can act as a form of therapy. In A Beautiful Mind, for instance, Nash claims to “solve” his schizophrenia with the same part of his brain that he uses to solve mathematical puzzles. In her psychoanalysis of Virginia Woolf, Dalsimer provides a thoughtful, elegant exploration of the idea that a creative outlet can enable an artist to escape her inner life.

In Becoming a Writer, Dalsimer constructs a psychological portrait of Virgina Woolf by analyzing Woolf’s own work, fictional and non-fictional, and inferring Woolf’s emotional state from her writings. In weaving together analysis of Woolf’s major novels, To The Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway, with excerpts from Woolf’s letters and diaries in which she describes her feelings at the time that she was writing, Dalsimer provides a solid framework for her subtle literary inferences. She draws on an impressive compilation of Woolf’s writings, from the weekly newspaper Woolf wrote for her family as a child to the essays she worked on shortly before she committed suicide at age 59.

Dalsimer chooses to focus her psychoanalysis specifically on Woolf’s adolescence, when Woolf first decided to become a professional writer. This choice is predicated on two assumptions which are central to the picture of Woolf that emerges from Dalsimer’s analysis: First, that the manic-depressive disorder that afflicted Woolf for most of her life, ultimately leading her to suicide, was primarily formed by the traumatic losses she suffered at a young age. Woolf’s mother died when she was 13. Before she reached age 25, she had lost her sister, father and brother as well. Dalsimer finds the recurring pain of these losses throughout Woolf’s writings, paying special attention to the way Woolf’s work deals with the death of her mother. Dalsimer sets the relationship between Mrs. Ramsay, the matriarch of the family in To The Lighthouse, and Lily Briscoe, the artist figure in the novel, as a paradigm for Woolf’s own relationship with her mother. In this way, Dalsimer is able to extrapolate and interpret the emotions that consumed Woolf throughout her development as a writer.

The second major assumption that underlies Dalsimer’s account is the claim that Woolf’s decision to become an author is central to her psychological development. Dalsimer sees Woolf’s love affair with books as an internal drive that Woolf is incapable of controlling. In Dalsimer’s analysis, Woolf’s voracious desire to read as a child and her subsequent decision to become a writer are “medicine” for Woolf’s depression. Woolf reads to distract herself from the pain she feels and she writes so that she can become aware of her emotions and come to terms with them.

In Dalsimer’s construction, Woolf’s decision to become an author functions as a form of therapy. By finishing To The Lighthouse, for example, Woolf is finally able, in her own words, to stop “obsessing” over her mother’s death. In this way, Becoming a Writer gives credence to the idea that extraordinary talent can be an effective remedy for mental disease.

But, as is evident from Woolf’s ultimate surrender to her illness, the catharsis she experiences in writing is not in the end an effective cure. In her analysis of Woolf’s later writings, Dalsimer exposes the limitation of Woolf’s work to positively affect her emotional state. By depicting Woolf’s art as an involuntary drive, Dalsimer shows that writing can distract Woolf from her pain without necessarily getting to the core of her illness.

Because she analyzes Woolf strictly on the basis of her own writings, Dalsimer must assume that Woolf’s account of her own feelings is always trustworthy. As a result, Dalsimer’s attempt to trace the psychological development that led Woolf from her childhood to, ultimately, her suicide is limited by Woolf’s own self-image and by her selective expressions of emotion. But Dalsimer’s skillful organization of Woolf’s expansive body of work and intelligent analysis of Woolf’s literature gives us a thoughtful, nuanced picture of the connection between Woolf’s illness and her extraordinary artistic talent.

books

Virginia Woolf: Becoming a Writer

By Katherine Dalsimer

Yale University Press

224 pp., $24.95