Virginia Woolf, the English writer committed to the fight for equal rights between men and women, had an intense life worthy of her own literary work, still remembered and admired in our times. Virginia Woolf: life, homosexuality, disorders and death.
Who was Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882. in a wealthy family. His father, Leslie Stephen, was a famous literary critic and philosopher of the Victorian era. Virginia grew up in a cultured atmosphere, in fact, his parents’ house was frequented by famous writers of the time such as Henry James and Thomas Hardy. The writer herself attended some courses at King’s College London, but studied mainly at home, where he had his father’s huge library. The Stephen family spent summers with family and friends at St. Ives in Cornwall, where they had a home, Talland House.
The death of Virginia’s mother
Virginia adored the sea, the waves and the sea and the house, they were the basic themes of such important novels as Jacob’s Room (1922), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Las Olas (1931). The happy period for the Stephen family ended in 1895, when Virginia’s mother died and his father, unable to bear the thought of being in Talland House without his wife, decides to sell the house.
Virginia begins one of the darkest periods of her life. The death of her mother, the loss of Talland House affect her to the point of going through a long period of depression, beginning to show the first signs of the mental illness that accompanied her all her life. In these years he spent a lot of time in his father’s library reading and writing articles and essays and, at the same time, he began to develop a conflictive relationship with his father due to his authoritarian and tyrannical character.
The move to Bloomsbury
After Leslie Stephen’s death in 1904, Virginia, her brother Toby and her sister Vanessa left the house in Hyde Park Gate and moved to the neighborhood of Bloomsbury .
His home became the center of the famous Bloomsbury Groupwhere important intellectuals met, including the art critic Clive Bell, who married Vanessa, the publisher and journalist Leonard Woolf, who would become Virginia’s husband in 1912and the novelist E. M. Forster. The group expressed the new trends of the early 20th century and were decidedly against the rigid Victorian moralism that had permeated Virginia’s youthful years.
Journey’s End: His First Novel
After her marriage to Leonard Woolf, the writer published her first novel The Voyage Out (End of travel – 1915). These years were characterized by another period of depression which culminated in a suicide attempt.
The fight for feminism
Throughout her life, Virginia Woolf was always interested in the role of women in society and worked as a volunteer in the movement that fought for women’s right to vote, she also wrote works on female emancipation such as a room of your own (1929), which had a major impact on the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
The Hogarth Press: the publisher founded by Leonard and Virginia Woolf
In 1917 Virginia founded a publishing house with her husband, the Hogarth Press, which published, in addition to his works, those of young authors such as T. S. Eliot . In 1925 he published the Mrs. Dalloway, in which she experimented with the new narrative techniques of the day: the stream of consciousness novel in which the writer follows the stream of thoughts of the characters, in this case we follow the stream of thoughts of Mrs. Dalloway over the course of twelve hours as she prepares a party for the same night in his house.
In 1928 he published Orlando, who dedicated it to Vita Sackville-West, a writer with whom Virginia had an intense relationship. This novel, set in the Elizabethan era, follows the life of the protagonist Orlando, who has feminine and masculine features, from the 16th century to the 20th century.
Virginia and the narrative techniques of the 20th century
Virginia Woolf, like James Joyce and her contemporaries, embraced the new narrative techniques that characterized the first decades of the 20th century. The writer was convinced that the narration of events in chronological order was now a superficial and imperfect way of presenting life. Virginia Woolf was interested in giving voice to the inner world of man, whose consciousness was conceived as a continuous flow of emotions and impressions.
The psychoanalysis of Freud revealed that our consciousness is made up of several layers, many of which are unknown to us. The unconscious is the mysterious part of our mind and is driven by irrational forces that reason cannot explain. Even the French philosopher Henri Bergson had elaborated a new theory of time, according to which it is necessary to distinguish between chronological time, made up of the orderly sequence of past, present and future, and psychological time, the duration of which varies from one individual to another and is measured by the intensity moment emotional.
The rejection of conventional narrative techniques
In the 1919 essay Modern Fiction, Virginia Woolf writes: “Let us examine an ordinary mind for a moment on an ordinary day. The mind receives a great number of impressions: trivial, fantastic, evanescent or carved with a steel point, which come from all sides. It is like a ceaseless rain of innumerable atoms. We register the atoms as they fall into the mind and in the order in which they fall, we trace the drawing, no matter how disconnected or inconsistent it may seem, that each image or incident affects the consciousness. «. This statement shows Virginia Woolf’s rejection of conventional narrative techniquesthe events that build a story are no longer important since chronological time and external reality do not matter, what counts is psychological time, the life of the mind of the characters, where the past, the present and the future are overlap.
The outer world counts only for the influence it can exert on the inner life. The omniscient narrator disappears and the point of view is transferred to the minds of the characters, where everything flows as a continuous flow and is represented through flashbacks, associations of ideas, temporary impressions and emotions.
The differences with the narrative style of James Joyce
Unlike James Joyce, who expresses the thoughts of his characters through interior monologue taking them to extreme conditions, Virginia Woolf control the flow of thoughts maintains logical and grammatical order. The writer tells her stories in the third person, giving the impression that there is a link between the outer world and the inner world. While Joyce uses epiphanies, a moment of sudden spiritual revelation, Virginia Woolf uses what she calls “Moments of Being” which are rare moments of great intensity and insight, allowing the characters to clearly see the reality of their condition.
The Virginia Woolf’s themes explored many themes typical of the modernist novelsuch as anxiety, crises and communication difficulties, but they also dealt with issues very close to her, such as loneliness, the distinction between dream and reality, mental illness and prejudice against women that prevented them from expressing their identity.
Virginia Woolf Mental Disorders
Virginia Woolf’s life was intense but not only because of her love and passion for literature, but also, it was marked by the mental disorders that overwhelmed her with anxiety and insecurity since childhood.
Virginia Woolf He once said: “Growing up is losing some illusions in order to acquire others.” Woolf lost many of her illusions as a child through trauma cases. The first of them came when her half-brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth, began sexually abusing her. In her personal essays, Woolf revealed that the abuse occurred from when she was six years old until she moved out of her family’s home at the age of 23.
While this sexual abuse probably caused many of her problems with mental illness, her mother’s death in 1895 seemed to be what solidified them. Shortly after, At the age of 13, Woolf had her first mental breakdown.
In the years after her mother’s death, Woolf experienced a succession of trauma. your mean sister Stella passed away two years later and in 1904 his father died of stomach cancer. This soon led to Woolf being institutionalized for a short period of time.
Even after her success in writing and her happy marriage to Leonard, Woolf continued to deal with depression and mental illness. He made several suicide attempts throughout his life.Ay suffered hallucinations and periods of mania.
Woolf tried various psychiatric treatments, but due to mental health research during his childhood, they only had negative results. One of these treatments even involved extracting several of his teeth, a common medical theory in the 1920s that associated mental illness with dental infections.
World War II worsened his fears. Walking through the war-torn streets of London, he saw the disintegration of the world around him; what’s more, he started hearing voices in his head and fearing to go crazy chose the only possible way for her, drown in the River Ouse (Sussex) near his home in 1941.
The truth is that Virginia Woolf suffered from Bipolar disorder which seems to be associated with psychotic symptoms in the last stages of his life. In the novels he shed his wickedness of living and the suffering of human existence and turned it into a literary art,in this way the act of writing was also a therapy for the writer, a way to escape from her inner discomfort and to come out turning it into written words, into art. Surely Woolf’s mental disorders influenced not only her life but also her art.
In his novels the internal dialogue of the characters is constant. Like Woolf’s own with herself. A very complex and interesting character from the Mrs Dalloway It’s of Septimus Warren Smitha veteran of the First World War who suffers from mental disorders ever since he saw his best friend die in front of him. Yes Clarissa Dalloway the novel’s protagonist, represents the obvious and clear part of the writer, perfectionist and belonging to british society of the time, co-star Septimus reflects the dark, tormented masculine side of Virginia Woolf. The events of the two characters are intertwined on Clarissa’s birthday, touching without touching, but turning out to belong to the same soul, like the two sides of the same coin, like the lifeand the death .
Sentimental partners of Virginia Woolf and her homosexuality
Much has been shown and told about Virginia Woolf’s life, work, and fragile, troubled soul, but one essential element of her personality has often been left out: Virginia Woolf was bisexual and his contacts with women represented an irreplaceable source of his pleasure and his literary and intellectual research. She once said: “I like the…