by Alexandra Magearu
Virginia Woolf, as photographed in 1902 by G.C. Beresford, is perhaps one of the most recognizable literary figures in Western culture, next to authors such as Franz Kafka or Oscar Wilde. Printed on book covers, postcards, in biographies and newspapers, published extensively on the Internet, on view in museums, her photograph [illustration 1] has survived history and now partakes in the circulation of images which informs our knowledge of world literature, a subject to perpetual clashes, dissensions, fractures, metamorphosed by canons, institutions and ideologies. Despite being more than a century in age, this image still sends a loud echo, rippling through the decades like a bullet. It is more alive, substantial and charged with meaning than it was, perhaps, at the time of its making. The photograph shows Virginia Stephen (later Woolf) in her twenties dressed in a white and lace garment in the custom of the age, her hair gathered awkwardly in a heavy bun at the back of her head. The young woman in the picture was to become a famous writer, highly acclaimed and fiercely criticized, opaque to some readers, pure delight to others, an artist capable of writing a new language in the history of literature.
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| Illustration 1: Virginia Woolf (née Stephen) by George Charles Beresford, platinum print, July 1902, (152 mm x 108 mm). The National Portrait Gallery, Primary collection, NPG P221. |
But what does this photograph have to say to the twenty-first century critic, who is significantly derailed in his reading by the post-structuralist attack on (auto)biography as prompted by Roland Barthes' essay, “The Death of the Author”? Should we relegate “the image” of the author to the shadows of history, limiting ourselves to the pure structuralist study of the literary text? I believe that, on the contrary, autobiography has considerable value as literary artifact since it can reveal historical experiences we would not have access to by other means. Autobiographical texts can also be employed to study the functioning of memory and the work of recollection. Even more, literary autobiographies sometimes provide keys to understanding the author's creative process, as I will argue in this paper. In Virginia Woolf's case, it is almost impossible to consider the full extent of her work without including the autobiographical perspective. The writer herself was, after all, extensively preoccupied with life-writing, investing a large amount of her time in authoring several volumes of diaries and various autobiographical texts.
In this paper I employ a synthesis of psychoanalytical texts, trauma theory and philosophical arguments in order to suggest that the lead narrative in Virginia Woolf's (semi-) autobiographical writings is swayed by the occurrence of traumatic disjunctions in the author's early years. Based on the way in which the writer structures her recollections in her memoir, A Sketch of the Past, I will argue that the experience of trauma is a formative influence in the development of Woolf's remarkable perceptual acuity and her fragmented autobiographical voice, evidence of a fractured consciousness. Spurred on by the desire to relinquish the pressure of her traumatic past, Woolf turns to the therapeutic process of fictionalizing her life in the novel To the Lighthouse, in an attempt to work through the loss of her parents. In order to analyze the way in which trauma affects the creative process of writing and the work of recollection in autobiography, I propose a method of study which identifies the transformations in perception and self-consciousness engendered by the occurrence of trauma and which follows the evolution of subjectivity in a post-traumatic environment. My purpose is to demonstrate that the experience of trauma informs Woolf's creative powers to a great extent.
If we start from the argument that subjective knowledge about the world is collected through empirical investigation archived under the heading of individual history, then remembering constitutes the foremost method available for accessing the stored information, in order to construct narratives about the self. Autobiographical memory becomes the foundation on which personal identity is established. Without the illusory sense of an uninterrupted cause and effect narrative stretching across time from our first memories to the present, we would have no structural scheme to resort to when formulating opinions about ourselves and the world. Basing our knowledge of ourselves on the culturally constructed notion of temporal linearity, we sometimes attribute absolute value to our capacity to remember and understand our personal history, even though aware of the possibility of failing memory. We function in the manner of the historian who applies a forensic method to the study of history, that is, we follow a subjectively selected lead or clue in order to uncover the larger context. Autobiographical memory is thus a selective process constructed around a lead narrative (that is, the individual's cumulated predispositions, affections and attitudes toward the past) according to which episodic memories are regrouped into several other narratives of the past. If, by chance, trauma disrupts the personal narrative, then autobiographical memory is forced into a different structure, characterized by repressed memories, the compulsion to repeat and re-enact in a Freudian sense, and forgetting. Trauma displaces the lead narrative and impacts on the way in which the individual writes her personal history. Resorting to what I will call discriminating memory, the autobiographer eludes peripheral memories and focuses on those related to the traumatic moment. This recurrent event or image will become the core of the narrative.
The "Shock-Receiving Capacity"
The "Shock-Receiving Capacity"
The premise on which I will base my argument can be found in Virginia Woolf's A Sketch of the Past, her remarkable unfinished memoir, written towards the end of her life. With great clarity and insight, the now fully mature writer returns to the most significant memories of her childhood and youth, discussing their impact and influence on her development as an artist. What is especially striking about her text is that she offers the reader a key for understanding her aesthetic process. While reminiscing about powerful discoveries in her childhood that came to her as a shock – the futility of violence, the reality of flowers in their unity with the earth, the suicide of a family friend – Woolf suggests that such blows, although often unnoticeable to a child, must eventually be assigned an explanation later in life, and that the mere attempt to explain them has the power of alleviating their force. Even more, she insists that this “shock-receiving capacity” is what makes her a writer since every shock leads to a desire to articulate it, to inscribe it in language:
“[…] and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me” (A Sketch 72).
The root of the author's artistic drive lies in her exposure to repeated cognitive blows, in fact insinuations of trauma, that would subsequently require articulation and elucidation in order to be rendered innocuous. When transferred into the meta-space of language where they are decoded and externalized, these instances of trauma can become revelatory experiences that connect the writer to the hidden pattern behind the “cotton-wool of daily life”, a transcendent realm of knowledge that holds the essences of the world together (A Sketch 72). The formulation of these traumatic occurrences into a coherent narrative, gives her the chance to fictionalize experiences, to historicize them and, thus, to write them into the past. Thus, the author strives to be detached from their painful impact by relegating them from her personal history into the universal time narrative.
This reasoning then casts a different light on Woolf's authorial process. First, it is evident that the autobiographical narrative is deeply embedded in the structure of her fictional writing. Even more, it constitutes the driving force behind the text, a fact which allows us, for the purpose of this paper, to place in abeyance the post-structuralist insistence on the death of the author. Secondly, it can be surmised that the author's approach to writing is partly based on a therapeutic need to deal with the burden of memory. In her autobiographical texts, in particular, the lead narrative is structured along the lines of the author's encounters with trauma and the enlightenment drawn from these situations with the purpose of achieving relief.
Trauma represents a delayed response to a shock that was not fully realized at the time when it took place but that left its residues embedded in memory to return in the form of dreams, hallucinations or anxiety-ridden sensations. It represents a distortion of subjective time and a contamination of memory. In the first sense, trauma interferes with the individual's perception of time to such an extent that past events are coagulated around traumatic memories as though attracted to a magnet. The personal time narrative is restructured from its apparent linearity to the bursts of traumatic time which trigger distorted self-narratives. This is done at the expense of memory and knowledge, as Cathy Caruth points out, since the individual records a certain latency in recognizing and internalizing the experience. Caruth argues that the occurrence of trauma cannot be defined merely through its distorting power over reality, nor just through its quality of causing the repression of what was lived, but that it should rather be described through the structure of its reception, in that “the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it” (Caruth 4-5). To relive an event post-traumatically is, thus, to be haunted by an image which is disconnected from its origin. Precisely because of its latency and unaccountable quality, the recurrent memory image related to the traumatic event manifests itself as an intrusion in the familiar time and memory patterns of the individual, leaving scars on the psyche.
In the work of remembering, these memories stand out as odd isolated objects with no apparent link to past circumstances. To deal with the burden of these events, the autobiographer seeks to decipher them, to place them in context and to attach them to lived experiences because of a need to provide continuity to the narrative of the past. This procedure sometimes succeeds in uncovering the original blocked memory of the traumatic event and removing, thus, the pressure of the shock. In a Freudian sense, writing becomes a manner of working through the obstacles of a traumatic past with the purpose of filling in the gaps in the narrative of the self and reactivating the latent regions of the subconscious where the repressed memories are stored. In Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through, Freud does away with the cathartic method proposed by other psychoanalysts and suggests a new approach to the treatment of traumatized patients through the work of interpretation or “working through”. This is a dialogue established between the analyst and the analysand in which the former attempts to overcome the resistance immanent in the patient and expressed through the compulsion to repeat or to unconsciously reenact the repressed memories. For the patient, the work of recollection is replaced by the need to reiterate or to act out substitutes of the original shock without being aware of the repetition. The role of the analyst is to allow the patient to manifest her compulsion through transference in a safe liminal zone between illness and reality where it can be analyzed and explained without affecting the patient: “We render [the compulsion] harmless and indeed useful by giving it the right to assert itself in a definite field. We admit it into the transference as a playground in which it is expected to display to us everything in the way of pathogenic instincts that is hidden in the patient's mind” (Freud, 154). The analysand is, thus, guided towards overcoming cognitive resistances until the sought memories are identified and grasped in their full. The compulsion to repeat is then put to rest and it can be said that the patient is reacquainted, through remembering, with the traumatizing experience which he marks as lived experience and which he assigns to the narrative of the past.
Following Freud's argument, I would like to suggest that Virginia Woolf enacts a similar practice of transference when seeking relief from the past through the construction of self-narratives. However, in this case, it can be said that the writer plays both the role of the analysand and that of the analyst, applying the therapeutic method on her own consciousness. This implies that she is either well aware of her compulsion to repeat the shock experienced and capable of working through the cognitive barriers imposed by a post-traumatic environment, or that she acts according to instinct when fictionalizing traumatic memories. Transference is here equated with language, which is to say that, through articulation, memories are transferred into the intermediary realm of writing and, thus, depersonalized, no longer in a position to harm the writer. Once the pen is disconnected from the paper, the memories are abandoned to a page in a notebook, a buffer zone between Woolf, the writer, and Woolf, the reader of her own work. As emphasized previously, the shock loses its capacity to harm when transformed into a narrative whole.
Virginia Woolf's writing was profoundly shaped by the repeated losses she suffered in her formative years, such as the death of her mother, Julia Stephen-Duckworth, when she was only thirteen years old, followed by the death of her half-sister, Stella Duckworth, and her father, Leslie Stephen. In A Sketch of the Past, Woolf records the extent to which the image of her mother haunted her after her death. She could hear her voice as if she was present. She imagined what her mother would do in various circumstances (A Sketch 81), thus, experiencing the present as a composite of her own will and the imagined desires of her mother. Julia Stephen had been a crucial figure in Virginia's childhood and the central member of the family. Just like Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, she could stop time and bring harmony and pacification to every conflict. As Woolf tells in her memoir, the family falls apart with Julia's disappearance and the struggle to cope with loss and the difficulties of a dark and stifling family atmosphere, punctured by the mood swings of her father, plunges her into a deep depression. Julia's death had upturned the balance of an idyllic childhood and marked the first essential blow experienced by the future writer. Not fully registered in its momentousness, the traumatizing loss was preserved in her memory where it continued to possess her thoughts in a paradoxical manner, as the constant experience of both a presence and a lack. As we shall see later on, the only way in which she was capable of overcoming her compulsion to repeat this ritual was the transference of her obsession into writing in To the Lighthouse, her semi-autobiographical elegy to her parents.
Trauma, Perception and Creativity
Trauma, Perception and Creativity
But let us return for a moment to A Sketch of the Past to study the first occurrences of trauma as recollected by the writer. In order to grasp the whole extent of the issue, one must go back to the beginning of the narrative and identify the earliest manifestations of trauma after the fashion of the psychoanalyst. The structure of the memoir apparently revolves around key memories, many of them related to or perhaps engendered by shocks. The lead narrative of the text is marked by the recollection of odd moments, effects of trauma, that contribute to the expansion of the author's perception and the growth of her artistic sense, as we shall see later on. One is unable to tease out from the narrative whether it is an accurate rendition of the most significant events in the author's early years, since so many factors interpose themselves between the past and the work of remembering. In any case, absolute knowledge is not necessary, since autobiography essentially consists of convoluted processes of filtering, editing and reconstructing, despite its claim to truthfulness. Remembering, in this sense, relies more on a type of discriminating memory, which selects what it needs, and removes or forgets what it does not. By underlining the lead narratives of the text, in this case, the memories revolving around the shocks received, the perceptual experiences and the artistic discernment, I hope to emphasize the extent to which the author creates interrelated histories of the past sustained by a common drive, the desire to explain the traumatic experience in order to achieve closure.
If we assume that knowledge about the world, formed by means of the reception and reproduction of external data, blends with memory to define what one subsequently terms personal identity, there is no wonder that Virginia Woolf begins her memoir by recalling her first perceptions of the world. There is also no wonder that her first memories, which she terms “colour-and-sound memories”, possess qualities generally belonging to the cinematic. Woolf was, after all, deeply concerned with matters of vision, perspective and sound in her writings. Her very first memory, it seems, is of the patterns in her mother's dress seen from the vantage point of a child's head laid on her mother's lap (A Sketch 64). Another significant memory relates to a space that was dear to her and that reflected the safety and warmth of childhood, the nursery of the Talland House at St. Ives. This memory has now morphed into the sound of waves clashing into the shore very close to the Stephen house. In To the Lighthouse, she would return to the wonder of these first days and piece together what she idealized as the heaven of her childhood, the house at St. Ives, where the Stephen-Duckworth family entertained visitors, organized long dinners, played cricket and took long walks on the beach. To note the importance of these first images to Woolf is to point out how poignant, how significant sounds, lights and colors must have been for her in the formation of a sense of herself as independent subject, distinct from the environment in which she was developing. Before she learned language, these accumulated perceptions were internalized so powerfully that, when she began writing, they flowed out of her naturally almost cluttering her texts with minute visual and auditory details.
The idyllic ambience of the first years was to be disrupted dramatically by Julia Stephen's death. This loss affected Woolf's perception considerably. The experience of trauma accelerated the awakening of her sensitivity to the external world. In mourning and consumed by her first major breakdown, she became aware of something that had been invisible to her before. Observing the reflection of the sunset in the glass dome of a train station, blazing with light, she realized that she had never seen it from that vantage point. This fact she attributes to her recent loss:
“[…] it was partly that my mother's death unveiled and intensified; made me suddenly develop perceptions, as if a burning glass had been laid over what was shaded and dormant. Of course this quickening was spasmodic. But it was surprising – as if something were becoming visible without any effort” (A Sketch 93).
This sudden expansion of perceptions is linked to another discovery of hers when opening a book of poetry and literally being absorbed by language. For the first time, she understands the meaning of words, as if they had become transparent and “so intensified that one seems to experience them; to foretell them as if they developed what one was already feeling” (A Sketch 93). Trauma, therefore, participates in Woolf's development of special linguistic and aesthetic categories.
How is this then possible? What is the relationship that can be established among the coordinates of trauma, perception and creativity (or, perhaps, genius)? In his fundamental book, The World as Will and Idea, Arthur Schopenhauer advances the theory according to which transcendence and, consequently, a tranquil state of consciousness, can be achieved through aesthetic contemplation of external objects, works of art or fragments of nature. To reach this state, the individual must abandon all abstract thought and reason and surrender to perception, forgetting her individuality until she exists “as the pure subject, the clear mirror of the object,” which she no longer perceives in its material reality, but as Platonic Idea, as eternal form in its ideal essence. This experience transforms her into a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge” (231). Even more, the philosopher argues that the artist has the capacity to remain in the state of pure perception for a longer period of time and can thus extract the ideal essences of things and reproduce them in his art, creating a final product in which the Platonic Ideas are reflected (240). Through aesthetic perception one can gain access to the transcendental realm where the true nature of things is found, a hypothesis very similar to Woolf's description of the pattern found beyond “the cotton-wool of daily life” (A Sketch 72). She, on the other hand, achieves this transition to the metaphysical state of ideas by receiving repeated shocks and explaining and articulating them in her fiction. What was her stage of perceptual awakening, then, if not a glimpse at the Platonic Ideals hidden behind ordinary things? I would assert that, in her case, trauma remains a latent invisible presence in her consciousness and, thus, interferes with her observation of the world. Perhaps because of the overwhelming suffering, the author seeks a method of transcendence that would bring her to the pure, will-less and timeless state described by Schopenhauer, where no pain is possible and where the individual becomes depersonalized. And she does this by discovering language and the fact that she can rise above through writing.
Mirror Encounters
Mirror Encounters
A Sketch of the Past marks another significant episode in Virginia Woolf's development of perception, a shock suffered in the supposed safety of the home. Woolf confesses that, although being aware of the famed beauty of the women in her family, she always felt an odd form of shame when looking at her own face in the mirror. This, she feels, was not to be attributed to her boyish behavior as a child, but to something deeper:
“At any rate, the looking-glass shame has lasted all my life, long after the tomboy phase was over. I cannot now powder my nose I public. Everything to do with dress – to be fitted, to come into a room wearing a new dress – still frightens me; at least makes me shy, self-conscious, uncomfortable” (A Sketch 68).
In her text, she traces this “looking-glass shame” to two significant events in her life that impacted her self-perception. One of them relates to her shame and fear of her own body as a result of being abused by her half-brother when she was very young. The instinctual feeling of self-preservation led her to believe that there was something very private and secret about her body that needed to be guarded from contact with others (A Sketch 69).
When reading Woolf's diaries or letters, one becomes aware of a curious ambivalence in both her perception of her own image and of her creative powers. During the strenuous and exhausting effort invested in writing her texts, and, especially in the months following the completion of one of her books, she seems to be permanently torn between positive and negative feelings about her work, sometimes alternating with the rapidity of a couple of hours. Her ambivalent feelings about her writing and her physical self-perception sometimes intermingle as is evident in a fragment from her diary where she confesses that she cannot bear to look at her photograph anymore during one of her bouts of depression following a bad review of Mrs. Dalloway: “and I don't think I should bother to write this if I weren't jangled. What by? The sudden heat, I think, and the racket of life. It is bad for me to see my own photograph” (A Writer's Diary 76). The looking-glass shame seems to be transferred to the author's sense of self as an artist. Her reluctance to look at her own picture becomes intensified by her ambivalence towards the quality of her writing.
The second memory connected to the looking-glass shame is located in the space between reality and dream. This is of another face in the mirror, the frightening figure of an animal behind her back:
“I dreamt that I was looking in a glass when a horrible face – the face of an animal – suddenly showed over my shoulder. I cannot be sure if this was a dream, or if it happened. Was I looking in the glass one day when something in the background moved, and seemed to me alive? I cannot be sure. But I have always remembered the other face in the glass, whether it was a dream or a fact, and that it frightened me” (A Sketch 69).
At the essential mirror stage, when the child is expected to recognize herself in the looking-glass, she perceives the presence of an otherness, factual or imagined, which does not belong to the wholeness and integrity of her being. Completing the feeling of shame, now comes a dread of her own image when reflected in the mirror as dissociated between her self as entity and the body of another being, which she cannot locate in her former experience. This moment represents perhaps one of the elements that contribute to Woolf's split of consciousness, which is later reflected in the multitude or roles and selves she impersonates in her life-writing and in her aesthetic proclivity to fragmentation and discontinuity. A result of another instance of trauma, the incident fractures the author's subjectivity, as Shari Benstock points out: “For Woolf such an experience – really an aftershock of trauma – recorded both differentiation and a psychic/somatic split. A mysterious, frightening, unknown shame clouds the mirror; the other face in the mirror marks dread” (148). Psychological health, Benstock follows, depends on the full construction of the self by separation from the other, which is what Woolf attempts to do by recalling these memories in her autobiography.
The experience is significant from a psychoanalytical point of view, in light of Jacques Lacan's theory on the infant's mirror stage. The formation of the ego takes place when the infant realizes that his movements are synchronized with those reflected in the mirror, thus becoming aware of his own reflected image, a fragment of his ego. At this point, according to Lacan, a rupture takes place, and the child becomes aware of the existence of a self projected in the real world which is constructed through the gaze of the mother. The ego is thus capable of identifying himself with another image, this counterpart formed in the imaginary realm, which brings him joy as it represents an evidence of power. Once the child identifies himself with his image, he also looks to the big Other, the adult, to confirm his realization. The subject can thus come into being only with the confirmation of the Other, as it exists in its gaze.
The anxiety of being separated from the mother's care and protection might lead perhaps to unsettling confrontations with the self as reflected in the mirror. The moment of mirror-gazing, according to Susan Squier, is in fact a re-enactment of the relationship between child and mother, in which the child can see herself represented in the eyes of the mother (275). The construction of subjectivity, thus, takes place first in relation to the mother figure, before the mirror-stage, and, afterwards, continues to be reproduced in the mother's gaze, which gives the individual a sense of confirmation and a means for separation and development. In Woolf's case, Julia Stephen's death brutally interrupted this process of individuation. She remained tied to the image of her mother in the years to come until she finally pursued this separation by writing To the Lighthouse.
Remembering, Reconstructing, Working Through
Remembering, Reconstructing, Working Through
“The past is like the scene of a crime,” claims Annette Kuhn, and it should be pursued in the same way in which a crime is resolved by detectives, that is by “searching for clues, deciphering signs and traces, making deductions, patching together reconstructions out of fragments of evidence” (Kuhn 5). This forensic type of investigation, termed memory work by Kuhn, entails an attempt to reconstruct the past by surveying the evidence available, in her case, family photographs. Likewise, one would expect Virginia Woolf to be looking for clues in her family albums or her early journals, when she sits down, in her garden room at Monk's House or elsewhere, to write her prose. To arrest the movement of memories and reconfigure them in narratives is, as we have seen, one of the methods to deal with the charge of the traumatic past.
The Stephen family had a strong interest in documenting family life. After Julia's death, Leslie Stephen compiled a photograph album and wrote his autobiography, Mausoleum Book, in her memory. Virginia and her sister, Vanessa, took an early interest in snapshot photography and captured a wealth of images of the domestic order in the Stephen family, which they put together in their own family albums (Humm 3). It wouldn't be an exaggeration, then, to infer that Woolf based many of her descriptions in To the Lighthouse on the information extracted from the family albums or autobiographical texts of the time. The work of recollection becomes a composite effort on the part of the author in which she both responds to the feelings and memories prompted by historical remnants and puts forth her own version of the past.
As Paul Ricoeur argues in Memory, History, Forgetting, reminiscing represents an active process of reviving the past through consistent effort and by resorting to various memory aides. Employing the notion of trace to mean the cognitive mark left by events in the memory, Ricoeur claims that the mnemonic process can be internalized in the form of meditative memory “with the help of a diary, memoirs or anti-memoirs, autobiographies, in which the support of writing provides materiality to the traces preserved, reanimated, and further enriched with unpublished materials” (Ricoeur 38). Reminiscing is not an involuntary spontaneous process as in the case of recognition or reminding; it implies a conscious effort on the part of the autobiographer and a search for both internal traces and external objects that facilitate the memory work.
In the first part of To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf reconstructs the idyllic atmosphere of her childhood at Talland House in St. Ives. The peace of the Ramsay family is pierced by an almost imperceptible conflict between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, literary embodiments of Leslie and Julia Stephen. James, their six year old son, wishes nothing more but to travel to the lighthouse on the other side of the gulf on a boat, with his father, yet Mr. Ramsay keeps postponing the moment on account of bad weather. The conflict has to do, in fact, more with Mrs. Ramsay's empathy and deeper understanding of the needs and feelings of her children, as opposed to Mr. Ramsay's detachment from family life and his intellectual remoteness.
Lily Briscoe, one of the many visitors of the Ramsays paints Mrs. Ramsay's figure as she stands in the window, reading to her son. Her picture, relying on the abstract developments in painting, represents the mother and child figure in the centre as a “triangular purple shape” (To the Lighthouse 290). The inspiration for the triangular shape formed by Mrs. Ramsay and her son might stem perhaps from one of the photographs in Leslie Stephen's album which captures Julia Stephen, Virginia and Adrian in one of the windows of Talland House. The construction of the frame has something of the shape of a triangle precisely in the disposition of bodies, Julia is seated between her two children, her dress spilling over the stairs that are descending from the window [illustration 2]. The fact that this moment represents a pivotal memory in the entire narrative is emphasized by the choice of title selected for the first section of the novel, “The Window”. This consistent return to the figure of the mother in the window all throughout the novel reveals perhaps the author's desire to recapture her image from the narrative, to animate the photograph and to give it three dimensional breadth and fluency, until she finally manages to banish the image from her mind and achieve closure. In A Sketch of the Past, Woolf reflects on the cathartic effect attained by completing her novel:
“[...] I wrote the book very quickly; and when it was written, I ceased to be obsessed with my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her. I suppose that I did for myself what psycho-analysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and laid it to rest” (A Sketch 81).
In this passage, Woolf employs the same vocabulary used to describe her “shock-receiving capacity” earlier on in the text. Even more, she stresses the therapeutic function of fiction writing, hinting at psychoanalytical notions such as repressed emotions and working through by transference and narrative, which were emphasized previously in connection with Freud's text. Without considering whether she had applied the treatment to herself consciously at the time of writing the novel, I would like to point out again that the desire to overcome trauma represents the driving force behind the author's creative process in To the Lighthouse, which is to say that, post-traumatic stress might be linked to the need for expression in human beings.
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Illustration 2: Julia Stephen with Virginia and Adrian, 1890s. Reproduction of plate 37d from Leslie Stephen’s Photograph Album Original: silver print (7 x 7 cm.) Presented by Quentin and Anne Olivier Bell. Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College. |
Woolf reenacts three main stages preceding and following the traumatic event in her novel by substituting herself for some of the characters, most significantly Lily Briscoe. In the first chapter, Woolf reconstructs the setting of her childhood and focuses on the representations of Mrs. Ramsay in the familial setting and on her relationship with her husband and children. This is a period of relative calm where the subtle conflicts between the characters are still faint, although deeply rooted. This fragment also emphasizes the strong attachment to the figure of Mrs. Ramsay betraying a desire for possession in the author. Through Lily Briscoe's eyes, Woolf lingers on Mrs. Ramsay's image extensively, she observes her in the intimacy of the home, admires her beauty, her kindness and elegance. This stage marks the author's identification with the figure of the mother, which will be violently interrupted by her unexpected death.
The second part of the novel, “Time Passes”, is in fact a space of mourning, marked by the gradual collapse of the Ramsays' holiday house, deserted after Mrs. Ramsay's death. This is the stage immediately following the traumatic occurrence, a stage where the loss is not yet fully realized, but it is experienced in the chaotic transformations in the psyche. In this almost ritual description of the physical collapse of the house, Woolf articulates the experience of loss in its entire magnitude and works through it in the rhythm of her writing.
The last chapter entitled “To the Lighthouse,” brings closure to the novel and conciliation in the conflict between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay. Mr. Ramsay finally takes his son and daughter on a boat trip to the lighthouse in a gesture of repentance and as a commemoration of his wife. As they sail away towards the lighthouse, Lily, who had stayed back on the shore, can see an apparition in the window pane, the place where she had painted Mrs. Ramsay before. At first, she feels it must be only the wind stirring something in the room, but then she fully embraces her vision as if it were part of ordinary experience: “Mrs. Ramsay [...] sat there quite simply, in the chair, flicked her needles to and fro, knitted her reddish-brown stocking, cast her shadow on the step” (To the Lighthouse 386-387). This final vision, very similar to the recurrent latent post-traumatic memories, enables Lily to return to her painting and finish it by drawing one last line. She had abandoned her picture in the attic of the house after Mrs. Ramsay's death, as if putting the bad thoughts away to a corner of the mind, but the sudden ghostly appearance in the window allows her to contemplate the painting one last time and to finally lay it to rest. Lily delivers Mrs. Ramsay's shadow to the canvas. Woolf writes the last two lines in her book: “It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision” (To the Lighthouse 391). Likewise, Woolf is done, she has finished her masterpiece and left the remnants of trauma in the text, she has accepted her compulsion to recall her mother's presence and abandoned it all at once through the art of literature.
The second part of the novel, “Time Passes”, is in fact a space of mourning, marked by the gradual collapse of the Ramsays' holiday house, deserted after Mrs. Ramsay's death. This is the stage immediately following the traumatic occurrence, a stage where the loss is not yet fully realized, but it is experienced in the chaotic transformations in the psyche. In this almost ritual description of the physical collapse of the house, Woolf articulates the experience of loss in its entire magnitude and works through it in the rhythm of her writing.
The last chapter entitled “To the Lighthouse,” brings closure to the novel and conciliation in the conflict between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay. Mr. Ramsay finally takes his son and daughter on a boat trip to the lighthouse in a gesture of repentance and as a commemoration of his wife. As they sail away towards the lighthouse, Lily, who had stayed back on the shore, can see an apparition in the window pane, the place where she had painted Mrs. Ramsay before. At first, she feels it must be only the wind stirring something in the room, but then she fully embraces her vision as if it were part of ordinary experience: “Mrs. Ramsay [...] sat there quite simply, in the chair, flicked her needles to and fro, knitted her reddish-brown stocking, cast her shadow on the step” (To the Lighthouse 386-387). This final vision, very similar to the recurrent latent post-traumatic memories, enables Lily to return to her painting and finish it by drawing one last line. She had abandoned her picture in the attic of the house after Mrs. Ramsay's death, as if putting the bad thoughts away to a corner of the mind, but the sudden ghostly appearance in the window allows her to contemplate the painting one last time and to finally lay it to rest. Lily delivers Mrs. Ramsay's shadow to the canvas. Woolf writes the last two lines in her book: “It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision” (To the Lighthouse 391). Likewise, Woolf is done, she has finished her masterpiece and left the remnants of trauma in the text, she has accepted her compulsion to recall her mother's presence and abandoned it all at once through the art of literature.
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Works Cited
Primary Sources
Woolf, Virginia. A Writer's Diary. Editor: Leonard Woolf. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1973. Print.
---. “A Sketch of the Past” in Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings. Edited by Jeanne Schulkind. London and Toronto: Sussex University Press, 1976. Print.
---. “To the Lighthouse” in Selected Works of Virginia Woolf. London: Wordsworth Special Editions Ltd., 2005. Print.
Secondary Sources
Benstock, Shari. “Authorizing the Autobiographical” in Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader. Edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. London and Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. 145-156. Print.
Caruth, Cathy. “Introduction” in Explorations in Memory. The John Hopkins University Press:
Maryland, 1995, 3-13. Print.
Freud, Sigmund. "Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through." Standard Edition, vol. 12: 147-56. Translated and edited by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1958. Print.
Humm, Maggie. Snapshots of Bloomsbury: The Private Lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. London: Tate Publishing, 2005. Print.
Kuhn, Annette. Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination. New edition. London and New York: Verso, 2002. Print.
Lacan, Jacques, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I" in Écrits: A Selection (London: Tavistock, 1977; New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1977). Print.
Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2004. Print.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Idea. Volume I. Translated by B.B. Haldane and J. Kemp. Routledge & Kegan Paul: London, 1957.
Squier, Susan. “Mirroring and Mothering: Reflections on the Mirror Encounter Metaphor in
Virginia Woolf's Work” in Twentieth Century Literature 27, no. 3 (1981): 272-289. Print.