There is a Woolfness deep within me.

| By Sofie Vandamme |

Woolf overwhelms me, she crushes me. Her work feels too close, too intense, too intimate. Yet at the same time, it is so familiar and safe. Her writing gets under my skin. It slips into my bloodstream. It is rooted in my body. I have no idea why. I even wonder if it has anything to do with the ‘real’ Virginia Woolf. Or am I drawn to someone who exists only in my head? Is Virginia Woolf the person I have made her out to be, my Virginia Woolf? And why is she so dear to me? 

Emily Dickinson had My George Eliot.

Susan Howe had My Emily Dickinson.

Louis Begley had My Kafka.

Alain de Botton had My Proust.

Siri Hustvedt had My Louise Bourgeois.

In her essay, My Louise Bourgeois, Siri Hustvedt describes how this kind of appropriation works. Drawing on the psychoanalytical concept of transference, she illustrates how all manner of desires and identifications are projected onto an artist. Her Louise bears no relation to the idiosyncratic artist who was the woman of flesh and blood. She emerges in the space between the creator, the work and the viewer. Thus, the possessive pronoun ‘my’ does not refer to ownership, but to an interaction, to a reciprocal encounter: not only does the work touch me, but I also add to it myself. In that exchange, meaning unconsciously emerges.

Virginia Woolf is my Virginia Woolf. My most individual, my personal, particular Virginia. She crafts a unique universe in which descriptions, characters and passages bob about on the waves of my mind. She makes me think. Sometimes she makes me laugh. Occasionally, she compels me to write. And she frequently reduces me to silence. Unpredictable and inevitable. Grimly resigned. Poetically restless. The unconscious is a curious thing. There is a Woolfness deep within me.

My Virginia Woolf is a woman, untouchably vulnerable.

My Virginia Woolf is a portrait, suffused with sadness.

My Virginia Woolf speaks, lives and endures in the tragedy of her end, resonating with the allure of the abyss. 

My Virginia Woolf searches for a physical language for illness, a fascination that I share. 

My Virginia Woolf... 

My Virginia Woolf is a fishwife. I cannot think of Woolf without the image of a flabby haddock; or of a sour, faintly discoloured sausage. They seem to be the nauseating props in a misplaced scene by a literary icon, somewhere in the final pages of her writer’s diary. But they are so much more.

“Occupation is essential. And now with some pleasure I find that it's seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.”

ONE 

GAINS 

A CERTAIN 

HOLD 

ON 

SAUSAGE 

AND 

HADDOCK 

BY 

WRITING 

THEM 

DOWN.

Virginia Woolf wrote these words in her diary on 8 March 1941, twenty days before she filled the pockets of her coat with stones and stepped into the River Ouse to drown herself.

How peculiar: the feminist star author who, in the final days before her self-appointed death, writes in her diary that she must cook dinner. Haddock and sausages. She does not quite add that it is for her husband. It could scarcely be more banal. And yet it is precisely these words that strike me so deeply.

They do not speak; they shout, they rage. 

Haddock and sausages 

haddock and sausages 

haddock and... 

They pray, they plead

I think it is true

I think it is true

I think it is true

They conjure, they compel. 

Gains a certain hold on

gains a certain hold on

gains a certain hold on

They reveal a secret.

Writing down

writing down

writing down

On those chilly spring days in March, she feels it rising again: the madness, the madness. She does not utter the word, yet she tries to preserve the normality of domestic life. She will cook. It's seven o'clock. That's when people cook. She may be cooking for Leonard, perhaps also for herself. Fortunately, it’s almost seven o'clock. She has made it through the day. Now she is going to cook, because it is time to cook. Time and cooking are anchors in her unstable existence.

Yes, you'd better start cooking, my Virginia, then it will seem like you have everything under control. No one will notice, no one will see that you must cook, not for Leonard but for yourself. Not to eat – because you hardly eat – but to maintain the semblance of normality. You convince yourself to start cooking so that no one will know about your despair, your fear, your emptiness, your darkness. 

Occupation is essential. Everyone is occupied. Keeping ourselves occupied is what we do all our lives: occupied with cooking, occupied with haddock, occupied with sausages. As long as we stay occupied, we remain meaningful, we remain whole. Occupation wards off the desire for death. It wards off death.

Your domesticity is the mask you hide behind. The masquerade of bourgeois life is the death mask that Leonard modelled for you when he married you. He turned you into an object of care, the madwoman. He reduced you to a sick woman who was deemed unfit for motherhood. The so-called rest cure, often imposed upon you by ‘that pig-headed man’ Dr Savage, actually drove you mad. Leonard believed, as so many did, that intellectual work was harmful for fragile female brains. However, that forced rest created an unlit void that devoured you from within.

Leonard intended only the very best for you. No sacrifice was too great for him. Not that your life together was easy. In your so-called moments of madness, you repeatedly unleashed your aggressive anger on him. In your periods of sanity, he created the ideal environment for you to blossom into a literary genius. He meticulously recorded the cycles of intense creativity during the writing of novels, interspersed with exhaustion and mental breakdowns. Repeatedly, as a woman, as an artist, as a human being, you were reduced to that single thing: the madwoman. 

‘It’, they say.

‘The goat who has always been mad’, they say. 

‘Possessed by insanity’, they say.

‘Whatever we are to call it’, they say.

‘All that summer she was mad’,they say.

‘Postmarital psychosis’, they say.

‘Unintentional, irrational and meaningless mad behaviour’, they say.  

‘Anorexic’, they say.

‘Insane’, they say.

‘Mentally ill’, they say. 

‘An intensified form of her imagined life’, they say.

Your biographers discuss the nature of your disease as if it were an external force that occasionally overrules your personality. Leonard, who knew you so well, reinforces this when he says, ‘There was a moment when she passed from what can be rightly called sanity to insanity’. But it is precisely this madness that earns you the aureole of ‘the mad genius’, a dubious honour usually reserved for men. 

But who are you, as a woman, as an artist? Although you do not write about it explicitly, you perceive your madness less as a weakness, but as a force. ‘My madness saved me,’ you wrote in a letter to Jacques Raverat in 1924. On 22 June 1930, you wrote to Ethel Smyth: ‘... my brains went up in a shower of fireworks. As an experience, madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I can still find most of the things I write about.’ 

Strikingly, in On Being Ill, your famous essay about illness, you do not write about your traumas, or about the hunger that chills you to the bone, or about your periods of severe depression. Instead, you write about ‘the poverty of language when it comes to sickness and disease’. In this essay, you make an impassioned plea for a new language to articulate experiences of illness; one that is more primitive, sensory and ambiguous. 

You detested simplified, functional language. ‘When words are pinned down, they fold their wings and die’, you write in in On Craftsmanship. You would not have approved of contemporary psychiatric labels, a corset too tight for what madness means to you. But you would probably turn in your grave if you knew how your unique language is being psychiatricised, as if your literature were merely a symptom of illness.

At the end of your life, you indeed search in your diary for a primitive language for madness, a fishy, greasy language. In writing of your haddock and sausages, you are truthfully describing madness in all its power and torment. Your fish and meat touches upon madness in its unpalatable, illogical composition of fishiness and sausage-like reality. You are grasping that amorphous, sucking force of the depths over which even writing can gain no hold. The image of haddock and sausages renders tangible what you describe as ‘the strange, yes, the diabolical power of words’.

Yourmine haddock and sausages: demons and nocturnal torments

Yourmine haddock and sausages: the hollow void from within 

Yourmine haddock and sausages: the fever in every fibre of the body 

Yourmine haddock and sausages: the indeterminate days of darkness 

Your language of madness, my Virginia, resonates within me. Not because it truthfully represents a shared reality, but because these words also escape your will. Your words carry their own associative charge; they do something to me that you, as the writer, cannot fully control. Your haddock and sausages, my Virginia, are not yours alone. They are mine too.

Your haddock and sausages ‘cut into the seams of the skin that most of us are covered with’, as you so poetically put it in your essay What is a good novel. These are words that cut and stink, that pierce complacencies. In their banality and materiality, they shatter the pathological discourse of your mythical genius. And it is precisely there that you resonate as My Virginia Woolf, stripped of literary grandeur, but imbued with the banality of haddock and sausages, which robs writing about madness of any linguistic logic. These are words that chafe and scratch at fixed interpretations of what it might mean to be a mad artist.

After all, your haddock and sausages are free words, words that yearn to live unconfinedly. Precisely because they are free, they make madness tangible: vulgar, stinking, retching, gulping, devouring, drowning.

No one knows how these free words operate; they are not entirely controllable. ‘Why words do this, how they do it ... nobody knows’, you write in On Craftsmanship. Your words are not passive instruments; they carry their own history and their specific associative load. They sometimes subvert the author's intention, generating meaning that cannot be fully controlled. ‘They do it without your will and even against your will’. 

That is what the free words haddock and sausages do for me. Something indeterminate yet recognisable, like a minimal form of resistance against the void, or an attempt by language to grasp what continually slips away. 

Haddock and sausages make room for the unconscious.

They reveal that our darkness is the light of words. 

But today, it goes no further than writing about haddock and sausages. ‘It is time.’ ‘Silence!’

Bibliography

Caramagno, T. C. (1992). The flight of the mind: Virginia Woolf’s art and manic-depressive illness. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Ferrer, D. (2013). Virginia Woolf and the madness of language. London, UK: Routledge.

Hustvedt, S. (2016). My Louise Bourgeois. In A woman looking at men looking at women: Essays on art, sex, and the mind (pp. 25–34). Londen: Hodder &Stoughton.

Lee, H. (1997)Virginia Woolf.London, UK: Vintage.

Szasz, T. S. (2006). My madness saved me: The madness and marriage of Virginia Woolf. Londen: Routledge

Trombley, S. (1981). All that summer she was mad. Virginia Woolf and her doctors. London, UK: Junction Books.

Woolf, V. (1973). A writer’s diary: Being extracts from the diary of Virginia Woolf (L. Woolf, Ed.). London, Harcourt.

Woolf, V. (2020). On being ill/ Over ziek zijn. Amsterdam: hetMoet.

Woolf, V. (2009). Craftsmanship. InThe Death of the Moth, and other essays.ebooks@Adeleide.

Woolf, V. (2024). Wat is en goede roman? In Woorden willen losjes leven. Essays over schrijverschap. Leusden: ISVWuithgevers