Virginia Woolf - Mental Illness Defined Her Craft by Richard Cytowic

"Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse opens in opposition, with a fragment of conversation already in progress: “Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,” says Mrs. Ramsay to her son James. “But,” contradicts his father two paragraphs later, “it won’t be fine.”

The novel is unbalanced from its first line. Within four paragraphs, points of view shift among mother, son, and father; then an omniscient voice reveals the thoughts of all three members of the Ramsay family, “that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that.”

Could such opposing attitudes reflect Woolf’s own considerable ambivalence? Do the author’s real-life equivocations echo in the indecisiveness of her fictional characters and her inconclusive plot arcs? In her diaries, Woolf regularly described a recurrent “madness,” referring to the disruptive mood swings that plagued her career and ultimately led to her suicide. As a doctor who has studied neurological disorders for 35 years, I recognize such periodic and cyclical fluctuations as manic–depressive illness, or bipolar affective disorder.

Woolf could not piece herself together when unpredictable mental illness fragmented her world. “Virginia could be a very enchanting person,” said Vogue editor Madge Garland, “but there were times when I felt that she was more nearly enchanted.” When depressed, Woolf took to bed and withdrew, viewing the world as meaningless and without hope. On the upswing to mania she wrote at breakneck speed, the words seeming to compose themselves.

Because the distorted thinking of bipolar individuals persists even when they are neutrally poised between mania and depression, Woolf read meaning and portent into events that were likely coincidental. This tendency may be one reason Woolf’s novels are strewn with odd, minute details that lure readers to hunt for significance in them.

Critics and therapists often presume psychodynamic explanations of causation despite lack of evidence in Woolf’s writing. The thinking goes that because the young Virginia was sexually abused, she portrayed the sexes as incommensurable, misogynistic in the way Richard Dalloway is in The Voyage Out or Mr. Tansley is in Lighthouse. The modern habit is to think about mental forces in terms of cause and effect.

What if instead one took a biological perspective and asked how the distorted perceptions and self-absorption typical of bipolar individuals might have colored the thinking of one of the 20th century’s most celebrated authors? Such a mind makes it hard to see objectively, let alone distinguish facts from its projections. Though Woolf confused subject and object most often during manic upswings, she also did so to varying degrees all the time.

From my perspective as a neurologist who studies minds and as a creative writer who imagines characters’ inner lives, Virginia Woolf’s mind is a marvel to behold. No two books are alike. “Not this, not that,” she seems to be saying as she rejects convention and hones her technique in a lifelong experiment to portray consciousness and the character of thought. Her ideas about the unreliability of language were prescient given what science now knows: that the very structure of human brains allows language to introspect only a fraction of consciousness."

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