Illness, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath
I’m re-reading Virginia Woolf this week: To the Lighthouse, and some letters and re-edited journals, with a dip into Quentin Bell’s early 1970s and rather severe biography for additional context.
Bell is, of course, Woolf’s nephew, and I came to his biography back in high school, before I read a single word by Woolf herself. He shaped my view of a writer I didn’t think I needed to read, an odd duck who was sexless and neurotic.
Then during my first year of university, I was assigned To the Lighthouse in an otherwise irritating first-year lit course and felt transported out of myself, in a manner that only a handful of books have ever achieved. I was Mrs. Ramsay, and then Lily, and then Mrs. Ramsay again, dealing with tiresome men and their pouty demands on my time and energy. It felt less like reading and more like being possessed.
But I’ve never been able to quite re-capture that sense, in my re-readings. A wonderful book by Wendy Lesser, Nothing Remains the Same, analyzes this closely as the author returns to the books of her youth and early adulthood and compares her two (or more) reading experiences.
Lesser is, to be fair, less of a Woolfian than I am. Here she is in the NY Times, c. 1979, complaining about Woolf’s long-ranging impact as a literary critic:
“I find it disturbing that Virginia Woolf, the possessor of an intense but extremely limited form of genius, should have been able, in the course of just 60 or 70 years, to crowd a great novelist like Arnold Bennett right off the literary map. It is as if you had planted a delightfully unusual ground cover in your garden, only to discover some years later that its rampant spread had killed your favorite oak. (Well, not oak, exactly. Charles Dickens is an oak. Bennett is more like an unruly old apple tree: he could use some pruning, but the fruit is delicious.)”
It’s a lovely extended simile, but the suggestion that Woolf’s critique killed off Bennett is, I think, not quite fair: a single reader rarely has such a significant effect.
And I rate Woolf much more highly than Bennett.
But I don’t enjoy Woolf’s criticism, even in the rich and thoughtful Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, nearly as much as I enjoy a few of her novels, notably Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and, in some moods, The Waves; others, oddly, have left me cold.
Woolf was also a brilliant essayist, a writer of autofiction avant la lettre, in some instances. Arguably.
Instead of making that argument here, I want to turn to two essays: the one I read yesterday, as consolation during a sick day, and the one I’m reading this morning as a companion piece to Theresa Kishkan’s forthcoming memoir.
First, Woolf’s “On Being Ill.”
“Literature,” Woolf observes tartly, “does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, negligible, and non-existent. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night, the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens; colours, or discolours; turns to wax in the warmth of June; hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane–smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness, until there comes the inevitable catastrophe; the body smashes itself to smithereens and the soul (it is said) escapes. But of all this daily drama of the body there is no record.”
When Woolf’s health is discussed, the focus tend to be on her mental struggles and eventual suicide; but as her essay goes on to demonstrate, physical pain and suffering were intimately known to her. Influenza, pneumonia, even colds could send her to her bed for weeks and produce dark moods, the inability to write.
I’m thinking, too, of Sylvia Plath, whose physical ailments during college and grad school, her recurring bouts of what she called sinusitis, frequently sent her to the infirmary, where she could relax into the quasi-maternal care of the nursing staff at Smith College.
There’s a complex relationship between childhood trauma, which both women experienced (in different but equally devastating contexts), and adult health.
We’re learning more about how adverse childhood events are linked to autoimmune disorders, for instance, which are so over-represented in female patients and so much less likely to be taken seriously than, say, heart disease.
And now to Greece, because I have cancelled all of this year’s trip plans, with regret, to make myself available to the health establishment.
And that’s fine, but I’m a bit sad, because I’d been dangling the prospect of Montmartre and the Tivoli Gardens to myself, to get through the winter and my college’s next round of painful cuts.
Instead of travel, I’ve arranged to work with a developmental editor on a mystery novel this spring; I’m putting together a one-day online conference for those of us working on Alice Munro, and who are considering how we read her work now.
Plath wrote, “Work saves; work redeems.” I’m not convinced by this, but work does fill the time and one’s thoughts.
Virginia Woolf and Ancient Greek, via Alice Munro
“She gives me delight, Juliet could have said. Not that she is one of those song-and-dance purveyors of sunshine and cheer and looking-on-the-bright-side. But she has grace and compassion and she is as wise as if she’d been on this earth for eighty years. Her nature is reflective—not all over the map, like mine. Somewhat reticent, like her father’s. She is also angelically pretty—blond like my mother but not so frail. Strong and noble. Molded, I should say, like a caryatid. And, contrary to popular notions, I am not even faintly jealous. All this time without her—and no word from her, because Spiritual Balance does not allow letters or phone calls—all this time I’ve been in a sort of desert, and when her message came I was like an old patch of cracked earth getting a full drink of rain.” Alice Munro, “Silence”
Woolf begins her essay on ancient Greek tragedy with a disavowal, immediately following up (and amplifying) her title, “On Not Knowing Greek”:
“For it is vain and foolish to talk of knowing Greek, since in our ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since we do not know how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to laugh, or how the actors acted, and between this foreign people and ourselves there is not only difference of race and tongue but a tremendous breach of tradition. All the more strange, then, is it that we should wish to know Greek, try to know Greek, feel for ever drawn back to Greek, and be for ever making up some notion of the meaning of Greek, though from what incongruous odds and ends, with what slight resemblance to the real meaning of Greek, who shall say?”
The “we” here is, of course, both Woolf herself and the collective of women, the sisters of boys who study Greek and Latin in prep schools and take Greats at Oxford. Knowledge of classical languages was not considered a nineteenth-century feminine accomplishment, although there are some rare and intriguing examples of young women who did have access to language study and developed proficiency.
My favourite J.E. Harrison, cited in Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, is among this number.
Roger Kimball suggests in this recent piece in Antigone that her reputation has faded, but there is hope for renewal: “since almost any literary reputation – particularly that of a female writer – is a candidate for academic rehabilitation these days, it is hardly surprising that so substantial a figure as Jane Harrison is undergoing the process of reconstruction and reclamation.”
Harrison’s father married her governess, several years after her mother’s post-partum death. She was well educated and given liberal access to language study. From childhood, Harrison was apparently a magnet for languages, collecting them “like butterflies”: “She was fluent in Greek, Latin, French, and German, and had a good working knowledge of Spanish and Italian. In later years, she devoted herself to Russian and along the way dipped into Sanskrit, Cuneiform, Hebrew, Persian, Swedish and Icelandic.”
Intriguingly, after graduating from Cambridge, as one of its earliest female grads, Harrison drifted from academia to London, to work at the British Museum, where she taught and researched; it was only two decades later that she returned to Newnham College, her alma mater.
And Jane-Ellen Harrison, in keeping with one of my themes this week, experienced a range of maladies: “Though she suffered from an impressive battery of ‘nervous complaints’ at least from adolescence – headaches, shortness of breath, fainting spells, even bouts of blindness – she lived on until 1928, dying of leukemia five months shy of her 78th birthday.”
A good long life, with periodic bouts of likely-misdiagnosed illnesses.
Caryatid. Munro’s image.
It’s one of my favourite words, reminiscent of “katydid,” which is both a nickname for a cricket and, in a punning borrowing, the title of a set of books I once loved: What Katy Did; What Katy Did Next.
Susan Coolidge’s first novel in the series describes the adventures of a spirited eponymous protagonist. But then–and I remember this with a slight intake of breath, because it was impressed upon me so intensely when I first read it–Katy has a terrible accident, involving a swing. She injures her back and must spend months in bed; it’s not clear if she’ll be forever paralyzed.
And the accident is Katy’s own fault: she was cautioned not to use the broken-down swing, and her spinal injury is on her own conscience.
I was once a child who was told that all of my injuries and ailments were my own fault. This was the only way, I suspect, that my mother could endure her own pains: by alternating between denying them and taking responsibility for them. And so she did the same with/for/to me.
Because she died young(ish), at 55, and I will be 55 on my next birthday, she’s been on my mind more than usual this season.
Katy Did then does something rather Victorian, incidentally: Coolidge enables her young heroine to experience significant moral and spiritual growth, because being bedridden forces patience on her.
That I did not rebel at this prospect when I was a child reader now seems surprising to me. But I found it weirdly comforting, because it meant that time spent being ill was valuable, not merely wasted.
That takes me back to caryatids and mother-daughter relationships in Alice Munro’s
“Silence” is part of her triptych of stories about Juliet, the young classicist who halts her doctoral studies after a momentous encounter on a train. Instead of returning to grad school after a year spent teaching out west, after this first train encounter, she seeks out the man who was kind when she experienced a traumatic shock.
In “Chance,” we hear about this train trip from Toronto to Vancouver, which culminates in a man’s suicide on the tracks. Coincidentally–but perhaps fatally–he had made an overture to Juliet shortly before his death. A young woman travelling alone, she spurned him. Understandably. But is his death now her fault? Another man she meets–the one she will later pursue to his coastal home up north, and then fall in love with–insists that it is not.
In “Soon,” Juliet returns to Ontario and the home of her parents; her mother is dying and her father has found an odd solace in his impossible vegetable garden and the companionship of his young housekeeper. Juliet, who had expected more attention from her parents, has returned with her young baby, Penelope, and she is out of sorts, out of place. She misses Penelope’s father. (Many years later, she will learn that he missed her too, taking up with an old flame, her good friend, in her place. This affair will haunt the end of their marriage, and then he will die, suddenly: we learn about this only in the next story, however.)
The final story is “Silence.” Juliet is in late middle-age and growing elderly, while Penelope, who has been estranged from her for decades, is an adult with her own family (Juliet learns, inadvertently, from a chance meeting with Penelope’s school friend, Heather) of five children.
But why are they not speaking? Why has Penelope up and left Juliet behind?
Perhaps, Juliet thinks, Penelope simply has no use for her.
As comfort, after a successful broadcasting career, Juliet has returned to her classical studies, in a desultory manner, fastening on The Aethiopica‘s depiction of a long-lost mother-daughter pair. Heliodorus offers her the hope of a reunion.
But what we know now, as readers, is that even as Alice Munro was crafting this story, about a mother who has no idea why her daughter has abandoned her, she was enduring (and perhaps provoking, if we want to be judgmental) her loss of her own adult daughter.
It is a sad and terrible story.
I’m writing about it in a draft of an academic article about this story triptych and the real-life context, so I won’t delve into it further here, except to say that it is also a common story.
Men estrange mothers and daughters, and not infrequently. Husbands and fathers who need to be valorized and comforted, forgiven for sins they won’t even own up to, are held close more than their sinned against-daughters.
It’s maddening, and it continues to occur.
Alice Munro needed her life partner more than she needed her youngest daughter; she asked her daughter–like Lear–to love her more than the mother loved her daughter, and with greater sacrifice of selfhood.
It is enormously to the youngest daughter’s credit that she refused. Andrea Robin Skinner was no Penelope, no caryatid, cold and obdurate. But in turning her into a fictional character whose actions are baffling and incomprehensible, Alice Munro did her an enormous disservice.
“We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do–we do it all the time.” Alice Munro, “Dear Life”
But perhaps we shouldn’t. Perhaps, in some contexts, forgiveness is not earned.
And Finally: Theresa Kishkan
All of this was prompted for me, this week, by thinking about Theresa Kishkan’s forthcoming book, The Art of Looking Back, which is about re-discovering her younger self’s deep susceptibility to a painter, an older and married man who turned her into the subject (or object; that’s part of the riddle) of his art.
Kishkan was an adventurous traveller, and her description of going to Greece, solo, in her early 20s, has me equally admiring and fearful for the young protagonist, who is mixed parts bravado and vulnerability.
How I should like to go to Greece, which is now, perhaps, beyond my reach: too hot, too far, too rocky, too unpredictable, too stressful.
Back, instead, to my language study.
From the Fitzwilliam Museum‘s site:
“The derivation of the word caryatid, meaning a female figure that acts as a support in classical architecture, is unclear. The Roman writer and architect Vitruvius claimed, in the first century BCE, that the figures were named after the women of the Greek city of Carya, the inhabitants of which sided with Persia when it invaded Greece in 480 BCE.
In retribution, the victorious Greeks destroyed Carya, executed the male inhabitants and led the womenfolk in procession as slaves, still dressed in their jewellery and fine clothes. The first architectural caryatids however appear before the Persian invasion, so Vitruvius’ account, dramatic as it is, cannot be true.
It is more likely that the word is derived from the cult of Artemis Caryatis – ‘Artemis of the walnut tree’ – and that the earliest caryatids represented the young girls who danced for this goddess at her annual festival in Sparta.”
I much prefer this second explanation. Young girls dancing, not for a god, but for a goddess.
The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction 
Leave a comment