Azalea Bushes & Asparagus Beds
== Azalea Bushes and Asparagus Beds: Virginia Woolf and the Medical Backlash ==
Pamella Farley
June 1978 Berkshire Women’s History Conference
The social and linguistic forces which maintain the discourses of heterosexual normality in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway -- Conformity and Conversion, enforced through family and friends by doctors who are backed by the weight of the British empire, operated as well in her own life. At the end of that novel Clarissa sees with shame how her silence and practices of respectability help push Septimus, closeted in loneliness and silence, to his suicide. She even admires him for dying with “his treasure” – his homosexual love for Evans – “intact.” But her vision of a possible future as a lonely old woman makes her assemble herself and carry on. Although that novel is marked by ambivalence and coding, it is structurally clear that the twin stories of Clarissa with Sally and Septimus with Evans are the artistic form of Virginia Stephen Woolf's own conflicted experience as a married woman who loved women in a world increasingly threatened by the potential alternative to patriarchal control that lesbianism could --with the period's historic push toward independence and autonomy for women --provide.
Virginia Stephen loved women. As she is for everybody, the mother is the first great love. "My mother believed that all men required an infinity of care" (HPG, 143), she wrote in the early 20's,1 and her daughters were brought up in that tradition. Until she was in her forties and with the love and support of vita Sackville-West wrote To the Lighthouse, somewhat relieving the pressure of heterosexuality emanating from the parental relation, the presence of her mother's ghost obsessed her. Loving the mother, Virginia submitted to the requirements of men; she was held in place in the stream.2 And, loving her, she also resisted them; she maintained her love for women. Very early within the circle of family, relations, friends Virginia found female intimacy, affection and romance. She fell in love with Madge Symonds, for whom, she later told Vita, "she had never felt a more poignant emotion" (Bell, 1:61)3 and used that experience to create a past for Clarissa with Sally Seton.
Yet at the time, love between females was not regarded as significant in the world because it did not lead to “official love”: engagement and marriage. Watching Stella Duckworth and Jack Hills, young Virginia felt rapturous; this vision of heterosexual engagement set a standard of love for her, and for most of her life she maintained a distinction between the "official" and the "unofficial" versions of love (SP, 105). At this epoch however the unofficial love of women may have served a positive function; so long as its endearments, even its kisses, caresses, embraces, or as Quentin Bell puts it, its "bedding together" (Bell, 1I:119) kept women happy without threatening customary heterosexual relations, it was --covertly --either disregarded or indulged.
In 1902 when she was 20, Virginia studied Greek with Janet Case, whom she adored, and met Violet Dickinson, with whom for many years she shared a "friendship" involving physical and emotional intimacy, whose eroticism was coded at times in their letters by the playful assumption of creatureliness. In the summer of 1903 Virginia wrote from Hyde Park Gate (L,1:83-85):4
My child, I will come with joy on Friday, but it grieves me to think that your works are rusty. I see they want a good licking by the devoted Sparroy --poor Beast... Anybody can write half a sheet, but can anybody cram in the amount of pure hot affection that I do? ...I will lick you tenderly. Yr. Sparroy
and again:
My Violet, ...It is astonishing what depths--hot volcano depths--your finger has stirred in Sparroy...
In 1903 culture did not reflect what we might now think of as lesbian relationships; tremendous pressure was exerted to keep them invisible; Virginia both resisted and participated in this pressure.5 Propriety and decorum, which forbade the overt acknowledgement of sexuality, acted not only to veil the nature (which we would now recognize as sexual) of female love relations; it also provided a nearly impenetrable mask for improper heterosexual relations, particularly within the family. The sexual molestation which Virginia had endured from childhood from her half-brother Gerald Duckworth was hidden and nameless; she had "instinctively" withdrawn, deciding that her "instincts" were non-feminine, and that she must be ashamed of her body (SP, 68). She disliked the feminine role expected of women, and liked the women. She was devastated when her mother died; and when Stella died shortly afterwards, the last shields for Vanessa and Virginia from the brutal (SP, 125) tyranny exercised in the privacy of the home by the father over the women in the family were removed. In addition, they had to bear the sexual demands of the half-brothers which, if not met covertly within the family by their sisters, would, George threatened, drive the men to the less respectable alternatives of prostitution and homosexuality (HPG, 150). And as Sir Leslie Stephen himself grew ill, the authority of the Duckworth brothers was increased.
In the early 20's Virginia was to write of this period a private essay for her Bloomsburian friends in the Memoir Club, describing for her fellow critics of Victorian society the sophisticated social surface of the respectable society to which the Stephens sisters were being forcibly introduced by its darling, George Duckworth, and revealed its smutty underside --and his. She concludes: "Yes, the old ladies of Kensington and Belgravia never knew that George Duckworth was not only father and mother, brother and sister to those poor Stephens girls; he was their lover also" (HPG, 155). In a subsequent essay she recorded:
"George would fling himself on my bed, cuddling and kissing and otherwise embracing me in order, as he told Dr. Savage later, to comfort me for the fatal illness of my father --who was dying three or four stories down of cancer" (CB, 160).6 But while it was happening it was horrible --and because unmentionable, unbelievable: as though to hear the King use dirty words -- the very man who should be protecting you being the one to soil you. Who could speak against a brother so devoted, so universally acclaimed? To ungenerously speak ill of such a favorite would be shameful, would betray one’s self as problematic, would be to others like speaking in tongues, or in Greek, language of homosexual lovers. So Virginia, like so many incest victims afraid they wouldn't be believed but would be themselves blamed or found guilty, kept silent. Then Vanessa, with whom she had drawn close, forming a nucleus and battling together (SP, 124), rebelled. Painting, defending her affair with the husband Stella had left behind, she refused to acquiesce to George and Gerald. The pressure increased on Virginia, and she broke under it. Trapped, unable to speak out, to condemn George's desires or defend her own, she could express herself only in code.
When I recovered from the illness which was not unnaturally the result of all these emotions and complications, 22 Hyde Park Gate no longer existed.* While I had lain in bed at the Dickinson's house at Welwyn thinking that the birds were singing Greek choruses and that King Edward was using the foulest possible language among Ozzie Dickinson's azaleas, Vanessa had wound up Hyde Park' Gate once and for all (OB,62). 7
In moving to Bloomsbury (without George who suddenly married) and establishing a rather bohemian household, the orphaned Stephens were escaping from an oppressive heterosexuality into a predominantly homosexual world, where women were not sexual objects and could paint and write and talk intelligently without sanction. And they did, establishing an intellectual and artistic oasis of some renown.
Virginia found the Bloomsbury atmosphere at first lacking in love8 and complained to Violet, "Oh women are my line not these inanimate creatures" (L, I:208), but with the introduction into their conversation of the word "semen," barriers to discussion of phallic and hitherto unmentionable sexual affairs came down, changing for Virginia “the whole aspect of life” (OB, 172, 174). “Now there was nothing, nothing one could not do, at 46 Gordon Square…” she explained to the Memoir Club about old Bloomsbury; “the fact that the loves of buggers can be mentioned openly leads to the fact that no one minds if they are practiced privately. Thus many customs and beliefs were revised” (OB, 174). Adultery and male homosexuality were acknowledged; but we have no record that female lovers were as open and accepted.
Even in that atmosphere of sexual liberation from Victorian prudery, heterosexism and male supremacy were not yet vanquished. Perhaps indeed they were called forth in different guise to defend themselves by creating more liberal and subtle forms capable of burying the threat of lesbian relations as an alternative for rather than accommodation to male supremacy and marriage. It was precisely in this period that the professions were open in England to women: suffragists in 1910 turned to militant tactics to win the vote. The liberation from middle class idleness that women like Virginia and Vanessa Stephen fought for and experienced at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries also brought forth its opposite reaction. Female bonding and lesbian love were suppressed to keep women dependent upon men. Even a prominent homosexual rights activist such as Carpenter had publicly linked lesbianism and feminism together as a problem. Women’s liberation “freed” women from social conditions fostering female community and encouraged for women a more sexual and intimate bonding with men.
As the extended family broke down, the nuclear family developed as a more individualized and apparently desirable form of male supremacy, and divided women. The reforms which resulted in the sexualization of women and marriage simultaneously gave women sexual life and heterosexualized it; alternatives became deviant. Virginia, who experienced these shifts personally in her life, later wrote that human nature had changed around 1910; she married in 1912.
In 1905 she wrote, "Women are so much more amusing than men,” and then about Vanessa added (and later deleted) " -- it is one of the differences between us" (OB, 174). Vanessa gravitated toward the other heterosexual intimate of the old Bloomsbury set, Clive Bell, and to Virginia's dismay one day announced
with a gesture that was at once reluctant and yielding. "Of course, I can see that we shall all marry. It's bound to happen " -- and as she said it I could feel a horrible necessity impending over us; a fate would descend and snatch us apart just as we had achieved freedom and happiness. She, I felt, was already aware of some claim, some need which I resented and tried to ignore (OB, 170).
What claim could counterpose the imperative to marry? Virginia was determined in any case to become a serious writer; her work began to be published. In 1906 she wrote from Gordon Square, Bloomsbury (L, 1:245): My Violet, ...Now then will you believe that I am devoted to every hair, and every ridge and hollow, and every spot upon your body?.. Wall wipes his tender nose, and nuzzles you. AVS
Five days later their brother Thoby Stephen died and two days after that Vanessa agreed to marry Clive Bell. After Vanessa married in 1907, at 25 Virginia established herself first with her remaining brother and then in 1911 when she was 29 with a houseful of men. She worked for women's suffrage, taught, studied, wrote, published, was social and worked on her fiction. Putting together real feelings with conventional or new heterosexual love relations was clearly difficult for her, in life and work. In the vast body of English literature there was no tradition of strong heroines leading successful, fulfilling lives outside marriage, or after it. Moreover, what great writer wrote about whether Chloe likes Olivia --much less, loves her? "For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been" (RO, 89).9 Her experience of love for men was only slightly less difficult to talk about: as incest victim, as rapturous spectator, as failure. When Leonard Woolf returned from India on leave and moved into Virginia's household in December 1911, he courted her.10 When he kissed her, 30 year old Virginia "felt no more than a rock" (L, I:496).11
At this juncture the authority of the medical profession and that of the husband combined in her life, creating a powerful force which was at the same time perfectly conventional, normal, unremarkable -- and so nearly impossible to withstand. During the winter of 1912 Leonard proposed several times; Virginia turned him down and was tense, nervous and headachey. We are told she twice broke down.12
Leonard consulted medical specialists and even before their marriage undertook to medicate her, using drugs. Whatever the sources of her tension and headaches, the result was that he began supervising her health. Immediately after their engagement she wrote "a flurry" of letters to "her old friends and lovers" begging to keep their intimacy intact. To Violet she wrote: "It was idiotic to put you off –l’ve been rather headachey and had a bad night, and Leonard made me into a comatose invalid" (Poole, 119).
Within a year Leonard was to regard her as a mental patient, make daily notes as to her "condition" and supervise her eating and resting, her work and her play, and medicate her. The love and care with which he undertook to protect her from herself became legend. The label of insanity has obviated the necessity for looking beyond the supposition that she was very lucky to have been found by the rare man, whose skills had qualified him to govern a province of the empire, willing to devote his energies so thoroughly to the care of a woman. What we know of the history of women and madness however requires that we examine the situation more closely.13 Leonard and Virginia, married in 1912, saw and spoke different realities. He relied upon a medical model to cure or treat her of symptoms for her "unhappiness” -- for which she believed there was no cure. Despite her feminism, Virginia worried about some "corruption" of the “spirit” in herself (Poole, 23), and was vulnerable to the increasingly strident condemnation of lesbian love in this period. In the post-Darwinian urge to classify, sexologists had begun labeling the entire personality by what had previously been regarded as acts or behavior in which anyone might engage, thus "scientifically" producing normal and deviant types of people.
Such was the advance of science over religion, which had condemned homosexual behavior as sinful but under whose cloak much nonheterosexual behavior went on. Both systems were sustained by law, and first the behavior and then the individual was judged criminal. For the most part this system had been applied to men, for whom homosexuality was a logical, if officially forbidden, extension of male supremacy. But as capitalism brought women into the work force, higher education and the professions, and even political life, when feminism seemed to call attention to the "unnatural" behavior of women, what had hitherto been too taboo to conceive of in the nation's motherpeople now became suspect.
Lesbian love, by now classified as deviant sexuality, thus became visible in terms that had been reserved for men who had "lower" or " animal” instincts supposedly unknown in women. To sexologists (and some homosexual rights advocates wishing either to avoid a cure or promote themselves as a superior third sex) lesbian love was a congenital abnormality; to the more “advanced” and more thoroughly heterosexualized psychoanalysts, it was a symptom of arrested development. The main effect of these changes was to taint love between women, who were forced into notoriety (of high life or low) or even deeper closets. Virginia was caught in this vise. As a lover of women he had no support in Bloomsbury. E.M. Forster was to tell Virginia even during the trial of Hall's Well of Loneliness in 1928 (when liberals were called to defend her right to publish a novel about "inversion”) that he found Sapphism "disgusting," and felt that women should not be "independent of men" (D,III:193). By 1930 she seems to have accepted a theory of what she called her "congenital faults" (D,III:3l2).14
In 1912-13 Virginia was claiming that her "unhappiness" was due to her own "faults" (Poole, 148) and was not curable. So she battled the rest cures, the forced feeding and the medication. This resistance to "treatment" became symptomatic of her "illness." Leonard's view was the "reasonable" one, supported by friends and relatives. They quarreled about her social life; about whether her book was making her sick; about whether she should be allowed to have children; and mostly about whether she was ill.15 Leonard, reduced in his own words to "gibbering despair," found infuriating what he called "the terrible sanity of the insane" (Poole, 153).
Strongly motivated to marry by the desire to have "everything -- love, children, adventure, intimacy, work" (L,I:496), Virginia found after having "failed" him on their honeymoon that Leonard did not want to have children; the marriage became asexual. Although her own Dr. Savage had genially assured them that having children would be the best thing for her, giving the traditional wisdom of the day, Leonard sought more "advanced" opinion. The doctors he consulted about how to handle his wife were eugenics specialists, notorious for the use of a "scientific" model of medical practice conceived for the social and political purposes of counteracting racial and sexual "impurities" or "taints."
Racial purity, a concept developed as part of the backlash against Negro suffrage in the 19th century, was useful to England as an imperial power in keeping “the ruling race” strong. T.B. Hyslop believed that "the new breed of intellectual women was sapping ancient energies, and that the women who wanted to do 'mental work,' like writing and so on, would damage the general health of their offspring." Although he was Jewish and might have suspected racist doctrine, Leonard was more concerned about treatment for his wife; in Hyslop's words, intellectual work rendered women "neurotic and sexually incompetent" (Poole, 122-23). This hit a mark.
By the end of their first year of marriage Virginia had finished a novel that George Duckworth was to publish; she had heterosexualized it in revision, but was worried what people would think about the book -- in which she managed to get the heroine engaged, but couldn't keep her both alive and married. Leonard took her to the inn of their disastrous honeymoon, they quarreled about food and whether she were ill and had to follow prescriptions. Leonard called a friend, and finally to settle the argument Virginia agreed to consult a different specialist and Leonard took her back to London. The specialist Leonard suggested, and whom he had previously consulted unbeknownst to Virginia, was Dr. Henry Head whom their friend and fellow Bloomsburian Roger Fry had recommended as a neurologist. Head was a specialist who "could convert the Sodomites" as Forster put it later (D, 111:93). Head overrode Virginia, prescribing institutionalization and a rest cure with feeding. Leonard left Virginia, went out to inform Dr. Savage, and Virginia swallowed veronal (Poole, 135). Jean Thomas wrote Violet:
It is the novel which has broken her up. She finished it and got the proofs back for correction... couldn't sleep and thought everyone would jeer at her. Then they did the wrong thing and teased her about it and she got desperate --and came here a wreck. It was all heart-rending... (14 Sept. 1913, Berg) .
According to Leonard, one of the difficulties of the situation was that Jean Thomas felt an unconscious but violent homosexual passion for Virginia... Bell, II:n16).
Clearly Leonard worried about lesbianism and Virginia on some level. His alternative to Jean Thomas was to hire nurses and take Virginia to George Duckworth's home for enforced rest cure treatment. George, he felt, "was an extremely kind man and, I think, very fond of Vanessa and Virginia." -- "No wonder the birds began to sing in Greek again:" (Poole, 145-46).
Those available to support her themselves participated in the patriarchal suppression of sexual and creative energy of which Virginia Stephen Woolf was a victim, a participation masked by socialism, liberalism, loving care. In later years she was able to write feminist analyses linking the power of the social male to that of imperialism and war; the stark metaphor for the (unmentioned) lesbian16 at the heart of Three Guineas is Antigone, locked, living, in a tomb by Creon for obeying a more natural law than his. But when she accused her friends, relatives, doctors of conspiracy from 1913-15, her bitterness was seen as madness. Guarded by several nurses, deprived of intellectual activity, drugged, what efforts she made to break through the walls of what she felt was a prison were interpreted --and still are --as
even more harrowing symptoms, for now Virginia was violent and screaming, and her madness culminated in virulent animosity toward Leonard himself...At the end of June Vanessa wrote: Ka had been to see Virginia and thinks she's really getting better slowly, but it sounds most depressing as she seems to have changed into a most unpleasant character. She won't see Leonard at all and has taken against all men (Bell, 11:26, emphasis added).
With no support network validating her spiritual and sexual differences, under the utmost pressure exerted through the family, marriage and the community in conjunction with the medical profession backed by legal power, Virginia Woolf accommodated finally after two years of struggle called madness to standards that would gain her entry into the world again as not quite a normal, but a passable woman. When she was able to achieve this state she was very happy. Most of our time is lived in "cotton wool" she believed, with a few moments of real being. As an outsider exiled from "natural happiness" (D, 111:74)17 she lived and wrote a double reality.
As long as she kept within the bounds of heterosexual propriety, which always acts in defense of class (simultaneously sustaining and imprisoning her as a writer), she was able from time to time to see a lover: after the first married decade, Vita Sackville-West, and the last, Ethel Smythe. But both in her life and in her work her most intense happiness and sense of reality was submerged. Her "unofficial" love affair with Vita, a "known Sapphist," had become far less tolerable even in her circle than Vanessa's heterosexual extramarital arrangements. In 1926 Virginia complained to Vanessa:
Vita is now arriving to spend two nights alone with me -- L is going back. I say no more; as you are bored by Vita, bored by love:, bored by me, and everything to do with me, except[the children] but such has long been my fate, and it is better to meet it open-eyed. Still, the June nights are long and warm; the roses flowering; and the garden full of lust and bees, mingling in the asparagus beds (L, III: 275) .
When she had to return home after a visit with Vita at Long Barn, or when Vita did not come, or when she worried about the failures of her work from self-protective silences and gaps in it, or that childless she had no claim to normal womanhood, she became intensely depressed, even ill, and closed down.
I believe these illnesses are in my case -- how shall I express it? -- partly mystical. Some thing happens in my mind. It refuses to go on registering impressions. It shuts itself up. It becomes chrysalis. I lie quite torpid, often with acute physical pain --as last year; only discomfort this. Then suddenly something springs. Two nights ago, Vita was here; and when she went I began to feel the quality of the evening--how it was spring coming; a silver light; mixing with the early lamps; the cabs all rushing through the streets; I had a tremendous sense of life beginning: mixed with that emotion, which is the essence of my feeling, but escapes description...I felt the spring beginning, and Vita's life so full and flush; and all the doors opening; and this is I believe the moth shaking its wings in me. I then begin to make up my story whatever it is; ideas rush in me; often though this is before I can control my mind or pen (D, 111:287).
She lived for the "moments of being" she experienced when she could put the pieces together into a whole by writing (SP, 72), and used some of the insights from her chrysalis state where she felt unprotected from the truth (D,III:7l), in her art. To the extent she could tell the truth she could rescue herself by writing from the pain and hurt, impotence and passivity, horror and despair. Torn, isolated, wanting the "real" life beneath socially constituted identity, she felt lured -- even while fighting to stay afloat -- into the depths beneath the surface, almost as though by sirens:
Here is something to fight --and when I wake up early I say to myself, Fight, fight. If I could catch the feeling, I would: the feeling of the singing of the real world, as one is driven by loneliness and silence from the habitable world... (D, 111:260).
End Notes
1. Virginia Woolf, “22 Hyde Park Gate," Moments of Being:Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, Jeanne Schulkind, ed. (New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1976) p. 143. (HPG) (ME)
2. "I could hear her voice, see her, imagine what she would do or say as I went about my day's doings. She was one of the invisible presences who after all play so important a part in every life. This influence, by which I mean the consciousness of other groups impinging upon ourselves; public opinion; what other people say and think; all those magnets which attract us this way to be like that, or repel us the other and make us different from that; has never been analyzed in any of those Lives I so much enjoy reading, or very superficially. "Yet it is by such invisible presences that 'the subject of this memoir' is tugged this way and that every day of his life; it is they that keep him in position. Consider what immense forces society brings to play upon each of us, how that society changes from decade to decade; and also from class to class; well, if we cannot analyze those invisible presences, we know very little of the subject of the memoir;” and again: "how futile life-writing becomes. I see myself as a fish in the stream; deflected; held in place; but cannot describe the stream" (Virginia Woolf, "A Sketch of the Past," MB, p.80). (Sp)
3. Vita Sackville-West, "Journal of Travel with VW", in Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Quentin Bell, ed. (New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1972), I: 60-61. (Bell)
4. Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Nicholsen and Trautman, eds. (New-York: Harvest/HBJ, 1975) 1:83-85. (L)
5. "I must obey, because he had force, of age, of wealth, of tradition, behind him. But even while I obeyed, I asked, 'How could anyone believe what he believed?'" (SP, 132). For "society in those days was a very competent machine. It was convinced that girls should be changed into married women. It had no doubts; no mercy; no understanding of any other wish, of any other gift. Nothing was taken seriously" (SP, 135).
6. Virginia Woolf, "Old Bloomsbury," MB, p. 160. COB)
7. "*This was Virginia's second serious mental breakdown which began in May, 1904. She spent almost three months at Burnham Wood, Welwyn, where she made her first serious attempt at suicide. She was cared for by Violet Dickinson, a family friend of the Duckworth's, who, since 1902, had been Virginia's most intimate friend. Ozzie is Violet Dickinson's brother" (COB, n, 162).
8. "The atmosphere at Hyde Park Gate had been full of love and marriage. But at Gordon Square love was never mentioned. Love had no existence. ...It seemed incredible that any of these young men should want to marry us or that we should want to marry them. Secretly, I felt that marriage was a very low-down affair, but that if one practiced it, one practiced it -- it is a serious confession I know -- with young men who had been in the Eton Eleven and dressed for dinner" (OB, 169).
9. Virginia Woolf A Room of One's Own (New York: Harvest/ HBJ , 1929), P .89. ( RO)
10. "He purged and reformed offices, he imposed order upon chaos, he made inefficient machinery work smoothly and sent men to their death" (Bell, 1:78). In 1905 Lytton Strachey had said that "he was like Swift and would murder his wife. He despised the whole human race. He trembled allover, he was so violent, so savage; he had pulled his thumb out of joint in a dream; he was, in short, a serious and powerful figure; but he had gone off to live in a jungle and no one knew whether he would ever return” (Bell, 1:101). When he returned in 1911 he was on leave; within six months he had proposed to Virginia, and though she turned him down he persisted, postponing his scheduled return to India, and finally resigning in hopes of persuading her to marry him.
11. "As I told you brutally the other day, I feel no physical attraction in you. There are moments -- when you kissed me the other day was one -- when I feel no more than -a rock. And yet your caring for me as you do almost overwhelms me.” She told him there was some feeling; "You want to know of course whether it will ever make me marry you. How can I say? I think it will, because there seems no reason why it shouldn't -- but I don't know what the future will bring” (L, I: 496).
12. “Virginia succumbed to two so-called 'mental illnesses' in January and February, 1912. Leonard had proposed marriage to her on 11 January, and repeated his offer twice by letter. Was this totally unconnected with the stress which Virginia obviously found too much on that occasion?” (Rogers Poole, The Unknown Virginia Woolf, Cambridge, 1979), p. 96). (Poole).
13. A contemporary feminist writer of the period in the United States, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, was also subjected to rest cures by husband and physician, both of whom she left to resume her work, and wrote about in The Yellow Wallpaper, reissued by the Feminist Press.
14. In the summer of 1930 she was to write, of The Waves: "I think this is the greatest opportunity I have yet been able to give myself: therefore I suppose the most complete failure. Yet I respect myself for writing this book. Yes -- even though it exhibits my congenital faults” (Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Anne Olivier Bell, ed. [New York: HBJ, 1987] III: 312. Emphasis added. [D]). She had just decided that her lover Ethel Smythe was so brave, that she herself took courage. "Ethel's letters are daily: for we have so much time to make up. Time is short...Should I curtail her and curb them? I think not. If one adventures, adventure wholly. And she is so courageous, remarkably shrewd, that it would be mere poltroonery of me to hold off for fear of ridicule...So I let the bonfire rage red and perhaps throw a screen on it" (D, 111:312).
15. "If she curtailed her visits and put off the children it was (in writing to Vanessa at all events) out of deference to a husband who got into unreasonable states when she lived a reasonably social life" (Bell, II:35). Looking at the mutual dependency between husband and wife from her perspective, we can see a woman who went to great lengths to accommodate herself before the "states" of a touchy husband. "When Leonard was unnerved, the habitual trembling of his hands became wild and ungovernable" (Bell, II: 120). Leonard made it a policy never to apologize for anything he had said or done, even when formally asked to do so by fellow Board members at the New Statesman (Poole, 163-4).
16. "What then can be the nature of the fear that still makes concealment necessary between educated people and reduces our boasted freedom to a farce? ...Again there are three dots; again they represent a gulf -- of silence, this time,. of silence inspired by fear. And since we lack both the courage to explain it and the skill, let us lower the veil of St. Paul between us -- in other words take shelter behind an interpreter" who refers to the concept of "the ‘man manqué’ and “male infantile fixation” as a source of male supremacy. Fearing to reveal herself as what we would call lesbian, she allows those apparently fixed conditions to serve as explanations of "why the outsiders, even where there is no question of financial dependence, may still be afraid to speak freely or to experiment openly" (Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas/New York: HBW, 1951), 127). (3G) She experimented, she spoke, but not openly and freely.
17. After visiting the Leafs in 1926 she wrote: "I am exiled from this profound natural happiness. That is what I always feel; or often feel, now -- natural happiness is what I lack, in profusion. I have intense happiness -- not that. It is therefore what I most envy; geniality and family love and being on the rails of human life...and being normal" (D, III:74).
