That Virginia Woolf suffered from mental illness throughout her life is well documented, including in her own writings, which depict illness from the patient’s point of view. In the memoirs of her husband, Leonard, we find an account of mental illness from the caregiver’s point of view – the view of someone who is not themselves suffering from the illness, but, as a loved one sharing a life with the patient, is nonetheless intimately connected to the illness. In his article “Caregiving as moral experience,” Arthur Kleinman points out, “What is at stake is doing good, for others and for oneself, if need be, despite the emotional and material cost” (1551), arguing that caregiving has a moral and not just practical dimension. The moral aspect of caregiving is well portrayed in Leonard’s writings, especially when the caregiver is looking after someone who cannot be cured, and where care is as much emotional as practical.
In the third part of his five-part autobiography, Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911 to 1918 (published in 1964), Woolf describes his wife’s illness in the early years of their marriage. As a caregiver, he faced two knowledge lacunae. The first was his own. “During the time that I lived in the same house as Virginia in Brunswick Square, and particularly in the months before we married, I became for the first time aware of [her mental illness] […] I had had no experience at all of nervous or mental illness and it was some time before I realized the nature and meaning of it in Virginia” (75). The second was the fact that the doctors the Woolfs consulted, who were reputed to be experts in the field, were unable to accurately diagnose her illness but nonetheless prescribed cures with confidence. The cures included “gaining weight, sleeping, and ‘rest of the intellect’” (Boeira et al. 70). Leonard Woolf recalled:
“I do not know what the present state of knowledge with regard to nervous and mental diseases is in the year 1963 [the year Woolf wrote his autobiography]; in 1913 it was desperately meagre […] [The doctors] had not the slightest idea of the nature or the cause of Virginia’s mental state, which resulted in her suddenly or gradually losing touch with the real world, so that she lived in a world of delusions and became a danger to herself and other people. Not knowing how or why this had happened to her, naturally they had no real or scientific knowledge of how to cure her. All they could say was that she was suffering from neurasthenia and that, if she could be induced or compelled to rest and eat and if she could be prevented from committing suicide, she would recover” (159-60).
These “cures” were an immense source of frustration to Virginia, who experienced the medical establishment as coercive. “You can’t think what a raging furnace it is still to me – madness and doctors and being forced” (Woolf Letters III 180), she wrote to her friend Gwen Raverat. Leonard, on the other hand, found himself in the position of having to take care of a patient while having very little knowledge of or guidance on the illness. Many sections of Beginning Again concerning Virginia’s illness express Leonard’s sense of helplessness. Of her refusal to eat when ill, he writes, “Every meal took an hour or two; I had to sit by her side, put a spoon or fork in her hand, and every now and again ask her very quietly to eat and at the same time touch her arm or hand. Every five minutes or so she might automatically eat a spoonful” (163). Moreover, it was impossible to reason with “the terrible sanity of the insane” (163-4); for “all Virginia’s actions and conclusions were logical and rational; and her power of arguing conclusively from false premises was terrific […] she could prove and did prove conclusively to you that she ought not to eat her breakfast” (164). In another episode, Virginia overdosed on veronal tablets; Leonard realized he probably did not remember to lock the tablet case (156-7). The latter episode in particular provoked some guilt. When writing his memoirs Leonard considered it a “psychological bad mark[s]” that “I did not at the time and have not since felt the misery and remorse that many people would think I ought to feel […] I felt that it was almost impossible sooner or later not to make a mistake of the kind” (157), evoking a sense of moral unease as well as resignation. Virginia Woolf never recovered from her illness, eventually dying by suicide in 1941.
What role, then, can the caregiver play when he or she cannot be part of the cure, indeed, when how to cure the patient is unknown? Arthur Kleinman notes that “Theorists of caregiving have also identified “presence”—being there, existentially, even when nothing practical can be done and hope itself is eclipsed— as central to the giving of care” (1551). Leonard Woolf’s memoirs illustrate the offering of this kind of “presence,” the act of being there and taking care of day to day needs imperfectly but committedly, even if the illness itself cannot be overcome.
Works Cited
Boeira, Manuela V et al. “Virginia Woolf, neuroprogression, and bipolar disorder.” Revista brasileira de psiquiatria (Sao Paulo, Brazil : 1999) vol. 39,1 (2017): 69-71. doi:10.1590/1516-4446-2016-1962.
Kleinman, Arthur. “Caregiving as moral experience.” The Lancet, vol. 380, no. 9853 (2012): 1550-1.
Woolf Leonard. Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911 to 1918. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1964.
Woolf, Virginia. “1550: To Gwen Raverat.” The Letters of Virginia Woolf Volume III: 1923-1928, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977, pp. 180-181.
Image credit:
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