[Vwoolf] Virginia Woolf: bi-polar

Sat Mar 10 16:45:58 EST 2018

I think that in the classroom it’s important to remind our students of three key things:

1) This is a literature course, taught by a literature professor/teacher, not a psychologist or a psychiatrist.  For me, humility about the limitations of my scholarly/teacherly and experiential knowledge has always been key here.  My doctorate is in English.  My discussions with students about mental health issues necessarily will be anecdotal and biased.  Individual students’ knowledge is likely as good or better than mine on many of these issues.  Voicing that up front is important, I think, as I need students not to interpret my own opinions or way of understanding bipolar disorder (for example) as authoritative in a way that makes more sense when I’m discussing Woolf’s evolution of modernist forms of fiction (just for example).

2)  Again, this is a literature course, so it seems useful to me to bring the discussion of Woolf’s personal psychological and physiological health at any given point in her life back to the literature.  As one Woolf scholar put it offlist, we need to ask students how questions or biographical information about Woolf’s health and death affect how they “read this novel? (which is, btw, not an autobiography nor a memoir…).”

3)  Woolf is dead.  We can’t diagnose the dead.  But, as I said earlier and many have reiterated in different ways, if it helps us or individual students to think of Woolf as having had bipolar disorder or PTSD or having been dealing all her life with the psychological effects of incest, of having lost her mother early, etc, then it’s fine for them/us to think about that if we can talk about it in the classroom in non-stigmatizing ways and without us as their teachers making authoritative pronouncements about things we cannot really know (Woolf is dead) and which are beyond our province as scholars (see point #1).

I hope you all will pardon the didacticism (and the repetition and the stridency!), but I think this gets back to Ellen’s original question, which is in part about a very wise hesitancy to launch into discussions of Woolf’s mental health.  Most of us are not experts in that field and are likely to inadvertently engage in stigmatizing rhetoric.  And ideally we would take the opportunity to direct the discussion to Woolf’s work, and to questions about how our very limited biographical knowledge about dead authors impacts the way we read and understand and experience their fictional work.

Very very best!

Brenda

Brenda Helt

Co-editor Queer Bloomsbury (with Madelyn Detloff)

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-queer-bloomsbury.html

Fine artist

http://www.brendahelt.com <http://www.brendahelt.com/>  

From: Vwoolf [mailto:vwoolf-bounces+helt0010=umn.edu at lists.osu.edu] On Behalf Of Anne-Marie Lindsey via Vwoolf
Sent: Saturday, March 10, 2018 6:42 AM
To: vwoolf at lists.osu.edu
Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] Virginia Woolf: bi-polar

As someone whose PTSD diagnosis has been a decade-long project and whose family is filled with reasons to give biology a long, suspicious look, I’m increasingly intrigued by the mysteries of epigenetics and other interactions between trauma and the brain/body. These interactions seem to change much and remain poorly understood. It seems eminently reasonable that all of would wish discussions of the impact of trauma and biology on our lives and work to caution heavily that everyone remember that we were “Exceptionally Sane Most of the Time.”

Anne-Marie

On Mar 10, 2018, 9:24 AM -0500, Christine Froula via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>, wrote:

I've always cherished a New York Times Book Review heading from long ago, perhaps about VW's essays when they were coming out:

Exceptionally Sane Most of the Time

On 3/10/2018 6:54 AM, Madelyn Detloff via Vwoolf wrote:

I hesitate to enter this conversation again, since we have had forms of it for years on this list and it always seems to devolve into an either or - either trauma or neuroaffective atypicality as if we are not allowed to imagine that Woolf might have been a survivor of sexual abuse and someone who may have had a condition that looks like what we call  bipolar disorder or some other atypicality that she lived with while also being a prolific author and critic.  There is  stigma connected to each hypothesis that we ought to challenge.  What  I wish for us as a community of scholars is that we don’t fall prey to the desire to ‘rescue’ Woolf’s  reputation from one stigma by reinforcing the stigma of the other hypothesis.  

There have been a number of well meaning posts that nevertheless participate in ableist logic and language regarding neuroaffective atypicality.  Woolf was not “crazy” or “insane” whether or not she experienced something like bipolar disorder, or PTSD, or some mixture of both (I happen to think both is quite likely).  To be sure, there has been a lot of damage done in the name of psychiatry, medicine, other various forms of ‘cure’ that aim to normalize our body minds. We ought to expose and critique that damage.  But I think we can do that without suggesting that people who take medicine or other therapies for neuroaffective atypicalities (lithium for example) are somehow suffering from false consciousness or are  to be distinguished from “essentially sane” people who have mood swings or struggle with PTSD.  

I’ve written a little about this dilemma in the Blackwell Companion to Woolf

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118457917.ch20/summary <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__onlinelibrary.wiley.com_doi_10.1002_9781118457917.ch20_summary&d=DwMFaQ&c=yHlS04HhBraes5BQ9ueu5zKhE7rtNXt_d012z2PA6ws&r=B2e-UKKhnYe5lrEq8NEkMf9o4KvCJF-4y7Z7WnzjMp0&m=xbbBluCeP-K4-MtgVPHpJkYqCqXG-LSSAyfNwh2WPGc&s=Et8k7OcqA7iOvBFe3L8J8EYhjBtu2u_IfWhtM9rF_pU&e=> . It also might be helpful to read Alison Kafer’s Feminist Queer Crip on the ‘curative imaginary,’ as well as Margaret Price’s Mad at School.  

Please note: what I write is not directed at any one post or poster on this list.  The discussion we are having now has a long history on this list and I worry that we are simply repeating our positions rather than evolving them. 

Best,

Madelyn

Sent from my iPad

On Mar 7, 2018, at 12:24 PM, Diane Reynolds via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu> wrote:

Ellen, 

I have not had this question come up in class, but it is topical and relevant. In my Quaker meeting, we have concerns about gun control being off-loaded, as it were, onto the mentally ill, however, that term is defined, and we fear it will lead to further stigmatization of mental illness, especially bi-polar disorders—and of course, Woolf feared the consequences of her illness. What I would emphasize with Woolf,  is that mental illness is increasingly understood to come out of childhood trauma and that while it is biological to some extent, our brain biology actually changes to become more “depressive” as a result of trauma. This is in an interesting article: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/02/will-take-political-revolution-cure-epidemic-depression.html <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.nakedcapitalism.com_2018_02_will-2Dtake-2Dpolitical-2Drevolution-2Dcure-2Depidemic-2Ddepression.html&d=DwMFaQ&c=yHlS04HhBraes5BQ9ueu5zKhE7rtNXt_d012z2PA6ws&r=B2e-UKKhnYe5lrEq8NEkMf9o4KvCJF-4y7Z7WnzjMp0&m=xbbBluCeP-K4-MtgVPHpJkYqCqXG-LSSAyfNwh2WPGc&s=Jd3mmmzVE3W1gbC489_WNAj_Sf6tY5oCI6WYx4JohK4&e=>  that makes the point that if we want to reduce mental illness, we need to fix society. This seems to me, in the context of Woolf, a good launching point for trying to imagine what it was like trying to grow up in that Victorian household with abusive half brothers, a self-absorbed father, a mother stretched too thin who labeled her “goat” and the whole set of oppressive mores—you well know the drill—that beset her. 

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