Exposing the "nerves of language": Virginia Woolf, Charles Mauron, and the affinity between aesthetics and illness

Literature and Medicine

Volumn 21, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 242-263

  Coates, Kimberly Engdahl ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; CREATIVITY; ESTHETICS; HISTORY; HUMAN; LITERATURE; PATIENT ATTITUDE; PHILOSOPHY; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; PUBLIC FIGURE; WRITING;

CREATIVENESS; DRAMA; ESTHETICS; FAMOUS PERSONS; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HOLISTIC HEALTH; HUMANS; MEDICINE IN LITERATURE; SICK ROLE; WRITING;

EID: 0036731391     PISSN: 02789671     EISSN: 10806571     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/lm.2002.0018     Document Type: Review

References (59)

1. Virginia Woolf, "On Being I11," in The Moment and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1947), 12
2. "On Being I11" does receive a cursory glance in Bonnie Kime Scott's Refiguring Modernism, 2 vols. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995)
3. Makikow Minow-Pinkney's Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987)
4. Maria DiBattista's Woolf's Major Novels: The Fables of Anon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980)
5. Shirley Panken's Virginia Woolf and the "Lust of Creation": A Psychoanalytic Exploration (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987)
6. and Jane Marcus's essay, "Virginia Woolf and Her Violin: Mothering, Madness, and Music," in Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987)
7. Jeanne Dubino contrasts Woolf's account of illness with Bakhtin's notion of "carnival" in her paper, "On Illness as Carnival: The Body as Discovery in Virginia Woolf's 'On Being Ill' and Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World," in Virginia Woolf: Emerging Perspectives. Selected Papers from the Third Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf (New York: Pace University Press, 1994)
8. Mark Hussey includes an informative excerpt on the essay in Virginia Woolf from A to Z (New York: Facts on File, 1995)
9. Woolf refers to the essay as "one of my best" in a Diary entry where she is responding to T. S. Eliot's unenthusiastic response. Eliot had asked her to submit a copy of her work to The Criterion. In response to his reaction, Woolf writes, "There is Tom's postcard about On Being Ill - an article which I, & Leonard too, thought one of my best: to him characteristic &c: I mean he is not enthusiastic; so, reading the proof just now, I saw wordiness, feebleness, & all the vices in it." See Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume III: 1925-1930, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980), 49
10. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume II: 1920-1924, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978), 125
11. Woolf, Diary III, 174. Subsequent page references to this work appear in parentheses in the text
12. Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf Volume III: 1923-1928, eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 570
13. Woolf uses the expression "the nerves of language" while trying to articulate the effect reading Marcel Proust has had on her: "But Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence ... such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification that he procures.... Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me: it becomes an obsession." See Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf Volume II: 1912-1922, eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 525
14. Woolf, "On Being Ill," 14, 20
15. her sanity defended in Stephen Trombley's All That Summer She Was Mad: Virginia Woolf and Her Doctors (London: Junction Books, 1981)
16. Roger Poole's The Unknown Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978)
17. and, more recently, in Irene Coates's Who's Afraid of Leonard Woolf?: A Case for the Sanity of Virginia Woolf (Australia: Brandl & Schlesinger, 1998)
18. In addition, her entire psyche has been rediagnosed in Louise DeSalvo's Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Child Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989)
19. and Thomas Caramagno's The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf's Art and Manic-Depressive Illness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)
20. See Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972)
21. Jean Love, Virginia Woolf: Sources of Madness and Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977)
22. Betty Kushen, "Virginia Woolf and 'Dr. Freud,'" Literature and Psychology 35 (1, 2) (1989): 37-45
23. Susan M. Kenney and Edward J. Kenney, Jr., "Virginia Woolf and the Art of Madness," Massachusetts Review 23 (1982): 161-185
24. Louise DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989)
25. and Virginia Woolf's First Voyage: A Novel in the Making (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980)
26. Mark Spilka, Virginia Woolf's Quarrel with Grieving (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980)
27. Murray H. Sherman, "Psychosensory Images from Virginia Woolf's 'A Sketch of the Past,'" Psychoanalytic Review 70 (1983): 33-39
28. James Naremore, The World Without a Self; Virginia Woolf and the Novel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973)
29. Shirley Panken, Virginia Woolf and the "Lust of Creation": A Psychoanalytic Exploration (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987)
30. See also Kay Redfield Jamison's Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (New York: Free Press Paperbacks, 1993)
31. Caramagno, The Flight of the Mind, 57
32. S. Kay Toombs, The Meaning of Illness: A Phenomenological Account of the Different Perspectives of Physician and Patient (Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993), xiv
33. For a more detailed account of Mauron and Fry's relationship, see Mary Ann Caws and Sarah Bird Wright, "The Maurons, E. M. Forster, Julian Bell, and Bloomsbury," in Bloomsbury and France: Art and Friends (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 267-289
34. Charles Mauron, Aesthetics and Psychology, trans. Roger Fry and Katherine John (London: Hogarth Press, 1935), 106-107
35. Charles Mauron, The Nature of Beauty in Art and Literature, trans. Roger Fry (London: Hogarth Press, 1927), 45-46
36. See Sir George H. Savage, M.D., "Clinical Lecture on Post-Influenzal Neuroses and Psychoses," Medical Press and Circular 96 (1913): 578-581. Dr. Savage delivered this lecture at the London Post-Graduate College, November 19, 1913
37. Woolf, "On Being Ill," 10
38. Woolf's use of illness to emphasize the body's role in the aesthetic experience provides an important counterpoint to the disembodied aesthetic theories being promoted by her male contemporaries Roger Fry and T. S. Eliot, both of whom she held in very high esteem. Fry's "aesthetic emotion," as defined in relation to visual art, referred to a "detached impassioned vision," a vision that deliberately ignores external associations. See, for example, Roger Fry, "An Essay in Aesthetics," in Vision and Design, ed. J. B. Bullen (London: Oxford University Press, 1981), 12-27
39. Similarly, T. S. Eliot, in his famous essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919), had argued: "The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him mil be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material." See T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1964), 54
40. See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). Subsequent page references to this work appear in parentheses in the text
41. "On Being Ill," 9
42. Woolf, "On Being Ill," 18, 20
43. Virginia Woolf, "Professions for Women," in The Virginia Woolf Reader, ed. Mitchell Leaska (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 280
44. Woolf, "On Being Ill," 19. Subsequent page references to this work appear in parentheses in the text
45. See Virginia Woolf, "Hours in a Library," in Granite and Rainbow: Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 30
46. Stephen Regan argues in The Politics of Pleasure: Aesthetics and Cultural Theory (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992) that aesthetics, as defined by Walter Pater and later Oscar Wilde, "sustained a theory of art in which sensuous pleasure was unashamedly promoted" (6). For the average Victorian Brit, "sensuous" suggested sensuality. Regan asserts that the status of aesthetics in the nineteenth century became tainted by moral and political associations during and after Wilde's trial and conviction for violating England's sodomy laws. Thus, aesthetics was deemed a less than palatable topic for intellectual discourse
47. Art historian J. B. Bullen has gathered the various journal articles, physician's lectures, and popular responses together into one volume. See J. B. Bullen, Post-Impressionists in England (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 118
48. For a more detailed discussion of Max Nordau's Degeneration
49. see Hans-Peter Soder's article, "Disease and Health as Contexts of Modernity: Max Nordau as a Critic of Fin-de-Siècle Modernism," German Studies Review 3 (1991): 473-487
50. For a contemporary assessment of British anxiety about degeneration, see George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (London, 1936). Dangerfield remarks that "all that was old and familiar seemed to be dying.... There was talk of wild young people in London ... of night clubs; of Negroid dances. People gazed in horror at the paintings of Gauguin and listened with delighted alarm to the barbaric measures of Stravinsky" (63-64)
51. Mauron, Nature of Beauty, 12-13. Subsequent page references to this work appear in parentheses in the text
52. Mauron, Aesthetics and Psychology, 61
53. Woolf typically had very little faith in the medical establishment and deemed herself much more capable of diagnosing her states of mind and body than the average physician. In April 1921, she began recording attempts in her diary to "medicine" herself: "I must note the symptoms of the disease, so as to know it next time. ... I must hurriedly note more symptoms of the disease, so that I can turn back here & medicine myself next time." See Woolf, Diary II, 108
54. In a letter to Violet Dickinson dated November 26, 1904, she likewise writes, "My life is a constant fight against Doctors follies, it seems to me." Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume I: 1888-1912, eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 159
55. Woolf, "On Being Ill," 15
56. Roger Fry offers a similar critique in his essay "The Post-Impressionists II," where he writes, "Surely no one has painted flowers like Van Gogh ... modern European art has almost always maltreated flowers, dealing with them at best but as aids to sentimentality until Van Gogh saw, with a vision that reminds one of Blake's, the arrogant spirit that inhabits the sun-flower, or the proud and delicate soul of the iris. The gibe of insolent egotism was never more misapplied than to so profound, so deeply enduring a genius as Van Gogh's; for his distortions and exaggerations of the thing seen are only the measure of his deep submission to their essence." See Roger Fry, "The Post-Impressionists II," in A Roger Fry Reader, ed. Christopher Reed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 92
57. Woolf's assertion here is a response to another writer lingering in the shadows of her prose. Although he goes unmentioned, Henry Dwight Sedgwick, an American essayist and historian, had published his own essay entitled "On Being Ill" in 1916, ten years prior to Woolf's own. The essay appeared in his book An Apology for Old Maids (New York: Books for Library Press, 1916)
58. While she quotes directly from Sedgwick's essay in the first paragraph of her review, Woolf never mentions anything about the essay's thematic content. After reading the entire text of Sedgwick's "On Being Ill," it becomes quite clear that Woolf, whether consciously or unconsciously, finds herself countering his meditation on illness with her own. For Sedgwick, the suffering endured by a mind and body during illness stimulates a state of hyperconsciousness that accentuates a beauty of symbols. Illness is thus a mystical experience, a communion with symbols in their purest sense: "Is knowledge of the rose a piece of mystical experience, a communion with a symbol of pure beauty, a partial and momentary loss of the self in the consciousness of that which is Life's explanation? Is every sick man a mystic?" (Sedgwick, "On Being Ill," 92)
59. Whereas Sedgwick's gaze upon the rose fosters a communion of self with a "symbol of pure beauty," Woolf wrenches us away from the rose's symbolic properties. Woolf repeats Sedgwick's meditation on the rose not as an act of assimilation but as one of intense respect for an object as it exists on its own terms. For Woolf's review, see Andrew McNeillie, ed., The Essays of Virginia Woolf Volume II (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), 80-82