I am
coming to the end of the third book by Virginia Woolf. My attempt was to write
a review of To the Lighthouse – but as I began typing away at the keys on the
keyboard- I realised that I do not intend to write about the book – but my
thoughts are more about woolf. Before reading this book, I had already read her essay “ A room of one’s own” as well
as her most famous “Mrs. Dalloway”. Woolf’s protagonists are often women – in
my eyes, they just happen to be. They could have been men. That’s exactly my
sentiment about woolf. She is a woman. She could have been a man. It wouldn’t
make a difference. I think that was her pathos- she could slip into both
genders very easily – gender didn’t matter to her- personalities did-people did.
This didn’t bode very well for early 20th century Europe where roles were
defined strongly by genders. She was not the conventional woman of her times by
any standards. She didn’t want to be a man either. That’s why possibly she was
able to love a man as well as a woman with equal intimacy. Gender didn’t matter
to her – love did. She was just what she was- an intelligent, thinking, deeply
sensitive human being with lots and lots of beautiful thoughts and images in
her mind which came out through her words – never deeply enough.
As
one reads her books, one is moved by her attempt to pour out the beauty she
feels in her heart and soul onto paper. It was so deep that I feel she never
managed to put it completely in words on paper. The influence of the French
writer Marcel Proust is very telling on her works. She was an ardent admirer of
Proust’s works. One wonders whether their personal struggles with their
respective sexual orientations [proust was known to be a homo-sexual while woolf was a bisexual – she
is said to have had an intimate relationship with fellow author Vita Sackville
West while being much married to Leonardo Woolf. Here’s what she had to say about Proust’s writings
“Proust
so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the
sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the
astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification that he
procures—there’s something sexual in it—that I feel I can write like that, and
seize my pen and then I can’t write like that. Scarcely anyone so stimulates
the nerves of language in me: it becomes an obsession. “It’s almost like she found a kindred
soul in Proust and some of his love for beauty of art and language got added to
hers.
“Books
are the mirrors of the soul” [Between the Acts – Virginia Woolf] A
meditation on her writings makes it very apparent that there was a lot more
from where it came. She was born far ahead of her times- actually no..i need to
correct myself. She could have been born at any time and as any gender. Her
thoughts and ideas hold good for all times – for all genders. Today a lot of
her work is classified as feminist – in her times it was classified as radical-
I firmly believe she didn’t mean to be both. Her thoughts and beliefs just
were. She did not want to be radical. She did not try to be feminist. She felt
whatever she wrote, she wrote whatever she felt.
Woolf’s
suicide bothers me. She had a history of mental illness (she was
institutionalised a few times) as well as two attempted suicides before
succumbing to the third one. She is said to walked into the sea with her
pockets filled with stones. As one of her diary entry states “ I am in a mood
to dissolve in the sky”, she decided to dissolve her self in the water.
Sometimes I wonder, did she really need the stones to drown her? The pathos
that she carried in terms of unresolved thoughts and emotions, the burden of
words not said nor written down, the “shadows of the universe” that she carried
under her skin- would not the unbearable weight of all this been enough to
drown her?
