Virginia Woolf: A Portrait

by Viviane Forrester

  He does not speak to Brenan of Virginia’s frigid behavior, but on the contrary, of an “excitement,”54 which could mean that she resisted (not necessarily irrevocably, of course), but also that she responded to this lover, hopeless as he might be, that she expected him, endowed with some capacity for that pleasure which he would rather consider harmful to a wife he termed mentally ill, continually threatened by madness.

  Now, at the time of their honeymoon, he could not have “known” of a single “state of excitement” signifying “a prelude” to what he calls “her attacks of madness.” He hardly knew her, they had not lived together, he had almost no experience of her—he would often insinuate that he was not adequately warned about his fiancée’s fragility. He had yet to imagine the rituals he would later perform, constantly watching over his wife with ostentatious discretion, playing a role generally perceived as that of protective, dominant guardian—interrupting her in public when she spoke with too much passion, according to him, limiting her engagements, managing her time to avoid all forms of “excitement.” Excitement that he would decide, once and for all, provoked the attacks from which he would protect her. So many conspicuous arrangements would persuade their circle, would convince Virginia herself, of her state of suspended madness, forestalled by the devotions of a providential benefactor.55

  Virginia’s fragility was obvious, but what made her more fragile, what endangered her, was the continuous, surreptitiously spectacular fuss made over her throughout her life, even though, beginning in 1916 and over the course of her remaining twenty-five years, she experienced not a single real attack. Perhaps (although nothing is so simple) in part thanks to Leonard and his fanatical precautions!

  Leonard’s constant vigilance would serve as a screen for his own troubles, allow him to project them onto a woman and tend in her what worried him about himself, what he feared, repressed, tried desperately to forget through the strict protocols and routines necessary to the obsessive personality he was. Like the daily glass of milk that he brought her and made her drink—in short, suckling the woman whom he would deny children. In fact, he distracted himself from his own neurasthenia, from his existential anxiety, evading them by transferring them symbolically to a skittish Virginia, whom he would nurse for life. “I begin to despair of finishing a book on this method—I write one sentence—the clock strikes—Leonard appears with a glass of milk.”56 A glass also emblematic of his influence over her.

  What he describes to Brenan is his own neurosis, his phobia, his terror—among others—of degradation, his dread of the “horrible preliminary complications” and, just as “ghastly … of virginity and marriage,” provoked by a honeymoon, the very idea of which repulsed him in Hambatota. Caught in that situation, he is the one who feels threatened and who blocks, interrupts, “stops” what viscerally alarms him.57

  For Virginia, that part of life was done for. Maybe she had hoped that Leonard could show her the way to it; what was forbidden her had to be turned into another loss.

  Thanks to Leonard, it was decided that she was frigid toward men and the sexual act, under the pretext that her experience—if it could be called that—with her husband had not delighted her. The opposite would have been rather surprising! It is easy to imagine the immense disappointment of her honeymoon, such a failed, curtailed initiation, for which she would accept sole responsibility.

  But upon returning, to a woman friend: “Why do you think people make such a fuss about marriage and copulation? … I find the climax immensely exaggerated,” before adding: “I might still be Miss S … ,” and “Don’t marry till you’re 30—if then.”58

  Writing to Lytton, casualness and crude expressions were due. From a letter written during the honeymoon, this most romantic account—we are in Venice: “The W.C. opposite our room has not been emptied for 3 days, and you can there distinguish the droppings of Christian, Jew, Latin and Saxon—you can imagine the rest.” But there is a certain (resigned) bitterness between the lines:

  Several times the proper business of bed has been interrupted by mosquitoes. They bloody the wall by morning—they always choose my left eye, Leonard’s right ear. Whatever position they chance to find us in. This does not sound to you a happy life, I know; but you see, that in between the crevices we stuff an enormous amount of exciting conversation—also literature. My God! You can’t think with what a fury we fall on printed matter, so long denied us by our own writing! I read 3 new novels in two days: Leonard waltzed through the Old Wives Tales like a kitten after its tail: after this giddy career I have now run full tilt into Crime et Châtiment … [Dostoyevsky] is the greatest writer ever born: and if he chooses to become horrible what will happen to us? Honeymoon completely dashed. If he says it—human hope—had better end, what will be left but suicide in the Grand Canal?

  Much to be heard here under the chatter that is trying to be pert, and then, as throughout the letters, the diary, and the work, water to throw oneself into.59

  There remains the loss of a love life more or less consciously awaited for a long time, thus refused her, out of reach. “To want and want and not to have.”60

  And the legacy of this fiasco: the role of the wife promptly pronounced “frigid.” Never did the illusory masculine archetype or Leonard himself come into question. The lover’s prowess went without saying? Like Brenan and the Bells, didn’t everyone perceive Leonard (he saw to this) as “strongly sexed”? No one was privy to what we now know about him at the time of his marriage, through his letters to Strachey, except the cynical Lytton.

  And so, “masculine frigidity, reluctance”? You must be joking! A heterosexual male’s aversion to the female body? You must be delirious! Leonard, the couple’s male principle, obviously embodied the “norm.” Virginia herself didn’t deny it. From which arose a sense of deficiency regarding her own body, of indebtedness to her husband. But also a feeling of doubt, perhaps, and resentment over what went supremely unspoken, for no doubt she was aware (more or less consciously!) of what that was. What had determined for her—reflected in her—his justified withdrawal.

  Virginia was never clear herself on those grounds, but it seems certain that Leonard led her into sexual failure, which he made almost public and attributed to her, and which was his doing. And which would not have had such significance if Leonard had not sacrificed his wife in order to exonerate himself and even derive benefits, boasting of his victimization, playing the hero. If he had not thrown his wife’s reputation to the Brenans and the Quentin Bells, thus allowing them to discuss Virginia Woolf’s sexuality and to conclude that she was “abnormal.”

  Their failure might have strengthened their bond, henceforth founded on less fragile relations, but not without favoring a certain domination on Leonard’s part, not without justifying his tacit demands, not without nurturing and solidifying the image of a wife so far outside the norm as to be “abnormal.” And not without giving the husband power over his deficient wife.

  And truly, what could be better than the alibi Virginia offered? Henceforth, it would allow her husband to escape all women, including her, even as it secured him the reputation of a frustrated Don Juan, with a martyr’s halo.

  What a blessing!

  Virginia “frigid”? No. But the opposite, deprived by others of what she had hoped for.

  In any case, why not let Virginia Woolf be her own model? Why hold her up to convention and be shocked that she doesn’t conform? Her “norm” would have us consider “normal” her own sense of the erotic: a raindrop sliding down a window, say.

  Which is true, as well.

  But there is more.

  Let us listen to Rhoda, also assumed to be frigid, and who clearly speaks for Virginia in The Waves, where six voices tell of six lives at every age and over time. Is this voice silent on sexuality?

  There is some check in the flow of my being; a deep stream presses on some obstacle; it jerks; it tugs; some knot in the centre resists. Oh, this is pain, this is anguish! I faint, I fail. Now
my body thaws; I am unsealed, I am incandescent. Now the stream pours in a deep tide fertilizing, opening the shut, forcing the tight-folded, flooding free. To whom shall I give all that now flows through me, from my warm, porous body? I will gather my flowers and present them—Oh! To whom?61

  To whom?

  With Leonard, Virginia can act in concert, with him she can gather flowers—but give them, receive them?

  Oh! To whom?

  And of whom is she thinking when Septimus Smith, in Mrs. Dalloway, attributes his own feelings to Shakespeare? “Love between man and woman was repulsive to Shakespeare. The business of copulation was filth to him.” Or: “How Shakespeare loathed humanity—the putting on of clothes, the getting of children, the sordidity of the mouth and the belly!”62

  Oh! To whom?

  One oasis in this desert, in this wasteland of sexual desire: Vita Sackville-West, gifted with a love for women, as Virginia was attracted to them. Virginia, who fell in love with Vita in 1925. Passionately, and it was reciprocal. But on her part, she offered herself totally, without the least reservation, overcome with well-being, sensuality, and physical pleasure. There for the taking. And almost immediately rebuffed. Soon Vita would beat a retreat with regard to sex. Her pretext? It would be … identical to Leonard’s!

  She confided in her husband, Harold Nicolson (they were forever linked to each other and, in principle, forever without jealousy; he as captivated by men as she was by women and some men as well). Vita, coming from an aristocratic lineage that made Virginia dream, was a writer, often successful, but she was thrilled (and flattered) to be loved by Virginia Woolf, so prestigious and whose value she measured, which did not prevent her commentaries, even more boorish than Leonard’s confidences to Brenan.

  Virginia’s reputation prompted Vita’s boasting, flattered as she was by such a conquest, even as she reassured Harold. Like Vita, he was under the influence of the legend, started by Leonard, accepted by Virginia, according to which the latter was frigid and would be mad were it not for her husband’s vigilance. Vita remarked in her a “funny mixture of hardness and softness—the hardness of her mind, and her terror of going mad again.”63

  A radiant Virginia, believing she was experiencing the natural sensuality of a shared passion, did not stand a chance. Vita declares to Harold,

  I am scared to death of arousing physical feelings in her, because of the madness. I don’t know what effect it would have, you see; and that is a fire with which I have no wish to play. No, thank you. I have too much real affection and respect. Also she has never lived with anyone but Leonard, which was a terrible failure, and was abandoned quite soon…. Besides ça ne me dit rien; and ça lui dit trop, where I am concerned…. So you see I am sagacious—though probably I would be less sagacious if I were more tempted…. I have gone to bed with her (twice), but that’s all; and I told you that before, I think.64

  A true chauvinist!

  Virginia frigid? No, dangerous: “Ça lui dit trop.” Once again, she is too “excited.”

  Harold was reassured, which was the aim of Vita’s letter, at least part bluff; it ends there. Of course he considered Virginia “beneficial” for his wife (as well as for her literary reputation). Nevertheless he warned: “I do hope that Virginia is not going to be a muddle. It is like smoking over a petrol tank.” Then, recovering his composure: “It’s a relief to feel that you realize the danger and will be wise. You see, it’s not merely playing with fire; it’s playing with gelignite.”65

  So there it is.

  The game is up. Virginia is judged. A perpetual candidate for madness. Inaccessible. Taboo. Kindness means that she be spared what she desires—what she wants and wants and cannot have, “protected” from all bliss of that order, from all supposedly harmful excitement—but according to what decision, what decrees, if not the scenario concocted (in all sincerity, he believed) by Leonard? No one thought at the time—or since, really—of the contradiction between a woman judged as simultaneously frigid and too “excited.” Both grounds for rejecting her.

  It was not her lover’s coldness that fazed Vita Sackville-West, but her seemingly excessive ardor, her desire, no doubt heightened by her long-standing frustration and her frantic hope. Virginia tries to reassure Vita: “Please come, and bathe me in serenity again. Yes, I was wholly and entirely happy. If you could have uncored me—you would have seen every nerve running fire—intense, but calm.”66

  Vita, as seen by Virginia: in her eyes, all pearls and cashmere, castles and prestigious ancestors. Vita, in love with her for a time, but forever fickle, only briefly the physical lover of the long-awaiting Virginia: “Remember Virginia. Forget everybody else. Should you say, if I rang you up to ask, that you were fond of me? If I saw you would you kiss me? If I were in bed would you—…”67

  Awaiting, often in despair: “Talking to Lytton the other night he suddenly asked me to advise him in love—whether to go on, over the precipice, or stop short at the top. Stop, stop! I cried, thinking instantly of you,” she wrote to Vita. To Lytton she wrote: “I do feel that love is such a horror I would advise anyone to break off.”68

  Virginia: then incandescent, singularly passionate. Anything but frigid. Rejected, “interrupted” here as she had been by Leonard.

  As for him, surely the most awkward of lovers, reluctant, incapable of engaging his partner except in his own denial—perhaps the hint of passion, even of sudden wonder, might let him successfully shift their relationship to another register? But if we search her husband’s autobiography for signs of Virginia, he seems immune to any such enchantment.

  Let us watch her surface in these pages and memories, their author’s life, let us watch for signs of emotion. He has returned to London, on leave from Ceylon. The trouble is … she does not come up. Leonard mentions other thrills, as the young poet Rupert Brooke appears to an enthralled Woolf, passing through Cambridge: “When I first saw him, I thought to myself: ‘That is exactly what Adonis must have looked like in the eyes of Aphrodite’ … the red-gold of his hair and the brilliant complexion. It was the sexual dream face not only for every goddess, but for every sea-girl wreathed with seaweed red and brown and, alas, for all the damp souls of housemaids.”69

  Let us turn the pages. Virginia? Still no sign of her. Then here comes one by way of her sister: “Vanessa was, I believe, usually more beautiful than Virginia.” This belated, inferior Virginia, whose sole function is to be compared to her sister, who outshines her since

  the form of her features was more perfect, her eyes bigger and better, her complexion more glowing. If Rupert was a goddess’s Adonis, Vanessa in her thirties had something of the physical splendour which Adonis must have seen when the goddess suddenly stood before him. To many people she appeared frightening and formidable, for she was blended of three goddesses with slightly more of Athene and Artemis in her and her face than of Aphrodite.

  As for her voice: the most beautiful ever heard. Ah, and her tranquility! Which did not at all detract from her depth, because in addition to extreme sensitivity, there reigned in her “a nervous tension,” indicating “some resemblance to the mental instability of Virginia.”70

  The first glimpses of Virginia, recollected: less beautiful than her sister and mentally unstable.

  Let us read on. Here is Woolf, overcome with admiration. For Virginia this time? No: for Thoby, who so embodied his nickname, the Goth. And whom Vanessa embodied in turn … his female double. Six years earlier in Ceylon, when Lytton announced that Vanessa, Thoby’s double, was going to marry Clive Bell, Leonard acknowledged his bewilderment:

  I always said that he [Clive] was in love with one of them—though strangely I thought it was the other…. You think that Bell is really wildly in love with her? The curious part is that I was too after they came up that May term to Cambridge, & still more curious that there is a mirage of it still left. She so superbly like the Goth. I often used to wonder whether he was in love with the Goth because he was in love with her & I was in love wi
th her, because with the Goth.71

  But what about Virginia, so rarely and belatedly encountered in these pages? Ah, there she is! And, at last, defined: “a very different kind of person beneath the strong family resemblances in the two sisters.” But Virginia? Virginia herself? Well: “She was, as I said, normally less beautiful than Vanessa.” Nonetheless, Leonard continues, “when she was well, unworried, happy, amused, and excited, her face lit up with an intense almost ethereal beauty,” and also “when, unexcited and unworried, she sat reading or thinking.” Otherwise, tension, disease, or anxiety did not erase her beauty but rendered it “painful.”72

  All the more so because Virginia was, alas, a genius, the only one Leonard acknowledged knowing personally. A genius. Is that even reasonable? And what can be done about it? “One has to call it genius because the mental process seems to be fundamentally different from those of ordinary or normal people and indeed from the normal mental processes of these abnormal persons.”73 A bit convoluted, even vague, but how disturbing! Though it’s reassuring finally to encounter here the “true” Virginia Woolf: Quentin Bell’s Virginia Woolf.

  After such an enthusiastic description, Leonard immediately moves on to the essential thing: poor Virginia makes passersby laugh. She seems “strange to the ‘ordinary’ person.” The word “ridiculous” appears three times in two pages, and the word “laughter” repeatedly: people “would go into fits of laughter at the sight of Virginia.” They “stop and stare” and “giggle” and “roar with laughter.”74

  And note especially that, to their eyes, Virginia represents: “some monstrous female caricature.”75 According to Leonard. This is not innocuous. What he claims here is what he himself imagines; what he claims to interpret and convey are his own assumptions, originating with him.

  These are Leonard’s spontaneous memories of the past; this is how Virginia appears in the book that is his witness.