Virginia Woolf: A Portrait

by Viviane Forrester

  His recourse? For the philosopher, writing is a weapon. He undertook the Mausoleum Book sixteen days after Julia’s death, to her glory and to be read by her children. There he revives the time of feelings and puts Julia on display, anxious to convince them (and convince himself) that his “noble wife”28 to him (as to Herbert Duckworth), even though he never got her to say it, he admits, loved him.

  Wild passion is notably absent in his letters to his living wife, in which he describes not the state of his soul but rather that of his intestines.

  If Julia laughed, embarrassed and a little shocked, at Virginia’s questions on her courtship, the Mausoleum compensates—oh how it compensates—for that reserve and broadcasts with great emotion the intimacy of the couple and the couples they had each been part of during their successive marriages. Leslie’s intimacy with his two “darlings,” first with Minny, that is “my darling Minny,” Thackeray’s youngest daughter, with “her beautiful bronze hair, brilliantly white teeth and delicate complexion one minute with the soft tint of the china rose and then again white as a lily…. One day she would look like the young girl she really was and, on the next, twenty years older, so varying were her moods and expression … she was sincere almost to bluntness.” Though elsewhere he calls her not very pretty,29 sweet and gay, hardly brilliant: “She was a poem, though not a poetess.”30

  This sweet, gay poem, also in love with the Alps, would play with their baby Laura for a few summers in the Grindelwald meadows, never anticipating that their laughter, the looks exchanged between them, would be the last signs of kindness Laura would experience. Minny would die unsuspecting of her daughter’s future difficulties, her abominable fate.

  Laura, “Her Ladyship the Lady of the Lake,” as the other children nicknamed her, “backward,” in the words of her father, would be no more than an unseemly, disagreeable problem that had to be rectified. Scolded, punished, roughly handled, but most importantly, barely, grievously loved by Leslie alone, who was ravaged with pity, impatience, anger, and consternation, she would be permanently ruined in a time when nothing was known about such marginal cases, forced to fall into line regardless. Today she would be treated very differently. Ignorance, cruel as it was, thus incited cruelty; Laura would be lost among the three Duckworth children, more or less her contemporaries, and the four Stephens, born one after the other, whom she destabilized. As she did Julia.31

  Virginia would flee her memory all her life. Nevertheless, indignant and terrified, she mentions that “besides the three Duckworths and the four Stephens there was also Thackeray’s grand-daughter” (and not the daughter of her own father), “a vacant-eyed girl whose idiocy was becoming daily more obvious, who could hardly read, who would throw the scissors into the fire, who was tongue-tied and stammered and yet had to appear at table with the rest of us.”32

  Leslie, often wildly angry and distressed at his daughter’s limitations, which he considered a “perversity,”33 worked desperately to teach her to read and succeeded, but to whose benefit? Laura got to the end of Aladdin at eleven years old; at fourteen, she read Robinson Crusoe and at sixteen, Alice in Wonderland.

  Pedagogical harassment, strictness, outbursts of rage followed by remorse were the extent of interactions with Laura. The distance and confusion grew. The anomaly was reinforced, the gap widened. A little kindness would no doubt have improved her life, allowed her a place in this already “blended” family, instead of a steady withdrawal from their life and her perceptions of it, unknown to them. Incongruous. At those rare times when someone reached out to her, like Minny’s older sister, her Aunt Anny, Laura ran happily into their open arms, laughing with delight at their embrace. Those were the exceptions: Aunt Anny had her own life to lead; such “moments of being” were sporadic at best.

  No longer quietly sequestered with her widowed father, Laura weighed on Hyde Park Gate, as Leslie’s worries and remorse weighed on Julia, and this thankless cause, this heavy burden, excited her far less than others that drew her elsewhere. As she sent Virginia to distract Leslie from the beautiful Mrs. Gray, this time she undoubtedly drafted her son George Duckworth, a favorite with her husband. Leslie records this incident with feeling in his Mausoleum Book:

  Once when we were at St. Ives, my dear George, then a schoolboy, remonstrated with me, saying that his mother ought not to have such a task. I thanked him, I need not say, and fully agreed. I must add that in this matter I do not blame myself. I took considerable part in teaching or trying to teach Laura. I shall never forget the shock to me, when we were at Brighton after Mrs. Jackson’s illness of 1879–80, I think. We had sent Laura to a “kindergarten” and the mistress told me that she would never learn to read. I resolved to try and succeeded in getting the poor child to read after a fashion, although I fear I too often lost my temper and was over-exacting. My darling Julia was, of course, vexed by my vexation and had her full share of trouble; but I do not think that my conduct in the matter caused her any needless trouble.34

  But Laura?

  After having been increasingly isolated and confined to one part of the house, she was sent away to special schools. Then, at nineteen, she was institutionalized, perhaps wrongly and certainly for life. She would live seventy-five years, abandoned in an asylum for nearly sixty of them, where her condition deteriorated completely.

  After Stella and Leslie died, no one visited her, or only very infrequently, a distant relative perhaps, like a certain Dorothea Stephen who, during a visit with Virginia, spoke to her of Laura: “the same as ever, and never stops talking, and occasionally says, ‘I told him to go away,’ or ‘Put it down, then,’ quite sensibly; but the rest is unintelligible.”35

  The only time Virginia really includes her in her family is when, in “Old Bloomsbury,” she mentions saying good-bye to Hyde Park Gate, where “not only had the furniture been dispersed. The family which had seemed equally wedged together had broken apart too,” and she includes in that family a half-sister, “incarcerated with a doctor in an asylum.” But that was a long time ago.36

  Twelve years younger than Laura Stephen, Virginia Woolf died four years before her, and her every hour was lived simultaneously with those of that wasted life, discarded alive. A suppression perpetuated in the Woolfian opus, where she is practically omitted—we have just read one of the very rare passages mentioning her, a half dozen, including the following one—where Virginia willingly opts to leave her out of the biography of their father that Fred Maitland is preparing: “The history of Laura is really the most tragic thing in his [Leslie Stephen’s] life I think; and one that one can hardly describe in the life.”37 Nevertheless, we will see how their brief cohabitation and her suppressed memory haunted Virginia. Her determination to forget it, to elude it, to erase all record of it may serve as proof of that.

  She had witnessed Leslie’s other daughter alienated, and thus rejected, despised, roughly handled, powerless. Locked up. Laura held Virginia spellbound, horror stricken and terrified. Laura’s terrible difficulties with reading would drive Virginia to books as a child, to flaunting the incredible list of thick volumes she consumed. She knew that if you were called mad, you were at the mercy of a father, or a husband. And how not to think of the Great Lady of the Lake when Virginia ends up at the bottom of the River Ouse? Who was waiting for her there? Who would she go to rejoin?

  Laura’s would be a substantial legacy, growing from an initial investment that would have time to yield a profit. Leonard, widowed … would claim Virginia’s share; to no avail. He was the one who remarked—on one of those rare occasions when Virginia mentioned this half-sister—that she was “the one we could have spared.”38

  Laura’s mother’s death: a disaster infinitely worse for her than Julia’s death was for Julia’s children. She was five years old when Minny was abruptly seized with convulsions one night and died the next day. It was Leslie’s birthday (he would never celebrate it again). He was forty-three years old.

  Now it was on the eve of this drama that J
ulia happened to appear in his life, when, as a young widow grieving for five years, she paid a neighborly visit to the Stephen couple, but found them to be so happy that she felt out of place, even sadder than usual, and she departed almost immediately. Only to return the next day to comfort Leslie, now the grief-stricken widower. Three years later, they were married. Twenty years later and Leslie relives this same drama, plunged into grief this time over Julia, who had become for him that “strange solemn music”39 in which he had immersed himself. But also Julia Stephen, discretely elusive, impenetrable, and reticent, whom he now pursued posthumously, harassing her as he harassed their children.

  The Mausoleum Book includes a litany on the intimacies of both marriages of both parents, Leslie the sole survivor among them. An exhibition of the conjugal feelings of the dead procreators, Herbert, Julia, Minny. Only Laura, in the asylum, will be spared word of the happiness her father provided his dear Minny. As for Herbert, he elicits some jealousy: “There is a touch of pain—I cannot deny it—in the clear consciousness … that my darling Julia owed her purest happiness to another man.” Yet Leslie thanks his gallant posthumous rival for the “unqualified happiness,” the “perfect happiness,” he bestowed upon “my darling,” who “made a complete surrender of herself in the fullest sense: she would have no reserves from her lover.”40

  Leslie paws through their personal lives, puts parental agonies and ecstasies on display. The Mausoleum Book is always proper and nevertheless oozes impropriety, especially since it was meant for children, fragile and grieving for their mother, a mother thus exposed, and for the Duckworths, exposed not by a father but by a second husband. Its sentimentality camouflages (or accentuates) the insinuated indecency. It flaunts a parental web permeated with tacit lusts, implicit omissions. Hyde Park Gate resounds with virtuous words, displays of remorse, sweet memories derived from the dead, aroused by her and behind which throb passions and desires that are very simply (and legitimately) sexual. But made mawkish, concealed under the dripping words of Victorian Anglicanism, they weigh even more heavily, equivocal, hybrid, in an atmosphere thick with cleverly circumvented prohibitions, furtively transgressed limits, with a licentiousness capable of transforming what would have been inevitable sexual deprivation, legitimate sexual urges, into depravity.

  It is not Leslie’s actions that are being questioned here, but the lugubrious, suspect atmosphere that he established, that he exuded, and his appetites masked under his lamentations; “in those days nothing was clear,” writes Virginia. A lascivious, poisonous fog in which brothers and sisters struggled, that “choked us and blinded us,” she recalls. An insidious permissiveness that would lead to incest but without coitus, as Lytton Strachey used to say. A groping, suspended kind of incest experienced openly and overtly and nevertheless unacknowledged.41

  A long chapter in the life of Hyde Park Gate, which had become a trap. Stella’s trap. The naturally and essentially submissive, devotedly self-sacrificing, malleable, and very beautiful Stella Duckworth, who could only accept Leslie Stephen as the sacred charge handed down from her mother. And who would henceforth provide him “any comfort, whatever its nature,” according to Virginia. Who continues: “Whatever comfort she had to give. But what comfort could she give?” before noting “suddenly she was placed in the utmost intimacy” with this elderly man of letters, although, despite their long cohabitation, they hardly knew each other.42

  He would descend upon this stepdaughter who so strangely resembled his “darling Julia” at the time of her beauty; he would depend upon her to such an extent that all she could absolutely depend upon was that dependence. Soon “she found that she had completely pledged herself to her stepfather; he expected entire self-surrender on her part,” notes Virginia, who read the Mausoleum Book and knows the meaning Leslie gave to that expression.43

  In Moments of Being, what is “impossible to say aloud,”44 what is never said, surfaces: Virginia Woolf speaks about it, but without ever pronouncing it. For Virginia, nothing seemed to exist unless she wrote it down, she confided to Nicolson before writing it in her diary.

  She gives explanations and finds excuses for what was merely suggested. Because Stella lacked self-confidence, “she gave indiscriminately, conscious that she had not the best of all to give.” Being alone and unadvised, her stepfather considered it “his right.” And Stella, who “could not give him intellectual companionship, … must give him the only thing she had.” Virginia does not say what that was.45

  But it is certainly what Virginia would have wanted both to reveal and to keep hidden in 1940, swept up in her memories: what alone was tangible: the suspicion. The suspense, the threat, the imprint of that which had not taken place.

  Because there is nothing definite to say about that incest floating about Hyde Park Gate after Julia’s death, in the form of fantasies. On Leslie’s part, there were apparently only vague impulses, a duplicity paired with repression, and that repression oddly exhibited. What Virginia insinuates remains vague, but nevertheless seems relegated to the realm of the virtual: forbidden gestures would certainly be sidestepped, hardly hinted at; they would no doubt be avoided, like all overtly improper situations. Leslie Stephen was too attached to his illusions to shatter them so. To his image and his convictions as well, to his own self-regard, his need to believe in his own innocence. But he and Stella knew what boundaries were crossed.

  How far? The innuendos resound, equivocal, marked with shame, in the two documents that point to and clearly reflect what Leslie Stephen elsewhere managed to leave vague: two letters addressed to Stella Duckworth and eventually released by her. The first, from the very day she married Jack Waller Hills, a marriage that Leslie would have so liked to prevent; the second, three days later. Two years have passed since Julia’s death.

  An excerpt from the first letter. It is addressed to Stella Hills, married that same morning:

  My darling daughter…. The world seems to have turned topsy-turvy with me since this morning & I feel as I felt when I picked myself up after a fall—I cannot tell whether I am hurt or healed of a wound or simply dazzled…. The terrible sorrow I have gone through has taught me to know you as I never knew you before & to feel that you have—what could I say more expressive?—the same nature as my darling. I said to her that I not only loved but reverenced her & I never said a truer thing. Now one cannot exactly reverence a daughter but I have the feeling wh. corresponds to it—you may find a name for it—but I mean that my love of you is something more than mere affection, it includes complete confidence & trust. Well, I will say no more. It is only repeating what you know. Love me still & tell me sometimes that you love me. Good bye!46

  Under the guise of paternal duty and a passion devoted exclusively to Julia, Leslie hoped to be understood without risk, but here is a confession that, moreover, includes its retraction, as well as contrition, desire, a pathetic attempt to maintain the ambiguity of an equivocal—and now impossible—relationship. This is not a matter of a single, unusual outburst, but of a final effort to continue that morbid, covert game, played daily until now with his stepdaughter; a subterfuge aimed at maintaining it, which he knew to be in vain. With regard to his troubled relations with Stella, this is indeed his swan song.

  Leslie was reminding the newly married wife of Jack Hills; he had already said such things to her, without saying what had to be kept quiet but that Stella understood, since she knew that she could not listen to her stepfather were he to express himself otherwise. Stella knew and he knew it, and she knew that he knew she was aware of the profaned memory of her mother, used to hide the meaning of tortuously convoluted behavior. They both knew what Leslie was trying to pull, and that it couldn’t succeed. The others knew it as well. They were all ashamed—above all, of knowing.

  Virginia’s depression, her (feeble) suicide attempt after the death of her father, otherwise so dignified but faltering here, would stem from remorse at having once caught him unawares. For having suspected him, and even worse, detec
ted the illicit behavior, the transgression, indeed the violation, and above all, for having guessed him to be secretly ashamed. And worst of all: discredited.

  Virginia is quick to excuse her half-sister … of what she does not specify. But does she see Stella’s role as so clear and simple? A certain rancor comes through, a certain irony. An unasked question is left hanging: how did the reserved, humble, inexpressive Stella position herself in relation to their mother? And to this stepfather? In this dark period, beneath her passiveness, beyond the pain of her abiding grief and the now definitive absence of her mother, was she taking revenge in some timid, confused, covert way (no longer the “Old Cow”), or seeking a deeper intimacy with the maternal idol? Or even just fulfilling a sacred mission, Julia’s legacy … or all those things combined with, especially (or perhaps simply), a permanently masked and vanquished repulsion for her stepfather’s theatrics, at once chaste and perverse? Stella, so pale and growing ever paler in her mourning dress, whom Virginia often caught in tears, though she would immediately hide them, her face turning suddenly serene. Stella, whom Virginia also caught (“often one would break in upon a scene of this kind”) throwing her arms around a wailing Leslie.47

  Stella Duckworth. Virginia Stephen. Perhaps Virginia harbored a feeling of being usurped by Stella, who always protected her, of being wronged by the daughter of Herbert, who had always kept this other father in his place until then, a father easy to love, unquestionably commended.