Monday, February 17, 2014

Virginia Woolf is described by Professors as having Multiple Personality sort of issues

Woolf possesses and communicates not a single, but a multiple personality. I do not approach this multiple personality as a pathological condition, that is, as a more public and controlled form of the madness [bipolar disorder, aka manic-depression] that periodically overwhelmed her. I take what many may consider an even more perverse position: I treat her multiple or plural personalities as the highest achievement of her disciplined art.
Maria DiBattista: Imagining Virginia Woolf. Princeton University Press, 2009

For she had a great variety of selves to call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for, since a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand. —from Woolf’s Orlando
      Orlando’s biographer keeps disassembling and then re-assembling Orlando’s “selves”: a reflection of Virginia Woolf’s sense of her own “great variety of selves.” As she began to develop her ideas for The Waves—of the author as six different voices speaking in solitude—and as at the same time her public, famous self became increasingly established, her life can be seen as a complicated range of performances. Questions about her “selves” filled her mind in the late 1920s. Her battle-cry, “How I interest myself!” was loud in her ears. She knew she had different ways of presenting her own identity. She kept returning to Orlando’s idea of the unstable self.
—Hermione Lee: Virginia Woolf. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1997

She has begun to use the name “Miss Jan” rather than “Virginia” to describe what happened to her; it is a name that she continued to use throughout 1897 [age 15; two years after her mother died]. She writes: “It is so windy to day, that Miss Jan is quite afraid of venturing out. The other day her skirt was blown over her head, and she trotted along in a pair of red flannel drawers to the great amusement of the Curate who happened to be coming out of Church.” The retelling of this event is significant for it explicitly conveys the reason why Virginia Woolf became agoraphobic: she was terrified because her bottom had indeed been exposed. And she was afraid that everyone would see it.
—Louise DeSalvo: Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work. Boston, Beacon Press, 1989

The above quotations from Professors DiBattista, Lee, and DeSalvo raise the possibility that Virginia Woolf—completely separate from, and unrelated to, her bipolar disorder—had multiple personality.

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