Ways of Seeing

Virginia Woolf played with identity in her fiction—what is/is not known about people, and what those people cannot tell. She got these ideas from the way she lived her own life and the lives of those around her. In fact, the early Bloomsbury group talked about these very things: how much can be divulged about one’s life before, (a) embarrassment veils the story, or (b) ridicule from others shows from the revelation of those facts (stories); and, likewise, how much should be told to friends or anyone else (including, perhaps, physicians).

The Bloomsbury group led open lives—much more so than their Edwardian society around them would indulge, and scandalously so compared to their Victorian roots (and yet living relatives)—and talked about every subject, including debates on the moral solvency of suicide. They were a close-knit group, but their evenings together became famous (some might say infamous) in contemporary society for that very openness. How the information came to be known around London did not come so much from the Bloomsbury gang themselves, but through the impressions they made on the visitors who came and went on those famous Thursday night gatherings. Yet…not everything was revealed about their lives. Not in public (even among friends), and not even in their diaries.

Woolf’s novels possibly expose the most intimate details of any Bloomsbury members, deftly folded into literary stories, characters, and settings she chose. She took from herself, her friends, family, and enemies to build those worlds within the word. Her diaries also tell a story, perhaps the most intimate of all details of the interior life she led. By interior, I mean the life within the mind. Woolf used her inner life as models for the interior story that revolutionized literature.

The diaries are fascinating reading. Woolf writes entries where she battles with herself in deciding what she could write in the diaries & what she must leave out. Somehow, she felt the need to keep secrets from the private journal. You might wonder, How odd to censor oneself even in the most intimate of privacies. Perhaps.

A wider issue needs to be considered, I think, in Woolf’s instance, and perhaps for all diarists. VW wrote her diaries for herself, of course. She reread them often, in fact, retracing her thoughts and the processes by which she came to ideas for stories, and conclusions any other subject. She often argued with herself in these pages. Just as well, she learned something and was not afraid to later (or within a single entry) contradict herself, notice the contradiction, and wonder why & where that all came from (or would lead). This is good stuff. We all do this…. but few of us (and fewer as a whole, perhaps) commit these thoughts to paper (or today, the blog???) for later reading. How Virginia Woolf must have understood herself so completely! In all her flaws and contradictions. I’m not sure I’d have the guts to do this so consistently, and brutally, as VW often did. (But it must also be said that VW just as easily could fool herself, at least for a single entry…as human beings are wont to place themselves in the best light.)

But as Woolf wrote her diaries, she had the idea firmly planted in her mind that someday her diaries would be published. By that notion, she felt she had to exercise some prudence in divulging certain informations. Mostly these came from her life. She could be brutally honest and cutting about her family and friends, as her descriptions and assessments of people show. Those of you who keep a diary (you can call it a journal, men, so you don’t feel emasculated) likely understand the need to “hold back” some information.

When I write in my diary, I often find myself (or is the term “catch” myself) holding the pen above the page, wondering-if-and-what-or-how-much I can or should write about me or someone I know. “What if…” I ask myself, “the diary ‘falls’ into the wrong hands before I’m dead?” Yes, self-censorship. Yes, secrets. Yes, they would not be SECRETS any longer!

And…we all have secrets. Mine are…

I’m not telling.

These secrets we carry are likely nothing momentous to life, liberty, or the outside world. At least I don’t think mine are. Nor are mine illegal secrets (perhaps). They are, nonetheless, informations, events, thoughts, that to no one in this life I would want known.

Vanity? Embarrassment? Something else? Oh…maybe. Whatever the case, they are my thoughts, unavailable to any other. Of course, I doubt very much if my life will be written after I die. Nor shall my diaries be published.

In Virginia Woolf’s case, she held back even her final thoughts of suicide, before she actually killed herself. Her last diary entry was just a few days before she drowned herself in the Ouse River, outside London.

Virginia Woolf’s life has been dissected by dozens of literary historians, feminists, misogynists, cranks, and sycophants. From the straightforward, to the intrusive, to the respectful but truthful, to the outright bazaar, VW’s legacy has been a pincushion for writers. (And, I suppose, I’ve now weighed in?) Whatever your own reading of Woolf is based on biographies and her writing, the rumors of her life, surrounding her childhood, possible sexual abuse, the factual mental breakdowns (and the ridiculous treatments for those, including a milk diet) must be taken as a whole to her writerly life, her vivid insight to human nature combined with her revolutionary literary imagination.

That writerly life, I think, is the real treasure we can find from reading VW’s diaries and letters (many volumes of both). The rest seems all so post post-modern tittle-tattle when weighted against many people’s drive to learn about “the dirt” of someone’s life—not to mention schadenfreude.

That we do not know every though of Virginia Woolf (though there is so much) is good. What there is shows how Woolf established that the interior mind was not only valid as subject for literature, but vital to the evolution of character-centered story.

Tags: Literature, Seeing in Progress //