When I write, I'm a woman | Virginia Woolf Memorial Death

Interface News Reporter | Dong Ziqi

Interface News Editor | Yellow Moon

On March 28, 1941, British writer Virginia Woolf committed suicide by throwing herself into the river. At the end of her life, she said to a friend, "The happiest moment in a person's life is walking in his garden, and maybe you will pick a few withered flowers, and then suddenly remember that my husband is in that house, and he loves me." ”

From her teenage years, Woolf suffered from mental illness, but she continued to fight it with her serious writing. As the recently published Lyndell Gordon's Virginia Wool: A Writer's Life reveals, Woolf spent her life fighting against the fixed Victorian image of women, as well as against the closed life of women, not only against physical confinement and restraint, but also against the ignorance and emotional repression of the guided.

Virginia Wool Biography

Written by Lyndell Gordon and translated by Xie Yaqing 

Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2024-3

"I have a woman's emotion, but only a man's language. In 1920, Woolf quoted in a book review that Gordon drew attention to in his biography of Virginia Woolf in the context of which Woolf in the upper echelons of society had to remain silent like a lady. It wasn't until 1929 that she was convinced that she had acquired a female voice in writing, "When I write,...... I am a woman. ”

Woolf's search for a female voice spans several years, and we can see this process in her diary. Woolf said that she was happier at 38 than at 28 because she found a new form of fiction: one event can emerge from another, loose and inclusive, everything is hazy, but the inner activity and the emotions of the characters shine like a fire in the twilight. At the age of 40, she says she finally found a way to express herself, just beginning to understand how the brain works and how it can be used for work and happiness. After Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf wrote To the Lighthouse and marveled that she had discovered a new way of writing that would give her a new theme: that the scale of time would be completely out of order, that the fall of an event, a flower, might contain the future, and that "there is no real event, not even time." ”

"Virginia Woolf's biography" describes Woolf's female voice as "like a rolling wave, always ready to come again." The statement still jumps after the terminator is drawn". The imagery of waves and water is a symbol often used by Woolf. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf incorporates the rhythm of the ocean into Mrs. Dalloway's sewing scenes, "stitch after stitch, sewing silk lightly and properly...... At this time, there is a sense of tranquility in the whole body and mind...... Like the waves of summer, they lose their balance and scatter in all directions. ”

According to the biographer's hypothesis, the imagery of water, waves, and waves originated from the visions she saw during her melancholy attacks. In "Mrs. Dalloway," the madman Septimus, believing that he would not drown easily, walks through the waters, only through a green mist, pushed farther ashore by the bumpy waves. When the first draft of To the Lighthouse was completed in 1926, Woolf was at the peak of her work, but suddenly fell into a depressive vision: she saw a huge wave coming towards her, rising higher and higher, as if to shatter and annihilate her, and saw a fin of fish slicing through the vast ocean. Three years later, she began writing The Waves, a work that suggests that Woolf's sudden depression is the beginning of middle age, and can also be seen as a means for the author to recover himself after creative stagnation and decay.

Mrs. Dalloway

Written by Virginia Woolf and translated by Sun Liang Su Mei

Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 2009-1

In addition to her work, Woolf's literary criticism is sensitive to male/female voices. In one case, despite her friends' praise for Ulysses, she decided to keep her assessment — the work wasn't good enough, and Joyce's writing reminded her of the stinking little boys in public schools, resourceful and capable, but also overly arrogant and selfish, noisy and hardly at ease. I had hoped that such a little boy could grow up, she wrote sarcastically, but given that Joyce was forty years old, it hardly worked. For example, Milton's "Paradise Lost" is that the author seems to have never really lived, never understood men and women, and that the contempt for women is as malicious as the end of a quarrel between husband and wife, but this does not prevent the work from being smooth, vigorous and concise.

Joyce was manly, like a male goat, and she complained to her friend. The masculinity of literature and art often worries her. In A Room of One's Own, Woolf commented on a male writer of the time: "Compared with women's writing, self-confidence, straightforward writing, which embodies the freedom of thought and the person, is enjoyable and enviable, but sometimes it reveals certain difficulties and obstacles that block the source of creativity."

She reveals to the reader that an era of pure, conceited masculinity is dawning at this time. From the newspapers, she saw the progress of Italian literature and art, and the scholars presided over a conference entitled "Promoting the development of the Italian novel":

"Whatever effect this masculine value may have on a country, its influence on the art of poetry is worth questioning...... Poetry is not born in incubators...... I am afraid that fascist poetry will turn into a terrible premature fetus, like the collection of the small county town museum, displayed in a glass bottle. ”

She also used her novels to criticize the most unattractive traits for women: aggressiveness, egocentrism — Mr. Ramsay in "To the Lighthouse" is likened to a brass bird's beak or a bloodthirsty knife that cannot imagine a woman's needs when he is immersed in his own needs.

Hermaphroditic minds are better suited to creation. In A Room of One's Own, Woolf argues that writers who lack femininity, such as Kipling or Goldsworth, appear crude and immature because they lack the power of emotional communication and suggestion. Although the words are excellent, sensitive, and insightful, there is a lack of communication, and the author's brain seems to be divided into several different rooms, and no sound can be heard, so that when it enters people's minds, it falls to the ground with a thud - Dead, but if it were Coleridge, it would explode and inspire all sorts of ideas, while Proust was completely androgynous, and Woolf wrote in his diary that his achievements were nothing compared to Proust's, because he explored the gradations of color of butterfly wings, as tough as a sheep's intestine and as fleeting as the powder on a butterfly's wings. 

How can the reader understand Woolf's emotional communication and suggestion? "To the Lighthouse" may serve as an example. There is a scene in the novel where the Ramsays read Shakespeare's sonnets together, and their emotions are expressed by suggestion rather than directly: the husband is willing to respond creatively to his wife's silence, and the lady does not know the nature of her love, but the other "understands". On a related note, as early as 1919, Woolf was praised by commentators for creating a new type of sentence structure: like the deep fluctuations of the brain under calm. In fact, she once told her girlfriend Vita that sights and emotions caused a fluctuation in the mind long before it could create a suitable language.

In the manuscript of To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay asks rhetorically, wouldn't it ruin things to tell them, wouldn't it be better to communicate silently, and in a wondrous silence that attracts us more than words, we glide quietly side by side on high places...... In her life, Woolf also noticed the voice and silence of women. She recorded the scene of drinking tea in her girlfriend's room, seeing the tugboat with a red light passing by, and hearing the river rushing in the river, and how pleasant it was to be friendly with women!

Written by Virginia Woolf Edited by Leonard Woolf

Translated by Song Binghui and Wu Xin

CITIC Publishing Group 2024-1

Finally, it was not only the silence and suggestion from her mother that influenced Woolf, but also the form of her writing that had to do with her father's walking habits. A year after her father's death, her interest in solo trekking was awakened, and she wrote in her diary, "I have now walked through a large area around the township, and the map of this land has become three-dimensional in my mind." ”

Her novels always zigzag from place to place, following the free flow of ideas, and we may have reason to believe in this metaphorical connection—Woolf walks down the road and onto countless trails, so narrow as rabbits that lead to mountains and moors in all directions. The locked gate and the farm fence were all obstacles, and when she climbed over them, everything was unblocked, and in this way, Woolf discovered a vast network of hidden and narrow paths. Her love for the variety and serendipity of wild walks goes beyond the precision of road walks, which is also reminiscent of the structural principle of her novels, which she later put into practice in the twenties of the twentieth century, which is to "ignore landmark events such as births, marriages, and deaths, and look for the casual moments that shape life".