Politics, Mental Health and Virginia Woolf

It is a measure of how much we generally manage to keep political events separate from our internal functioning that it sounds unusual, and possibly eccentric, to speak of such events as having any power to ‘drive us mad.’ Of course we may sometimes sigh at our screens and let out an expletive or two at a given situation in the company of a friend, but somehow ‘madness’ – that truly extreme state in which we lose a grip on the functioning of our minds, in which we can no longer contain our anxieties or retain perspective – feels exaggerated in relation to political events that do not personally touch us, when no bomb is directly falling on us and no tyrant is explicitly sending us to prison. We associate sanity with not going mad even when the world does appear – some miles away from us, in its own way – to have gone a little mad.

But if things are pressing on us with particular force, perhaps more than is generally held to be legitimate, we might turn to the writer Virginia Woolf, one of the most sensitive humans ever to have lived, who did – it seems – lose control of her mind, and eventually of her life, over the rise of fascism in Germany and the outbreak of the Second World War.

Woolf had not been mentally well for a long time. She had been sexually abused by her half brothers from the age of six until late adolescence, she had lost her mother at the age of 13, her beloved half sister at 15 and her father at 22. It is no wonder that the world did not feel quite safe, that she was often terrified, that she internalised what was done to her by imagining herself a terrible person and that she had great difficulty trusting that anyone could be kind, reliable or properly on her side. At the same time, her challenges gave her an enormous appetite for beauty, for gentleness, for friendship, for literature and for compassion and sympathy. She held on extra tightly to what felt ‘good’ outside to make up for all that was frightened and hurt inside.

It is this faith that Hitler, a stranger living far away in another land, destroyed for Virginia Woolf. His aggression, his hate-filled and untruthful speeches, his control over the minds of Germans wore away at Woolf’s trust in everything. He seemed to paint the world black and removed the hope that she had always already found in short supply. His cruelty echoed too much that had been cruel in her life.

The invasion of Poland and then France and all of Western Europe, the beginning of the Blitz and U-boat campaigns chiselled away at the foundations of her belief in reasoned and principled behaviour. The world had lost its way and Woolf could not prevent herself from following suit. She tried very hard to stop the fears, the voices, the anger and distress but despite the love of her husband, the safeguards gradually fell away. On March 28, 1941, following a particularly senseless and destructive German air raid on London, she filled her coat pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse near her home in Rodmell, Sussex. Her body was found three weeks later.

Before drowning, she left a letter to her husband: ‘I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness… I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer… Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness.’

It seems peculiar to think of Virginia Woolf as one of the victims of Nazism. After all, none of Hitler’s furious speeches targeted her, no Luftwaffe raid gunned for her and yet in a sense, the atmosphere of mayhem and unbounded violence generated by Hitler and his gang were to blame for unbalancing the fragile mind of possibly the greatest writer of the twentieth century, living in a quiet English village far from any bomb or concentration camp.

Woolf’s case stands as a warning – and a reminder of susceptibility. For those of us who are not wholly steady inside, whose minds have been placed under enormous stress by early losses and abuses, what happens in the political realm is not as distinct from us as it might be and may prove especially charged and especially dangerous. The hateful voices and motives we see faraway can’t help but evoke those we have known too well from our vicinity and that we have fought for many years to keep at bay. We may have a special need, more than we realised, for the world to show evidence of solidity and goodness to counterbalance the violations of the past.

If we find ourselves ‘abnormally’ affected, if the shouting and the hate and the betrayals and the viciousness cut deep into our minds, we need to take particular care. We may need to fight with extra courage, and assiduously enlist the love of all who care about us, to remain on the side of hope; to ensure that all that is unkind outside of us is never allowed to achieve a victory over the wisdom and goodness that endure within us.