![]() ![]() ![]() It allows us to see that her fiction was not necessarily produced by hypothetical unconscious conflicts, her supposed flight from sex, or her morbid preoccupation with death-all the favorite Freudian themes which, not coincidentally, sustain sexist assumptions about the nature of the creative woman. Biology lifts from Woolf's shoulders the derogatory weight of responsibility for her illness. The biological realities of manic-depressive illness limit the critic's freedom to tie events in Woolf's life to symptoms that seem metaphorically similar. The science/literature model I use silences, not Woolf's own voice, but the voices of those Freudians who pontificate upon matters that cross the line between brain and mind without first investigating where the line is drawn or what it might mean for their conclusions. ![]() Neuroscience at the least teaches literature to soften its focus on the infantile, the cowardly, and the regressive in its subjects. But when we unthinkingly blame the victim for his or her illness, we simplify our work by ignoring the mind/brain nexus from which everything most human about literature arises. As academics, we are in the business of proving our mastery over our material and ourselves perhaps that is why we are ungenerous toward those artists who show less control. We literary scholars can no longer afford to remain comfortably ignorant of the mechanisms of the brain or to pretend that, in any particular biographical case (and especially that one in which we have invested so much of our self-esteem and academic destiny), biology did not affect the mind. Freud was a great pioneer in the study of the human psyche, but he himself, given today's knowledge about the brain, would have moved on, incorporating his most enduring insights with ongoing research in neuroscience. In the rarefied atmosphere of academia, however, many psychoanalytically inclined literary critics cling to the outmoded, simplistic Freudian model of this disorder as a neurotic conflict that the patient is, either consciously or unconsciously, unwilling to resolve.īy integrating neuroscience, psychobiography, and literary theory, I challenge these critics' often disparaging evaluations of Woolf's life and art and argue against the arbitrary and subjective practice of reading all symptoms or texts as neurotic disguises supposedly obscuring a causative origin. In the real world of the clinic, the use of lithium, antidepressants, and antipsychotics has revolutionized psychiatric care for bipolar disorder and produced remissions in cases that thirty years ago would have been considered hopeless. In this interdisciplinary study of Virginia Woolf I reexamine her madness and her fiction in the light of recent discoveries about the biological basis of manic-depressive illness-findings allied with drug therapies that today help nearly one million American manic-depressives to live happier, more productive lives. ![]()
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