The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf's Art and Manic-Depressive Illness

by Thomas C. Caramagno

Overview

In this major new book on Virginia Woolf, Caramagno contends psychobiography has much to gain from a closer engagement with science. Literary studies of Woolf's life have been written almost exclusively from a psychoanalytic perspective. They portray Woolf as a victim of the Freudian "family romance," reducing her art to a neurotic evasion of a traumatic childhood.

But current knowledge about manic-depressive illness—its genetic transmission, its biochemistry, and its effect on brain function—reveals a new relationship between Woolf's art and her illness. Caramagno demonstrates how Woolf used her illness intelligently and creatively in her theories of fiction, of mental functioning, and of self structure. Her novels dramatize her struggle to imagine and master psychic fragmentation. They helped her restore form and value to her own sense of self and lead her readers to an enriched appreciation of the complexity of human consciousness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520935129
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	11/15/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	362
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Thomas C. Caramagno teaches in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska. Kay Redfield Jamison is Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Table of Contents

List of Figures and Illustrations
Introduction

1. "I Owned to Great Egotism":
   The Neurotic Model in Woolf Criticism
2. "Never Was Anyone So Tossed Up & Down by the Body As I Am":
   The Symptoms of Manic-Depressive Illness
3. "But What Is the Meaning of 'Explained' It?"
   Countertransference and Modernism
4. "In Casting Accounts, Never Forget to Begin with the State of the Body":
   Genetics and the Stephen Family Linc
5. "How Completely He Satisfied Her Is Proved by the Collapse":
   Emblematic Events in Family History
6. "How Immense Must Be the Force of Life":
   The Art of Autobiography and Woolf's Bipolar Theory of Being
7. "A Novel Devoted to Influenza":
   Reading without Resolution in The Voyqge Out
8. "Does Anybody Know Mr. Flanders?"
   Bipolar Cognition and Syncretistic Vision in Jacob's Room 
9. "The Sane & the Insane, Side by Side":
   The Object-Relations of Self Management in Mrs. Dallollway 
10. "It Is Finished":
    Ambivalence Resolved, Self Restored in To the Liqhthouse 
11. "I Do Not Know Altogether Who I Am":
    The Plurality of lntrasubjective Life in The Waves 
    
Epilogue: Science and Subjectivity 
Afterword, by Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison 
Appendix: Virginia Woolf's Mood Swing Chart (1895-1941) 
Notes 
Works Cited 
Index