For one person's highly articulate account of her own psychotic manic experience, see Kay Redfield Jamison's book AN UNQUIET MIND: A MEMOIR OF MOODS AND MADNESS (1995).
For informed discussions of non-psychotic forms of elevated manic tendencies, see John D. Gartner's book THE HYPOMANIC EDGE: THE LINK BETWEEN (A LITTLE) CRAZINESS AND (A LOT OF) SUCCESS IN AMERICA (2005) and Peter C. Whybrow's book AMERICAN MANIA: WHEN MORE IS NOT ENOUGH (2005).
VIRGINIA WOOLF'S MISANDRY
Virginia Woolf published two famous feminist manifestoes: A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN (1929) and THREE GUINEAS (1938). In them, she also criticizes the pompous men at the proverbial "top" of British culture for their manifest misogyny, which she counters with her own pronounced misandry.
For a more irenic account of male agonistic tendencies, see Ong's book FIGHTING FOR LIFE: CONTEST, SEXUALITY, AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1981), the published version of his 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University.
Virginia Woolf's pronounced misandry grows out of her decidedly ambivalent view of her father -- and her unresolved mourning of his loss.
In her admirably circumstantial biography VIRGINIA WOOLF (1999), Hermione Lee, who is now the president of Wolfson College at Oxford University, discusses Virginia Woolf's "complicated, lifelong rage against her father" (page 146). One element of her rage, Lee says, "was the experience of helplessness in the face of an egotistical exploitation of power" by her father (page 146).
No doubt many girls and boys can remember "the experience of helpless in the face of an egotistical exploitation of power" by their fathers and/or mothers.
According to Lee, "[t]he other [element of Virginia Woolf's rage against her father] was a more practical resentment of the irrational meanness which not only made him [her father] a tyrant of housekeeping books but prevented him from paying for her education as he paid for his sons' education" (page 146).
Lee says, "Arguably -- as she sometimes argued herself -- he gave her a better education from his study than she would have had at school or college. And certainly she would not have been the writer she was, with the subjects she chose, if she had a formal education. But, with all these provisos, the fact remains that she was uneducated because he did not want to spend the money on her. She would come to resent bitterly the condition of her mind in her late teens" (page 146).
I don't think it is entirely fair for Lee to say that Virginia Woolf was "uneducated." As an autodidact, she was widely read. In addition, she was tutored in Greek and Latin by qualified teachers. But perhaps she was under-educated in certain ways. For example, she evidently knew little about evolutionary theory.
But I want to focus here on Virginia Woolf's "complicated, lifelong rage against her father," because I will argue below that her decision to commit suicide as the result of a deep psychological crisis involving her memories of her father and her resentment of him.
Now, as Lee notes, Virginia Woolf claimed that she experienced profound therapeutic relief regarding her long deceased mother as a result of the process of writing her deeply evocative novel TO THE LIGHTHOUSE (see Lee, pages 475-476). Her mother died in 1895, when Virginia was 13. Following her mother's death, Virginia had her first mental breakdown.
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