But Virginia Woolf never claimed to have also received comparable profound therapeutic relief regarding her long deceased father, Leslie Stephen, the Victorian author and editor of the DICTIONARY OF NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY. (He died in 1904, the year in which Virginia turned 22.)
As a result, it strikes me that in the process of writing BETWEEN THE ACTS (1941) and the two essays "Anon" and "The Reader" Virginia Woolf precipitated the psychological crisis that led her to commit suicide. In that novel and those two essays, she was plumbing the depths of her personal unconscious and the collective unconscious in her psyche, just as she had years earlier in writing TO THE LIGHTHOUSE (1927).
As a precocious teenager, Virginia Stephen read widely in her father's personal library. Even though her father arranged for her to be tutored in Greek and Latin by qualified teachers, she was outraged that he did not spend the money on her formal education that he spent on her older brothers' formal education, as mentioned above.
But she also loved her father deeply. According to Lee, "Her father was the love of her life" (page 147). If Lee is right about that, then Virginia Woolf had major ambivalence about her father, which would undoubtedly impede the possible successful resolution of her unresolved mourning of his loss -- unless and until she somehow resolved certain aspects of her ambivalence about him.
Symbolically, Virginia Woolf's father embodied and represented the entire literary world that she discusses in the essays "Anon" and "The Reader."
Symbolically, Virginia Woolf herself also embodied and represented the entire literary world that she discusses in those two essays.
In theory, Virginia Woolf might have experienced profound therapeutic relief regarding her long deceased father comparable to the profound therapeutic relief she had earlier received as a result of the process of writing her novel TO THE LIGHTHOUSE (1927). But her own personal and professional identity as a public "somebody" was deeply enmeshed with her strongly ambivalent memory of her father as a public "somebody."
Evidently, her memory of her mother had not involved the kind of strong ambivalence that her memory of her father involved.
In theory, had Virginia Woolf been able to withstand and somehow successfully negotiate the strong psychological crisis that she was undergoing, she would not have decided to commit suicide.
But what would it have taken for her to have withstood and successfully negotiated that psychological crisis that she was undergoing?
Symbolically, not only would she have to have deconstructed and torn apart her father and the world of mostly male "somebodies" as Osiris is torn apart and the pieces of his body are scattered around, but also she would then have to gathered up the scattered parts of her father's dead body of work and reconstructed her memory of him and his work and his life-world of mostly male "somebodies" -- as Isis reconstructs Osiris, except for one missing symbolic part. Actually, Virginia Woolf had begun the task of reconstructing, or at least moving toward reconstructing, her sense of the past in her essays "Anon" and "The Reader."
Figuratively speaking, the spirit of Isis in Virginia Woolf's psyche did not enable her to reconstruct Osiris fully -- involving her memory of her father and the mostly male world of "somebodies," and her own life-world as a public "somebody."
In short, Virginia Woolf's misandry expresses her unresolved mourning of her father.
However, after World War II, both Ong and McLuhan were able to discuss certain cultural shifts that Virginia Woolf discusses more briefly in her essays "Anon" and "The Reader." But their discussions of those cultural shifts did not precipitate the kind of strong psychological crisis in them that Virginia Woolf was undergoing around 1940 and early 1941, which led her to decide to commit suicide.
Figuratively speaking, the spirit of Isis in the psyches of Ong and McLuhan enabled them to reconstruct Osiris, except of course for the missing symbolic part -- and thereby advance the project of reconstruction that Virginia Woolf began in her essays "Anon" and "The Reader."
In conclusion, in her essays "Anon" and "The Reader" Virginia Woolf articulated a perceptive critique of print culture 1.0 more than a full decade before Ong and McLuhan articulated their critiques of print culture 1.0.
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