Streaming Consciousness: What I learned from reading Virginia Woolf during COVID-19
By Jonathan Lowndes
During COVID-19, many people are searching for meaning in literature set during times of war, disease, and dystopia. We hear about skyrocketing sales of Camus and are reminded of the great impact of the plague on Shakespeare’s work. But ReD’s Jonny Lowndes has been wading into classic texts that tell us something about the impact of isolation on the way we think. In this personal essay, he shares insights gleaned by reading by Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
The curtains in my in-laws’ room have a print that looks like bats in the evening. In the morning the white lines get brighter and it looks like Cs and Ds. On a good day they look like trophies; on a bad one they look like funeral urns. I spend as much time looking at them as I do at my laptop screen.
I’d imagine your workday, like mine, flows through your laptop. Without a commute, a shared lunch, and wasting time with colleagues, the day’s rhythm is driven and punctuated by little red dots and popups: new emails, a videocon, a task list built inexpertly online because there’s no place on a card table for a calendar. Looking at anything outside the 8x13 of the laptop screen feels irresponsible and wasteful. I do it anyway: my eyes can’t rest on one thing for long. It is ruining my self-esteem.
Worse, without confirmation that everyone else is doing what I’m doing, I imagine everyone else is perfectly productive. The emails I get seem disturbingly thoughtful, clearly the result of multiple drafts. Nobody else is wearing sweatpants on videocons. Other people take breaks, get some fresh air, and return even more productive; I wander off and have to saddle up again a dozen times a day.
My response is a series of ever-changing and repeated pacts with myself, to think about X for Y minutes and, when I fail, to think about Z for X minutes and then come back to X when I’m fresh, which is never. I’m constantly failing, and constantly terrified I’ll be found out.
I’m going to be writing a number of pieces about what literature can teach us about life in a pandemic in 2020. And since I’m stuck at my in-laws’ place and sitting on three cushions on a bathroom stool, I wanted to start by rereading A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf. It might cheer me up to read about someone with real problems.
Woolf wrote the essay for female Oxford undergrads in 1928, and the thesis is damningly simple: “a woman must have money and a room of one’s own if she is to write fiction.” She invents a sister for Shakespeare to show how impossible it was for a woman to have the time, rest, and resources to write, let alone their exclusion from education, academia, and the literary community. I responded most not to what she says, but how.
Lesson 1: We do a lot of thinking outside our heads
The essay starts with the kind of pre-emptive strike I’d love to try out on the editor of these pieces:
When you asked me to speak about women and fiction I sat down on the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words meant.
I should never be able to fulfil what is, I understand, the first duty of a lecturer—to hand you after an hour’s discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece for ever. All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved […]
As Woolf proceeds to lay her thinking bare, the essay spends more time describing the banks of the river where she sits than making any direct points:
To the right and left bushes of some sort, golden and crimson, glowed with the colour, even it seemed burnt with the heat, of fire. On the further bank the willows wept in perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders. The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if he had never been. There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought.
Thought—to call it by a prouder name than it deserved—had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it, until—you know the little tug—the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out?
Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating. I will not trouble you with that thought now, though if you look carefully you may find it for yourselves in the course of what I am going to say.
It’s not easy to pinpoint the moment when Woolf stops describing the physical world, and starts describing her own thoughts as if they are part of the physical world. The language sounds the same, it’s just as concrete, and she’s so committed to the ‘thought-fish’ metaphor that I didn’t doubt for a second that that’s how we think. She doesn’t even tell us *what* she is thinking - it doesn’t matter - the important thing is the process of thinking, and how it’s inextricable from her perceptions of the world.
Woolf refuses to hand over her thesis without also describing all the sensory elements of her thought. This stubbornness becomes as powerful as the thesis itself to the essay, because what she can perceive is determined by men: she is moved on from the riverbank by a sexist beadle, she’s denied entry to the library without a male companion, and she details the food at a lunch party because she’s excluded from conversation. If humans thought only in our heads, women could think anywhere. We all could. But we don’t — we think by perceiving as much as by braining it out, and where we are (and who’s in charge of it) matters.
All the things my curtains become (bats, letters, trophies, and urns), all the half-captured perceptions and lazy whimsy, are thinking, teaches Woolf. As we try to stay in our laptops, forcing our brains to focus, we’re fighting against a truth that phenomenologists have outlined, but that writers like Woolf make it impossible to ignore.
Lesson 2: If we’re forced into our heads, the result can be catastrophic
Even after reading A Room of One’s Own, I still don’t like realizing with a start that I’ve been staring at the curtains. It reminds me of The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s terrifying ghost story of a living death written in 1892. The narrator is suffering from what we might now diagnose as post-natal depression, and is mostly confined to an upstairs nursery with moldy yellow wallpaper. Early in the story the narrator starts by describing something I imagine we’ve all experienced:
I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression they have! I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy-store.
I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy-store. I remember what a kindly wink the knobs of our big old bureau used to have, and there was one chair that always seemed like a strong friend.
I used to feel that if any of the other things looked too fierce I could always hop into that chair and be safe.
Especially when sick or exhausted, I see expression in inanimate things often: I still dream of the geese on my grandparent’s walls, and there’s a marble slab in our office that looks like a lion Santa Claus.
Finding expression in inanimate things has a clinical name—apophenia—and worryingly it can be an indicator of the prodromal phase of schizophrenia. Part of being schizophrenic is an overabundance of interpretation, so that the world outside our heads becomes hard to separate from the imaginative response to it. The Yellow Wallpaper becomes an object lesson in this kind of mechanism. The narrator sees a woman’s face in the wallpaper; the woman in the wallpaper starts appearing everywhere; the narrator starts to believe she is trapped in the wallpaper herself; she rips out the wallpaper to free herself - but ends the story creeping round the room, never letting go of the walls.
She’s the victim of a domineering and patriarchal husband, John, who seems to want to protect her from any external stimuli:
When I get really well John says we will ask Cousin Henry and Julia down for a long visit; but he says he would as soon put fire-works in my pillow-case as to let me have those stimulating people about now.
Scholars often include The Yellow Wallpaper in compendia of Gothic literature, because it treats similar paranoia, anxiety, and delirium to the likes of Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart; but I find it much more disturbing than most Gothic fiction. Poe’s narrators go insane because they’re driven mad — by guilt, or some semi-supernatural Other, or lust for some external stimulus like gold. Gilman’s story is about what happens when you take all stimulus away, except a child’s wallpaper: you can drive yourself mad, and all it takes is a quarantine, a system that strips you of all agency, and nothing to look at. Reading this on your laptop, or on your phone between calls? Sound familiar?
Lesson 3: Going for a walk, or talking to a child, isn’t rejecting thought; it's essential to it
The saddest bit to me in The Yellow Wallpaper is this one:
I don’t want to go outside. I won’t, even if Jennie asks me to. For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow.
I’m in Delaware, a minute’s walk from a pond with herons, eagles, and a water snake. At the weekend I watched with my five-year-old son as the snake stretched out dead straight in the sun, coiled up to snap its skin, wriggled out of it, and swam lazily and shining away.
I haven’t been to the pond once on a weekday, because if I go, my son will come, and it’ll be on his terms: I can’t breathe in twice and walk back. More than that feels like a waste of time. Nature won’t help me write more thoughtful emails, more thinking will; Nature won’t help me understand people for clients, more reading and interviewing will; Nature won’t put bread on the table, more hours will. I know, abstractly, that fresh air and exercise are good for my mental health; concretely, I want to just get the work done, and ideally do good enough work that the paranoia will subside for a day. The green that matters has Presidents on it. I don’t go outside, I don’t parent, and when I do it’s tinged with guilt.
It feels more responsible to try and access the sublime through my computer: I just read the Wikipedia page for water snakes, and for some reason I’m really into pictures of the Gobi Desert. If I’m going to give my mind a break through Nature, I want it to be focused, managed, and short.
But reading more Woolf revealed what a mistake I’ve made in feeling this way. Pictures of nature aren’t nature; you can’t manage or predict what it will actually throw at you; and children in particular have a direct line to what Nature is throwing at you that adults can benefit from. Here are the first twelve lines of Woolf’s The Waves:
'I see a ring,' said Bernard, 'hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.’
'I see a slab of pale yellow,' said Susan, 'spreading away until it meets a purple stripe.’
'I hear a sound,' said Rhoda, 'cheep, chirp; cheep chirp; going up and down.’
'I see a globe,' said Neville, 'hanging down in a drop against the enormous flanks of some hill.’
'I see a crimson tassel,' said Jinny, 'twisted with gold threads.’
'I hear something stamping,' said Louis. 'A great beast's foot is chained. It stamps, and stamps, and stamps.’
'Look at the spider's web on the corner of the balcony,' said Bernard. 'It has beads of water on it, drops of white light….’
'…A caterpillar is curled in a green ring,' said Susan, 'notched with blunt feet.’
'The grey-shelled snail draws across the path and flattens the blades behind him,' said Rhoda.
'And burning lights from the window-panes flash in and out on the grasses,' said Louis.
The speakers are all children at an English boarding school. These are some goddam precocious kids, but once I’d gotten over that, my second impression was, “Oh, this is like in A Room of One’s Own — this is what thinking feels like.” The third was, “This is so accurately child’s-eyish; this is how I remember looking at things as a kid; these kids remind me of the look on my son’s face when he saw the snake shedding, and asked, ‘Does the snake ever go back into its skin?’” The fourth was, “The eyes on that snake were amazing: They looked like they were looking at everything at once, like a pigeon’s do, but like they were reaching out at everything at once, where a pigeon is taking in everything at once.” The sixth was “I think I’m a pigeon, more than a snake;” the seventh was, “I think the feeling of things happening to us right now is more interesting than the things we’re trying to achieve;” the eighth was the idea for this piece on literature and the pandemic, and the pieces to come.
I now bring my kid to the pond daily. Each time, something in the pond has bled into my thinking about work; most of the time, my kid has pointed it out; and I’m more consistently up on my emails. I still worry that you’re more focused than I am, but the pain of anxiety has been replaced by sunburn.
Texts I read:
You might want to:
Read Sun and Moon by Katherine Mansfield: it’s a great bit of child’s-eye description of pompous adult behavior
Listen to the cover of Yellow by Earl Okin: it’s all yellow
Read A Natural History of the Senses, by Diane Ackerman: much more, and much more beautiful, about the senses.
[Banner image by Edrece Stansberry, via Unsplash]