A Look at Virginia Woolf:

Richard E. Cytowic’s essay, “Many Minds, One Story” is about how Virginia Woolf’s mental illness affected her life. He points out how her novels are unbalanced using multiple points of view. Also he discusses how different the left and right hemispheres of the brain react to situations. This information he uses to explain how Woolf reacted to her bi-polar affective disorder. In addition he explains how her life influenced her novels.

Cytowic writes about the “opposition” (1) Woolf uses to begin the Lighthouse. He expands on this thesis of opposition by addressing the evidence he finds in both her writing and her life. First, he points out that all of her work has opposition in them. That is he notes, “tensions between public and private; alienation versus belonging; nature versus man-made artifice; inner time versus the imposed timekeeping of Big Ben’s hours” (1). He also suggests that there is uncertainty used in her writings. He discusses how her bi polar caused mood swings from one extreme to the other.

His style of writing flows well. He expresses his impressions and follows it up with his evidence. His intended audience are fans of Woolf and people who struggle with bi polar affective disorder. Also family and friends of people with bi polar affective disorder can be considered part of his intended audience. My own involvement is reflected by my own personal style of writing. I also like to state my impressions and back it up with my research. My brother has bi polar affective disorder so I would be part of his intended audience because it helps shed light on the similarities and differences between Woolf and my brother.

Cytowic reflects on how Virginia Woolf’s mood swings up to mania influenced how much she wrote. When she would get into mania moods she would write nonstop as if possessed by some unknown force. When she was depressed she would lay in bed and not write at all. Her mania mood also affected her social life. He writes about how she struggled with finding stability for herself and her novels’ characters. She wrote in her autobiography of the feeling that some other consciousness using her hands to write her novels. This was the case when she wrote Lighthouse. She worked through to address the problems it created stating “some kind of whole made of shimmering fragments” (1).

The first time I had heard of Virginia Woolf was this semester. Finding this article I was surprised to learn about her mental condition. For Woolf her writing was therapy which helped her work out issues in her life. She wrote that after finishing the Lighthouse that she was no longer obsessed with her mother and she no longer heard her mother’s voice or saw her.

It was interesting to read about how Cytowic includes the information about how the study on the differences to the left and right hemispheres of the brain. He writes about how Roger Sperry and Robert Myers did the first brain research to prove that the two halves have different ways of processing information. For Woolf her “divided consciousness accounts for the detached feeling of not authoring the very craft that others ascribe uniquely to them”. (1) It is a heartbreaking that the illness that motivated her

writing was what caused her to decided to commit suicide. (2)

Reference Lis http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/many_minds_one_story/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf


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