The Flight of the Mind

Virginia Woolf's Art and Manic-Depressive Illness

Thomas C. Caramagno

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9780520072800
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520935129
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.


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 Wool

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 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 Line
• 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” Readirig without Resolution in The Voyage 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-Telations of Self-Maniement
• 10 “It is finished” Ambivalence Resolved, Self Restored in To the Lighthouse
• 11 “I do not know altogether who I am” The Plurality of Intrasubjective Life in The Waves
• Epilogue: Science and Subjectivity
• Afterword
• Appendix: Virginia Woolf’s Mood Swing Chart (1895-1941)
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index