The line from the infamous biography of Virginia by her nephew, Quentin Belclass="underline" “All that summer she was mad.” A demonology. And yet Virginia’s journaled account of her last meeting with both the Eliots together, has also helped write the myth of Viv:
But oh — Vivienne! Was there ever such a torture since life began! — to bear her on one’s shoulders, biting, wriggling, raving, scratching, unwholesome, powdered, insane, yet sane to the point of insanity, reading his letters, thrusting herself on us, coming in wavering, trembling — Does your dog do that to frighten me? Have you visitors? Yes we have moved again. Tell me, Mrs. Woolf, why do we move so often? Is it accident?…
She powerfully, even magnificently, concludes: “This bag of ferrets is what Tom wears round his neck.”
I think of Viv as the mad double Virginia both identifies with and wants to dissassociate herself from. The spectre of the shuddering, chattering woman haunting her. She is her Bertha Mason. In Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic they read the figure of the violent double in Victorian texts as an unconscious incarnation of the female author’s own rage and alienation, her “desire to escape male houses and male texts.”
Virginia’s revulsion towards Vivien(ne) is apparent in her journals. She is obviously an object of fascination, if not obsession for her, for how many inches she devotes to her. At times Virginia shows empathy, depicting Tom as cruel in his monk-like objectivity. That famous scene of Tom irritably telling Viv to put brandy in her coffee while out to tea with the Woolfs, while Viv refuses. This is towards the end, when everything had completely imploded. “One does not like to take medicine before one’s friends,” said Virginia, kindly. And yet she participated gleefully and fully in Viv’s eventual exclusion and ostracism from the Bloomsbury pack.
In his screenplay for the film Tom and Viv, based on his play, Michael Hastings must invent a friend for Vivien(ne), a nurse she takes tea with, one who doesn’t prefer Tom, as all of her friends did.
All these women isolated from each other. There are exceptions, the friendship of Emily Holmes Coleman and Djuna Barnes, Emily both the confidante and de facto agent to Djuna for Nightwood, she is the one who got Tom to read it. The competitive yet intense intimacy between Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. Virginia so relieved to speak of writing with another woman. To speak of solitude. The Dinner Party of modern literary women, if it was anything like Bloomsbury, would be pretty vicious. Most of the wives didn’t speak to each other. No friendship between Zelda and Ernest’s wife Hadley — they could have used it.
In those early months in Akron, I structured my solitude through John’s voice coming at me through the phone — sometimes clipped and disengaged. But then one day I decided to start a blog I called Frances Farmer Is My Sister, where I began to communicate with other voices. A small community of mostly women, all writers, each to their own cages, in different corners of the world. In private email exchanges and in the public comments on our blogs, we began to speak of solitude, like Katherine and Virginia. To speak of writing. To confess and hear confessions of the pauses and gaps and scratches that were not writing, but still part of this cycle. I even began correspondences with a few where we spoke about our marriages and partnerships, breaking the silence with each other.
I began to realize the need for another kind of invisible community. Where mostly we suffer alone, in anonymity. This feeling of being a ghost in the physical world that can come from being a wife, a writer, an adjunct. I wonder, despite the tyranny and chaos of her personal life, if Viv had had some sort of community then maybe she wouldn’t have lost herself.
She talked to the greats, while I talked to the wives and mistresses.
I hear their voices, calling to me.
Rhoda in The Waves is Virginia’s attempt to write a mad-woman. The alienated woman, distanced from her body. She experiences the torment of the alienated self, she is terrified, anxious, preferring absolute solitude. “But here I am nobody. I have no face. This great company, all dressed in brown serge, has robbed me of my identity. We are all callous, unfriended.”
The male characters in The Waves are egos set forth into the midst — they all want to be authors. They create themselves and each other through language. Louis the Australian poet, partially based on T.S. Eliot. The women do not have these ambitions. (Susan wants to be a farmer’s wife, Jinny a socialite, Rhoda a wallflower.) Virginia apparently considered making Rhoda a fiction writer, but decided against it. Perhaps again like with Septimus Smith a desire not to draw too close to the mirror. Even more naked.
But Rhoda would surely have been a failed fiction writer. More like a Vivien(ne).
Perhaps Vivien(ne) can be read as a Shakespeare’s Sister of the modern era, the fictional sister of the great playwright whose fate Virginia is so concerned about in A Room of One’s Own. Embodying the drama of the woman who wants to write, can’t write, must write. Who ultimately has her pens taken away from her.
There are so few photographs of Viv. There is that photo of her in a dance costume playing croquet, the scarf around her head gypsy like, her little white heels. She seems almost lively. She is alive. That is the beginning. When she was a pretty, charming girl who hasn’t come to consciousness, who wanted to drag some life into the weakened Tom, a challenge. The couple would go quickstepping, in the beginning. Flirting with the officers, like Zelda. The slim androgyne. Life a whirl of tea parties and balls and dinner parties. Like Jinny, all body.
How she must have amused Tom in those early days, trying to get him outside of himself. She saw herself as the coquettish heroine Daisy Miller. And like in the Henry James novella his snobby Boston relatives disapproved.
James’ Daisy Miller is often praised as a psychological portrait of a young American girl. The stuffy, small-minded Winterbourne analyzes her with surgical precision, trying to decipher her. But she is depicted as a chatty, flirty, cipher. A silly enigma. Like how Fitzgerald later wrote her namesake in Gatsby.
Later on, when she became a Rhoda, Vivien(ne) took on the name of Daisy Miller as a pseudonym. She who had become so accustomed to false identities. The movement of taking on the name of a woman in fiction. These women who perceived themselves as heroines in novels. She saw in James’ portrait a mirror, the misunderstood girl ostracized into an early death.
The Bloomsbury Group saw Eliot’s wife as an intellectual lightweight. Ottoline Morrell wrote in her journal that Viv was a “frivolous, silly little woman.” The gifts of dancing lessons and silk drawers from Bertrand Russell (Bertie), who also subsidized holidays at the seaside. She wanted, like Zelda, to be a ballet dancer “in order not to become merely ‘T.S. Eliot’s wife.’” She didn’t throw herself into it as ardently as Zelda, however. Girls of that time were expected to be “accomplished” (French, watercolors, piano) but not artists. (Girl? She was in her early 30s when she married Tom. Yet she was still girlish.)