The Hours

The character Virginia exemplifies a theme of uniquely pained creativity, an idea borne out by scientific research. In 1993, Kay Redfield Jamison—Johns Hopkins clinical psychologist who both specializes in bipolar disorder (formerly known as “manic depression”) and has the condition herself—produced a formidable text reviewing the substantial scientific and biographical evidence showing a connection between mood disorders and creativity:

The fiery aspects of thought and feeling that initially compel the artistic voyage—fierce energy, high mood, and quick intelligence; a sense of the visionary and the grand; a restless and feverish temperament—commonly carry with them the capacity for vastly darker moods, grimmer energies, and, occasionally, bouts of ‘madness.’ […] Poetic or artistic genius, when infused with these fitful and inconstant moods, can become a powerful crucible for imagination and experience. […] In short, [these elements] form the common view of the artistic temperament, and, as we shall see, they also form the basis of the manic-depressive temperament (Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, The Free Press, 1993).

Jamison also emphasizes that this assertion is justifiably controversial, and she cautions that casual psychiatric labeling of creativity risks “trivializ[ing] a very serious, often deadly illness.” Her study is therefore exacting, and it is not due to romanticizing speculation that she places Woolf among her sizable catalog of historical artists with likely mood disorders. Even so, Woolf’s experience persists in mystery; while many scholars now believe Woolf’s symptoms were consistent with bipolar disorder, various illnesses might have produced Woolf’s symptoms, and no accurate diagnosis was made in her lifetime. Cunningham’s novel not only maintains this ambiguity but renders, in addition, Woolf’s experiences of migraine, the neurological disturbances of which can sometimes vaguely mimic aspects of a mood disorder and even involve simple hallucinations.

Woolf herself used the word “mad” when describing her agonized episodes, and the term—though it has fallen into disfavor for its unscientific imprecision and potentially stigmatizing effect—accords with a loose philosophical concept of creativity and insight dating at least to Plato’s “mania” or “divine madness.” This idealistic mythology, in addition to the real historical link between creativity and psychic turbulence, plays into the stereotype of “tortured genius” (note that genius is a Romantic concept, not a scientific one). Cunningham takes this dynamic—the relationship between pain and creativity—and makes it a theme, taking cues from Woolf’s life in his portrayals of both Richard and Virginia. Both characters are writers who experience headaches and auditory hallucinations that Cunningham describes with remarkably similar imagery, suggesting a parallel between the two characters.

For Virginia and Richard, their illnesses are not only routinely debilitating but often profoundly painful. Still, as for other historical artists, Virginia’s migraines—and likely another neurological or psychiatric condition—are at once the cause of her suffering and the source of her creative vision. That Richard’s illness is described so similarly suggests his pain plays a similar role for him. Virginia’s migraine is a classical migraine, meaning that it involves an aura, which she vividly describes as “a scintillating silver-white mass floating over the cobblestones, randomly spiked, fluid but whole, like a jellyfish” (82). Richard describes one of the voices he hears as “a black, electrified jellyfish” (70). The jellyfish symbolizes the relationship between his creativity and his pain: As 95% water, jellyfish are almost one with their surroundings, a connection akin to the attunement and immersion in the world necessary to literary genius. As the images of the jellyfish as “spiked” and “electrified” connote, channeling this connection is dangerous. Virginia’s headaches and their accompanying hallucinatory voices renew her creative vision, allowing her to write with confidence, and yet they leave her battered. In her and Richard’s worlds, suffering and tragedy are the price of genius.

There is, historically, philosophical interest in the idea of immense pain that paradoxically both debilitates and inspires. French philosopher Simone Weil popularized the concept of affliction—a distinctly profound, spiritually immobilizing anguish that Weil nevertheless connects to an ultimately heightened spiritual vision (Weil, like Woolf, experienced torturous chronic migraines). This idea finds some resonance with Jamison’s observations and certainly with the fact that Richard and Virginia, who have both suffered greatly, plumb the depths of their suffering to craft powerful works. In addition to physical illness, this suffering includes trauma. Clarissa notes Richard’s absent mother haunts Richard’s work: His poetry and fiction are mechanisms to both cope with and process the childhood trauma of his mother’s suicide attempt and abandonment. Likewise, Virginia writes Mrs. Dalloway hoping to convey that women, who are expected to perform domestic roles in her world, suffer just as much as men. Virginia’s incompatibility with this role causes a pain she thinks wouldn’t be taken seriously if she directly and literally expressed it. By conveying this suffering through literary work, Virginia hopes to illuminate women’s suffering, showing that they cannot be expected to dutifully play the roles of both audience and caretaker for men’s suffering.

Finally, Cunningham charts a tragic landscape for these characters by drawing a connection between genius and suicide. In Western literature, a common trait of tragic heroes is that their unique excellence—some greatness of soul—is irrevocably bound up to their suffering and even their demise. Richard’s belief in his own genius and his pursuit of a literary life ultimately leaves him unfulfilled, and he is still negatively affected from his childhood trauma. While he hoped to resolve this trauma through his work, he ended up aggrandizing his life to extraordinary proportions, preventing him from mourning his childhood loss and from acknowledging the ordinariness of his life. As Woolf attempted in her own life, and as her character Septimus does in Mrs. Dalloway, Richard jumps out of a window to his death. Both Richard’s and Virginia’s character arcs portray the path of literary genius as ill-fated, a trajectory foreshadowed by Virginia’s death in the Prologue and by the subsequent similarities between her life and Richard’s. However, though his sense of failure contributes to Richard’s suicide, his main motivation is to escape the pain of his illness. Similarly, Virginia drowns herself to escape her illness, which by 1941 she thinks is incurable. In the chapters following Virginia in 1923, she develops a sense of fatalism about her condition. She is stuck in a catch 22: She cannot be happy unless she pursues a life of literature, and yet pursuing that life provokes her affliction, which undermines that very happiness. She finally decides that she would rather write, thinking it’s “[b]etter to die raving mad in London than evaporate in Richmond” (84). Because it is immediately revealed in the Prologue, Virginia’s suicide is a fait accompli that creates a dramatic irony in later chapters: The reader already knows Virginia will die by suicide as she contemplates her illness 1923. The parallels between her life and Richard’s, and the intertextual echoes in the scene of his suicide—where he quotes from Woolf’s suicide note—make his suicide feel like a fait accompli as well. For both literary geniuses, suicide seems an unavoidable fate, and it results from the very suffering that informed their creativity.