Mania
The manic phase is characterized by an elevated and expansive mood (patients describe it as "going high"), but, because various biologic components (endocrine glands, electrolyte metabolism, peptidergic hormones to "fine-tune" brain activities, and electrical and chemical systems in brain cells, among others) are involved, mania can be mild, moderate, or severe, with or without psychotic features (hallucinations and delusions, marked formal thought disorder, or grossly disorganized behavior).[19] Moreover, psychosis is not necessarily related to the depth of the mood. The manic mood may range from dreamy or infectious cheerfulness to ecstasy and exaltation. Or joy and love of mankind may change without warning to vitriolic hatred marked by verbal abuse.
Manics often evidence low tolerance for frustration coupled with explosive anger, "affective storms" that resemble temper tantrums or extreme touchiness, what Quentin Bell has called Virginia Woolf's ability to turn "purple with rage" and create "an atmosphere of thunderous and oppressive gloom."[20] As bipolars fall in and out of moods, their tempers fluctuate. Duncan Grant remembered that, although Virginia was sometimes "very shy" and quiet in company, there was also "the danger of sudden outbursts of scathing criticism," and Elizabeth Bowen described Woolf's flashes of temper as "fleetingly malicious, rather than outright cruel" or prolonged.[21]
The manic's irritability lies at the center of a critical debate in Woolf studies. Freudians typically read intent in Woolf's manic rage, as if it revealed the real feelings of the real Woolf, not the ill one. Susan M. Kenney, for instance, argues that "surely her violent aversion to Leonard Woolf during other attacks was a reaction against the silent reproach she felt in his actions," that is to say, his supposed moral disapproval of her having fallen ill.[22] But Leonard himself said he believed that there was "nothing moral" about her breakdowns (Letters 191) and that manic-depressive illness "really is a disease" that was "not really under [Virginia's] control."[23] Furthermore, modern medicine warns us that, since we cannot know whether statements made by a manic in the throes of an affective episode represent attitudes held by the individual when normal, we should amend Kenney's "surely" to read "perhaps" and look for more convincing corroborating evidence than Leonard's silence. Manic rage is usually unrelated to the patient's long-term feelings; it seems to be a component of the manic's potential for paranoia. In an apologetic letter to Ethel Smyth, Woolf specifically connects an outburst of temper to madness:
This no doubt seems to you wantonly exaggerated to excuse a fit of temper. But it is not. I see of course that it is morbid, that it is through this even to me inexplicable susceptibility to some impressions suddenly that I approach madness and that end of a drainpipe with a gibbering old man. (Letters 4: 298)
Not all manic outbursts end so peacefully. In rare cases, patients feel So fearful and persecuted that they attempt suicide to escape, thinking that their loved ones intend to murder them.[24] Both manic delusions—either that the world is full of magical people and things, or that it is full of demons and tyrants—result from the distortion produced when elevated mood and dysregulated brain chemistry mediate perceptions in uncharacteristic ways over which the individual has no control. When reality testing fails completely, in severe mania, hallucinations result.
Mild mania (hypomania), however, can be fairly pleasant, especially in social situations. Manics are "people seekers": they love attention. In return, they can be sociable, witty, and inventive, the life of the party, the "bubbly, and elastic individual who bounds into a room vigorously inquiring about everybody and everything," producing a torrent of ideas and words connected by complex webs of associations, rhymes, puns, and amusing irrelevancies.[25]
The manic's entertaining social behavior can escalate into the startling or absurd. Manic speech may become theatrical, elaborated by dramatic mannerisms and even singing.[26] Uninhibited impulsivity can lead to accidents. Her mishaps earned Virginia the family nickname of "The Goat," and Barbara Bagenal remembers that Virginia "had a strange, rather clumsy way of moving," but friends who saw her in other moods commented on her grace, elegance, and fluidity of movement.[27] Manics may also embarrass their companions by ignoring social protocol, behaving rashly, or dressing in colorful or strange clothes. Lyndall Gordon opines that Woolf acted "the cracked Englishwoman" by dressing in extremes: either in drab, dowdy outfits or in outrageous creations of her own, one of which made her look "like a young elephant," and Madge Garland remembers that "there was a presence about [Virginia] that made her instantly noticeable. But what also attracted my attention was that she appeared to be wearing an upturned wastepaper basket on her head," a basket that turned out to be a hat.[28] Even without egocentric clothing, Woolf attracted attention when she drifted through the streets "staring, entranced." Bystanders reacted predictably to her "unaffected strangeness": they "tended to laugh" at her or feel "uneasy."[29]
Many manic-depressives, Woolf included, feel humiliated by their involuntary effect on other people. Manics frequently become public spectacles because they are energized, unabashedly self-confident and exuberant, exhibiting a noisy hilarity and spouting high-flown ideas. Though mania seduces them into mistaking the ridiculous for the sublime, later, when they have shifted out of mania, they may remember their eccentric behavior with shame at its undiluted vanity. Over time, they come to fear the smile that mocks, the gaze that condemns, the friend who forgives with lingering suspicion, and they may decide to avoid intimacy, public display, even photographers, to spare themselves further embarrassment. But such resolutions usually last only until the next manic episode.
Ninety-nine percent feel the "pressure of speech." With or without an audience, they talk rapidly, tying together myriad ideas and leaping from topic to topic (known as a "loosening of associations").[30] Manic thought disorder strings ideas together, "extravagantly combined and elaborated," with many irrelevant intrusions that appear either inappropriately flippant or desperate.[31] As one patient remembered:
My thoughts were so fast that I couldn't remember the beginning of a sentence halfway through. Fragments of ideas, images, sentences raced around and around in my mind like the tigers in Little Black Sambo. Finally, like those tigers, they became meaningless melted pools. Nothing once familiar to me was familiar. I wanted desperately to slow down but could not. Nothing helped—not running around a parking lot for hours on end or swimming for miles.[32]
Manics generally feel unable to control their racing thoughts, as if they have been inspired by a divine Muse. Some do become highly productive, but others find that the combination of overstimulation and insomnia merely spins their wheels. In a letter to Ethel Smyth, Woolf explains that, though her brain is "teeming with books I want to write," none of these visions translates into action. Rather, she feels frightened:
Never trust a letter of mine not to exaggerate thats written after a night lying awake looking at a bottle of chloral [a common prescription for mania and insomnia at that time] and saying no, no, no, you shall not take it. Its odd why sleeplessness, even of a modified kind [,] has this power to frighten me. Its connected I think with those awful other times when I couldn't control myself. (Letters 6: 44)
In mania the imagination seems to go into overdrive, finding great significance in ordinary events. The individual experiences seemingly
profound but inexpressible insights (e.g., the meaning of life), delusions, or vivid hallucinations. Hyperalert, patients may misinterpret actions by doctors and nurses as evidence of a sinister plot against them. When family or experience contradicts these misreadings, manics may withdraw into their own world or engage in even more desperate attempts to "read" their environment, to discover the elusive "truth" that will explain all, imposing meaning and a sometimes highly idiosyncratic order upon a world spinning out of their control:
Our patients were labile and frequently angry. Their "world" was not stable and rosy but changing without reason and frustrating. . . . [The typical patient] frequently had insight into the fact that he was ill, often at the same time he was expressing delusional or grandiose ideas . . . . For the most part, the patients remembered being wound up and unable to stop, not feeling tired but aware that something was wrong, upsetting their families, and not being able to stop.[33]
Manics'often experience extremely vivid hallucinations, and even when they are not hallucinatory, their accelerated psychomotor activity and intensified sensory perceptions make their perceptions or visions seem profoundly meaningful: objects look significant.[34] John Custance, a British manic-depressive who, like Clifford Beers, achieved notoriety by writing a book about his illness, when manic had "a rather curious feeling behind the eyeballs, rather as though a vast electric motor were pulsing away there," with the result that electric lights looked "deeper, more intense" and were surrounded by a "bright starlike" effect which reminded him of the Aurora Borealis. The faces of hospital staff seemed "to glow with a sort of inner light." His senses of touch, smell, and taste heightened: "even common grass tastes excellent, while real delicacies like strawberries or raspberries give ecstatic sensations appropriate to a veritable food of the gods." Heightened perceptions inspired "animistic conceptions," in which objects literally became such entities as time, love, God, peace: "I cannot avoid seeing spirits in everything."[35] Colors were so intense that they seemed to signify real threats or blessings, messages from the devil or Christ, hints which Custance felt obliged to decipher as if he were explicating a literary text:
There was a time when I was terrified of green, because it was the signal to go, and the only place I thought I could be going to was Hell. However I eventually got out of Hell [when he recovered from
his depression] and at present green has no terrors for me. . . . [I]t stands for grass and growth.
. . . Red is the Devil's colour, and perhaps I am not quite safe from him yet. Red also means stop, and I don't in the least want to stop here for ever. However, with a certain amount of effort, concentration and prayer, I conquered the red with the help of the green and felt safe.
The next day the colours had suffered a kaleidoscopic change. Gone were the reds and the greens; there was nothing but blues, blacks and greys, with an occasional purple. The sky, which had been bright and clear, was overcast; it was raining. This new combination of colours constituted a new threat, with which I had to deal.[36]
Delusional beliefs occur in a wide range of clinical conditions (seventyfive, by one count). They are frequently seen in schizophrenia, affective disorders, substance abuse disorders, and organic psychoses, in all of which sensory experiences can be so puzzling that even impossible delusions serve an explanatory function. In a sense, delusions are necessarily unusual ways of coping with unusual circumstances.[37] Because perception is so greatly altered by mania, the patient's beliefs about his situation may become quite bizarre. When his often inappropriate or impossible, though to him reasonable, requests are not carried out, he may feel frustrated and angry, and withdraw even further into himself. As the mania becomes more severe, the world outside matters less and less, whereas attempts to explain it become increasingly important in themselves. The manic self feels dominant, creative, full of incipient meaning that is imposed willy-nilly upon perceptions of the world.[38] He may feel mystically "at one" with the universe, but in fact self has divorced the world.
Manics rarely speak of mood spontaneously or examine it critically—rather, they live out their moods.[39] Filled with great plans and designs, manics may appear supercilious and haughty, claiming to have profound visions of life's meaning which they plan to codify in some future work. One patient, a successful artist, was extremely productive during mild manias, but when his moods soared higher his work suffered from impaired reality testing:
He would think he had done something original only to discover later that his "inspiration" was ridiculous. His political and religious theories suffered from the same lack of critical perspective during his psychotic highs. He would conceive them in a flash of enthusiasm only to discover later that they were absurd.[40]
Heightened mood and a stimulated imagination give rise to delusional belief in the self's power and importance. Woolf herself noted that mania intensifies both confidence and creativity:
Curious how all ones fibres seem to expand & fill with air when anxiety is taken off; curious also to me the intensity of my own feelings: I think imagination, the picture making power, decks up feelings with all kinds of scenes; so that one goes on thinking, instead of localising the event. All very mysterious. (Diary 4: 176)
But she was wary of unrestrained elations and their doubtful products, as, in a dreamy, hypomanic mood, she considered how to write To the Lighthouse:
The thing is I vacillate between a single & intense character of father; & a far wider slower book—Bob T[revelyan]. telling me that my speed is terrific, & destructive. My summer's wanderings with the pen have I think shown me one or two new dodges for catching my flies. I have sat here, like an improviser with his hands rambling over the piano. The result is perfectly inconclusive, & almost illiterate. I want to learn greater quiet, & force. But if I set myself that task, don't I run the risk of falling into the flatness of N[ight]. & D[ay].? (Diary 3: 37)
Understandably, manics can become intrusive, irritating, or violent if balked in their pursuit of the marvelous. Euphoria can quickly change to irritability and even anger, especially if the mania is mixed or alternates with microdepressions. Beneath the surface elation may lie deep pools of black despair:
If one allows a manic patient to talk, one will note that he shows fleeting episodes of depression embedded within the mania ("microdepressions"). He may be talking in a grandiose and extravagant fashion and then suddenly for thirty seconds breaks down to give an account of something he feels guilty about. For instance, he may be talking vigorously and in the midst of his loquacity he may suddenly talk about the death of his father for which he has felt guilty for some time. His eyes will fill with tears but in 15 to 30 seconds he will be back talking in his expansive fashion.[41]
In one study, half of the manic patients displayed pervasive depression.[42] Such manics can be, as Woolf herself was, "very vulnerable and childishly sensitive to criticism," for the base of their inflated confidence is hollow.[43] Criticism strikes deep because the manic-depressive's worst fear is that at any moment he may permanently and unknowingly lose his judgment, his sanity.
Because manic delusions and hallucinations create and/or accompany ideas of sometimes cosmic proportions, they are frequently interpreted as religious experiences, especially by those who have been raised in a religion. The patient may believe that she has been chosen by God—why else would she suddenly feel so captivated? When euthymic (not ill), John Custance recognized that his religious delusions and visions were similar to the pseudo-revelations induced by nitrous oxide and other drugs, but when manic, he fervently believed that "depth beyond depth of truth" had been revealed to him, that the mystery of the universe had been "unveiled" and become "certain beyond the possibility of a doubt."[44] Such mystical experiences of universal communion can also be induced by mescaline, LSD, and other hallucinogenic substances that alter the biochemistry of the brain.[45]
Perhaps because abnormal brain chemistry is inherently unstable, religious delusions tend to be short-lived and variable. They seem to be used by patients as explanations for the way they feel: a mystical theory explains the elevated mood, and as moods change, explanations must change too. William Cowper (a favorite of Virginia Woolf's) explained his shifts between mania and depression in terms of Calvinist theology. When manic, he attributed his euphoria to God's saving grace; when depressed, he reasoned that he must have unknowingly rejected God and committed the sin of apostasy.[46] The manic typically engages in immoderate projection, reading as real emotions and ideas that exist only in his mind. Strong emotion skews perception, creating an obscure symbolism, solipsistic and misleading, that convinces because it is congruent with the experienced emotion. Thus, a sudden vision of life's true meaning or God's intentions or the hearing of voices seems to explain what the manic is feeling at that moment. These explanations are both true, because they bring coherence to experience, and false, because they are merely mental constructs. They are pieces of fiction that, like all fiction, are meaningful only if we understand their objective and subjective components; they are neither empirically real nor irrelevant and false, but products of the self that incorporate and reveal an inner truth. But in manic-depressive illness this inner truth is not under the individual's integrative control. When we read or write fiction, we try to balance what we know is objectively true (that we are not the book's hero or heroine, that this rendition is not a history) and what we feel is subjectively true (we identify with the protagonist and are moved emotionally by the adventures as if they were real). But manics live in a room of mirrors and do not see the inconvenient
discrepancies between what they project and what they perceive. They re-create the world. To outsiders they appear self-indulgent, vain, egotistical, but it is an ego that no longer owns its identity, because it is incapable of insightful introspection and the self-control that insight brings.[47]
Woolf's manic episodes ran the gamut from lively sociableness to wild and incoherent gibberish, from pure ecstasy to mixed mania. When merely hypomanic, Woolf felt energized and creative, and fiction came easily to her—"my body was flooded with rapture and my brain with ideas. I wrote rapidly until 12" (Letters 3: 428); "& these curious intervals in life—I've had many—are the most fruitful artistically—one becomes fertilised—think of my madness at Hogarth—& all the little illnesses" (Diary 3: 254). She seems to have detected the connection between the hallucinations, the heightened perceptions, and the ecstasy of more severe manic moods:
I've had some very curious visions in this room too, lying in bed, mad, & seeing the sunlight quivering like gold water, on the wall. I've heard the voices of the dead here. And felt, through it all, exquisitely happy. (Diary 2: 283)
When severely manic, she was unable to distinguish between fact and fiction, as Leonard remembers:
But one morning she was having breakfast in bed and I was talking to her when without warning she became violently excited and distressed. She thought her mother was in the room and began to talk to her.
. . . she talked almost without stopping for two or three days, paying no attention to anyone in the room or anything said to her. For about a day what she said was coherent; the sentences meant something, though it was nearly all wildly insane. Then gradually it became completely incoherent, a mere jumble of dissociated words. After another day the stream of words diminished and finally she fell into a coma. (Beginning Again 172–73)
Custance, too, connected mild mania with pleasant hallucinations of the dead, a "sense of communion [that] extends to all mankind, dead, living and to be born. That is perhaps why mania always brings me an inner certainty that the dead are really alive and that I can commune with them at will."[48] But in severe mania, the same sense of consuming communion between self and object frightened him. He saw
demons and werewolves, strange faces of forgotten gods, and devils, while my mind played unceasingly on everything it remembered of myths and magic. Folds of the bedclothes suddenly became the carven
image of Baal; a crumpled pillow appeared as the horrible visage of Hecate. I was transported into an atmosphere of miracle and witchcraft, of all-pervading occult forces, although I had taken no interest whatever in these subjects prior to my illness.[49]
Woolf, too, as her mania intensified lost the beneficial, nurturing images and entered a paranoid world in which Leonard and her nurses had formed a conspiracy against her.[50] Her racing mind imposed the illusion of coherence on bird songs (they seemed to sing in Greek) and on noises from the garden (they sounded like King Edward VII uttering muffled profanities), and it vividly projected memories other dead mother (conversing with one's past is a way of thinking about it, but it is a diminished kind of thinking that cannot result in a conclusion that benefits the patient). Paranoia explained why sickroom attendants whispered to each other and why she was being restrained. Although her interpretations were uncorrceted by reality testing (so that neither a royal visit nor birds that spoke seemed unlikely), they followed a logical process shared by us all. But what of the interpretations themselves? Can we decode them? Do they evidence an unspoken hostility toward men? Frigidity? An unhealthy obsession with sex, or with her mother, or both? When psychoanalyst Shirley Panken tries to make sense of Woolf's hallucinations (in order to "demystify" them), she reads them for symbolic significance. Her premises include: King Edward, who is a father-figure, stands for Leslie's "incestuous" invasiveness; birds have hard beaks, so they might refer to the phallus; the Greek songs (by a tangled web of literary allusions to a Greek myth about two sisters who are turned into birds) symbolize Woolf's dead mother; bird imagery appears in Mrs. Dalloway; Septimus Warren Smith commits suicide in that novel. Panken reaches a conclusion by simple arithmetic: bird = phallus = death. A number of explanatory interpretations now present themselves: "Does the [bird] myth evoke Woolf's guilt regarding her mother's death? Woolf's silence regarding her half-brothers' lovemaking? Her frustrated longing to find a voice to express her repressed rage?" The list goes on: birds are resilient and passionate, Panken decides, whereas Woolf feels fragile and frigid; birds are small and victims of hunters, and so Virginia may be identifying with them; in a letter, Vanessa once compared Virginia to a bird, and, as children, the Stephens had bird nicknames, often ascribed by Leslie. Panken brings us back to the father because repetition implies repression: Leslie must be the organizing center of the hallucination. Theory demands it.[51]
But in whom does the repetition compulsion lie, Woolf or Panken? Since her patient is dead and cannot acknowledge, deny, or correct these symbolic connections supplied by the analyst, Panken speculates without hindrance or adequate information, using Woolf's conscious associations (bird imagery used deliberately in her novels and essays) as if they were identical to unconscious connections. But it is Panken's associations, not Woolf's, that dominate here. In a sense, the psychoanalyst is behaving like the manic-depressive, the ill Custance who does not have privileged access to why he is hallucinating and therefore must free-associate with bits and pieces of remembered lore, hoping that he will hit upon the meaningful connection. The trouble is that too many seemingly meaningful connections can be found too easily. Doubtless, both Custance and Panken construct ingenious explanations, but ingenuity is no proof of insight. To apply such ingenuity to hallucinations seems misguided, since neurotics, who might be supposed to make such associations, rarely hallucinate, and manics, who often do, are driven by biochemistry, not by mental trauma.
Complete hallucinatory and delusional manic breakdowns were, fortunately, relatively rare for Virginia Woolf. For the most part, she experienced hypomania, best exemplified by what Quentin Bell labels her "conversational extravagances":
This was one of the difficulties of living with Virginia; her imagination was furnished with an accelerator and no brakes; it flew rapidly ahead, parting company with reality, and, when reality happened to be a human being, the result could be appalling for the person who found himself expected to live up to the character that Virginia had invented.
. . . she must have reduced many poor shop assistants to the verge of blasphemy or of tears, and not only they but her companions suffered intensely when she found herself brought to a standstill by the difference between that which she had imagined and that which in fact was offered for sale.[52]
Bell's illustration is negatively charged; hypomanics can also be great fun. Virginia would use "a prosaic incident or statement to create a baroque mountain of fantasy," a childlike "freedom from banality" which her friends loved.[53] In a letter to Leonard, Barbara Rothschild asked him to "tell Virginia that we long to see her too and to be led again into the tortuous and torturing mazes of indiscretions into which she lures the carrot followers."[54] Lyndall Gordon describes Virginia's "mercurial public manner" at Bloomsbury parties:
With a little encouragement she threw off words like a musician improvising. Her voice seemed to preen itself with self-confidence in its verbal facility as she leant sideways, a little stiffly in her chair, to address her visitor in a bantering manner. She confounded strangers with wildly fictitious accounts of their lives or shot malicious darts at friends, who, the night before, she might have flattered outrageously.[55]
Most of Virginia's friends considered her fantastic stories "a splendid game," "dazzling performances," "burlesque, a love of exaggeration for its own sake." They saw that she indulged in "wild generalizations based on the flimsiest premises and embroidered with elaborate fantasy . . . sent up like rockets."[56] Nigel Nicolson valued them for precisely that reason:
Virginia had this way of magnifying one's simple words and experiences. One would hand her a bit of information as dull as a lump of lead. She would hand it back glittering like diamonds. I always felt on leaving her that I had drunk two glasses of an excellent champagne. She was a life-enhancer. That was one of her own favorite phrases.[57]
Christopher Isherwood, noting the Tennysonian impression of unhappy fragility in Virginia's physical appearance, contrasts her "fairy-story princess under a spell" look with her liveliness:
We are at the tea table. Virginia is sparkling with gaiety, delicate malice and gossip—the gossip which is the style of her books and which made her the best hostess in London; listening to her, we missed appointments, forgot love-affairs, stayed on and on into the small hours, when we had to be hinted, gently, but firmly, out of the house.[58]
David Garnett reported that Virginia "had the gift for sudden intimacy" (also a common manic trait), which both "flattered and disturbed" people, for her interest in details—central or irrelevant—was intense. However much her gaiety charmed and entertained, it also suggested depths. Madge Garland noted that "Virginia could be a very enchanting person," but "there were times when I felt . . . that she was more nearly enchanted. This was when she seemed removed from the people she was talking to—almost dreamlike." Another friend (and a psychoanalyst), Alix Strachey, observed that Woolf's need to know every detail of other people's lives was connected to her experience of estrangement, of being "different": "it seemed to me that her wish to know all about them sprang ultimately from a feeling of alienation from reality—an alienation which she was trying to overcome."[59]
Mania has trade-offs; one ascends to visionary heights by distancing ordinary things. Still, we must not underestimate the assets of hypomania. Like most bipolar patients, Woolf enjoyed her flights, and her pleasure is by no means sure evidence of a neurotic attachment to being ill. "Who would not want an illness," K. R. Jamison asks rhetorically, "that numbers among its symptoms elevated and expansive mood, inflated self-esteem, more energy than usual . . . 'sharpened and unusually creative thinking,' and 'increased productivity?'"[60] Woolf saw quite clearly the creative advantages of her mood swings, even though she also knew (as is suggested by Garland and Strachey's observations) that their usefulness would be undercut by lopsided object-relations until her euthymic periods, when she could reconnect mind and world, balanced the unrestrained imagination with an external coherence. The result then was a "moment of being":
The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. . . . [o]ne must become externalised; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one's character, living in the brain. Sydney comes & I'm Virginia; when I write I'm merely a sensibility. Sometimes I like being Virginia, but only when I'm scattered & various & gregarious. (Diary 2: 193)
Woolf recognized that the manic state stimulated her already rich imagination to create and project fictions that had little basis in reality but that explained (or at least embodied, if obscurely) her experienced moods. In mania, she mistook her subjective world for the objective, imposed what was inside her mind upon what was outside, and learned later through disappointment that perception was neither reliable nor simple, as she shows in two penitent letters to Leonard after one of her abusive scenes:
Dearest, I have been disgraceful—to you, I mean. . . .
You've been absolutely perfect to me. Its all my fault. . . . I do want you and I believe in spite of my vile imaginations the other day that I love you and that you love me. (Letters 2: 34)
John Custance felt much the same way about his religious vision:
Only now and then, when I am in an excited state bordering on acute mania, will it emerge from its elusive retirement and allow me to get it down. Unfortunately, when I come to read what I have written in cold blood, after the manic excitement has passed, I can barely make head or tail of it and very often its appalling egocentricity nearly makes me sick.[61]
Shame and self-doubt frequently visit the morning after a night of magical vision, boundless joy (or paranoia), and absolute certainty that one has seen the "truth," if not about the universe, then at least about oneself. Imprudent marriages, rash purchases or career changes, and adulterous flings may seem romantic and "fated" in mania, only to become tawdry and empty and undesired after mania has passed.
What could Woolf have learned from episodes that seem extravagant and meaningless? The reconnection between mind and world threatened her with a sudden, dispiriting deflation of self. The shock of falling out of solipsistic mania taught Woolf the integrity of objects, their intractable solidity, their "otherness," independent of the illusions her "unreal" self could foster about them. When well, she could invite the external, objective world into her internal, subjective world, while still maintaining the power to create fiction; it was then that she felt she could find an all-embracing coherence that was neither self-destructive nor solipsistic. She recognized that she could not control a "moment of being"; such a moment could be frightening, but it offered a "representative" and "arranged" lesson about the nature of object-relations: "we are sealed vessels afloat upon what it is convenient to call reality; at some moments, without a reason, without an effort, the sealing matter cracks; in floods reality" (Moments of Being 142). The image here of incipient drowning is frightening because how she responded to this flood of reality was crucial: she had to be careful neither to disregard it, as she did in mania, nor to be overwhelmed and destroyed by it, as she was in depression. And yet both mania and depression, as I will argue in Chapter 6, taught her valuable lessons about what this moment of being was. Often characters in her fiction experience similar disillusionment and deflation of wishful thinking while still remembering the value, the truth, of illusion. James Ramsay, for instance, who finally sees the lighthouse building as it really is, white and stark on the black rock, blends this fact with his idealization of his childhood and his self-serving hatred of his father until all views become facets of truth: "So that was the Lighthouse, was it? No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing. The other Lighthouse was true too" (To the Lighthouse 277 ). Inevitably, such insights into how meaning is made and unmade, never finished, yet satisfying, are life-affirming.