Virginia & Vanessa - New English Review

by Friedrich Hansen (December 2019)

Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell

The story of Virginia and Vanessa touches on an archaic issue known as sibling rivalry. It plays a crucial role in biblical scripture, namely in the narrative on the Patriarchs or what Christians call the Old Testament. The rivalry between Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, or Joseph and his brothers come to mind. Biblical siblings’ rivalry is at the center of polygamous shame-and-revenge culture of the patriarchs and provides ample evidence that monotheism was incomplete without monogamy. It is for this reason that Moses revelation of guilt culture at Sinai changed everything. It culminated in the synthesis of monogamy and monotheism, which would mitigate sibling rivalry by the covenantal family.

This brings us right into the center of Ozick’s presentation of sibling rivalry in post-Victorian England. With regards to family feelings, Cynthia records Virginia‘s “unslakable maternal envy . . . of the childless for the fruitful” with a reference towards her sister Vanessa who gave birth to three children. At the same time Virginia found her sisters parenting “obsessive and excessive” and felt after visits with Vanessa‘s little sons “a suffering documented again and again in her diary”. Ozick’s novel treats envy and jealousy superficially, however.

While a household term in the 1960s, today “penis envy” has been displaced by the male fashion toward effeminate transitioning. Penile envy simply confirmed a truly appalling gender bias within Freudian psychoanalysis imitating the millennial Christian gender bias toward males. After all it was Jesus Christ who distorted the pre-established harmony of Jewish gender equality flourishing in the biblical narrative of Genesis. Therefore we may forgive Virginia Woolf for in the course of her deepening neurosis revealed her Christian confusion of outward envy with inward jealousy. Cynthia Ozick spotted this early on. Like other post-WW II intellectuals of the New York literary circles—as for instance Norman Podhoretz in his autobiographical “Making it” —Ozick chose to distance herself from their Bloomsbury peers in London.

While at Columbia University, Podhoretz in his outstanding performance became the subject of envy by his peers who called him a grade grabber and teacher’s pet. Podhoretz, raised as he was in a close-knit family of Jewish immigrants, was not prepared for this exposure to raw envy that emerged in a liberal culture where the demarcation between peers and family was beginning to fade away. Which brings us back to Virginia’s family and her nascent madness which would eventually drive her to suicide. Virginia struggled with her Christian sensibilities much more than her sister Vanessa, a matter that concerned Ozick in her essay as a means to protect Virginia’s heterosexuality and family credentials in a very peculiar way, namely by stressing the “uxuriousness” (“uxor” is Latin for husband) of Virginia’s Jewish husband. Leonard Woolf was a husband of rare devotion who stood out for his marital loyalty resisting the “hypersexual tide” pouring in from chaotic Weimar Germany. He particularly kept the sanity of not insisting on sexual marital obligations upon his spouse. Instead, he went for lovingkindness and seemingly limitless patience toward Virginia’s madness which he astutely took as the means for nursing her extraordinary literary talent.

Meanwhile her biographer Quentin Bell seemed very keen to dwell on Virginia‘s same-sex inclinations and by that in a way alienating her from her creative self. Cynthia Ozick by contrast stresses Virginia’s inward orientation and conjugal fidelity which allowed her literary genius to flourish not despite but because of her neurosis. On this view Cynthia might have better explained her use of the word “competitive envy” instead of “sisterly jealousy” as it has conventionally been understood. As explained above jealousy was an achievement of monotheism and figured as refined envy within the religious context of guilt culture which is based on the inward perspective of love in the family. While inward jealousy can therefore be assuaged by human love, outwardly directed envy cannot. After all it attaches itself to non-animated things which do not respond to human affection.

Cynthia Ozick’s outstanding literary sensibilities emerge from her reservations against those who all too easily succumb to biology and enables the reader to fully appreciate the genius of Virginia Woolf. Concerning the argument of gender alienation or dysphoria, advanced by Quentin Bell, inevitably detracts from Virginia‘s brilliant performance and strong character. Ozick dwells unduly on what she calls Virginia‘s “Vanessa envy” which can be better explained as a symptom of her madness. Sisterly jealousy is the more fitting term which could be converted into love of the arts thanks to her husband Leonard‘s Jewish family skills which were probably only second to his nursing skills, including milk at eleven in the morning and certain healthy topics of conversation in the evening.

Vanessa’s thriving as Madonna-cum-Bohemian, raising three children as well as participating in “free love” seems to be of crucial importance. For Virginia could only maintain the sisterly bond of love and master the full burden of her closeness to Vanessa by working out the moral implication of her sister’s escapism. She had to translate family jealousy into professional performance. It affected her whole person negatively and inwardly and, at the same time, sustained her poetic imagination. It is therefore easy to understand why the pathology took hold in her personality rather than in Vanessa‘s, whose lifestyle merited emotional distress of sorts.

To sum it up: Virginia‘s extreme empathy for her “outwardly mad sister” indulging in countless extravagancies eventually carried her away into her own inward madness, which was subsequently driving her literary genius. While Vanessa seemed at ease in handling her contradictory lifestyles, Virginia lived through them on a far deeper plane—in terms of tradition, after thought, and remembrance. So, while Virginia’s jealousy was constantly drawing her inward, if only by being a centripetal force, it elicited her literary genius. By contrast envy alone is centrifugal and dispels any intensive feelings into the visible and outward world.

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Friedrich Hansen is a physician and writer. He has researched Islamic Enlightenment in Jerusalem and has networked on behalf of the Maimonides Prize. Previous journalistic and academic historical work in Germany, Britain and Australia. He is currently working in Germany and Australia.

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