Hypothesis Contradicted

Virginia Woolf's last publication, The Years, is revealing in a way that I did not expect after reading her other works. Instead of writing to vacate her self, The Years is written like a confession. The novel focuses on the private details of select characters over the course of fifty years.  Each chapter is defined by a singular day of that year. Each year is characterized by a particular quirk in the cycle of the seasons. The novel takes place in London, the environment in which Woolf belonged. In 1923 after living in Richmond with her husband, Woolf insisted that they move back to London, saying:

"I can't be happy in this quietness."

I wrote before about the silence of water and the seductive calm of drowning. Perhaps I was wrong...maybe it's more like an explosion.

The first section of The Years is to me the most relevant. It begins with Colonel Abel Pargiter's visit to his mistress, Mira. Pargiter thinks about his invalid wife, Rose, two times throughout his visit...fleeting thoughts about what he will have the liberty to do "one of these days," referring to when Rose dies. This led me to think that he would be enthusiastic about visiting Mira, but Woolf captured his demeanor with judgemental thoughts and passive movements. The scene was starved for passion. Woolf's writing style in her last novel is particularly contradictory to her style in earlier works, such as Mrs. Dalloway. In Mrs. Dalloway Woolf streams together memories that feel like they belong to the Clarissa Dalloway. In The Years her characters and choice of detail seem to be direct presentations of her worries. Partiger is reminiscent of Leonard Woolf and the parallel between Rose and Virginia Woolf cannot be argued. The relationship that Partiger has with the idea of his wife mirrors Virginia's fear of driving away her husband with her unsteady mental state. Her fixation on the ability of the seasons to govern human life suggests that she feels a lack of control over her body. In the novel Rose's daughter, Delia, feels smothered by her mother's mental illness and looks forward to when she dies. Rose takes a stubbornly long time to die. In addition to weather, death is a dominant, all-encompassing theme in the book. Delia's character is reminiscent of Woolf's unusual awareness of her own condition and the inevitability of death. 

Woolf's suicide note to husband, Leonard:

Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that - everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer.

I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.

V.

It is clear that Woolf wrote The Years with her personal self in mind. It is important to consider the difference between the writing style used near the end of her life and the techniques used earlier in life. All of her works are written as a stream of consciousness, but most of her early works disguised the stream by building it inside a character's brain. The Years is a stream of consciousness coated with a very thin artifice. Thesis: In her early works, Virginia Woolf wrote to distance herself from her self. When mania accumulated control she lost the desire, or maybe the ability, to be distant, and wrote in an attempt to explode.