Abstract
In On Being Ill, Woolf figures sickness as a new perspective that grants priority to the immediacy of the body more than the mind, endowing language with a new physicality. O’Hara notes the materiality of the words “plush perhaps” and Woolf’s general “crushing together” of words and meanings, that at once enable multiplicity and open up abysses in meaning disjunctions between words and thoughts. Similarly, O’Hara casts revisionism as a sickness that enables multiple vantage points, multiple impossibilities, so any particular subject position may be transcended, thereby temporarily bridging the abyss. This literary politics, modernist style, relies on the imagination to play out the embryonic selves that inhere in moments of being within the larger context of the common experience.
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Notes
Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill, Introduction by Hermione Less (Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 2002), p. 28. This is a reprint of the 1930 Hogarth Press edition. Another reprint of this edition, keeping the same pagination of the essay, I also consulted closely:
Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill, Introduction by Hermione Lee with Notes from Sick Rooms by Julia Stephens, Introduction by Mark Hussey, Afterword by Rita Charon (Ashfield, MA: 2012), p. 28. See also
Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (New York: Vintage, 1996), pp. 363, 441, 491.
I have greatly benefited from and so am deeply indebted to the scholarship of Kimberley Engdahl Coates: “Exposing the ‘Nerves of Language’: Virginia Woolf, Charles Mauron, and the Affinity between Aesthetics and Illness,” Literature and Medicine, 21, 2 (2002), 242–263; and “Phantoms, Fancy and Symptoms: Virginia Woolf and the Art of Being Ill,” Woolf Studies Annual, 18 (2012), 1–28. Coates tracks down the review Woolf did in 1916 of
Henry David Sedgwick’s “On Being Ill,” in his book An Apology for Old Maids and Other Essays (New York: Books for Libraries, 1916), pp. 82–109, which serves as one contrapuntal springboard for Woolf’s essay, along with the many scattered chapters in Proust, as she herself notes (6). “The raptures of transcendentalism” and other allusions to Emerson and the Americans (4) refer back to Sedgwick and the influences upon him.
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 2nd Edition, with the author’s new Preface, “The Anxiety of Contamination.”
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© 2015 Daniel T. O’Hara
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O’Hara, D.T. (2015). The Revisionary Muse in Virginia Woolf’s On Being Ill: On Literary Politics, Modernist Style. In: Virginia Woolf and the Modern Sublime: The Invisible Tribunal. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137580061_5
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