Ernest Shulman is a Canadian who has lived in New York City for many years. He is a suicide researcher with a Ph.D. in social psychology from the City University of New York. His specialty is why famous people do or do not kill themselves. He is now at work on a book on the causes of suicide, titled “Thirty Famous Suicides.”

The article has two sections:

Virginia Woolf was an Englishwoman, and an ardent proponent of feminism; Anne Sexton, an American, was highly regarded by her feminist admirers, but she herself disclaimed a feminist philosophy. For Virginia Woolf, advocacy of female rights helped give meaning to life, as did opposing patriarchy and male military emphasis. For Anne Sexton, being female meant little except the opportunity to enjoy sex with men. Virginia Woolf drowned herself when her sense of self dissolved depite pride in her femininity. Anne Sexton asphyxiated herself after her identity as a lovable person was compromised.

Part 1

Virgina Woolf (1882-1941)

Critics consider Virginia Woolf a major novelist, although her stories contain limited character development or narrative drive, little humor, passion or ideological tension, and little dramatic conflict. Her originality lay in revealing the introspective gropings of her characters, most of whom are struggling to discover order and meaning in their chaotic worlds.

She herself was sociable and gregarious, but paradoxically remote. Stephen Spender, a poet who knew Virginia, suggested what she knew best “was how it felt to be alone, unique, isolated…. She was lacking in the sense of a solid communal life…. What bound people together escaped her. What separated them was an object of wonder, delight and despair. She seemed as detached from herself as from everyone else.” One of her biographers, who knew her from his childhood, recorded a remark she made to him: “Nothing has really happened until it has been described.” Virginia lived for her writing; she fell apart when she wasn’t working on a book or essay.

She was raised in an upper middle-class home that followed Victorian principles: sex was an unfortunate necessity at times, self-control the basis for proper living. But Virginia went beyond Victorian principles to disdain all biological functions, including eating.

Probably the childhood origins of her detachment lay in parental neglect. Her father, a pillar of the British literary establishment, tyrannized over his large household with outbursts or rage and self-pity, monopolizing his wife’s attention and failing to nurture Virginia beyond encouraging her interest in books and writing. (From age eight, Virginia ran a weekly family newsletter.) Virginia loved her mother, but the poor woman was generally depressed, spoke of wanting to die, and was usually away from home taking care of the sick. At home she was too busy attending to her husband’s needs to have time for her three children from her first marriage, or to Virginia or the other three more recent children. Virginia had governesses, but mainly depended on her older sister, Vanessa, for nurturance. Her situation was severely worsened by the sexual abuse she suffered, unprotected, from her two much older half-brothers. She talked about that abuse for the rest of her life.

Little wonder she became an embittered feminist, writing essays against the evils men inflicted, including deprivation of female rights.

Virginia was unrealistic about her parents. She exalted her mother’s depression; “She felt herself possessed of the true secret of life at last, which is still obscured from a few, though they too must come to know it, that sorrow is our lot, and at best we can but face it bravely.” Virginia was thirteen when her mother died, and she then had the first of several breakdowns. When she was twenty-two, her father died, precipitating another breakdown involving guilt over her father. She also made a suicide gesture, jumping (without being injured) from a second-floor window.

While she was growing up, she was considered “mad” by everyone in the household: she had sudden, violent rages, and often preferred living in a secret, fantasy world to the real world. Virginia bought into the idea she was “mad,” with life-long consequences. Although a lesbian feminist, she depended on Leonard Woolf, the man she married at age thirty, to control every area of her life; she seemed unable to trust herself to manage anything. She married Leonard in part because of her sister Vanessa’s influence, Vanessa eager to unburden herself of the responsibility for taking care of Virginia.

Good reasons exist for viewing Virginia as mentally ill, albeit sporadically. First: hallucinations, often associated with failures to eat or sleep much; such episodes occurred when she lacked support from a close friend or relative, or when she completed a writing project and felt bored. Next, as her diaries and letters showed and other people noticed, Virginia lived in her head and outside ordinary life; sometimes when she walked in crowded areas of London, she was so oblivious to her surroundings that nearby people pointed to her and tittered. Then there was her justification for feminist writing: among other things she asserted the mind is a jumble, and only a woman’s understanding of introspection, as opposed to the male emphasis on actions, could accurately reflect the reality of life; but she did not seem to realize that the minds of most people are orderly.

Under stress, she apparently blurred the line between fantasy and reality. When she suffered one of her frequent episodes of depression, she might rest in bed for days or weeks, fighting off headaches. Also, she had sudden incidents of unprovoked, uncontrolled fury. She believed she might return from death with insights into mysteries she never previously understood. And most telling, as characters in her books did, she often felt doubts about who she was and why she was on earth; when her biography of Roger Fry, published in 1940, met Leonard’s disapproval, she lost all confidence in the value of her writing, so dependent on outside support she was.

During her lifetime, Virginia made several suicide attempts. Most were minor, leaving her without serious injury. The one exception came when Leonard went behind her back, and with the support of some (but not all doctors) persuaded her not to have babies by reason of her mental instability. But Virginia eagerly wanted to have babies and for the rest of her life dwelled on her reluctant childlessness. She so resented Leonard’s manipulation and failure to consult with her, and was so angry about being deprived of motherhood, she overdosed on pills and would have died but for the accidental discovery of her condition with emergency hospital treatment. Condemned to rest homes for the next three years, that to her felt like imprisonment because of deprivation of reading and writing, and visits from friends, and forced feeding to combat anorexia, Virginia focused her anger on Leonard, whom she usually refused to see (Leonard merely ascribed her hostility to her “madness”), and lambasted when he did appear.

Several factors contributed to Virginia drowning herself in 1941. Her important sources of pleasure had all been denied her by World War Two restrictions on travel: socializing with Vanessa and her friends; the cultural life of London; and confidence in her own writing and ideas. And most importantly, she was determined to do whatever it took to avoid being placed in the total deprivation of a rest home for the mentally ill, which might have happened because she was hardly eating or sleeping, and had hallucinations. She was cooped up in the rural village of Rodmell, had failed to develop a satisfactory friendship with a female physician who lived nearby, and perhaps suspected Leonard’s duplicity in supporting her. The river Ouse, which flowed near her cottage, became her final, tragic destination. A couple of weeks later, her body washed up on shore.

Part II

Anne Sexton (1928-1974)

Anne Sexton, who was from the Boston suburbs, published several books of poetry, winning the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967. Suicidal throughout life, she overdosed on prescription pills at least a dozen times, on each occasion with a family member nearby to call an ambulance. At these times she would be hospitalized for a few days or weeks.

Perhaps the key event in her adult life occurred when at twenty-eight she experienced her first hospitalization and began psychotherapy with a psychologist, Dr. Martin Orne, who convinced her to write poetry to inspire other mental patients. Hence she turned herself into a “confessional poet.” Her poems revealed aspects of her life history, such as sexual abuse by her father, and masturbation, things people usually conceal. Dr. Orne told her that what she regarded as a meaningless life would become important if she devoted herself to poetry to help the mentally ill. (Such a life purpose was better than nothing, but it couldn’t replace the callous indifference and hostility of the family in which she was raised.)

Anne would never develop a sense of her own value; Dr. Orne, whom she trusted, saw her value as a person in terms of poetic talent, and Anne herself viewed her relevance to men primarily as a sexual object. She looked to psychotherapy for support, rather than for self-understanding. Her therapists — she had four chief ones — apparently never realized that her main problem was inability to trust her own judgment outside of poetry. Consequently, each one dominated her according to a private agenda. Dr. Orne seemed to relish control, and when, after a few years, he moved to a distant city, he passed her on to a psychoanalyst who had sex with her during sessions. He, in turn, threatened by Dr. Orne with professional unmasking, passed her on to a female psychiatrist who dropped her over a dispute regarding fees. She ended up with a female social worker. Altogether she spent eighteen years seeing therpists, but her addictions never ceased — sex, alcohol, prescription pills, and suicide attempts.

In addition, she used other escapes from her pain. Under stress, sometimes she went into what she referred to as “trances.” These were periods of immobility and unawareness lasting for several minutes or longer: she simply ignored her environment. Another escape was to use others to take care of her. Someone would have to walk with her or accompany her to the store; provide her food; manage her finances; reassure her. Her husband, Kayo, whom she married right after high school, managed the household, including the kitchen, put her to sleep at night by stroking her hair and repeating that she was a good girl, and tolerated her constant infidelities by ascribing them to her “illness.” They had two daughters; she physically abused the elder one, Linda, and sexually abused her when she was a teenager. As an adult, Linda, like her mother, was chronically suicidal. The younger girl, Joy, as a pre-schooler was raised by her paternal grandmother, whom she greatly preferred to her own mother. Joy much later told an interviewer that her “mother was incredibly selfish. She just didn’t have the ability to see things beyond herself…. Her sickness made it a bitch for me to grow up…. From the time I was very young, I understood what suicide was, and I lived in constant fear of it…. There had been so many attempts, it was almost as if she had been dying of cancer…. I was embarrassed about my mother for most of my life.”

Nevertheless, Anne had many good qualities that attracted others when she was at her best: charm, vitality, originality, generosity, and helpfulness. She was loved by friends she tutored in poetry, and by the poetry students she taught at Boston University as a tenured full professor. She had a close friend and collaborator, Maxine Kumin, who also wrote poetry and won a Pulitzer, and with whom she exchanged support and critiques every day.

In her final year of life, Anne fell apart. Severe problems began when, with the encouragement of the lady psychiatrist, she started divorce proceedings against her husband, the family anchor. He occasionally became furious and struck her, and she mistakenly believed she’d be able to find a more suitable mate who would appreciate her poetry, as Kayo did not. Accordingly, she embarked fruitlessly on a series of love affairs, eventually being reduced to picking up men in bars. She became totally dependent on alcohol, and she lost most of her friends by making drunken phone calls to them in the middle of the night. Her teenage daughters, tired of their mother’s neediness and constant demands, left home and moved into college dormitories. And to top off the losses, her best friend, Maxine Kumin, permanently damaged their relationship by telling her off for selfishness.

By now, Anne, no longer interested in improving early drafts, was getting negative reviews of her work. Anyway, she felt she had produced enough good poetry already to leave an important legacy. Apparently she felt it was now time to take leave of the world. She put on the fur coat of the deceased mother who had neglected her but whom she had loved. She sat in her car with the engine running and the garage door closed. No note, nobody around to rescue her. Everything was different from the many occasions when she overdosed on pills, striving for love, gaining the opportunity for rest in the hospital. This time she had too many losses from which she felt able to recover.

Conclusion

Virginia Woolf and Anne Sexton had much in common. Both were outspoken on behalf of other women and themselves. Both attempted suicide many times before finally going through with it. Both were sexually abused by close relatives as children, and were demeaned by parents and siblings, but maintained family ties as best they could. Both developed as highly dependent on others, lacking self-reliance. And both invested themselves heavily in literary endeavors, taking their lives when severely discouraged regarding work, along with despair over significant relationships. These similarities outweighed obvious differences..