'A good many shrewd knocks': The faces of depression in the life and art of Virginia Woolf

This dissertation examines depression in the life and writing of Virginia Woolf. The treatment Woolf received for her psychobiological disorder and its accompanying physical maladies---the mandatory rest cures, the accusations of willful intractability, the moralizing, to name just three---shaped Woolf's identity as a writer and citizen, and had the adverse effect of exacerbating her depressive outlook. One of the ways Woolf fought against the dominating voices of her doctors as well as certain family members and friends was to expose the inner lives of women in her fictions---women who, as denizens of late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Britain, lived subjected lives similar in many ways to hers. The dual constraints of Woolf's affective disorder and patriarchal mandates to uphold feminine propriety contributed to her melancholic perspective, a perspective that influenced her modernist aesthetic, particularly in her experimental novels. This project, while building on previous scholarship concerned with the mind/body connection figuring in Woolf's fictions, departs from earlier inquiries in its psycholinguistic, psychoneurological investigation of the manner in which depression leaves syntactic and linguistic traces in her texts and, in the end, nearly forestalled her writing process. Woolf's efforts to reinscribe the modern stream of consciousness technique induced her invention of a way to signify sadness in her texts, melancholic writing that differs from that of other modernists in its gender-typing of mourning and melancholia. Drawing from firsthand experience with the bodily flux caused by depression and its impact on thought and speech, Woolf created what was a distinctly female discourse of depression. A feminist dedicated to founding an "exciting conversation" between men and women that would allow freer expression for all, Woolf was continually impeded by her depressions, imbricated as they were with the Victorian moral codes of her youth. Mutually informing and synergistic, these forces collided in Woolf's psyche, imposing Draconian standards of decorum on her work, and, ultimately, quelling her best attempts at self-assertion.