“When the lights of health go down”: Virginia Woolf's Aesthetics and Contemporary Illness Narratives

Summary

In her introduction to Virginia Woolf's “On Being Ill” (1926), Hermione Lee asserts that “this essay has, in recent years, gained another kind of recognition in a burgeoning literature of pathology, cited on medical websites” (xxiii)—literature that includes illness memoirs and medical humanities books which are becoming increasingly popular. Looking at such websites we notice, however, that in most cases Woolf's essay is mentioned as an example of a time when there was a scarcity of narratives about illness. For instance, the annotation of “On Being Ill” on The Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database, at the School of Medicine of New York University, reads as follows: “The essay's premise [that illness is not a subject of literature despite how common it is in real life] is no longer true; we now have a great deal of writing about illness.” Are we meant to conclude then that “On Being Ill” is a bit dated now that so much has been, and is being, written about illness? Has what Woolf called “the unexploited mine”1 been exploited and has this paradoxical richness of illness—the main contradiction in Woolf's essay—been resolved?

A fruitful use of “On Being Ill” for those interested in the intersection of literature with illness or medicine would be “to juxtapose its claim that in 1930 the body was not taken seriously as a literary theme, with our contemporary obsession with the body” (The Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database). This is demonstrated by the proliferation of first and third-person narratives that record “the daily drama of the body” (Woolf 5): ranging from Joan Didion's essay about her migraines “In Bed” (1968), Audre Lorde's Cancer Journals (1980), Paul Monette's AIDS memoir Borrowed Time (1988), to Anatole Broyard's account of prostate cancer in Intoxicated by My Illness (1992), Jean Dominique Bauby's story of his stroke that left him physically paralysed in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (1997), and Hilary Mantel's memoir dealing with her struggles with severe endometriosis entitled Giving Up the Ghost (2003), to mention but a few examples.