Virginia Woolf, 1902. Photo: George Charles Beresford. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

When Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out begins, Mr. and Mrs. Ambrose are making their way from the Strand to the Thames Embankment, where a rowboat will take them to a steamer that will take them across the Atlantic to South America. Helen Ambrose—fortyish, beautiful, hard to please—is quietly weeping. “Mournfully” she regards the old man who rows the boat and the anchored ship he rows them to, for they are “putting water between her and her children.” They are joined on this journey aboard the Euphrosyne—the first voyage out—by Mr. Pepper, a prickly scholar who went to Cambridge with Ridley Ambrose, and twenty-four-year-old Rachel Vinrace, the Ambroses’ niece, whose mother is dead. She’s been raised (to unsatisfactory fashion, in Helen’s eyes) by her father, Willoughby Vinrace, upon whose ship they travel, and her other aunts. Among this group on the ship, Helen fears she’ll be “considerably bored.” (The specter of boredom is important in Woolf’s work; Orlando strikes me as a novel about life’s infinite richness, and how life is still somehow a bore.)

The ship drops anchor again in Lisbon, where they collect two additional passengers for part of the journey, none other than Richard and Clarissa Dalloway, characters Woolf would go on to write several stories and another novel about. The Dalloways’ snobbishness puts Helen off, but they connect on the subject of children. “Isn’t it detestable, leaving them?” Clarissa asks. “It was as though a blue shadow had fallen across a pool,” Woolf writes. “Their eyes became deeper.” Their talk makes moody Rachel feel excluded, “outside their world and motherless.” Helen is consumed with thoughts of her children now, but soon she will seem to forget them almost entirely. It is just one example of the book’s most prevalent theme: the limiting nature of perspective. The people in England and the people on ships are unreal to each other. “But while all this went on by land, very few people thought about the sea. They took it for granted that the sea was calm … For all they imagined, the ships when they vanished on the sky-line dissolved, like snow in water,” Woolf writes. “The people in ships, however, took an equally singular view of England. Not only did it appear to them to be an island, and a very small island, but it was a shrinking island in which people were imprisoned.” Much as it’s nearly impossible to imagine being hot when one is freezing cold, or happy when one is miserable, the passengers on the Euphrosyne can hardly imagine what life is like in London, or that it goes on at all. Read More

On Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet.

In 1973, the psychologist David Rosenhan published a paper in the journal Science called “On Being Sane in Insane Places.” The paper was based on an experiment he had conducted, sometimes called the Thud Experiment, designed to interrogate how we distinguish the sane from the insane, if in fact sanity and insanity are distinguishable states. Rosenhan arranged to have eight “pseudopatients” seek voluntary admission to a psychiatric hospital. The instigating complaint was of auditory hallucinations: the patients claimed to hear voices saying the words empty, hollow, and thud. All eight were admitted into psychiatric wards, most with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Once in the wards, the patients experienced some initial anxiety—they hadn’t expected to get in so easily—but then proceeded to act normally. Rosenhan writes:

The pseudopatient, very much as a true psychiatric patient, entered a hospital with no foreknowledge of when he would be discharged. Each was told that he would have to get out by his own devices, essentially by convincing the staff that he was sane. The psychological stresses associated with hospitalization were considerable, and all but one of the pseudopatients desired to be discharged almost immediately after being admitted. They were, therefore, motivated not only to behave sanely, but to be paragons of cooperation.

When asked how they were feeling, the patients all said they felt fine and were no longer hearing any voices. But they continued to be treated as though they were schizophrenic. They were kept in the hospital for an average of nineteen days (one for fifty-two days), and when they were eventually discharged, it was under the assumption of “remission.”

Rosenhan (who was himself one of the pseudopatients) came to the conclusion that “we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals.” You could say that the staff were prone to overdiagnosis, that the structure of the institution creates a hammer/nail relation between doctor and patient—or you could say that the structure of the institution creates the conditions for insanity. Rosenhan claimed that, in a hospital setting, “the normal are not detectably sane.” So were they all mad, as in Wonderland? (“ ‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice. ‘You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’ ”) (It must be noted that the validity of the study, and indeed most studies, has been called into question.)

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