“No Pain and No Consciousness”

This chapter examines pain’s importance to the sensitized, embodied consciousness valued by William, Henry, and Alice James. All three siblings disdained what Henry once called “the odd numbness of the general sensibility.” Yet William insisted that an individual’s higher capacities along with a more profound reality could best be accessed while physicality was numbed and waking consciousness was suppressed. For him anesthesia provided a gateway to the higher reaches of consciousness that his two siblings typically anchored in the feeling, suffering body. Henry and Alice repeatedly represent pain as comparable to an intense aesthetic experience in that it arouses the senses, increases responsiveness to stimuli, and heightens consciousness while still tethering the sufferer to the material world. They both count themselves among the rare few who possess this capacity for an aesthetic aliveness to suffering, which distinguishes them from purportedly less animate humans who in their assessment suffer less and hence invariably live less. Both siblings simultaneously stage the reconciliation of physical discomfort with material comfort at a time when their peers tended to view the two conditions as fundamentally antagonistic.

Virginia Woolf, the War Without, the War Within

Virginia Woolf, The War Without, The War Within completes Lounsberry’s trilogy on Virginia Woolf’s luminous diary and the diaries she read. It offers the first treatment of Woolf’s final diary stage (1929–1941), in which she turned more to her diary—and to others' diaries—as the war pressures of the unfurling 1930s grew. It reveals her artistic wars within as the encroaching outer war (World War II) approached. For the first time, this book will explore each of Woolf’s 12 final diary books in depth and trace her final flowering as a diarist. We watch as Woolf increases her number of diary entries in the 1930s and uses her diary more and more as a morning prop (as well as a post-tea-time act). We see her wish to write a “meatier” diary in 1940: an “evening” diary for “Old Virginia.” Interwoven into her own diary as it unfolds are the 18 key diaries that helped shape both her semi-private diary style and her public prose, including the diaries of Leo and Countess Tolstoy, Dorothy Wordsworth, Guy de Maupassant, Alice James, and André Gide. This book functions as a new Woolf biography, marking her life through her diaries from age forty-seven to four days before her suicide in 1941. Additionally, a new reading of Woolf’s suicide is offered—one based on her diaries.