Lindsey Arnold

ENG 4990
Professor Gerend
10-12-2021

Moments of Disconnection

Virginia Woolf’s memoir takes on an interesting tone, speaking of events in her life

through a lens seemingly separate from the activities and experiences occurring. She manages to

keep her own image away from the action and avert her feelings in many instances even though

this book is her memoir. It seems at points that it is actually more about others than herself.

Therefore, through a structuralist reading of Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Being, consistencies

of Virginia describing moments without placing herself within the story and favoring others over

herself emerge in her experiences, showing that Woolf feels disconnected from her own life,

never feeling completely present, even in moments of apparent being.

Woolf opens her memoir with the focus of the story being ‘you’, in this case Julien Bell,

her sister Vanessa’s son and Virginia’s nephew, immediately setting someone else as the central

figure in the story. She places her sister Vanessa and nephew Julien front and center, focusing on

them rather than herself. As she begins to describe the way she and her siblings all grew up

together, she continually discusses the others more than herself. While she does mention herself,

it is usually in the context of a scene with others rather than a singular, self-centered event, even

though she is the one remembering the situations and giving her perspectives on them. Much of

the memoir is a retelling of memories about Virginia’s mother, her sister Stella, her father, her

sister Vanessa, and various stories about other family members or other friends and relations of

the family. Virginia’s life is made up of observing others, something that is established right at

the start of the compilation, immediately creating the understanding for the reader that Virginia
is more of a narrator looking in and observing the situations rather than living through them. It

puts her on the outskirts looking in on her own life.

As Virginia begins her “Sketch of the Past”, she finds herself having difficulty describing

what she wants to. She writes, “I could spend hours trying to write that as it should be written…

but I should fail (unless I had some wonderful luck); I dare say I should only succeed in having

the luck if I had begun by describing Virginia herself” (65). Woolf interestingly describes herself

in the third person, claiming she cannot completely grasp the situation because she is unable to

first describe who she is and how she fits in. Her description of herself would require ‘luck’.

Most people would easily be able to describe themselves if asked to, but the way Virginia

describes her struggle to define herself is shown in her use of the word luck not once but twice in

the short line. By repeating herself here the reader is able to see her belief that finding who she is

and describing the situation in relation to herself is unlikely for her. It would be something that

would require a magical form of help in order to be accomplished. She cannot, on her own, insert

herself deeply into the story. She is more narrator than character.

Later on in the memoir, Virginia describes vivid memories at St. Ives and again, she can

be seen putting herself outside of the situations. She describes these experiences because they are

the ones that stuck with her, yet she still sees herself as an outsider within them. Virginia writes,

“The peculiarity of these two strong memories is that each was very simple. I am hardly aware of

myself, but only of the sensation. I am only the container of the feeling of ecstasy, of the feeling

of rapture” (67). To describe oneself as a container struck me as strange at first, but after

observing the way this relates back to Virginia viewing herself outside of her own story, this

description became understandable. She doesn’t see herself as a true participant in the

experience, but rather, these experiences are occurring and she is simply encasing them as if she
can pull them into herself. Virginia’s experiences are like pieces of clothing while she is like the

suitcase that they are packed into. While the two are connected and at some points dependent on

each other for meaning, they are not innately intertwined; they can be separated.

The reader can better understand this disconnection Virginia feels with her experiences

through the mirrored disconnection she feels with her family. She describes family members in a

similar light to each other without including herself in that connection. When Virginia’s mother

was alive, she was the rock that her husband leaned on. Now that she has died, Virginia’s father

refuses to take care of himself and, therefore, Stella, the oldest daughter, takes her mother’s

place. She waits on her father and responds to his every need. Then when Stella dies, the same

relationship is seen to develop between Virginia’s sister Vanessa and her father. When one

woman passes, another has to take the place to care for the father. We can see three women move

through this role; however, Virginia is never one of them. This is a seemingly important role in

the family, one that all of the central female figures move through in the same manner. The fact

that Virginia, the fourth and last major female role of the family, does not at any point occupy

this role places her outside of the circle, suggesting that she is not as central to the family as the

other female members. This example emphasizes the societal roles and how they fit into the

larger image of the way society functioned in Virginia’s time. The way that this family unit

functions is clear. The women take care of the men and tend to them when they so please. It is a

very male-centered society and family.

Near the end of Woolf’s memoir, she returns to the discussion of her father and how her

relationship with him is fractured because of a disconnection in the way they each view the

relationship. While her father sees her as his daughter, she does not view him as her father.

Virginia describes this disconnection as follows: “We were not his children; we were his
grandchildren. There should have been a generation between us to cushion the contact” (147).

Virginia views herself as more separate from him than she should because there is such a

distance, not only in personality and attitude, but also in time. Her mother had three children

before marrying her father – Stella, George, and Gerald – who are, give or take, around fifteen

years older than Virginia. This generation of siblings sort of functions as that gap between them

that Virginia discusses, causing them to be a few of the reasons why she feels distanced from

someone who should be an integral part of her life. This disconnection is mirrored in her

relationships with her half-brothers as well. She is unable to connect because there is a gap in the

family. The family itself is disjointed, stemming from multiple marriages and many groups of

children. Virginia fails to connect with George and Gerald just as she fails to connect with her

father because they feel like more of the generation that her father should come from than her

own father does. He acts in a similar manner, forcing her and Nessa to dress and behave in a

certain manner in order to take them out and use them to aid himself. He rules over the women of

the family, taking after his father. It is difficult for Virginia to view their fiery demeanors as

direct blows though because she has no connection with them in the first place. Virginia even

describes her relationship with her father as one of ‘ambivalence’. She is basically indifferent to

the male members of her family, especially her father. Through these failed relationships,

Virginia is able to depict her disconnected feeling with her family. While Stella and Vanessa take

on the role of the loving motherly figure, and George and Gerald take on the role of the irate

father figure, Virginia finds herself stuck in the middle, fitting into neither role completely.

Touching on Virginia’s descriptions of her three vivid memories that she returns to as an

adult, Woolf, herself, describes her role in her own life. Woolf claims, “I only know that many of

these exceptional moments brought with them a peculiar horror and a physical collapse; they
seemed dominant; myself passive” (72). Virginia notes her own passive role in her life here,

bringing to the surface that she, at least in some situations, realizes that there is much going on

that she does not feel she plays an active role in. Even in these most powerful memories that

Virginia has she still feels as if she is apart from them. She observes them rather than

remembering them and sees herself as a self-proclaimed vessel. She is a figure within her own

memory; she can picture herself as if looking at a photo. She seems aware of this and attempts to

sort this out in her mind through writing her memoir.

Virginia Woolf’s memoir brings to light the fragmentation of her family vase, with

Virginia’s particular shard of glass being the one kicked under the table and lost. She remembers

so much about the lives of the others but never truly describes herself as the central figure.

Through a structuralist reading of this text, the reader can better understand how the recurring

descriptions of others and lack of placing herself at the center of her own life, Virginia is able to

portray the way in which she views her family; she views herself as a related but not innately

connected piece of that framework.

 Works Cited

Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being. Harcourt, 1985.