Meet my friends...

Virginia Woolf - English novelist, essayist and feminist

Birth date: January 25, 1882 - London, England

Marriage: to Leonard Woolf in 1912

Death date: March 28, 1941 - near Rodmell, Sussex, England

Reason for death: Suicide

What caught my heart: the poetic prose of Mrs. Dalloway

Favorite quote: "My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?"

Frida Kahlo - Mexican painter

Birth date: July 6, 1907 - Coyoacán, near Mexico City, Mexico

Marriage to: Diego Rivera in 1929, divorced in 1939, remarried in 1940

Death date: July 13, 1954

Reason for death: Illness, Pulmonary embolism, possibly overdose

What caught my heart: her tumultuous love life with Diego Rivera and La dos Fridas

Favorite quote: "Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?"

If you knew me while I was taking my Modern European Lit class, you heard a lot about Virginia Woolf and her novel Mrs. Dalloway. I was very interested in her life and mental illness and suicide, as well as her poetically written novels. She took the novel and turned it completely upside down. Her syntax is intriguing and occasionally confusing. Especially when she's been discussing a topic or character for a page and half and still hasn't told you who or what she's talking about. She also played with gender roles, creating masculine female characters and feminine male characters. In Mrs. Dalloway, a bit of Freud is apparent as well.

She was brilliant and so deeply troubled at the same time. As a child she was sexually abused and throughout her life suffered from manic depression, leading to her suicide (she put stones in her pockets and walked out in a river and drowned herself). She married Leonard Woolf, and though they had a close bond, Woolf had various affairs with other women. She suffered through terrible mood swings and mental breakdowns throughout her life. Her use of words, her life, her fascination with death... it all piqued my interest.

"I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greets possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that - everybody know it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. V." - March 28, 1941 - to Leonard Woolf

And then there was Frida. During the summer I watched the movie Frida. The movie tells the story of Frida Kahlo's life and her passionately crazy relationship with Diego Rivera - their many affairs, her pain, her paintings.. And once again, I was attracted to the work and story of a brilliant but tortured artist.

When she was 18, Kahlo was in a terrible bus accident that left her body completely broken and injured her reproductive ability. She would be confined to her bed - often in body casts or other forms of casts - for weeks or months. Even though she regained her ability to walk, she suffered from pain and illness the rest of her life. Her paintings reflected her pain. She married the muralist Diego Rivera, but their marriage was not a peaceful. Both Kahlo and Rivera had many affairs... sometimes they lived together and sometimes in separate houses. They got divorced after several affairs and later, they remarried. Kahlo and Rivera were also active communists and were friends with Leon Trotsky when he came to Mexico seeking political asylum. Kahlo also had an affair with Trotsky while he was there. At the end of her life, she was hospitalized many times, had a leg amputated, and was taking numerous pain killers.

One of my favorite painting is La dos Fridas:

As my interest in Frida Kahlo increased, I couldn't help but notice the similarities between her and Virginia Woolf. Here's what I first observed:

1. Both were crazy brilliant and artistic women
2. Both suffered from some type of debilitation - Kahlo, physical & Woolf, mental
3. Both were bisexual
4. Both women's struggles and lives are reflected deeply in their work

In an effort to celebrate these two women, I've connected a passage from Mrs. Dalloway to one of Kahlo's paintings:

"A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wrested about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in correction, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death." ~ Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway pg. 84

The Dream (The Bed)

I don't know why I am so fascinated with these two women. Maybe it's the way they take their lives and put it into their work. Maybe it's their interest in death. Maybe it's how their lives were so different than my own

Maybe it's because they were two women, transformed by pain and love and the beauty of words and art.