Abstract
Men with power in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, including psychiatrists, shared the bias that those who deviate from norms should be eliminated from society so as to prevent the human race from degenerating. In the context of such medical and eugenical discourse, Virginia Woolf was designated as "the congenital degenerate" to be exterminated because she was "a new woman", genius and neurotic. We will trace the way she fought against this label that was attached to herself. Apparently Virginia Woolf was consistent in her attitude toward medical and eugenical discourse. She made a continual attack on the falsehoods of "pseudo-science" and the hypocrisy of professionals, especially in her feminist essays. Besides she knew their political unconsciousness well enough to disclose them when she characterized two wicked doctors - Dr Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw - in her fiction Mrs Dalloway. For all these conscious rejection and criticism, however, in the cracks unconsciously revealed in her texts we can find another Virginia who accepts the doctors' discourse, which is revealed often enough in her discriminating words to others, sometimes in the perception of herself as an incompetent neurathenia. Above all, the very action to commit suicide illustrates her ultimate acceptance of medical discourse. It was ironically Virginia herself who put an end to the degenerate. What made her suffer all through her life is, as it were, "mental illness as metaphor" rather than her illness itself.
