Doubled Visions: On Heather Christle’s “In the Rhododendrons”
Heather Christle | In the Rhododendrons:A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf | Algonquin Books | April 2025 | 288 Pages
In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf, by Heather Christle , is full of stereoscopic visions. Christle is the author of four books of poetry (most recently What is Amazing) and The Crying Book, a marvelous hybrid memoir / lyric essay / research investigation into the history and biology of tears. The precise observations and playful juxtapositions Christle deploys in her poetry, and the fusion of personal revelation with wide-ranging research she performs in The Crying Book, return to make In the Rhododendrons a moving and fascinating exploration both of her own life and of the process of reading and re-learning the past.
Some of the double visions in the book are literal: Christle describes using a stereoscope—or rather, a virtual-reality device called “Google Cardboard”—in an attempt to get a glimpse of London when Covid shutdowns made travel impossible. This glimpse turns out to be unsatisfying (she really wants to visit Kew Gardens, and the closest the device will get her is the London Eye). But the memoir itself adopts a stereoscopic approach much more ambitiously, presenting pair after pair of ever so slightly divergent images, separated not by the two and a half inches required for three-dimensional stereoscopic photography, but by time. The result is a remarkable work of synthesis, overlay, and double exposure, in which past and present, child and adult, literary figure and family member illuminate each other.
“We think back through our mothers if we are women,” writes Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own. Woolf is not looking for her actual mother, but her mothers-in-literature, including Aphra Behn, Jane Austen, and Charlotte Brontë, the forerunners who made Woolf’s own writing possible. When Woolf urges women to “let flowers fall” on Behn’s grave, or when she argues that Brontë’s writing is “deformed and twisted” by her “indignation,” she is charting a family history of writing women, and offering a challenge to the younger women to whom her book is addressed. Christle’s memoir thinks back both through and to her literal mother—and to Woolf, whose role in the book is part second self, part other mother, and part quest object.
In the Rhododendrons interweaves Christle’s many visits to her mother’s childhood home near Kew, her pilgrimages to places Woolf lived or visited, and her life with her husband and child in Atlanta, as part of her attempt to find out exactly what happened after a sexual assault that took place when she was fourteen. Christle particularly wants to understand her mother’s coldness toward her following the incident. As she searches for evidence in diaries, boxes of old papers, and conversations with family members, Christle’s feelings are sometimes confirmed (her mother admits, ““You know, I always loved you, but sometimes I didn’t like you very much”), but their context and meaning shift as she turns adult eyes on her mother’s loneliness, her dislocation, and her own experience of an assault eerily similar to what Christle went through.
Christle’s history, her mother’s, and Woolf’s line up in a number of ways. Woolf and Christle’s mother are, she writes, “geographically proximate (both Woolf and my mother spent years living near Kew Gardens), and their biographies overlap at certain points of shared suffering.” Woolf and Christle, too, share significant overlaps: both have beloved sisters, and both write about their experiences of mental illness and suicidal ideation. And of course all three survived assault. But Christle is quick to point out the differences, as well: “between the two women there are enough differences in class, artistic practice, and historical moment that if, as I worked, their overlaid paths began to feel too dangerously bright I could step off onto a shadier route.” If the similarities are instructive, the differences are protective, or liberating.
Of course, any reader of Woolf, or of Christle, will instantly recognize that a recitation of parallel facts like the one in the preceding paragraph is misleading and reductive. This is especially true when some of the parallels are grounded in trauma, and Christle is clear that she does not want to be “a mediocre practitioner of the trauma plot.” Christle protests against readings of Woolf as a tragic figure when she describes how a playful quotation from Woolf is truncated in Max Richter’s music for Woolf Works: Woolf’s original compares memory’s twists and turns to “the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind,” but Richter snips Woolf’s long sentence to end in an image of “disconnected fragments… dipping and flaunting.” This edit, Christle writes, “consign[s] her to a smaller tonal range than the varied moods in which she wrote and lived. Why not let her get to the underwear? It is dishonest—cruel—to stop her from reaching her laugh.” Christle’s memoir, like Woolf’s fiction, is full of verbal and visual surprises, mischievous leaps of the imagination, breadcrumb-trails of pretend play, as when she is spotting beauty on a late-night walk by the Thames: “When a streetlamp illuminates a tree I pretend it is the tree itself that is sending light out from within. Sometimes I am able to untether myself from pretending and coast all the way to belief.”
This is not to say that play is the dominant note. Christle, like Woolf, wrestles with mood swings and suicidal ideation. But one obstacle to understanding suicide is that we think in terms of narrative. We like to tell stories with beginnings, middles, and ends, in which the final event reveals or consolidates the accrued meaning of the story. Flaubert’s Emma swallows arsenic or Tolstoy’s Anna leaps in front of a train because their stories are tragic, not the other way round. “Reader, I married him” leaves Jane Eyre happily ensconced as Mrs. Rochester, reassuring us that we have been reading a romance, not a horror story about an abusive husband victimizing the nanny. But Woolf’s novels are not so tidy. In To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay dies in a brief parenthesis toward the start of the novel’s central section, “Time Passes,” a long chapter set in an empty house and containing almost no human activity. The suicide of Septimus Warren Smith is part of the climax of Mrs. Dalloway, but Clarissa, the title character, does not see it as an end-point. “Death,” she thinks, “was an attempt to communicate.” And in Orlando, the novel with which Christle engages most rewardingly, the main character never gets around to dying at all, instead living for the three hundred years it takes to write and publish a really good poem. We can read Woolf’s work in light of her suicide—it’s hard not to—but in doing so we see all the more clearly that her central interest is understanding a thousand facets of life.
Christle’s juxtaposition of Woolf with her mother reminds us that, as Woolf’s artist Lily Briscoe realizes, “nothing was simply one thing.” Woolf gives Christle a prototype not just for the artist, or the woman artist, or the survivor, but for the practice of holding different ideas in mind simultaneously (Keats’ “negative capability”—not all the literary influences here are maternal). This ability allows the artist to look at her own history and attributes and see her imperfections, contradictions, and yes, suffering without reaching reductive conclusions. Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway “would not say of any one in the world that they were this or were that.” Christle’s memoir similarly refuses to neatly parcel off her past or her characters into tidy categories, not just out of fairness but from the profound desire to see things as they really are, in their beauty and complexity.
“If I line up the right pairs, then the past will come clear, and so will my place within it,” writes Christle. But the purpose of this stereoscopic clarity is not just observation—it is action. Christle looks at the past, she says, to change it. By seeing what happened clearly, from the perspectives of her mother, her sister, her cousin, her child self, and her adult self, she can alter the past’s ripple effects into her present, revise the meaning of events. In the process, Christle comes to resemble not so much Woolf as one of Woolf’s most playful and creative characters, Orlando. Christle doesn’t switch genders or live for three hundred years (at least not yet), but she turns to Orlando as a model for the way that Woolf’s work transcends time, trauma, and even seriousness by holding them all in sight together. The clarity she achieves is a Woolfian “whole,” a refusal to “pin down” the past like a dead moth by adopting a single angle of view.
In a beautiful climactic moment, Christle uses her stereoscope to combine photographs of two parties celebrated at what her family calls “Birthday Hill” in Kew, separated by the distance of decades. The parallels and echoes she sees are not equivalences—she is neither her mother nor Woolf—but opportunities for mutual understanding, a chance to change the past through the miracle of binocular vision.