Mrs Dalloway (5 page)

Although many Bloomsbury intellectuals in Woolf's
circle had been pacifists during the war, she also had many friends, including Siegfried Sassoon, who had been in the trenches and who had experienced shell-shock. Many elements of Septimus's experience suggest deferred war neurosis. During the war, Woolf writes ironically, he has developed manliness, which is to say that he has learned how to repress his feelings. When his best friend Evans is killed, ‘Septimus, far from showing any emotion or recognising that here was the end of a friendship, congratulated himself upon feeling very little and very reasonably' (pp. 94–5). Yet after the war, everything in his life has changed. He can no longer appreciate literature; he does not love his wife; he cannot bear the thought of having a child. The world seems a vicious and desperate place in which ‘human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment' (p. 98). He suffers from ‘headaches, sleeplessness, fears, dreams' (p. 100). In particular he is haunted by the spectre of Evans.

Some critics have argued that Septimus is a repressed homosexual whose madness is caused by sexual guilt. But this reading neglects the fact that his most intense romantic feelings are for Miss Isabel Pole, the upper-class woman who introduced him to literature at Morley College. He is tortured with guilt over his sexual fantasies about Miss Pole, whom consciously he had only wished to respect, venerate, and idolize. Unable to reconcile his unconscious desires with his strong feelings of propriety and even class superiority, Septimus sees all sexual desire as evil and sordid. Overall, he is a tragic figure of the class system, completely displaced by the war. His romantic and vocational dreams cannot be met in the England of 1923.

Moreover, shell-shock cannot account for all of Septimus's symptoms. He is far more acutely disturbed than shell-shock patients. His visual and auditory hallucinations, his delusions of omnipotence, and his accompanying sense of guilt and martyrdom suggest schizophrenia. A voice constantly communicates with him, telling him that he is the messiah ‘come to renew society' (p. 27). The natural world speaks to him in a series of codes and signals. The letters of the skywriting plane are ‘smoke words . . . signalling their intention to provide him . . . with beauty, more beauty!' (p. 23) He feels so light that he might fly or fall into the flames except for his wife's hand on his knee holding him down; he believes that his voice ‘in certain atmospheric conditions' (p. 24) can make trees come alive. The random noises in the street he takes as premeditated harmonies calling for ‘the birth of a new religion' (p. 24); he thinks he can hear people's evil thoughts, ‘making up lies as they passed in the street'. Sitting in the park, he notes down ‘revelations', hears the birds singing messages to him in Greek, and sees the dead watching him from behind the railings.

In his delusional system, everything is conspiring to tell him that he has been chosen to learn the secret truths of life, and to convey them to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. These truths are not judgements on the war, as in Sassoon's poems; rather, they are abstractions about universal love, and, alarmingly, the view that there is no crime. The other side of these delusions of grandeur is the delusion of terrible guilt: that he has ‘committed an appalling crime and been condemned to death by human nature' (p. 105). The voices call upon him to destroy himself in the interests of mankind.

Woolf gives a finely detailed account of Septimus's desperate effort to distinguish between reality and hallucination. He dimly knows that what he takes as a musical crescendo is only an old man playing a penny whistle by the pub, or that the roses which seem to grow through his body are the figure on the boarding-house wallpaper. But he cannot keep these perceptions stable. It is characteristic of Septimus's deranged state of mind that he searches constantly for ‘scientific' rationalizations to explain his ability to read minds, know the future, or see dogs turn into men: ‘It was the heat-wave presumably, operating upon a brain made sensitive by eons of evolution' (p. 74).

In short, Septimus is not just a sensitive man who has been traumatized by the war; he is in the grip of a very serious mental illness. The description of his sickness was difficult for Woolf to write, since it drew on her own memories of breakdowns. ‘The mad part tries me so much, makes my mind squint so badly that I can hardly face spending the next weeks at it', she writes in June 1923.
⁵⁷
Woolf's indignant representation of the kind of therapeutic advice Septimus receives from Doctors Holmes and Bradshaw also incorporates her own unhappy experience with doctors. She had been treated with the ‘rest cure', a therapy designed for nervous women by the American physician Silas Weir Mitchell, and imported to England in the 1880s. The rest cure involved isolation, complete bed rest for up to six weeks, a rich diet and enforced weight gain, and the absence of all intellectual activity. It was a difficult and even maddening therapy for Woolf, who deeply resented the infantilization of the experience. During the war, moreover, military doctors argued that the rest cure was too feminizing a therapy to be useful in the treatment of
shell-shock patients, who needed meaningful activity to restore their self-esteem and equilibrium.

Woolf reserves her harshest satire for the doctors. The bluff middle-class Holmes tries to deal with Septimus's anguish by forcing him into the rigid mould of middle-class English masculine conduct, including doses of porridge and cricket. The upper-class Bradshaw recognizes the severity of the case, but his cold and arrogant manner, the style of someone accustomed to give orders, is the one least likely to succeed in the light of Septimus's delusions of persecution. As readers, we identify so closely with Septimus's suffering, and with the pathos of Rezia's effort to protect him, that we tend to be swept away by Woolf's anger and to see Septimus as the victim of medical power, whose suicide is, as Clarissa says, a heroic act of defiance. But this view cannot be sustained by a careful reading. Septimus has not only threatened to kill himself, but wants his wife to die as well. ‘Now we will kill ourselves', he tells her as they stand by the river, with a look in his eyes ‘when a train went by, or an omnibus' (p. 72). Rezia is brave and loving to stand by him, but he is dangerous. Although they are tactless, snobbish, patronizing, and obtuse, the doctors of
Mrs. Dalloway
are probably right in recommending rest and seclusion for Septimus. Indeed, much as she despised it, the rest cure was therapeutic to Woolf, and before the days of drugs, the best care available.

Yet in the contexts of the novel, the very extremity of Septimus's illness reflects the conditions of his society, one in which the after-effects of the war have been evaded, where Proportion is worshipped, and feelings have been numbed and anaesthetized. The war seems to have left the ‘governing classes' curiously untouched. They continue
in their routines of civilized luncheons, letters to
The Times
, well-meaning causes, Academy paintings of sunsets and cows, and elegant parties. None of the major upper-class characters in the novel has suffered a personal loss, or given a father, husband, or son to the bloodshed. The Dalloways have only a daughter; although Sally Seton is fifty-five, none of her five sons appears to be old enough to have fought. Even the circle of servants around the wealthy characters are either women or very old men. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, newly installed in Westminster Abbey, could almost stand for the anonymity of the dead for Clarissa's circle.

Historically, of course, this was not the case at all. Casualties among young officers were enormous. But Woolf wants us to see the emotional repression of English polite society. Alex Zwerdling notes that ‘solidity, rigidity, stasis, the inability to communicate feelings' point to something in the nature of these characters that ‘makes them incapable of reacting appropriately to the critical events of their time or of their own lives.' The governing class has reacted with stoic denial even to the tragedies of the war, although like ‘little Mr. Bowley,' they have become ‘sealed with wax over the deeper sources of life.' Thus, Zwerdling persuasively argues, ‘Woolf gives us a picture of a class impervious to change in a society that desperately needs or demands it, a class that worships tradition and settled order, but cannot accommodate the new and disturbing.'
⁵⁸

In this context, Septimus is a scapegoat, whose visionary emotional turbulence and lack of psychic defences has to be seen in contrast to the fatuousness, insensitivity, impassivity, and self-protective caution of the dominant codes. Septimus feels so much because others feel so little.
He has wished to be a poet and an artist, not a clerk; and his disordered perceptions are also creative and powerful. In the forms of ballet, film, modernist poetry, and surrealist art, they were also to shape the new post-war culture whose greatness Woolf had predicted.

In life, Septimus would never be invited to the Dalloway party which his death symbolically interrupts. ‘All must converge upon the party at the end', Woolf wrote in her notes. Indeed all that is snobbish and artificial about London society converges at the party. Here are gathered the pompous, the frivolous, the narrow-minded and the moribund. People arrive to be announced by the hired butler like ghosts of the past. The Prime Minister in his gold lace is an emblem of the hollowness of the occasion. As Zwerdling observes, ‘The party at the end of the novel, for all its brilliance, is a kind of wake. It reveals the form of power without its substance.'
⁵⁹
Clarissa's anxieties about the success or failure of this occasion seem trivial in view of what lies beyond the fairy-lights of her garden, and a reading which celebrates her as a great artist whose medium is parties does not seem justified.

Yet the party also is a communal event, and a comic pageant in which life itself is the cause of celebration. As Woolf takes us into the minds of the various guests, we see that their façades of festivity and good breeding conceal a terror of ageing and death. Coming together is a way for them to affirm continuity. For Sally and Peter it is an opportunity to remind themselves that they are still people of passion, that they feel deeply despite appearances. For old Mrs. Hilbery, the laughter is simply a way for her to forget that ‘it is certain we must die'.

This society will not undergo radical change. Elizabeth, who has vague dreams of a life different from her
mother's, will probably repeat it. She too adores her dog more than her suitors, and is already being watched by admirers like Willie Titcomb. Yet although Richard Dalloway is too shy to tell his wife that he loves her, he does tell his daughter that she is lovely. For Clarissa, the thought of Septimus's death is a reminder of the intensity and joy of a life, even if beyond the triumphs of youth. If her identification with Septimus is perhaps sentimental, nonetheless it is part of her realization of her own limits and possibilities. ‘For there she was,' the novel ends, insisting that as readers too we must take Clarissa on her own terms. Despite its fascination with death,
Mrs. Dalloway
ends, as it begins, with a tribute to endurance, survival, and joy.

Elaine Showalter
Princeton University, 1991

1.
There are now several studies of
Mrs. Dalloway
alone. See Harold Bloom, ed.,
Virginia Woolf's ‘Mrs. Dalloway'
(Chelsea House, 1988); David Dowling,
Mrs. Dalloway: Mapping Streams of Consciousness
(Twayne, 1991); and Jeremy Hawthorn,
Virginia Woolf's ‘Mrs. Dalloway': A Study in Alienation
(Sussex University Press, 1975).

2.
Margaret Drabble, ‘Introduction,'
Pride and Prejudice
(Virago, 1989, p. xiii).

3.
Diary
, II, 15 October 1923, p. 272.

4.
Jacqueline Rose,
The Haunting of Sylvia Plath
(Virago, 1991, p. 112).

5.
Paul Bailey, ‘Into the waves,'
Times Literary Supplement
, 13 May 1973.

6.
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar,
No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century
, vol. 2,
Sexchanges
(Yale University Press, 1989, pp. 317–18).

7.
See Harvena Richter, ‘The
Ulysses
Connection: Clarissa Dalloway's Bloomsday,'
Studies in the Novel
21 (Fall 1989); pp. 305–19.

8.
Diary
, II: 19 June 1923, p. 248.

9.
Alex Zwerdling,
Virginia Woolf and the Real World
(University of California Press, 1986, pp. 120–43).

10.
Diary
, II, 18 February 1922, p. 168.

11.
Diary
, II, 26 July 1922, p. 186.

12.
Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown
(1924): (retitled ‘Character in Fiction'),
Essays
, III, pp. 420–36.

13.
The Tunnel
(1919),
Essays
, III, pp. 10–12.

14.
For an excellent discussion of the evolution of Woolf's feminist modernism, see Makiko Minow-Pinkney,
Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject: Feminine Writings in the Major Novels
(Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1987, pp. 1–23).

15.
Herbert Marder, ‘Split Perspectives: Types of Incongruity in
Mrs. Dalloway
,'
Papers in Language and Literature
22 (Winter 1986): p. 59.

16.
Winifred Holtby, an early critic of Woolf, was the first to note the major influence that the cinema had on her writing. See Holtby,
Virginia Woolf
(Wishart & Co., 1932, pp. 116–36).

17.
‘The cinema,' in
CE
, II, p. 272.

18.
Ibid., p. 272.

19.
Gillian Beer, ‘The island and the aeroplane: the case of Virginia Woolf,' in
Nation and Narration
, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (Routledge, 1990, p. 276).