Shellshock, Suicide and Septimus: Illness as a Metaphor in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

It can be said that Modernity emerged from British society’s repulsion of four years of brutal trench warfare on the Western front during the First World War. New innovations such as mustard gas, tanks, and heavy artillery fuelled a maelstrom of death and destruction on massive scales, leading to hundreds of thousands of casualties on both the Entente and Central Powers’ sides. As the historian Derek Fraser notes, the ‘First World War had a profound influence upon British society, for quite simply it swept away a whole world and created a new one.’¹ Fraser also argues that the war radically altered the course of British social policy, though reforms in post-war social policy ultimately failed to secure the welfare of soldiers who suffered from war-induced psychiatric disorders upon their return from the Western Front.² Advancements in the psychiatric treatment of these mental conditions, such as shell-shock, lagged behind whilst the majority of British society remained oblivious and indifferent to the difficulties that these illnesses imposed on their veteran victims. This generally unsympathetic attitude toward the soldiers’ wounded minds³ inspired Virginia Woolf to write Mrs. Dalloway, a novel in which she addresses society’s attitude towards mental illness by focusing on the plight and torment of a shell-shocked veteran named Septimus Warren Smith. Woolf uses mental illness as a metaphor to describe the ills of a progressive society that ironically fails to understand how deeply the roots of the Great War extend.

In order to conduct a psycho-literary analysis of Septimus Warren Smith, one must first address Woolf’s frequent use of juxtaposition, an effective Modernist literary technique that adds dimension and depth to Septimus, a character the reader might otherwise interpret as obscure or superficially unhappy. The incorporation of this technique alongside other Modernist elements, such as technological advancement and the departure from conventional modes of thought, allows the reader to identify the social changes that have emerged from the remnants of post-War England as she plunges into a modern age. This is perhaps best displayed in the episode during which the reader first encounters Septimus, when he and Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway, the novel’s protagonist, first cross paths and thus become one another’s double. During this episode, Woolf uses juxtaposition in a twofold manner. She apposes Septimus and Clarissa to create a point of departure from which she then juxtaposes Septimus’s dynamic surroundings with his dark, troubled thoughts. Setting these elements side by side provides a frame of reference through which the reader first determines that Septimus is psychologically troubled, a tremendous feat considering the complexity of mental illness. As demonstrated in her notebook entry of October 16, 1922, Woolf wholly intended for this double juxtaposition to take place: ‘Suppose it to be connected this way: Sanity and insanity. Mrs. D. Seeing the truth. SS seeing the insane truth. The pace to be given by the gradual increase of S’s insanity on the one side by the approach of the party on the other’.⁴ Although one of Mrs. Dalloway‘s main objectives is to forge a link between mental illness and society’s failure to ultimately acknowledge the severity of this condition, there is an underlying parallel that connects Septimus and Clarissa. The former, a misunderstood war veteran, and the latter, a politician’s wife condemned to fulfill the role of the ‘perfect hostess’, both suffer from varying degrees of subordination and unhappiness. In this regard, the scope of one defines the other.

Woolf’s depiction of illness as a metaphor is not just an attempt to shed light on the ailments of post-war society; rather, she is expressing that the true illness lies in the fact that shell-shock is not recognised as a legitimate, war-induced medical condition by her contemporaries. The majority of physicians believed that ‘shell shock resulted from physical damage to the brain by the shock of exploding shells, but prolonged exposure to stress was the real cause.’⁵ Since the root of shell-shock is psychological and not physical in nature, the true illness lies in society’s failure to sympathise with those whose psychological welfare was compromised during the war. The First World War was not a war of annihilation but one of attrition, one that witnessed both the Entente and Central Powers’ ruthless attempts to destroy one another’s resources in order to reign victorious. Attrition, or total war, manifested itself in the accumulation of enormous body counts; a war in which Britain alone suffered 740,000 casualties.⁶ Although Modernism sprung from society’s disdain that such ruthless barbarism was unleashed over a civilised continent, a movement accompanied by countless new technologies, modes of thought, and genres of art, progressivism in psychiatric medicine straggled.

In 1920, Sir Philip Gibbs, one of Britain’s primary reporters during the First World War, noted in Realities of War that there was ‘a disease and insanity in our present state, due to the travail of the war, and the education of the war.’⁷ Woolf’s October 16, 1920 diary entry parallels Gibbs’s concerns in that her emphasis on juxtaposing ‘sanity’ and ‘insanity’ is part of her overarching view that society’s treatment of mental illness is an ailment within itself.⁸ That Septimus’s death at the end of the novel ushers in the climax of Mrs. Dalloway is a testimony to the fact that the obscurity of mental illness is of paramount importance to the author: ‘A young man had killed himself. [...] Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them [...] But this young man who had killed himself- had he plunged holding his treasure?’⁹ It is as though the events of the day have converged toward the moment during which Clarissa learns of Septimus’s suicide during her party. The novel’s motif, time, the temporal variable which binds the story together, has stopped and has thus disrupted the flow of the novel’s events. Septimus’s suicide abruptly throws Clarissa’s life into focus as she sees his tragic end as a means of communication and renewal, and as a way of placing her own life’s regrets into perspective:

We can only speculate that Septimus’s sacrificial gift includes a demonstration of Clarissa’s alternatives: to preserve the intensity of passion through death or to accept the changing offerings of life. Through Septimus, Woolf recasts the development impasse as a choice between development or death. By recalling to Clarissa the power of her past and the only method of eternalizing it, Septimus enables Clarissa to acknowledge and renounce its hold, to embrace the imperfect pleasures of adulthood more completely.¹⁰

Here, Abel offers insight into the choices Clarissa faces upon learning of Septimus’s suicide. She suggests that the shell-shocked soldier’s tragic demise infuses life into Clarissa, an empty shell whose sole form of self-expression is through hosting elaborate parties for her husband’s political entourage. Both Septimus and Clarissa, though members of different social strata, experience a form of death that is either physical or psychological in nature. J. H. Stape uses death in Mrs. Dalloway as a means of providing insight into the theme of the novel: ‘The theme of Mrs. Dalloway is probably more easily missed by the younger generation and by foreigners than by those who grew up surrounded by the English social scene before the first war. The theme of Mrs Dalloway is the death of the soul, or perhaps one should say the withering, for death is an exaggeration.’¹¹ Clarissa experiences a withering of her soul when she fulfills the role of the ‘perfect hostess’, a role that limits her social mobility and catalyses her loss of identity. Although Septimus never has a powerful, life-altering epiphany like Clarissa does, his suicide is ultimately a final attempt to communicate his grief. He is a recluse without a sense of reality, and he knows that taking his own life is ‘merely the only means of escape from the indignity of brutes with red nostrils snuffing into the secret places of his mind.’¹² Clarissa, on the other hand, uses his death as a point of departure from which she starts a new life. For Clarissa Dalloway, ‘her awakening to fellow-feeling with a madman is no more than a moment hidden in darkness, but it transforms her. She is no longer the bright hostess in a filmy green frock, leading in the Prime Minister, for alone in that dark room she meets a self never fully acknowledged, capable of an unprecedented imaginative reach.’¹³ Septimus’s death holds the bittersweet promise of new opportunities, albeit the characters are connected through the most peculiar of circumstances.

Mrs. Dalloway‘s subplot on Septimus begins in medias res; only later does the reader learn that his mental health deteriorated upon witnessing the death of his friend and fellow soldier, Evans, on the battlefield, a tragedy that plunges him into a world of detachment, isolation, and hallucination:

Septimus was one of the first to volunteer. He went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square. [...] when Evans was killed, just before the Armistice, in Italy, Septimus, far from showing any emotion or recognizing that here was the end of friendship, congratulated himself upon feeling very little and very reasonably. The War, death, had won promotion, was still under thirty and was bound to survive. He was right there. The last shells missed him. He watched them explode with indifference. [...] he could not feel¹⁴

His inability to feel emotion during four years of horrific warfare is testimony to the fact that Septimus experiences a ‘withering of the soul’, a tragedy that soon metamorphoses into a crippling psychological illness.¹⁵ His state of mind continues to worsen when he marries a young Italian woman named Rezia, whose ‘female world is shattered by the conjunction of marriage and war’, and returns with her to London.¹⁶ Rezia, like the majority of society, cannot understand her husband’s mental illness nor come to terms with it. In this regard, Woolf gives her reader insight into the common misconceptions of shell-shock during the early post-war years by ironically noting that Dr. Holmes, Septimus’s doctor, has ‘told [Lucrezia] to make her husband (who had nothing whatever seriously the matter with him but was a little out of sorts) take an interest in things outside himself.’¹⁷ As the novel progresses, it becomes evident that Septimus’s doctor has no insight into the plight of mental illness. He fails to realise that since his patient has suffered serious psychological damage after intense periods of stress, he is unable to detach himself from his own thoughts. Though shell-shock was not a term unknown in the British medical lexicon, since Septimus’s doctors, Dr. Holmes and Dr. Bradshaw, refer to his condition as such throughout the novel, it is evident that his doctors are unaware of the magnitude and severity of his disease. Woolf unabashedly draws inspiration from this reality: ‘Mrs. Dalloway has branched into a book; and I adumbrate here a study of insanity and suicide: the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side- something like that. Septimus Smith?’¹⁸

Since Woolf suffered from mental illness during her own life, a disease that eventually led to her suicide in the river Thames during the Second World War, her interest in addressing insanity in the post-war metropolis most certainly stems from her own experiences.¹⁹ In light of this, the reader realises that Dr. Holmes’ inability to understand the hardships that shell-shock imposes on its victims was a common attitude amongst Woolf’s contemporaries. In fact, shell-shocked soldiers (a condition referred to as neurasthenia or war neurosis by physicians) often suffered from symptoms of ‘anxiety, an exaggerated startle response, tremors, nightmares, hallucinations, delusions, [and] withdrawal’, symptoms that Woolf attributes to Septimus.²⁰ In a historical context, when attrition drastically increased the probability of dying in combat, a strategy that had especially devastating consequences in the bloody battles of the Somme and Verdun, twenty to thirty per cent of battlefield casualties and mutinying soldiers were psychologically impaired.²¹ These men were seen as effeminate and morally flawed by their respective General Staffs and Home Fronts, and their psychological plight ignored:

Early in the war the British diagnosed psychiatric casualties as shell shock with a ‘W’ [which] entitled men to a wound stripe and disability with a pension. The alternative diagnosis, neurasthenia, was a sickness with an ‘S’ designation, no honours, no pension. [...] medical officers were liberal with the diagnosis of shell shock and transfer home for rest and hypnotherapy. By 1917 the drain on frontline manpower for psychiatric reasons became serious, and medical officers were encouraged to use the ‘S’ designation. [...] Just before the Third Battle of Ypres, the British General Staff issued General Routine Order Number 2384 forbidding the diagnosis of shell shock and ordering that all psychiatric casualties be sent to a single diagnosis of ‘NYDN’ (Not Yet Diagnosed, Nervous) with the dual intent of returning as many men as possible to the front and of discouraging malingering.²²

The passage above reveals the extent to which the belligerent General Staffs did not sympathise with nor realise the severity of shell-shock. If one were to place Septimus within this historical context, while keeping in mind that neurasthenia was not considered medically legitimate since it compromised Britain’s military manpower, he or she might gain insight into the cause of Septimus’s troubles. Septimus’s doctors merely regard him as ‘a little out of sorts’, a vague and questionable medical theory.²³ Hence, from a Woolfian perspective, ignorance of the plight of shell-shock is an ailment that plagued military medicine both during and after the war.

Although Mrs. Dalloway takes place five years after the Armistice was signed in the woods of Compiegne, France on November 11, 1918, Septimus’s mental health does not improve. Instead, he becomes increasingly alienated and hallucinatory, just as ‘countless [soldiers] suffered long after [the war] had ended.’²⁴ Perhaps the time that has elapsed between the end of the War and Mrs. Dalloway is symbolic, as it sheds light on a facet of moral decadence or social ill. A common failure to grasp the subtleties of an ‘insane’ person who has been driven to his demise by a force much greater than himself, such as war (or perhaps internal conflict, an even greater battle) is the driving force behind Woolf’s juxtaposition of Clarissa and Septimus. In other words, her ‘revulsion from the way it had been interpreted’ allows her to draw parallels between a shell-shocked, suicidal veteran and an aristocratic, subordinated politician’s wife by touching on their common humanity and exposing their innermost thoughts through stream of consciousness. She effectively proves that her two characters, one who lost his sanity and the other who lost her opportunities, share many similarities and that internal conflict transcends boundaries of class and gender:

Woolf juxtaposes her ‘sane’ character to an insane doppelganger: Clarissa Dalloway represents the ‘normally’ alienated person who functions in her society, but whose other and perhaps better self is the madman Septimus Warren Smith. [...] Although they never meet, their paths through the physical world cross throughout the novel. On another level, the basis of their connection would also seem to be the experiences of both, differing only in degree of intensity, in the subjective realms of anxiety, isolation, ontological insecurity, and, finally, psychosis and mysticism.²⁵

The suggestion that there is an element of mysticism in Woolf’s treatment of Septimus commands attention. Mysticism plays a central role in an episode at the beginning of the novel during which the author paints a vivid portrait of London, a vibrant metropolis tottering on the brink of modernity. In this instance, modernity is symbolised by a jet soaring above awe-stricken city-dwellers as it spells out an advertisement for toffee.²⁶ Although most of the enthused spectators marvel at this new technology, as demonstrated by their indifference toward a royal streetcar entering Buckingham Palace, Septimus is completely transfixed by his thoughts and hallucinations and interprets the symbolism of the jet through a shell-shocked lens. Through the use of stream of consciousness, Woolf gives her reader access to Septimus’s psyche by describing that the ‘smoke words languishing and melting in the sky’ are a means of placing his thoughts into perspective.²⁷ While the people around him see the jet as a new beginning and as a transition from war-torn society to modern society, Septimus treats the event scientifically. Woolf’s choice of diction expertly conveys his mood in that it reduces the excitement around him to a series of sound and light waves; in one instance, a loquacious woman next to him sends ‘running up into his brain waves of sound’ and in another, he is entranced by ‘the excitement of the elm trees rising and falling, rising and falling… from blue to green of a hollow wave.’²⁸ In this regard, she juxtaposes the systematic and the subliminal in that each stimulus follows a parabolic trajectory through his troubled mind, much like the properties of waves and optics of Physics, while simultaneously creating an aura of mysticism and obscurity to expose Septimus’s deepest thoughts. Moreover, the colours and sounds he senses, such as ‘blue to green’ and ‘elm trees rising and falling’, are reminiscent of the sensorial shell-shock, as soldiers suffered distortions of light, sound, and other surrounding stimuli when caught in an explosion or in heavy artillery fire on the Western front. It is as though Woolf plunges the reader into the trenches and impairs his or her senses by means of a detonated hand grenade or the fiery trajectory of a trench mortar in an attempt to show the extent to which the jet has generated an explosive response from the city dwellers.

Just as the Londoners are mystified by the airplane, the reader is both mystified and alarmed by Septimus’s response to the jet and by how he feels that the sights and sounds of London are enough to drive an individual mad: ‘he [will] not go mad. He would shut his eyes; he would see no more.’²⁹ Like the ‘voices dinning in [Woolf's] ear’, as mentioned in the author’s suicide note, which ‘suggested to her that she was going mad’, the voices that Septimus hears in his mind reaffirm what the reader already knows.³⁰ Septimus has already gone mad and he sees shutting his eyes as a means of holding on to his sanity, a train of thought that foreshadows his suicide. His fatal case of shell-shock has destroyed his ability to adapt to the new modern metropolis. For the spectators, the plane soaring overhead is symbolic of socio-political rebirth and a chance to place their ills behind them and look ahead, optimistically, into the future. For Septimus, however, the jet represents a wartime agent of death and destruction, and candy advertisements by means of this death machine are aspects of modern society that disturb him overwhelmingly. In other words, his anxiety towards the jet is a synecdoche of his inability to assimilate into a modern, post-war society in which technology and large, booming city centres are synonymous with everyday life.

Although the post-war era witnessed countless innovative inventions and groundbreaking discoveries, too little was known about First World War-induced psychological disorders to properly treat shell-shocked veterans like Septimus. It was not the presence of shell-shock that ailed society, however, but that physicians and civilians alike failed to grasp the legitimacy and severity of the disease. From this reality emerged a masterpiece of Modernist literature, a novel in which Virginia Woolf sets out to juxtapose the ‘sane’ and the ‘insane’ in an attempt to express her repulsion of society’s indifference and obliviousness towards those who share her psychological plight. Although Clarissa Dalloway is partially developed by being compared and contrasted with Septimus, Woolf’s ingenious use of stream of consciousness, juxtaposition, modernity, and the war’s crippling psychological side effects allow her to portray mental illness as a metaphor in order to describe the ills of a progressive society that ironically fails to understand how deeply the roots of the war extend. As one of the most important characters in Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus embodies some of the conventions that eventually become defining characteristics of Modernist Literature. However, movements such as Modernism are ephemeral and often fuse into others. What makes Mrs. Dalloway so timeless is that Woolf’s social and psychological commentaries transcend all eras and always remain relevant and universal.

Endnotes

¹ Derek Fraser, The Evolution of the British Welfare State (London: Macmillan, 1973), p. 164.

² Ibid., p. 164.

³ The term ‘wounded minds’ has been borrowed from the exhibit ‘Shell-Shock: Wounded Minds’ in Gallery II (‘For Crown and Country’) of the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, Canada.

⁴ Phyllis Rose, Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf (London: Pandora Press, 1986), p. 135.

⁵ ‘Shell-Shock: Wounded Minds’, For Crown and Country: Gallery II, Canadian War Museum, Ottawa, Canada.

⁶ Michael Howard, The First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 122.

⁷ Who’s Who, ‘Sir Philip Gibbs,’ a Multimedia History of World War One, <http://www.firstworldwar.com/bio/gibbs.htm>.

⁸ Rose, p. 135.

⁹ Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York, Harcourt Inc., 2002), p. 184.

¹⁰ Elizabeth Abel, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 40.

¹¹ J. H. Stape, Virginia Woolf: Interviews and Recollections (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995), p. 161.

¹² Lyndall Gordon, Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1984), p. 66.

¹³ Ibid., p. 191.

¹⁴ Woolf, p. 86.

¹⁵ Stape, p. 161.

¹⁶ Abel, p. 41.

¹⁷ Woolf, p. 21.

¹⁸ Virginia Woolf et al., The Mrs. Dalloway Reader (New York, Harcourt, Inc., 2004), back cover.

¹⁹ Gordon, p. 273.

²⁰ Priscilla Mary Roberts, World War I: A Student Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2006), p. 1679.

²¹ Roberts, p. 1679-1680.

²² Ibid. p. 1679.

²³ Woolf, p. 21.

²⁴ ‘Shell-Shock: Wounded Minds’, For Crown and Country: Gallery II, Canadian War Museum, Ottawa, Canada.

²⁵ Barbara Hill Rigney, Madness and Sexual Politics in the Feminist Novel: Studies in Bronte, Woolf, Lessing, and Atwood (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), p. 41.

²⁶ Woolf, p. 21-22.

²⁷ Ibid., p. 21-22.

²⁸ Ibid., p. 21-22.

²⁹ Gordon, p. 273.

³⁰ Ibid., p. 273.

References

Abel, Elizabeth, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989)

Fraser, Derek, The Evolution of the British Welfare State (London: Macmillan, 1973)

Gordon, Lyndall, Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1984)

Howard, Michael, The First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)

Rigney, Barbara Hill, Madness and Sexual Politics in the Feminist Novel: Studies in Bronte, Woolf, Lessing, and Atwood (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1980)

Roberts, Priscilla Mary, World War I: A Student Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2006)

Rose, Phyllis, Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf (London: Pandora Press, 1986)

‘Shell-Shock: Wounded Minds’, For Crown and Country: Gallery II, The Canadian War Museum, Ottawa, Canada.

Stape, J. H., Virginia Woolf: Interviews and Recollections (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995)

‘Who’s Who, ‘Sir Philip Gibbs’, A Multimedia History of World War One, <http://www.firstworldwar.com/bio/gibbs.htm>

Woolf, Virginia, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt Inc., 2002)

Woolf, Virginia et al., The Mrs. Dalloway Reader (New York: Harcourt Inc., 2004)

Zwerdling, Alex, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986)

Be Sociable, Share!

•