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Mrs. Dalloway
The Mental Illness of Virginia Woolf and Septimus Smith
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Wolf explores the fragile nature of the human psyche and the effects of trauma on the human condition. First published in 1925 in England and written during the infancy of modern psychology, one of the most important themes of this novel is mental illness. One of the characters in the novel, Septimus Smith, displays mental issues and this work lays bare the way in which people with such illnesses were treated for their malaise at that time. This paper will examine a few of the parallels between the life of Virginia Woolf and Septimus Smith.
Virginia was only 13 when her mother's death triggered a nervous breakdown, the first of her many bouts of mental illness. After their father died in 1904, Virginia moved to a house in Bloomsbury with her two brothers and her sister, Vanessa, who was a painter. The effects of bi-polar disorder at times caused Woolf protracted periods of convalescence, withdrawing from her busy social life, distressed that she could not focus long enough to read or write. She spent times in nursing homes for rest cures and referred to herself as mad. She said she heard voices and had visions. "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?" (from a letter dated 28 Dec. 1932, Merriman).
The subject of suicide enters her stories and essays at times and she disagreed with the perception that it is an act of cowardice and sin. When Virginia was not depressed she worked intensely for long hours at a time. She was vivacious, witty and ebullient company and a member of the Bloomsbury Group or 'Bloomsbury' which had been started by her brother Thoby and his friends from Cambridge. It quickly grew to encompass many of London's literary circle, who gathered to discuss art,
"Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again....And I shan't recover this time.I am doing what seems the best thing to do....I can't fight any longer....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" (Merriman).
It is interesting to note that Woolf's death has strange similarities to that of the character Ophelia in William Shakespeare's Hamlet. Both Woolf and Ophelia were suffering from mental issues brought on by the deaths of a parent, and both weighted themselves down with rocks and drowned themselves in a river.
Woolf's portrayal of Septimus' mental illness whose shell-shock, brought about by action in the First World War seems to have brought about a plethora of other symptoms that mirror her own. Caroline Alexander reports shell shock first appeared in the British medical journal The Lancet in February 1915, only six months after the start of the war. Capt. Charles Myers of the Royal Army Medical Corps noted the similarity of symptoms in three soldiers who had each been exposed to exploding shells. Case 1 had endured six or seven shells exploding around him,…
Works Cited
Alexander, Caroline. "The Shock of the War" Smithsonian Magizine. September 2010. Smithsonian.com. 29 November 2011. < http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Shock-of-War.html?c=y&page=4>
Merrimen, C.D. "Virginia Woolf." The Literature Network.. (2007). 29 November 2011. <http://www.online-literature.com/virginia_woolf/>
Thomas, Jean. "Virginia Woolf and the Case of Septimus Smith." The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, Vol.23, No.3 August 2004: 55-71. 29 November 2011. <http://www.jstor.org/pss/10.1525/jung.1.2004.23.3.55
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
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