Mental Illness in Mrs. Dalloway and Virginia Woolf's Life

Introduction

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf 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, Septimus Smith, displays serious mental illness, and the work lays bare the way in which people suffering from such conditions were treated at that time. This paper examines a few of the parallels between the life of Virginia Woolf and the fictional Septimus Smith.

Virginia Woolf's Mental Illness and Personal History

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 bipolar disorder at times caused Woolf protracted periods of convalescence, during which she withdrew from her busy social life, distressed that she could not focus long enough to read or write. She spent time 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, 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, literature, and politics.

Virginia Woolf died on 28 March 1941 when she drowned herself in the River Ouse near their home in Sussex, having put rocks in her coat pockets. Her body was found in April and she was cremated; her ashes were spread under two elms at Monks' House. She had left two similar suicide notes, one possibly written a few days earlier before an unsuccessful attempt. The note addressed to Leonard read in part:

"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 bears strange similarities to that of the character Ophelia in William Shakespeare's Hamlet. Both Woolf and Ophelia were suffering from mental distress brought on by the deaths of a parent, and both weighted themselves with rocks and drowned in a river.

Shell Shock and the Case of Septimus Smith

Woolf's portrayal of Septimus's mental illness — whose shell shock, brought about by service in the First World War, produced a wide range of symptoms — mirrors many of her own experiences. Caroline Alexander reports that shell shock first appeared in the British medical journal The Lancet in February 1915, only six months after the start of the war. Captain 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; Case 2 had been buried under earth for 18 hours after a shell collapsed his trench; and Case 3 had been blown off a pile of bricks 15 feet high. All three men exhibited symptoms including reduced visual fields, loss of smell and taste, and some loss of memory. After documenting the symptoms of each case in detail, Myers concluded that they appeared to constitute a definite class among the conditions arising from the effects of shell shock.

Early medical opinion took the common-sense view that the damage was commotional — related to the severe concussive motion of the brain within the soldier's skull — and shell shock was initially deemed a physical injury. However, by 1916, military and medical authorities were convinced that many soldiers exhibiting characteristic symptoms — trembling, headache, tinnitus, dizziness, poor concentration, confusion, loss of memory, and sleep disorders — had been nowhere near exploding shells. Their condition was one of neurasthenia, or weakness of the nerves: in lay terms, a nervous breakdown precipitated by the dreadful stress of war (Alexander).

Conclusion

There are many similarities between Septimus Smith's mental illness and the real-life mental illness of Virginia Woolf. Both Woolf and Septimus eventually committed suicide, and Woolf once attempted to end her life by throwing herself from a window, just as Septimus does in the novel. Woolf also experienced moments in which she saw and heard the dead, and exhibited exaggerated feelings of happiness much like Septimus. With the benefit of hindsight, one can easily read this novel as a foreshadowing of the eventual death of Virginia Woolf, sixteen years after its publication.

Works Cited

Alexander, Caroline. "The Shock of the War." Smithsonian Magazine. September 2010. Smithsonian.com. 29 November 2011.

Merriman, C.D. "Virginia Woolf." The Literature Network. 2007. 29 November 2011.

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.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.