Septimus, an Echo of Woolf

 

Any book will, of course, tell us a lot about an author’s worldview, experiences, and personality. Reading Mrs. Dalloway, I found myself often reflecting not on the characters in the story but on Virginia Woolf herself and what drove her to make each of the characters the way they were, and I often thought about how she could have felt deciding and writing the events in her book. What sparked this focus for me was finding out that Virginia Woolf committed suicide – and that, prior to writing Mrs. Dalloway, she had attempted twice already. That is why one of the characters I found most intriguing and quite sobering was Septimus Smith, who I began to look at as not only his own character (still well written and impactful without context on Woolf, of course), but also as a reflection of Woolf’s lowest moments of depression and suicidal thoughts.

One of the first parallels I found interesting was moments such as on page 87, when Septimus describes people very negatively and hopelessly, saying

“One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that.”

He is unlike every other character in the story with this worldview – while others may critique and make fun, none but him view humans as so inherently awful, and I think that if we continue to view him as a sort of reflection of Woolf’s depressive thoughts, he can give us insight as to how she saw the world at times. Now, by saying this, am I saying that she must have hated all of humanity? I would expect not, as Septimus is after all just a character on which she could place any traits, and he could be the one who reflected the lowest and darkest of hers. She also wrote Clarissa as a relatable and expressive character, who has much more trivial issues keeping her mind occupied, so I’m sure that her worldview is also shared with other characters.

Next, looking at Septimus’s concerns in comparison to the other characters’, he more often branches out to thinking of the suffering and problems of others, such as when he saw “men were trapped in mines; women burnt alive; and once a maimed file of lunatics being exercised or displayed for the diversion of the populace… ambled and nodded and grinned past him, in the Tottenham Court Road”. This appeared to be a hallucination, and it, along with the previous passage mentioned showing how he views humans, gives us insight into what Septimus worries about and expects of the world. He, unlike the sheltered other characters in the book, has seen such traumatizing things in the war, that the normal barrier that the human mind constructs to stop us from obsessing over suffering and death for our own mental health, has been broken. He can’t stop thinking of it constantly and sees it everywhere. This makes me wonder if Woolf wrote some of that mindset from her own experience, and if her own traumatic past (suicide attempts, and her parents, brother, and half-sister dying), caused her to think about human suffering often like him, and makes me consider if she herself too experienced hallucinations during her depressive episodes.

Another detail I’d like to talk about is the emphasis Woolf placed on Septimus feeling emotionless and numb, and realizing it and being deeply concerned about it. Considering how little even doctors and mental health professionals such as Holmes and Bradshaw knew about depression and PTSD symptoms, I find it not unlikely that this is yet another case of Woolf writing from experience and using Septimuses character as a way to reveal what she herself had felt before or even felt while writing. In fact, even in our modern world, with much more education we have available about mental health, most people disconnected from the issue would associate depression with sadness or hopelessness rather than the numb feeling that Septimus describes, so if Woolf knew of such specifics back then and described them in such relatable detail, it further points to her writing about her own history with mental illness.  

The response to Septimuses illness is also very similar to Woolf’s: they were both prescribed the rest-cure treatment, which prescribed isolation and lack of mental stimulation to mentally ill patients. She wrote a lot criticizing the treatment after she went through it, and I believe that having Septimus commit suicide to avoid it was a direct show of her opinion on the treatments impacts. The next parallel is Septimus’s actual suicide scene, on pages 145-146. It is unsurprising that this too had connections to Woolf’s own struggles with mental health – she had attempted suicide by jumping from a window prior to writing Mrs. Dalloway, so I think it is not a coincidence that a main character does the same, and I don’t doubt that many of the emotions she described Septimus feeling in the moment had been drawn from her own attempt.

Finally, one of the connections between Septimus and Woolf most intriguing to me was actually not the character or the suicide itself but the reactions that others had. Rezia, who had so far believed that things were looking up for her and her husband, was calm and resigned when his suicide took place. Later, she smiles as she delivers the news of his death to someone else. Am I saying that she was in any way happy about his death? No, in fact her behavior could have come from her blocking out the full impact of the news and almost being in a trance because of the horrible effect it had on her. But what is significant about her reaction is that she simply takes in the news peacefully. This might not mean much on its own so let’s examine another character’s reaction – Clarissa Dalloway’s. Her incredibly understanding and what could be called positive examination of not quite the event itself but at least the idea of suicide, is jarring to read. She describes death as the ultimate statement and choice:

“Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate… There was an embrace in death.” (page 181)

And though she still sees Septimus’s actual death as a tragedy, and calls it a “disaster”, she also says that “She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away” (page 182).

Now, this response was very surprising for me, as so far Clarissa had been portrayed as a socialite with very few reasons and opportunities to ponder more serious aspects of life such as death – we’ve talked in class multiple times about how disconnected she is from the war and its effects on the lives of most people in her country. So why now does she have such an instant understanding of suicide and what comes with it? Why does she not ignore this subject as she does the war? She easily could – after all, she has a party to attend to.

I realized that two reasons Woolf wrote that scene could have been that she related to Clarissa too as much as she did to Septimus, and an odd sort of wish-fulfillment that she desired for the reaction to her own past attempts and future suicide. While Septimus was a character portraying Woolf during the worst of her mental illness, Clarissa had many similarities to her as well and could have had many of her traits during her life as a woman living a comfortable life in the city. Therefore, as Clarissa and Septimus were the characters Woolf likely most related to, it is in the end unsurprising that she consciously or subconsciously made them share her (momentary and past) views on suicide (and mental health professionals, as there was little explanation of why Clarissa too did not like Holmes – therefore perhaps another aspect of Woolf’s writing in similarities between herself and the character). Mrs. Dalloway was written years after her first two suicide attempts, but I think that her portrayal of both Rezia and Clarissa, who would normally not relate to something like suicide, responding in that way, speaks to how she would have, at times, wanted those who knew her to view her and understand her, had she died, because as someone who attempted so many times, she could have easily had some slightly romanticized views of suicide (not necessarily positive, that is – but her dramatic and deep description of suicide and its true meaning definitely points to form of romanization, at least by the person at the time of the act).