Through looking up articles about Virginia Woolf and her relationship with PTSD (because she portrays it so realistically she must have known someone with it), I found that she had a mental illness that resembled bipolar disorder.
Immediately I thought of the two main characters of Mrs. Dalloway: Clarissa and Septimus. The way they see the world had so much contrast there must be some kind of reason why she has decided to write a novel centered around characters so different both in body and mind (other than Septimus is intriguing compared to Mrs. Dalloway). Could their contrast, especially in their mental state, be commentary on her disorder?
I read further into Woolf's biography and discovered an interesting series of facts: Her sister died when she was 15, around the same time in Mrs. Dalloway’s life when her sister was crushed by a tree. She also had a poor relationship with her father, also like Mrs. Dalloway. She was admitted into a home for women with nervous disorder after having a nervous breakdown over the death of her father, though she had episodes before. This is similar to the plot of Septimus’ story of mental illness. And even though we know he has PTSD, his symptoms (hallucinations and depression) are similar to Woolf's.
Biographical evidence is not all that’s this theory together. In Mrs. Dalloway itself, we see her opinions on the institutionalization of the mentally ill and of the doctors treating these people through the voice of the narrator as well as Septimus. He also pursues the thought of suicide incessantly as she may have done until she drowned herself in 1941. Since we see her thoughts reflected through Septimus, is it unlikely that her worldview be featured in Mrs. Dalloway as well? Virginia Woolf’s feminist views seem to more or less be brought out by Mrs. Dalloway (though more in Sally) with her atheism and her decision to go buy the flowers herself.
Though this is a stretch, there are some interesting coincidences popping up between Woolf’s life and the lives of Septimus and Mrs. Dalloway’s. There is still a lot to read, and so a lot more character to see from Clarissa and her costar, but so far from what has presented itself in the text, it may be possible that Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus are stylized representations of different aspects of Virginia Woolf’s psyche.
Here's a link to the main article I referenced for her biography.
Wow! These connections between Virginia Woolf's personal life and the characters in Mrs. Dalloway create a whole new angle from which to analyze the book. For the past week or so, we have always been discussing what could have led Woolf to discuss both Septimus and Clarissa in parallel, and, while we have found a few tenuous connections between the two, it always seemed like we were trying to make the evidence fit our theories rather than the other way around. It is hard to see them as anything other than polar opposites of each other, but if we consider them as the two elements of Woolf's bipolar personality, this makes a lot of sense. In fact, this resolves one thing that has always been puzzling me - Septimus and Clarissa often seem to be at the same place at the same time when Woolf switches her narration from one to the other, but if their experiences are meant to make up the experiences of a single person, it is logical that one would continue where the other leaves off.
ReplyDeleteWoah, this is such an interesting connection. With this insight into Virginia Woolf's mind as she wrote Mrs. Dalloway, maybe some of the more minor characters, like Rezia, were meant to represent how she was treated by her family when she was suffering from PTSD.
ReplyDeleteThis was very interesting to read, and thought-provoking. I think it is very likely that Virginia Woolf may have put herself in the novel, or at least incorporated parts of her life. I especially liked your connection of the mental health professionals. Mr. Mitchell had mentioned in class that Woolf was very unimpressed by her treatment. In the book, the doctors are presented as incompetent with ineffective treatment methods. Woolf must have drawn on her own experiences for that. Also, Woolf's illness similar to manic depressive disorder would make sense and paints a fascinating picture when applied to the narrative. This was a very fascinating post.
ReplyDeleteThis is very enthralling, and I agree-- it really is a common theme that authors incorporate some aspects of themselves into their writing. My question is: who does Virginia Woolf relate to more? She seems to describe Septimus in a fond, amusing light, but a good portion of her time is also spent focusing on Clarissa Dalloway's life.
ReplyDeleteSo far, we have still not really read much into the relationship between Clarissa and Septimus in the book, as about 100 pages in the only interaction they had was during the motor car incident (and even that is stretching "interaction"). Taking this into consideration, the concept of expressing her illness in terms of two different, opposite in almost every way, characters, has some merit to it as it seems to make logical sense. If this was the case, this would explain why there is no interaction between the two main characters of the book, because they are connected by this idea of Woolf's disease instead of connected in the conventional way.
ReplyDeleteI really disagree with this analysis because of the implication that artists work is a reflection of their psyche or past experiences. It's true that writers a lot of times write about what they know, but looking at any work from an author who has dealt with mental illness and reading them commenting on it through their work and characters is flawed. Mrs. Dalloway deserves to be analyzed on its own, as a piece of art, without delving into its authors own history.
ReplyDeleteIt's true that I don't *need* the knowledge that Woolf had personal experience with mental illness and depression in order to appreciate or understand her depiction of Septimus's experience--and indeed, their experiences are importantly different, in gendered terms, as Septimus's shell-shock is a pointedly masculine postwar affliction.
DeleteBut it doesn't take anything away from those text-based observations to point out that, in fact, Woolf herself did have first-hand experience with this sense of her world crumbling all around her, and the feeling of being unable to communicate any of that. Given the often dubious history of the representation of "mad" or "insane" people in literature up to this point, and given her rather bold effort to represent Septimus on his own terms, it does seem important to note that she knows something about this subject first-hand, and that her depiction is profoundly sympathetic not only to Septimus but to traumatized war veterans more generally.
I think this comparison is interesting, but I'm not sure if I completely agree with it. Sure, she had a mental illness(es), and yes, she definitely projected her frustrations with mental health care at the time into the book Mrs Dalloway, but I'm not entirely sure that Septimus is a reflection of her own mental illness(es). I think he is an example of the failure of the system, enriched with her own experiences, but not necessarily an allegory to Virginia Woolf as a person. However, interesting blog post. Nice job!
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if Septimus was meant to represent Virginia Woolf herself, but now that I know more about her it seems like she was definitely trying to put her own (and many other people's) experiences out there to help the general public understand them, as well as show everything that was massively wrong with the system. Even if Septimus isn't supposed to be her per se, aspects of his mental state were familiar to her and it seems like a stretch to say that she wouldn't have drawn from her experience at least a little bit.
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