Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” and Death

Content Warning: suicide, mental illness.

Video version here.

Throughout Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa thinks about death. Even when she is enraptured by a life filled with people, lusciously described flowers, and a world “full of sublimity,” the question of mortality pervades. It exists in the loneliness of watching taxicabs drive away into London’s bustling streets, in the mirrored reflection of her aging face and body, in the wistful memories of girlhood summers spent in Bourton that pass through Clarissa’s mind, and upon hearing of Septimus Warren Smith’s suicide it cuts “in the middle” of her party.

These contractive moments, as Maria DiBattista would argue, in which the rising and falling “vertical” motions of life accumulate, expand in the novel alongside their “horizontal” counterparts, anticipation and retrospection. Mrs. Dalloway revolves around the temporal axis formed between these vertical and horizontal narrative lines, which also establish the metaphoric texture that unites Clarissa and Septimus.

However, the resulting structure, which is meant to represent Virginia Woolf’s fictional conception of lived experience, is shown to hide a hollow center. Given this, that “[t]here is an emptiness about the heart of life,” why does Clarissa choose to live, even after learning that Septimus does not?

This essay will do a close reading of how Woolf uses mortality to contrast the spiritual character of these literary doppelgängers, first with Septimus and then with Clarissa. Specifically, scenes of psychological insight, like Septimus’ internal monologue before his death or Clarissa’s during her party, will be plumbed for factors that either affirm life or create despair. Adopting this existential approach will help arrange the “myriad impressions” of everyday life into the humanistic values that guided Woolf’s belief in the possibility of a rich, interior life developed through modern fiction.

To begin with Septimus is to begin with the problem of suicide. As Clarissa realizes, the act of suicide can be understood as “an attempt to communicate.” One approach to making sense of Septimus’ decision is figuring out what was missing from his life.

Losing his kindred spirit Evans to the carnage of World War I, the flagging support of his loving but emotionally burnt-out wife Rezia, the callous and unempathetic treatment he receives from renowned psychiatrist Sir William Bradshaw — it is not difficult to see why lonely and alienated Septimus feels that “[t]he whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself”. As Gillian Beer points out, “Septimus haunts an absolute world, bare of locality” that populates Clarissa’s vibrant experience of London, and instead “endlessly and nihilistically” endures the traumas of reality alone.

“Septimus haunts an absolute world, bare of locality.”

A different approach concludes that Septimus’ death is simply inevitable, a by-product of having mental illness and inhabiting a highly industrial environment that suppresses emotional vulnerability. Under this interpretation, Septimus does not really choose to die, but is driven to suicide by uncontrollably painful symptoms that were insufficiently addressed and managed by psychiatric medicine.

As Sabine Sautter-Léger notes in her research, Septimus has numerous behavioral problems that go far above and beyond Dr. Holmes’ unmoving “funk” and span psychosis, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and even schizophrenia. At a fundamental level, what Septimus is trying to communicate is just that he is sick and needs more medical attention than he was receiving.

However, neither of these approaches appreciates Septimus as an individual who actively participates in his life and therefore has important insights about the condition of his lived experiences. Rather than reducing his suicide to an escape from suffering or an unfortunate side effect predetermined by his psychiatric situation, this humanistic approach would recognize that Septimus is a person with existentially relevant goals and that his suicide is therefore an act with meaning.

This aligns with Daniel Schwarz’s reading of Woolf’s fiction as a “process of sorting out values” and of participating in her “own quest for meaning.” As he argues, death is one of Woolf’s essential artistic subjects because it creates the possibility “to wrench meaning by imposing form on the flux of life.” A humanistic reading of Septimus then would treat his suicide much like a creative act, a terrible and regrettable tragedy, but one that expresses what lies underneath the empty core of Septimus’ being.

“…death is one of Woolf’s essential artistic subjects because it creates the possibility to wrench meaning by imposing form on the flux of life.”

Much of this interpretative work is already laid out effortlessly in Clarissa’s interior monologue: “Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.” This statement could be read as a declaration of Septimus as a Christ-figure, who self-sacrifices in order to awaken the rest of London to its “eternal loneliness.” Yet, Clarissa’s conception of suicide as an “embrace” suggests that Septimus has entered himself into a larger whole, and therefore cements himself into collective memory rather than erasing himself from it.

As Avrom Fleishman’s work on Mrs. Dalloway contends, Septimus embodies a “radical form of belief in a collective existence.” This incorporates people, objects, and even sensory phenomena into a systematic network of organic unity: “But they beckoned; leaves were alive […] leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body […] Sounds made harmonies with premeditation […] All taken together meant the birth of a new religion-”

However, I disagree with Fleishman’s claim that Septimus sees himself as “a sacrificial object” or as a martyr for mankind with his provocative cry “I’ll give it you!” My humanistic approach falls closer to Schwarz’s notion that Septimus and Clarissa, while having collectivist orientations, are intrinsically narcissistic and have a “lack of interest in things outside themselves.”

Therefore, while it is important to read Septimus in relation to his phenomenological experience of existence as collective, it is equally pressing to understand his motives as serving a private, existential need. This is an especially crucial move for the later discussion of Clarissa, who also experiences life communally, but whose needs instead energize her to live.

What does Septimus need then? Woolf makes it clear that he feels linked to the natural world, the “earth thrilled beneath him,” and that he recognizes “beauty was everywhere.” What fuels his ennui then is people and society: “Only human beings — what did they want?”

Septimus feels remote from an unappreciative London that has forgotten his grueling and self-damaging efforts to defend them in the war. He clings to memories of Evans, fearing the erasure of individual struggle in the mock-patriotic monumentalism of “absurd statue[s]” and public soldier marches. His wife Rezia subconsciously wishes for him to die so that she can move on with her life. Septimus becomes an outsider in his own hometown.

“Septimus feels remote from an unappreciative London that has forgotten his grueling and self-damaging efforts to defend them in the war.”

Thus, Septimus’ suicide is not a sacrifice in the name of man, but a realization of his inward desire to impose himself on society and its collective memory, an action that Woolf suggests succeeds because of its effect on raising Clarissa’s own spiritual awareness.

The artificial but profoundly meaningful relationship between the disconnected Septimus and the socially prominent Clarissa is important because it illustrates the thin line that Woolf believes separates “sanity and madness, civilization and barbarism […]” Both desperately want to become whole, to live on in the minds of others. In many ways, Clarissa’s party functions just like Septimus’ suicide in its efforts to create memory. While this may seem pathetic, or as Peter Walsh puts it “frail and thin and very far away,” Clarissa’s plea “remember my party tonight!” is of existential seriousness.

After all, what triggers Clarissa’s introspection about Septimus’ death is eye contact with an “ashen pale” elderly woman who closes the lights of her house in preparation for sleep. Clarissa’s later statement that “she felt somehow very like him [Septimus]” implies that this image depicts her deep fear of growing old in the domestic abyss of her home and being forgotten by her loved ones.

A cynical reading of Mrs. Dalloway would interpret this as a scene of despair, one in which Clarissa resigns herself to Sally Seton’s analogy about the prisoner scratching “on the wall of his cell” and being trapped in her social role as an upper-class woman. Presumably, her impulse to “go back” and find “Sally and Peter” immediately after contemplating death would be interpreted as complicity, a dependence on social comforts, and an inability to engage with issues of mortality.

Yet the sentence before runs counter to this notion: “He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun.” Here, Woolf not only creates a warm and almost convivial connection between Clarissa and Septimus, she also suggests that Clarissa’s party and her urge to “assemble” are choices that arise not from a desire to bury the horror of death but a recognition that death is a well of beauty and meaning. As previously mentioned, she is worried about people “feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre,” which implies both that finding meaning in life is in fact possible and that Clarissa’s mission is to help people feel more aware or at least more comfortable with their mortality.

“Clarissa’s mission is to help people feel more aware or at least more comfortable with their mortality.”

In contrast to Sally, who in being reduced to “Lady Rosseter” at the novel’s end does in fact succumb to her social role as an upper-class woman, and Peter, who can only wonder at the “terror” and “excitement” of life, Clarissa dives headfirst into the question of mortality and comes out alive and transformed.

Unlike Septimus, who preserves his ego by removing it from the corruptions of daily life, Clarissa reclaims her individualism from the title “Mrs. Dalloway” by surrounding herself with other unique people. Both Septimus’ suicide and Clarissa’s party demonstrate initiative, not complicity, in the face of the bleak landscape of the human condition. The party too is a creative act, one that assembles people and their identities much like how an author arranges characters in a story.

People gravitate towards Clarissa’s life-affirming aura, in some ways to fill the empty center of their beings. After all, why would anyone like the prestigious Prime Minister or the child-burdened Sally bother to attend this party if not for some mysterious, almost magical energy around Woolf’s protagonist?

Jeremy Hawthorn remarks that this humanistic vision of Clarissa reaching her spiritual potential, moving from a woman who simply bears her husband’s name to her own person, is tempered by the fact that the “final, extraordinarily striking, view of Clarissa’s ‘full selfhood’ is achieved through the eyes of another person, Peter Walsh.” This observation implies that Clarissa can never realize herself as an individual because she depends on others, like her husband and memories of Sally, to supplement her identity, much like how Septimus sees himself as a burden through Rezia’s eyes.

However, this account ignores Woolf’s fluid characterization of Clarissa that borrows techniques from Cubism to show how Clarissa’s identity changes depending the time and situation she finds herself in. Even within Peter’s singular gaze at the end, the narrative twice morphs from the future tense “I will come” to the present tense “It is Clarissa” and finally to the past tense “For there she was.” The humanistic approach’s claim then is not that Clarissa actualizes some ultimate fixed identity, but that she is liberated from the indiscriminate totalizing of social institutions and temporal continuity that mortality dissolves.

“…she is liberated from the indiscriminate totalizing of social institutions and temporal continuity that mortality dissolves.”

The question still remains: why does Clarissa choose to live, and what insights does she provide about what she needs to become whole?

Like Septimus, Clarissa is assaulted by episodic memories throughout Mrs. Dalloway, albeit ones of a more nostalgic and warm nature. Septimus’ response is to make himself a memory, inflicting his death on to the collective unconscious of London through death. Clarissa’s party plays a similar social role, but it creates connections between the people who have occupied Clarissa’s mind through presence rather than absence.

For Clarissa then, what she needs is not necessarily other people but for other people to feel cared for. She admits at the novel’s beginning “her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct,” and as Beer points out, Clarissa’s sense of kinship is not measured by events, class, or gender.

This sort of unconditional positive regard for others, which demonstrates that “she wished the whole world well,” and which Peter misinterprets as “effusive, insincere,” is Clarissa’s ongoing project to make others feel known. On one level, this reveals her own emotional need to care for others, in part to do what she eventually feels Septimus does for her. Furthermore, it fleshes out Clarissa’s method, which is that she wants to share her love for “simply life.”

Yes, Clarissa feels immensely lonely among the “carriages, motor cards, omnibuses, vans,” but she also finds it incredibly exciting to watch London’s lively cityscape. Clarissa may shudder at the sight of her aging body, but she has also come to appreciate the simplicity of “straightening the chairs” and the wisdom that comes after “the triumphs of youth.” She becomes conflicted over her memories of Bourton, lamenting the emotional distance between her and Sally and sometimes regretting her decision to reject Peter, yet those exact memories also fill her with a nostalgic joy and reverence of “this moment of June.” Even with Richard Dalloway, who is hardly the emotional bulwark that Clarissa needs, becomes sympathetic under her gaze.

Unlike Septimus, Clarissa creates a unified whole from life by recording the memories and pathways, the “piquant vignettes of people,” and gathering them into an interconnected sheet that one can find solace in. It is this collectivization of identity, represented by the party that counters the erasure of identity, represented by suicide.

At the close of Quentin Bell’s biography of Virginia Woolf is the letter she wrote to her husband Leonard Woolf before she drowned herself. In it, she emphasizes the happiness she feels because of their marriage but also the overwhelming sense of guilt that she is a burden to him. Importantly, Woolf also mentions her indescribable loss from mental illness: the inability to concentrate or read. While it may be insensitive to impose the literary dichotomy of Septimus and Clarissa on to the regrettable situation of an author, after all we cannot know what kept Woolf living until that point, I believe it is crucial that literature be used to understand how people really live.

What is clear from Mrs. Dalloway is that people’s lives are incredibly conflicted, and that to survive an ever-changing modern world we must combat an endless series of choices. At the most basic level, as Hamlet puts it, we all must answer the question to be or not to be.

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