SEPTIMUS AND HIS DOUBLE: PSYCHOLOGICAL CHAOS IN MRS. DALLOWAY OF VIRGINIA WOOLF

Abstract

Virginia Woolf discarded the realistic fiction of Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy and expressed her concern to portray the inner turbulent world of her characters. It is recorded that Virginia Wolf (1977) was hospitalized because of her trauma and depression, “wearisome headache, jumping pulse, aching back, frets, fidgets lying awake” (Woolf 125). Woolf intended her novel “to give life and death and to criticize the social system; to show it at work, at its most intense” (Virginia Woolf Diary 2, 248). The novel Mrs. Dalloway is full of scenes of death, disability and psychic injury. The novel has been hailed as a classical novel of modernist trauma literature. Cathy Caruth characterizes trauma as a “wound of the mind” (Caruth 4) that defies comprehension. Traumatic events themselves make known to consciousness through repetitious calls for a witness who can receive trauma narrative. Such re-externalization can restructure traumatic wounds repetitious calls as coherent narrative. Jonathan Judith Herman is of the view that Woolf created a narrative out of characters’ pre-speech level of consciousness and preserved the fragmentation of consciousness” (Herman 3). The novel begins with the details of preparations of a dinner party of Mrs. Dalloway she is giving for her husband. Two unique things are observed in the early pages of the novel; the party symbol and the role of Big Ben giving time consciousness to Mrs. Dalloway. The parties of Mrs. Dalloway are a routine matter and symbolize her mechanical and artificial existence. Septimus Smith is portrayed as a victim of war neurosis, “the victim’s faith in the assumptions he has held in the past about himself and the world” (DeMeester 650).