Mrs Dalloway 1171create one of the most important works of the 20th
century, transforming the novel as art form.
Gerri Kimber
deatH in Mrs Dalloway
Thoughts and images of death permeate Mrs Dal-
loway (defined by some critics as a study of insanity
and suicide), exposed through the novel’s two main
protagonists: Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class,
privileged, middle-aged wife and mother; and Sep-
timus Warren-Smith, a young veteran and shell-
shocked victim of World War I.
Both Clarissa and Septimus find themselves
remembering and repeating two lines from the
funeral dirge in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (which Cla-
rissa reads from an open book in a shop window near
the beginning of the novel): “Fear no more the heat o’
the sun / Nor the furious winter’s rages.” They form
a poetic refrain as the day progresses, implying for
both protagonists that death will be a relief from fear.
Clarissa is initially happy as she sets off to buy
flowers for her party on a beautiful morning in mid-
June, but at the same time she seems unable to shake
off the idea of her own mortality: “Did it matter
that she must inevitably cease completely; all this
must go on without her.” Even the crowds hurrying
along Bond Street are described as “bones with a
few wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the
gold stoppings of innumerable decayed teeth”—jux-
taposing life and death and introducing the notion
that post–World War I, the old order is decayed and
dying and must go.
With the appearance of Septimus comes the
idea of death as a physical reality. He is constantly
thinking and talking of death, both his own and
other people’s: “There was his hand; there the dead.”
Septimus’s friend, Peter Evans, was killed just before
the end of the war, while he himself survived. The
guilt of surviving, coupled with the effects of shell
shock, has driven Septimus over the edge into insan-
ity, or, in his own words, “the sin for which human
nature had condemned him to death; that he did not
feel.” His crime was to have survived the war when
his friend had not, and worst of all that he had been
able to go about his duties seemingly unaffected. In
Septimus’s own mind, “The verdict of human nature
on such a wretch was death.” Of course, Septimus is
suffering from the after-effects of shell shock. He
has been numbed by the events he has witnessed and
is unaware that what he is living through is a mental
breakdown, which is a direct result of his experiences
as a soldier in the war. When Evans was killed, we
learn, Septimus had “congratulated himself upon
feeling very little and very reasonably. The War had
taught him.” By the end of the war, Septimus had
witnessed so much horror that he is now incapable
of reacting normally; the war has, in effect, already
killed him emotionally and spiritually, leaving just
the physical body, which itself is killed when he
takes his own life.
And so, Woolf juxtaposes the scenes of Clarissa
Dalloway going about her day—busy with prepara-
tions for her party, confined to an apparently narrow
superficial world of upper-class concerns of maids,
party clothes, and flowers—with the dual narrative
of Septimus’s decline into madness and eventual sui-
cide: “The whole world was clamouring, kill your-
self, kill yourself, for our sakes.” Finally, both worlds
become intertwined as Clarissa herself is confronted
with the news of Septimus’s death, recounted by his
doctor, Sir William Bradshaw, and his wife, who are
late attending Clarissa’s party because of his suicide.
It is at this point in the novel, in the final few
pages, that Clarissa herself finally confronts the sub-
ject of death and dying: “She had escaped. But that
young man had killed himself. Somehow it was her
disaster—her disgrace.” She comes to a realization
that she does not pity him; rather, she can be glad for
him, since he has confronted his demons and moved
on, while so many continue their precarious exis-
tence of fear and hatred: “She felt glad that he had
done it; thrown it away while they went on living.”
The novel can thus be read as both a tribute
to the dead of the Great War as well as a diatribe
against the medical profession’s understanding of
severe depression, which Woolf suffered from all her
life, and which ended in her own suicide in 1941,
age 59.
Gerri KimberGender in Mrs Dalloway
The juxtaposition between women and men perme-
ates all aspects of Mrs Dalloway and is one of the
novel’s main themes. The identification of gender