All Eyes on Clarrisa?
Mrs. Dalloway is a story about a woman living in the 1920s preparing and hosting a party for her husband Richard Dalloway. Within this one day, the narrator freely enters the minds of various characters, portraying their story, worries, nostalgic memories, and love interests. Despite the story focusing on Clarissa Dalloway, the narrator shows a man, Septimus Smith, suffering from extreme PTSD from WW1 and cannot differentiate between the past and the present. The involvement of this character, Septimus Smith, makes the reader question why Virgina Woolf placed this unassociated character in her novel. However, I think Septimus’ connection to the novel is his reflection of Clarissa’s personality.
The reader is first introduced to Septimus Smith when he and his wife are sitting in a park. As the narrator jumps into Septimus’ mind, the reader sees in pages 20-25 that he begins to zone out of reality and into the past as the park environment slowly shifts to that of a war zone which he fought in WW1. This past memory almost becomes Septimus’ present as he describes on page 23, “There was nobody. Her words faded. So a rocket fades. It is sparks, having grazed their way into the night.” This shows Septimus getting lost as his troubling past seeps into his present reality. A similar series of flashbacks happen to Clarissa except she does not confuse the past with the present. In one of Clarissa’s monologues, she explains how she had a choice between Peter Walsh and Richard Dalloway. Being married to Dalloway in the present, she reflects on her life if she had chosen Peter. Since both Clarissa and Septimus reflect or are hit with sudden flashbacks of their past, Septimius's memories tend to be more extreme, with him often getting lost in traumatizing memories. As a result, Septimus reflects Clarissa's personality.
Despite these characters being reflections of each other, they both share a common emotion of alienation. On page 65, Septimus portrays this feeling that he is being laughed at and mocked as he falls into hell, proclaiming that he and his wife should just die. These harsh emotions show Septimus’ feelings of alienation in society, and the awareness that he is not normal to other people. Clarissa has similar thoughts just after being told she was not invited to lunch with her husband. Starting on page 29 when Clarissa beings to internalize not being invited to lunch, she goes down a spiral of not being a competent enough wife, how no one thinks of her, and how she is a social outcast. Like the example above, Septimus’ emotions are more extreme, however, the same underlying alienness is shared between them as they are excluded socially from the world.
This reflection between Septimus and Clarissa can also be traced to other characters in the book such as Peter Walsh, Richard Dalloway, and Sally Seton as all these character’s personalities reflect Clarissa’s. However, that is a longer essay for another time.
I agree that it is interesting to compare Clarissa's narration with Septimius's. They seem completely unrelated for most of the book, yet two very different people have similar internal struggles. As you pointed out, Septimius and Clarissa both struggle with feeling alienated from their lives. I think we especially see the connection between Clarissa and Septimius in the scene where Clarissa seeks refuge from her party in a room alone, while she thinks of Septimius. In that scene she is able to extrapolate much of what we read of Septimius's internal thoughts in his final moments. I think her ability to infer his thought process is more evidence that they are more connected characters than is initially obvious when first picking up the book.
ReplyDeleteThere is definitely a deeper connection between Clarissa and Septimus than most would assume. On the surface, you have a rich white lady and a PTSD WWI veteran; however, the book reveals both of their internal struggle. Just like Clarissa and her existential reflections, Septimus feels the weight of personal identity. Through her understanding of Septimus's death, she contemplates her own life in a way that connects their experiences.
ReplyDeleteGreat blog Deven! I agree with you that Clarissa and Septimus are most definitely related to each other in the sense that Woolf would not choose to add two stories if they didn't have some relevance to the other. I think that at a deeper level they both are connected in the sense with them struggling to figure out their personal identity. Keep up the amazing work!
ReplyDeleteThis is a good account of what it means to view Clarissa and Septimus as on a "spectrum" of "sanity" (or mental health, or however we want to say it). It's not as if they are having entirely different experiences of the present day in London, as you note: Clarissa too is "hearing voices" from the past, as she remembers Peter saying something about cauliflowers on the first page; she too is plunged into a traumatic and significant part of her past through the associations of weather stimulating memory; she too has these anxieties about her spouse and the degree to which they do and don't connect. The distinctions between the distortions of shell shock and the "normal" experience of having a consciousness and being human are not as stark as we might like to think--and in this light, Septimus's dislocations seem more "normal," and Clarissa's version of "sanity" seems a little forced and uptight. We also might see them both as having undertaken a "marriage of convenience," where they marry not out of pure love but a need to "seem normal," to do what is expected of them. The more we look, the more parallels we see.
ReplyDelete(Incidentally, what is the deal with that cover art for _Mrs. Dalloway_? That woman in the picture is definitely NOT Clarissa--though she could be a pal of Lady Brett in Hemingway's novel. It might be Elizabeth Dalloway in a few years, if she maybe moves to Paris or something. But it definitely seems like it was created by someone who hasn't read the book, but who has been told that it's set in the 1920s.)
This is really interesting! While reading the book I wondered why so much of it was dedicated to Septimus's seemingly irrelevant side plot, but you highlight some important connections between him and Clarissa. We did discuss some of their similarities in class, but your deep dive does a good job of clearly identifying why they are similar. They definitely do experience similar feeling of alienation and issues with the past.
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