The Sane, the Insane, and the Society that Shaped Them

Leigh Kincer

Throughout Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the main characters, most notably Septimus Smith and Clarissa Dalloway, float in and out of their own thoughts rather than through each other’s lives. Woolf originally imagined these separate streams of consciousness to depict twentieth-century England through the eyes of both the sane and the insane. However, while Clarissa Dalloway, a fluttering politician’s wife, and Septimus Smith, a World War I veteran who suffers from shell shock, play their respective roles well, it becomes evident that both are intrinsically damaged. The difference, however, between Clarissa and Septimus is that Septimus fully grasps the extent of the damage society has done to them and judges the world accordingly, while Clarissa does not.

            Septimus Smith, a shell-shocked war veteran, is the voice of the insane. He is what his conventional British society would deem truly crazy. Septimus hears birds chattering in Greek, imagines dogs changing into men, and is haunted by the specter of his dead friend. However, despite his focus on the terror and ugliness in his society, Septimus finds his world fundamentally beautiful. “Up in the sky, swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out, round and round, yet always with perfect control as if elastics held them… all of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty, that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere” (Woolf 68). His insanity is a result of desperation. He cannot bear to be reminded of the petty cruelties of his society’s inhabitants and is desperate to escape from a world of poverty, war, brutality, and indifference. Paradoxically, he is desperate both to escape such a ruined world and to remain in thrall of its original beauty.

            Clarissa, on the other hand, appears sane, yet, try as she might to escape them, she, too, has her own demons. While the respectable Mrs. Dalloway would never let unhappiness or dissatisfaction mar her well-crafted countenance, Clarissa is intensely disappointed in the way her life turned out. This disillusionment is made all the more tragic by the fact that even Clarissa herself is only vaguely aware of it. However, her feelings of emptiness permeate almost every aspect of her life. “Much rather would she have been one of those people like Richard who did things for themselves, whereas, she thought, waiting to cross, half the time she did things, not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that” (10). She allows herself to drift through life without ever truly touching it. While she embraces everything about her world, she never focuses on one thing. There is nothing she can pinpoint as meaningful or significant. She is a slave to society’s rules of behavior, which ultimately cut her off from any substantial relationship. Her snobbery prevents her from contacting her closest friend; her reserve does not allow her to confide in the man who knows her best; and her obsession with inane daily life hinders a relationship with her daughter and husband. 

Clarissa lives in a world of illusion. Everything that touches her is merely a symbol, a pale representation of the real world. For instance, her excitement over seeing the Queen’s car drive past has no real depth; it is merely the excitement of seeing a celebrity, yet she regards it as the most profound moment of her day. Clarissa is completely cut off from all real problems. She is a woman who cares “much more for her roses than for the Armenians” (117). She does not love life; she is frightened of it and therefore protects herself from it by secluding herself in the ignis fatuus of upper-class life. “She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had to feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day” (8). While there is no real meaning in her life, she is too frightened of what reality will imply about her world and her place in it to face it. She immerses herself in the frivolous passions of upper-class England so as not to face the empty reality of her existence.

            Septimus Smith’s insanity is more beautiful and hopeful than Clarissa Dalloway’s charmed and padded life. The paradise of Clarissa’s dream world is more terrifying than any hell crafted in Septimus’s mind. Both are society’s toss-outs; women and the mentally ill were not well cared for in that time, contrary to whatever English society liked to imply. Instead, they were considered unimportant, and English society, which refuses to care for anyone but its elite, treats them with indifference. However, Septimus, in spite of his tragic death, fares far better than Clarissa. Septimus is so detached from the world that he is better able to see it for what it truly is. He is able to see that his English society is rotten to the core. It has destroyed the beauty that England is capable of showing. His belief in the wickedness of the human race is such that he uses it to explain his madness, reasoning that “human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment. They hunt in packs. Their packs scour the desert and vanish screaming into the wilderness. They desert the fallen… And would he go mad?” (87-88).

Septimus is able to see the human products of a wicked society as the truly are. Many people who populate both Clarissa and Septimus’s worlds have no true capacity for compassion, love, or kindness. They are stupid, evil, or shells of empty selves. Sir William, for instance, offers no real help to those who need it and merely sends the afflicted away, despite being a renowned psychiatrist. “Sir William not only prospered but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalized despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate until they, too, shared his sense of proportion” (97). While Clarissa, who while sensing Sir William’s capacity for cruelty, actually entertains such a man, Septimus rebels against Sir William and his idiotic advice. When he realizes that he is too enmeshed in the restrictions of his world to fight it, he tries to flee, committing suicide rather than give up that crucial part of his soul that, though damaged, still defines him. He kills himself in order to save himself. It is Septimus who is able to judge his society, albeit harshly, and take it at face value. In this respect, he is more aware of himself and his world than Clarissa, the supposedly sane character.

Despite their similar struggles, Clarissa and Septimus have very different ends. While Clarissa chooses to remain in her dream world, Septimus finds himself unable to succumb to it. Septimus loves life even more than Mrs. Dalloway does. His love stems from genuine appreciation of all the beauty the world has to offer. Clarissa’s love of life, on the other hand, is born of her fear of the world beyond her closeted society. She throws glamorous parties in order to escape from and spite her fear. What Clarissa does not realize, however, is that by refusing to confront that world’s pettiness and cruelty, she is only feeding into it. For instance, she is thrown into an anxious and miserable tizzy when she learns that Ellie Henderson, a poor and unlucky cousin, will be attending her party. Ellie’s presence will only serve as reminder of all that is wrong with society, and yet by ignoring her, Clarissa makes her lot all the more miserable. She will never be able to have the courage to assert herself and reconnect with that part of her individuality society has taken. She is too caught up in the illusion of meaning that society has spun for her. Her illusion makes her happy and, despite her knowing it is not the truth and that she is playing into a fundamentall flawed society, she is unable to give up that lifetime of happiness for a glimpse of truth. As a result, Clarissa suffers from boredom and meaninglessness. However, while Septimus is able to escape, albeit tragically, Clarissa makes no attempt to combat the English society that has so repressed her sense of self. While she realizes how empty and trivial her life is, she simply goes back to her party. While Septimus frees himself, Clarissa cannot bear to face her empty world and her emptied life.

Clarissa hides from a cruel world through her propriety and her parties. She uses her reserve and respectability as substitutes for the true self that society forces her to suppress. Her propriety has become her identity. Above all else, Clarissa needs to understand herself. She needs to know the damage that her upbringing has done to her. In realizing this, Clarissa must also realize the damage that she in turn, through apathy and frivolity, has done to the world around her. While she throws magnificent parties, they only serve as way for her not only to stay in her dream world but to bring others into it as well, thereby completing the illusion of a happy world populated by the good and chosen people. However, while Clarissa realizes, on some level, that that happiness cannot last and that the ranks of the wealthy elite are full of hypocrites and frauds, she is too afraid to look beyond the glitz of her parties and the mindless rules of behavior that govern her society. She is too weak to fully acknowledge the misery of a war that has preserved her society, and she refuses to discover the sufferings in the world lest she feel compelled to take responsibility for the apathy and ignorance that enabled some of the suffering. By choosing to remain in her dream world, Clarissa only makes it harder for herself to find any real meaning in a society built out of illusion. While she realizes, on some level, how decayed her society is, she fails to acknowledge it lest she feels responsible for changing it. Only by consciously acknowledging the cruelty of her world and the damage it has done to her and by attempting to alleviate some of that suffering can Clarissa truly be free of society’s illusions.

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is not a novel that shows English society through the eyes of the sane and the insane, but through the eyes of two very damaged people. No one is fully whole in Woof’s England, but Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith are especially broken and disconnected. Both have been made weak and susceptible by society, and both confront societal oppression on some level. Septimus has been traumatized by the world’s brutality and thereby cannot connect with a society based on such evil and stupidity. However, his staunch belief that the world is inherently lovely enables him to find the courage to flee from the societal aspects that ruin it. He escapes in the only way he can knows how and tragically commits suicide.  Clarissa, on the other hand, is damaged because she is lonely and empty. While she views life as charming, she also realizes that, for the most part, her life and the upper-class world she lives in is meaningless. Unlike Septimus, Clarissa pushes her knowledge of an oppressive society out of her consciousness, choosing to live with the illusion of peace and purpose rather than embrace herself and her place in the world and face the responsibility that comes with it.

Work Cited

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2005.