the death of the soul

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is a tapestry of a book, with little threads tracing the connections between characters as they interact with Clarissa Dalloway. But the titular Clarissa isn’t the only focal point of the book; her story runs parallel to the life of World War I veteran Septimus Smith, who ends up committing suicide. Their only connection is a tangential comment from a side character at Clarissa’s party: “A young man has killed himself. He had been in the army.” And yet the little threads that connect them form a web that tangle them both, though their respective storylines play out according to their individual traumas and social standings.

Septimus fought in the war for his ideal of England, which amounted to Shakespeare and a beautiful English teacher. He essentially fought for the world that Clarissa lives in, one of belonging and tradition. Shakespeare is often discussed throughout the book as a symbol of this cultural belonging; Clarissa’s husband Richard Dalloway makes the comment that “no decent man ought to read Shakespeare’s sonnets because it was like listening at keyholes” (84). Richard is hated for this comment by Clarissa’s spurned ex-lover Peter Walsh, who at the time believed that Richard and his even-tempered disdain of poetry would crush Clarissa’s soul. But even as Peter admires her spirit within this context of cultural belonging, he disdains her for being “shallow” in her expression of it. She organizes parties to bring people together in a shared intimate space, but he believes she is obsessed with social standing in her efforts to do so. He sees her love of belonging as cold and power-driven, stemming from an obsession with social standing and tradition. She would appear to be in the room whose “keyhole” Shakespeare is listening at. However, her desperation to bring people together stems from her sense that she is on the outside. As Woolf describes it, “she sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside looking on. She had a perpetual sense… of being out, out, far out to sea and alone…” (7). Septimus has a similar sense of being an outsider, though he has a more complicated narrative within this dynamic. He is a poet who loved Shakespeare before the war, and Woolf’s description of his motives conflate Shakespeare with both England and the English teacher he was in love with. They were all part of the belonging that he sought through becoming a poet and running off to London for his work. However, after the war he finds himself locked out of this belonging. He rereads Shakespeare for the first time and realizes, for all the beauty of poetry, Shakespeare was locked out of it too. “How Shakespeare loathed humanity—the putting on of clothes, the getting of children, the sordidity of the mouth and the belly!” (95). Septimus finds himself disgusted with the idea of tradition and the mundanities of life that comprise English culture, and he spirals into a loathing that eventually leads to his own spiritual revelations and suicide.

Clarissa is desperate for social belonging while Septimus disdains it, yet through their experiences they arrive at strikingly similar spiritual understandings of the world and its mechanics. Septimus’ descriptions of his philosophy are grandiose and nonsensical; he talks of his revelations, about beauty and time and death. As Woolf describes it, his revelation essentially boils down to “universal love: the meaning of the world” (160). The world and everything in it is bound together by beauty: “up in the sky swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out, round and round, yet always with perfect control as if elastics helf 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” (74). Clarissa has a similar view of the spiritual significance of the ordinary, though she describes it in relation to people rather than nature. She never pinpoints what it is that connects people, but she describes the mechanics of the connections eloquently. Clarissa discusses her sense of connection in terms of threads: “And [her friends] went further and further from her, being attached to her by a thin thread (since they had lunched with her) which would stretch and stretch, get thinner and thinner… as if one’s friends were attached to one’s body… by a thin thread, which (as she dozed there) became hazy with the sound of bells, striking the hour or ringing to service, as a single spider’s thread is blotted with rain-drops, and, burdened, sags down” (121-122). 

Clarissa demonstrates the same sense of the totality of the world as Septimus. However, Septimus’ understanding is shaped by his conviction that as a veteran who has survived the horrors of war, he is a “chosen one” who has the meaning of the world and must act as a prophet. He uses more intensely religious descriptions of prophesy and life after death to describe his convictions. Clarissa’s understanding, on the other hand, is shaped by her role as a woman and a mother in the world she tries to belong in. She quietly traces the connections between herself and others without understanding of what those threads are made of, or even attempting to understand. In fact, she openly disdains the men in her life who pretend to understand the fibers of the world: “What’s your love? she might say to him. And she knew his answer; how it is the most important thing in the world and no woman possibly understood it. Very well. But could any man understand what she meant either? about life?” (132). Instead of trying to answer the question, she focuses on the social implications of these threads and her own service to the organizing beauty of relationships. Her hostessing, as a feminine role that she might otherwise feel as unconnected to as she does to motherhood, becomes an offering to the “meaning of the world” Septimus prophesies about. It becomes a spiritual practice just as strong as Septimus’ desperation to communicate the meaning of the world to everyone he encounters, even though it is quieter and channeled through the cultural sense of belonging she pursues.

Paired with this deep sense of spiritual understanding in both Clarissa and Septimus’ stories is a common enemy that cuts the threads of “universal love” and ultimately destroys the dearest parts of their lives. This enemy Conversion is personified in relation to Septimus: “…she feasts on the wills of the weakly, loving to impress, to impose, adoring her own features stamped on the face of the populace” (108). Septimus is most obviously affected by this enemy; his doctor, Sir William, is determined to “stamp his own features” on the people he helps, moderating their lives and wills with what he calls a “sense of proportion.” Both Septimus and his wife, Rezia, sense that Sir William is out to convert Septimus to his own image, and in fact their story together ends with an attempt to escape him. However, even before Sir William blatantly embodies this principle, Septimus encounters this enemy. Woolf conflates Conversion with the ethos of English society “even now engaged—in the heat and sands of India, the mud and swamp of Africa, the purlieus of London, wherever in short the climate or the devil tempts men to fall from the true belief which is [its] own—is even now engaged in dashing down shrines, smashing idols, and setting up in their place her own stern countenance” (108). In this sense, Septimus becomes a victim of the enemy of Conversion from the moment he becomes a soldier. Fighting for a cultural tradition that both embodies what he loves (Shakespeare and an English teacher) and enshrines Conversion ultimately leads to his PTSD and mounting insanity after his best friend Evans is killed in the war. He loses not only his friend and innocence, but also his ability to feel. He is plagued by the sense that he has lost his humanity by losing his feeling, and he is terrified throughout the book that “human nature” will punish him for this lack. This broad concept of “human nature” feeds in to the sense that he is on the outside of the world he fought for. 

Though Clarissa is neither a veteran nor a madwoman, she has experienced loss at the hands of Conversion that closely mirrors Septimus’ story. She, like Septimus, loses her best friend and potential lover Sally at the hands of English society. Sally as a character is the epitome of rebellion against tradition; she runs naked through the hallways and smokes cigarettes, pawning off family heirlooms so she can move to live with Clarissa’s family. Clarissa falls in love with her, even despite the tension Sally creates with her longing to belong in her cultural tradition. Clarissa herself is the first to lose her innocence at the hands of society. Like Septimus, she is seduced by the sense of belonging and tradition that embody English society, but it ultimately converts her to its own image. She marries a conservative man that disdains Shakespeare and who she feels no passion for, and while he provides stability, she loses a fundamental part of her personality in the process. She and Sally were out to change the world, bonding over all the things that were wrong with it and what they would change, just as Septimus and his best friend Evans joined the war to protect an ideal they loved. But, like Evans, Sally loses her life as a casualty in society’s quest for conversion. When she visits Clarissa for the first time in decades during her party, it turns out that she had married and had five sons. She has met a fate more subtle than Evans’ but more prolonged and agonizing: “her voice was wrung of its old ravishing richness; her eyes not aglow as they used to be, when she smoked cigars, when she ran down the passage to fetch her sponge bag, without a stitch of clothing on her…. It was bound, Clarissa used to think, to end in some awful tragedy; her death; her martyrdom; instead of which she had married, quite unexpectedly, a bald man with a large buttonhole who owned, it was said, cotton mills at Manchester. And she had five boys!” (197-198). Over the course of the book, it becomes obvious that like Septimus, Clarissa is plagued with the accusation that she has no feeling, especially when it comes to Peter Walsh. She lives a content life without passion, always under the shadow of “human nature,” the awareness that things could have been different and she could have gotten what she wanted. And all the while, like with Septimus, the threat of society and its conversion looms large over her and the life she has attempted to compromise to it.

It makes sense that when Septimus escapes from this threat of conversion in the most drastic sense by killing himself, Clarissa immediately recognizes as an act of defiance and an attempt to maintain his integrity in the face of forced conformity. “A thing there was that mattered,” she says, “a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance” (201). Clarissa is left with the unavoidable awareness that she had lost her integrity somewhere along the line, in the slow grinding death of her soul that society exacted on her. Sally judges Clarissa from beyond her “grave” as Clarissa contemplates the suicide, like Evans haunting Septimus with the awareness of death: “how could Clarissa have done it?—married Richard Dalloway? …And then all this? She waved her hand” (206). Septimus had died and Clarissa had survived, but her life is woven with the same threads as his downfall. The last words of the book become haunting in the light of this death of her soul: “It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was” (212).