Mrs Dalloway Mental Illness Essay

The novel, Mrs. Dalloway, purpose was to expose how shell shock and other mental illness was misdiagnosed by medical professions, who was supposed to acknowledge anything wrong with a patient. The novel had many good reviews about the message behind the novel, but many critics believed Virginia Woolf wrote the novel to deal with her own mental illness. In a way, the novel was a snippet of the author’s life because Woolf’s doctors did not understand her horror story with depression. The critic David Dowling saw the novel as a masterpiece because of the message of post-traumatic stress disorder, and the struggles of veterans back from the war zone. Dowling explained Woolf used the characters, Septimus Smith and Peter Walsh, to represent loneliness
and repression. Septimus’ shell shock helped to show a lonely person can feel because their message is not coming across to anyone, who lived through the pain and suffering of a certain event. Virginia Woolf’s mentality as she wrote Mrs. Dalloway was death is communication by someone, and Woolf commented, “…Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the center, which mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone.
There was an embrace in death” (Woolf,208). Septimus was a person with a damaged outlook on life because of the war, and the last resort for was death. The study of Sigmund Freud was used by Dowling to express how doctors saw post-traumatic stress disorder, but in Mrs. Dalloway, the mental illness was called shell shock. Freud’s claim was the doctors wanted to believe the mental illness, post-traumatic stress disorder, occurred from the fear and duty of the soldier. If the doctors keep believing in that idea, they could find a way to cure people with the disorder without understanding the pain. Sigmund Freud’s concept of death was “Thanatos” meaning the ultimate goal in life is death exactly like Septimus’ mentality slowly came to the idea. Septimus questioned the idea of seeking the truth and getting people to understand his struggle, and Woolf implied, “Miracles, revelations, agonies, loneliness, falling through the sea; down into the flames, all were burnt out...,” (Woolf, 160). The idea of death was all around Septimus, and the idea corrupts him while he sat and watched his wife, Lucrezia, work in their
home. The critic Elizabeth Monroe studied Virginia Woolf’s mentality of Mrs. Dalloway, and how Woolf explored the idea of sensibility as an end in itself instead of imitating a society to fit in with the idea. Monroe commented on Woolf’s vision for the novel as she developed each character and their personal lives, and Monroe said, “The outlines of the world are not fixed, but are constantly merging into a dream or vision, the outer world dissolved by the intensity of emotion or deliberately set aside in favor of an inner world, where man’s real life lies buried.” Woolf created her characters to have them to face their horror stories instead of placing their issues on the back burner like they did not have any issues, especially Septimus. Septimus knew something was wrong with him, and he started to fall apart every day until his suicide. Septimus made Lucrezia write down everything he said during his episode, and Woolf implied, “Yet they were quite alone. But he began to talk aloud, answering people, arguing, laughing, crying, and getting very excited…” (Woolf,74). Also, Monroe used Marcel Proust’s conclusion of unconscious constitute of a man’s real world to differ from how Woolf used the approach of exploring the personal life to show her audience that life is not always perfect and beautiful like other writers portray life as. While Proust believed someone’s, personal life can ruin the person’s world because of the attachment to memories and hopes in life. While Septimus deteriorate from his personal life, Doctor Bradshaw believed personal lives can ruin someone’s mentality of being able to live their lives within the society’s morals. Sir William Bradshaw treated his patients by having a mindset of the patients’ mental illness was actually the person falling off the right track of life, and he commented, “But he was not mad, was he” (Woolf,100). The sense of proportion helped Doctor Bradshaw ignore the real issues of his patients, especially Septimus. Virginia Woolf’s mentality helped make Mrs. Dalloway have a more powerful message linked behind the characters and content.