Similarities Between Septimus's Suicide And Okonkwo Suicide
The Comparison between Septimus’s Suicide and Okonkwo’s Suicide
Glory Li Tongyu
1155054266
I. Introduction
Septimus is one of the main characters in Mrs. Dalloway which is a story happened in western society after World War I, and Okonkwo is the protagonist in Things Fall Apart which is a book about the traditional African society in about 17th century. It seems like there are no connections between Septimus and Okonkwo, since they are from different eras and different social backgrounds; but in fact, both of them commit a suicide in the ending part of the story, which makes them a comparable pair. Besides, the two authors of these two books, Virginia Woolf and Chinua Achebe intend to let these two male characters die in the end, which emphasize …show more content…
the importance of feminine feature, and, to a certain extent, can show that both of them have the awareness of feminism.
II. The difference between Septimus’s suicide and Okonkwo’s suicide
The factors that cause Septimus and Okonkwo to commit a suicide are different. For Septimus, it is mostly the external factors, such as the WWI and people’s attitudes towards him that kill him. Septimus is a soldier during the period of World War I and “he is one of the first who volunteer for war duty with passion for defending their country and lover” (Li, Siyuan). “He went to France hoping to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square.” (94) However, in the battlefront, he is gradually trained to be emotionless. In the war, he witnessed his best friend Evans being killed by the exposure of a bomb. But Septimus, “far from showing any emotion or recognizing that here was the end of a friendship, congratulated himself on feeling very little and very reasonably” (94-95). When the war is over, Septimus comes back home, gets married, and get a good job. He should have led a normal and happy life, but the war destroyed his mental health. For one thing, he is tortured by the guilt of being too passionless and not showing his agony to Evans’s death; for another, he has long been suffered from delayed shell-shock and is mentally unbalanced. “He falls into the abyss of insanity, terror and loneliness” (Li, Siyuan) and finds he can’t get used to the public life. The war has destroyed his power to feel the world. “He looked at people outside; happy they seemed, collecting in the middle of the street, shouting, laughing, and squabbling over nothing. But he could not taste, he could not feel. In the tea-shop among the tables and the chattering waiters the appalling fear came over him—he could not feel.” (95) However, this after-war trauma doesn’t get enough attention and understanding from both the society and the psychiatrists. A widespread attitude about shell-shock is to condemn it as a form of cowardice or malingering, and those doctor like Holmes and Bradshaw know nothing about how to deal with this special mental disease, shell-shock. “The bluff middle-class Holmes tries to deal with Septimus’s anguish by forcing him into the rigid mould of middle-class English masculine conduct… The upper-class Bradshaw recognizes the severity of the case, but his cold and arrogant manner, the style of someone accustomed to give orders, is the one least likely to succeed in the light of Septimus’s delusions of persecution.” (xlii, Mrs. Dalloway) Although Septimus’s wife Lucrezia takes good care of him and always follows the doctor’s advice to make him notice things outside himself so as to help him recover, she doesn’t really understand him at all and is burdened by Septimus’s mental illness because she believes she would be judged by it. Not being treated suitably by other people and his doctor, and not being understood well by his wife, he then retreats from the physical world to the psychological world and getting more and more insane. At last, he chooses to end his life to relieve from all the sufferings. In a sense, it is the cruel war and the indifferent society that cause Septimus to commit a suicide.
For Okonkwo, it is mostly the internal factors that lead to his suicide, that is, he denies the good side of femininity and restrains himself from not being feminine in his characteristics.
Okonkwo’s father Unoka is the representative of femininity. He loves music, he loves nature, and he knows how to enjoy life. But in the meanwhile, Unoka is “lazy and improvident and was quite incapable of thinking about tomorrow” (4), and “when he dies he has taken no title at all and he is heavily in debt” (8). Okonkwo is too afraid of being someone like his father; therefore, he tries his best to behave bravely and toughly, and he works hard to accumulate wealth. All what he has done is quite different from what his father did. He denies his father, and then he denies every feature his father owns including the femininity. However, his restraining himself from being feminine makes him suffer a lot. He has a deep emotion to his adopted son, Ikemefuna. Ikemefuna is brave, diligent, clever and deft; he has all good masculine features Okonkwo believes one man has to have and under his influence, Okonkwo’s eldest son, Nwoye changes his softness and weakness into independence and toughness. So, all the people in Okonkwo’s family, including Okonkwo himself, love this young boy very much. However, life is unfair to Ikemefuna. He is force to sacrifice his young life to atone for his father’s wrong doing, and he is going to be executed by Umuofa. This is also a big strike to Okonkwo because he …show more content…
has long been treating Ikemefuna as his son. However, his denying of femininity doesn’t allow him to show his emotion and save Ikemefuna, for if he disobeys the tradition and beg the elders to leave Ikemefuna alive, he is to give up his fame and dignity. So, when Ikemefuna cry, "My father, they have killed me!" (61), he “drew his machete and cut him down. He was afraid of being thought weak.” (61). It can be said that his lack of femininity leads him to kill his son, which foreshadows his mental breakdown and suicide. Moreover, Ikemefuna’s death also leads to the rupture between Okonkwo and his eldest son, Nwoye. Nwoye cannot bear the cruelty of the tradition of Umuofa any more and begins to doubt the values of his tribe. When the Christianity is brought to his tribe, he quickly accepts its doctrine of being kind and tolerant to everybody because it is exactly what he is pursuing, and then he works in the church. But Okonkwo can’t accept his son’s betrayal to his own tradition and culture. He reproaches Nwoye harshly and forbids him having any connection with the church and Christianity, which intensifies the conflicts between him and Nwoye and leads to the rupture between them. He firstly suffers from kill his adopted son and then tortures by the rupture between him and his eldest son, it intensifies his mental breakdown badly. As the hero of his tribe, he thinks femininity like mild, humor, and romantic are synonym of weakness and incompetence, which is meaningless, whereas masculinity like powerful, brave and tough is worthy of promoting. However, it is his overly suppression of his femininity born in his characteristic that makes him the prey of mental breakdown. Therefore, at last, he finishes his own life by committing a suicide.
III. The similarity between Septimus’s suicide and Okonkwo’s suicide
It seems that Septimus and Okonkwo have no connection apparently, but their suicides both can tell the society the importance of feminine feature and are the reflection of the two authors’ awareness of feminism. In Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus is actually killed by the cruelty of war and the indifference of the society. Having experienced the misery caused by the World War I, Virginia Woolf herself is a victim of war. She asserts that there is a necessary correlation between patriarchy and war. (Li, Li) She once said that “war is a profession for man, it is the source of joy and excitement as well as the realization of male’ character”. By saying this, Woolf reveals that men are aggressive and not as perfect as the patriarchy believes. However, war is such a bad thing because it makes people, both soldiers and ordinary people suffer a lot from the agony of losing their family and friends as well as the after-war trauma; war actually leads to self-destruction. On the contrary, Woolf believes that women are born with merits like being peace and comforting, which can help avoid this self-destruction and lower the aggression of the patriarchal society. (Li, Li) If the society lacks feminine qualities, this male-dominated society will at any time leads to the breakup of severe war. Therefore, in Woolf’s idea, to avoid war, we have to at first give women equal social position to men, and women’s good qualities and feminine features have to be accepted and respected. Besides, women have the good quality of comforting people. If the society could be more feminine and less indifferent, Septimus would be understood better and would live in a more tolerant circumstance; then his suicide can, to a certain degree, be avoid. To give Septimus a suicide ending, Virginia Woolf wants to expose the bad effect that this male-dominated society has on people. Thus, she appeals for the society to give women more rights to have their own voice and appeals for both men and women to fully acknowledge and respect women’s merits and values.
Chinua Achebe shows his awareness of feminism too in his novel Things Fall Apart.
Okonkwo’s suicide is ultimately because of his lacking of femininity. Psychologists have point out that an individual should not only have visible masculine traits but also have visible feminine traits, and different traits need to be shown according to different situations. A moderate possessing of femininity is one of the important facts that assure male people’s mental health. (Tao) As a traditional hero figure in his tribe, Okonkwo couldn’t realize the importance of being masculine as well as being feminine; on the contrary, he tries very hard to constrain the feminine traits in his personality, which results in his mental breakdown in the end. However, as the author, Achebe himself admits that these female traits like being kind, humorous and romantic are very valuable, and he does know the importance of femininity to a normal man. Therefore, he deliberately gives Okonkwo this suicide ending to show the society that it’s no good to possessing only masculinity; we have to give more attention to women’s merits and the feminine personalities. In this sense, Chinua Achebe gives his attention and respect to women, which shows a male writer’s strong awareness of
feminism.
IV. Conclusion
As the tragic characters in Mrs. Dalloway and Things Fall Apart, Septimus and Okonkwo commit a suicide in the end. Although they have different reasons to end their lives by themselves, their suicide both reflects their author, Virginia Woolf and Chinua Achebe’s awareness of feminism. And these two characters also serve as a medium to appeal for the male-dominated society to give more care and respect towards female people’s rights and merits.
References:
Li, Li. “Dimensions of Perspective on Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Ideology.” US-China Foreign Language (46)2007: 74-76.
Li, Siyuan. “The Contradictory Living State of the Main Characters in Mrs. Dalloway.” Overseas English (09)2014: 208-209.
Tao, Xianghe [陶湘鹤]. 《瓦解》：一出英雄的悲歌——从女性主义角度解读奥康科. 安徽文学（文学评论），(12)2009: 17-18.
Wang, Huan. “Life versus Death: An Interpretation of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.” Overseas English (10)2011: 277-278.
Glory Li Tongyu
1155054266
I. Introduction
Septimus is one of the main characters in Mrs. Dalloway which is a story happened in western society after World War I, and Okonkwo is the protagonist in Things Fall Apart which is a book about the traditional African society in about 17th century. It seems like there are no connections between Septimus and Okonkwo, since they are from different eras and different social backgrounds; but in fact, both of them commit a suicide in the ending part of the story, which makes them a comparable pair. Besides, the two authors of these two books, Virginia Woolf and Chinua Achebe intend to let these two male characters die in the end, which emphasize …show more content…
the importance of feminine feature, and, to a certain extent, can show that both of them have the awareness of feminism.
II. The difference between Septimus’s suicide and Okonkwo’s suicide
The factors that cause Septimus and Okonkwo to commit a suicide are different. For Septimus, it is mostly the external factors, such as the WWI and people’s attitudes towards him that kill him. Septimus is a soldier during the period of World War I and “he is one of the first who volunteer for war duty with passion for defending their country and lover” (Li, Siyuan). “He went to France hoping to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square.” (94) However, in the battlefront, he is gradually trained to be emotionless. In the war, he witnessed his best friend Evans being killed by the exposure of a bomb. But Septimus, “far from showing any emotion or recognizing that here was the end of a friendship, congratulated himself on feeling very little and very reasonably” (94-95). When the war is over, Septimus comes back home, gets married, and get a good job. He should have led a normal and happy life, but the war destroyed his mental health. For one thing, he is tortured by the guilt of being too passionless and not showing his agony to Evans’s death; for another, he has long been suffered from delayed shell-shock and is mentally unbalanced. “He falls into the abyss of insanity, terror and loneliness” (Li, Siyuan) and finds he can’t get used to the public life. The war has destroyed his power to feel the world. “He looked at people outside; happy they seemed, collecting in the middle of the street, shouting, laughing, and squabbling over nothing. But he could not taste, he could not feel. In the tea-shop among the tables and the chattering waiters the appalling fear came over him—he could not feel.” (95) However, this after-war trauma doesn’t get enough attention and understanding from both the society and the psychiatrists. A widespread attitude about shell-shock is to condemn it as a form of cowardice or malingering, and those doctor like Holmes and Bradshaw know nothing about how to deal with this special mental disease, shell-shock. “The bluff middle-class Holmes tries to deal with Septimus’s anguish by forcing him into the rigid mould of middle-class English masculine conduct… The upper-class Bradshaw recognizes the severity of the case, but his cold and arrogant manner, the style of someone accustomed to give orders, is the one least likely to succeed in the light of Septimus’s delusions of persecution.” (xlii, Mrs. Dalloway) Although Septimus’s wife Lucrezia takes good care of him and always follows the doctor’s advice to make him notice things outside himself so as to help him recover, she doesn’t really understand him at all and is burdened by Septimus’s mental illness because she believes she would be judged by it. Not being treated suitably by other people and his doctor, and not being understood well by his wife, he then retreats from the physical world to the psychological world and getting more and more insane. At last, he chooses to end his life to relieve from all the sufferings. In a sense, it is the cruel war and the indifferent society that cause Septimus to commit a suicide.
For Okonkwo, it is mostly the internal factors that lead to his suicide, that is, he denies the good side of femininity and restrains himself from not being feminine in his characteristics.
Okonkwo’s father Unoka is the representative of femininity. He loves music, he loves nature, and he knows how to enjoy life. But in the meanwhile, Unoka is “lazy and improvident and was quite incapable of thinking about tomorrow” (4), and “when he dies he has taken no title at all and he is heavily in debt” (8). Okonkwo is too afraid of being someone like his father; therefore, he tries his best to behave bravely and toughly, and he works hard to accumulate wealth. All what he has done is quite different from what his father did. He denies his father, and then he denies every feature his father owns including the femininity. However, his restraining himself from being feminine makes him suffer a lot. He has a deep emotion to his adopted son, Ikemefuna. Ikemefuna is brave, diligent, clever and deft; he has all good masculine features Okonkwo believes one man has to have and under his influence, Okonkwo’s eldest son, Nwoye changes his softness and weakness into independence and toughness. So, all the people in Okonkwo’s family, including Okonkwo himself, love this young boy very much. However, life is unfair to Ikemefuna. He is force to sacrifice his young life to atone for his father’s wrong doing, and he is going to be executed by Umuofa. This is also a big strike to Okonkwo because he …show more content…
has long been treating Ikemefuna as his son. However, his denying of femininity doesn’t allow him to show his emotion and save Ikemefuna, for if he disobeys the tradition and beg the elders to leave Ikemefuna alive, he is to give up his fame and dignity. So, when Ikemefuna cry, "My father, they have killed me!" (61), he “drew his machete and cut him down. He was afraid of being thought weak.” (61). It can be said that his lack of femininity leads him to kill his son, which foreshadows his mental breakdown and suicide. Moreover, Ikemefuna’s death also leads to the rupture between Okonkwo and his eldest son, Nwoye. Nwoye cannot bear the cruelty of the tradition of Umuofa any more and begins to doubt the values of his tribe. When the Christianity is brought to his tribe, he quickly accepts its doctrine of being kind and tolerant to everybody because it is exactly what he is pursuing, and then he works in the church. But Okonkwo can’t accept his son’s betrayal to his own tradition and culture. He reproaches Nwoye harshly and forbids him having any connection with the church and Christianity, which intensifies the conflicts between him and Nwoye and leads to the rupture between them. He firstly suffers from kill his adopted son and then tortures by the rupture between him and his eldest son, it intensifies his mental breakdown badly. As the hero of his tribe, he thinks femininity like mild, humor, and romantic are synonym of weakness and incompetence, which is meaningless, whereas masculinity like powerful, brave and tough is worthy of promoting. However, it is his overly suppression of his femininity born in his characteristic that makes him the prey of mental breakdown. Therefore, at last, he finishes his own life by committing a suicide.
III. The similarity between Septimus’s suicide and Okonkwo’s suicide
It seems that Septimus and Okonkwo have no connection apparently, but their suicides both can tell the society the importance of feminine feature and are the reflection of the two authors’ awareness of feminism. In Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus is actually killed by the cruelty of war and the indifference of the society. Having experienced the misery caused by the World War I, Virginia Woolf herself is a victim of war. She asserts that there is a necessary correlation between patriarchy and war. (Li, Li) She once said that “war is a profession for man, it is the source of joy and excitement as well as the realization of male’ character”. By saying this, Woolf reveals that men are aggressive and not as perfect as the patriarchy believes. However, war is such a bad thing because it makes people, both soldiers and ordinary people suffer a lot from the agony of losing their family and friends as well as the after-war trauma; war actually leads to self-destruction. On the contrary, Woolf believes that women are born with merits like being peace and comforting, which can help avoid this self-destruction and lower the aggression of the patriarchal society. (Li, Li) If the society lacks feminine qualities, this male-dominated society will at any time leads to the breakup of severe war. Therefore, in Woolf’s idea, to avoid war, we have to at first give women equal social position to men, and women’s good qualities and feminine features have to be accepted and respected. Besides, women have the good quality of comforting people. If the society could be more feminine and less indifferent, Septimus would be understood better and would live in a more tolerant circumstance; then his suicide can, to a certain degree, be avoid. To give Septimus a suicide ending, Virginia Woolf wants to expose the bad effect that this male-dominated society has on people. Thus, she appeals for the society to give women more rights to have their own voice and appeals for both men and women to fully acknowledge and respect women’s merits and values.
Chinua Achebe shows his awareness of feminism too in his novel Things Fall Apart.
Okonkwo’s suicide is ultimately because of his lacking of femininity. Psychologists have point out that an individual should not only have visible masculine traits but also have visible feminine traits, and different traits need to be shown according to different situations. A moderate possessing of femininity is one of the important facts that assure male people’s mental health. (Tao) As a traditional hero figure in his tribe, Okonkwo couldn’t realize the importance of being masculine as well as being feminine; on the contrary, he tries very hard to constrain the feminine traits in his personality, which results in his mental breakdown in the end. However, as the author, Achebe himself admits that these female traits like being kind, humorous and romantic are very valuable, and he does know the importance of femininity to a normal man. Therefore, he deliberately gives Okonkwo this suicide ending to show the society that it’s no good to possessing only masculinity; we have to give more attention to women’s merits and the feminine personalities. In this sense, Chinua Achebe gives his attention and respect to women, which shows a male writer’s strong awareness of
feminism.
IV. Conclusion
As the tragic characters in Mrs. Dalloway and Things Fall Apart, Septimus and Okonkwo commit a suicide in the end. Although they have different reasons to end their lives by themselves, their suicide both reflects their author, Virginia Woolf and Chinua Achebe’s awareness of feminism. And these two characters also serve as a medium to appeal for the male-dominated society to give more care and respect towards female people’s rights and merits.
References:
Li, Li. “Dimensions of Perspective on Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Ideology.” US-China Foreign Language (46)2007: 74-76.
Li, Siyuan. “The Contradictory Living State of the Main Characters in Mrs. Dalloway.” Overseas English (09)2014: 208-209.
Tao, Xianghe [陶湘鹤]. 《瓦解》：一出英雄的悲歌——从女性主义角度解读奥康科. 安徽文学（文学评论），(12)2009: 17-18.
Wang, Huan. “Life versus Death: An Interpretation of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.” Overseas English (10)2011: 277-278.