Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway: "a well of tears"

Modern Age, Summer, 2004 by George A. Panichas

Time passes, it seems, unmitigably as the human spectacle and human fate inevitably interact in the framework of routine conditions and circumstances of present history, which is, nonetheless, indelibly still launched by the memory of the Great War: "This late age of the world's experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears." Clearly, whatever peacetime happenings and ambitions and hopes constitute the novel's soul, as it were, the resonances of war cannot be entirely erased, or forgotten even years later, for somehow the war revisits human consciousness and relationships in the visible forms of remembrance of things past. To be sure, five years have passed by since military operations ended, but for "the men of 1914" the Great War was, in the words of a French combatant, Henri Massis, "the home of our youth" and "would never cease to mark our work and our days." (8)

The truth of Massis's statement permeates the whole of Mrs. Dalloway and is personified, continuously and pitilessly, from the beginning to the end of the novel, by Septimus Warren Smith--"aged about thirty, pale-faced, beak-nosed, wearing brown shoes and a shabby overcoat, with hazel eyes which had that look of apprehension in them which makes strangers apprehensive, too." It is precisely the overarching note of apprehensiveness that captures and conveys the basic temper of Mrs. Dalloway, and that, in the end, testifies to the disenchantment that postwar literature (and society) was to highlight, with the inextinguishable power and acuity that were to earmark the modern age in its origins and developments since 1918.

It could even be said that Septimus is a representative figure in the pantheon of those early "moderns" who survived but who also lost their souls on the fighting fronts of the Great War, and who lacked, or perhaps rejected, the fundamental capacity and self-assurance, the faith, to refurbish and regain their equilibrium in an age that announced its unique ascendancy in the post-war years. Not only is Septimus a prescient historical figure and force, but also, in Mrs. Dalloway, a powerful presence that refuses to disappear, either in suicide or in death. To be sure, Clarissa Dalloway is the substantive character and center of Woolf's novel, but Septimus Warren Smith is its fictive coadjutor (or "double") without whom neither the role of Clarissa nor the full significance of the novel can be completely grasped. Indeed, as one critic observes, Septimus "is more closely identified with Woolf herself than is Clarissa." (9) In fact, Septimus unifies the novel in its parts and whole; consummates the burden of its vision; extends and rarefies its rendition; and, in sum, attenuates a "gradual drawing of everything to one centre."

Septimus was one of the first to volunteer after the outbreak of war on August 4, 1914. "He went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare's plays and Miss Isabel Pole who, before the war, had deeply impressed a shy, stammering, "half-educated, self-educated" Septimus, newly arrived in London from Stroud. She "lit in him such a fire as burns only once in a lifetime," exciting deep feelings, love, and idealism, and an aspiration to make something of himself, even to be someday an important literary figure. This early phase of his life was filled with poetry and enthusiasm, and was a portent of Septimus's future as his London employer, Mr. Brewer, believed. "Something is up" in Septimus, an enthusiastic Mr. Brewer said, as he gauged his young employee's character and prospects. Indeed, those brilliant portents, no less than his pre-war world, would soon turn into ashes, as that "monstrous" August of 1914 seemed to announce an eventual crumbling of modern civilization.