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

Modern Age, Summer, 2004 by George A. Panichas

Woolf's description of Septimus's condition is astonishing in its dispassionate power of insight and also of sympathy as she depicts him before and after the war, when he is sinking inexorably into an abyss of nothingness and desolateness. The fact is that Septimus never escapes from no-man's-land, that his only future is the death that, as the soldier-poet Sir Herbert Read has observed, he even now shares intimately with all those before him who had fought and died in the trenches. (12) Septimus, to be sure, was a brave warrior, but he had expended all his bravery in the war, as well as his love for his fellows. There was nothing left for him now: all his human concerns and literary ambitions were to count for him nothing in postwar English society, and he could not connect with other human beings or with the postwar world: "His body was macerated until only the nerve fibres were left. It was spread like a veil upon a rock." The spectre of his commanding officer, Evans, ("a quiet ... red-haired man") killed at the front just before the Armistice, stubbornly and mysteriously clung to Septimus and haunted his thoughts: "A man in grey was actually walking towards them. It was Evans! But no mud was on him; no wounds; he was not changed."

In the war Septimus "developed manliness; he was promoted; he drew the attention, indeed the affection of his officer, Evans by name." Clearly Septimus's friendship with Evans is a "sacramental" one, of the ethereal kind that developed among the combatants, now necessarily free of class distinctions, confronting a common enemy and a common danger, with a common loyalty and solidarity. But the shock of warfare and its grim consequences in the end robbed Septimus of his human feelings: "For now that it was all over, truce signed, and the dead buried, he had ... these sudden thunder-claps of fear. He could not feel." His view of the world of men and women, then, is a disordered one, indelibly warped by a war that was to ordain disillusionment and cynicism that will not go away: "For the truth is ... that human beings have neither kindness nor faith, nor charity .... They hunt in packs. Their packs scour the desert and vanish screaming into the wilderness."

Septimus's shell-shocked consciousness deteriorates in his postwar setting, as "he descended another step into the pit .... he dropped his head on his hands. Now he had surrendered; now other people must help him." Dr. Holmes, a kindly, amiable, but hopelessly imperceptive and inept general practitioner, who also happens to be Mrs. Filmer's physician, is now called on to examine Septimus: "There was nothing whatever the matter, said Dr. Holmes," who is totally oblivious of the young man's "degradation." Perfunctorily, he brushes aside the "headaches, sleeplessness, fears, dreams--nerve symptoms and nothing more, he said." Septimus's internal condition gets worse, in the meantime, not-withstanding Holmes's forty years' medical experience: "... Holmes himself could not touch this last relic straying on the edge of the world, this outcast ...."