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

Modern Age, Summer, 2004 by George A. Panichas

And once again we hear the voice from behind the screen: "Evans was speaking. The dead were with him." Having no real confidence in Dr. Holmes, who has been treating him for six weeks, and with Septimus's condition steadily reaching a breaking point, the "Warren Smiths walked down Harley Street," this time to consult with an eminent specialist, Sir William Bradshaw, who has attained "the reputation (of the utmost importance in dealing with nerve cases) not merely of lightning skill, and almost infallible accuracy in diagnosis but of sympathy; tact; understanding of the human soul."

Sir William "was certain directly he saw the man; it was a case of extreme gravity .... [a] complete physical and nervous breakdown, with every symptom in an advanced stage." For Septimus, as indeed for a neurasthenic like Virginia Woolf herself, Sir William's is the voice of thanatos, the voice of the world, unrelenting in its authority, cold and matter-of-fact, dogmatic in conviction, the last word in disenchantment. "Shortly and kindly Sir William explained to her [Rezia] the state of the case": Septimus had threatened to kill himself. "There was no alternative. It was a question of law."

In short, Septimus Warren Smith, "the drowned sailor; the poet of the immortal ode; the Lord who had gone from life to death," was condemned by Sir William to "go into a home" in the country, where he would learn to rest. "Really he was not fit to be about." ("The fellow made a distasteful impression" on the famous specialist, in whom there was "a grudge, deeply buried, against cultivated people who came into his room and intimated that doctors ... are not educated men.") Septimus's own instinctive perception of what Sir William represents is sharply expressed in his interior thoughts on the hard-nosed "arrangements" for his rehabilitation (for the sake of "divine proportion"): "Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you. Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly screaming into the desert. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is remorseless."

Sir William's meeting with Septimus and Rezia, which comes at the novel's mid-point, contains Woolf's conception of alienation in its modern constituents, as these are transcribed in an urban metropolis that, from the standpoint of human warmth and compassion, is cold and unfeeling, even indifferent to the possibility of suicide and death. If anything, the city of London in Mrs. Dalloway has the underlying look and feel of a necropolis and magnifies the sense of alienation that oppresses men and women who live in its houses, walk on its streets, meet and interact with others, hear sounds and words, and see things that are transient in context and meaning. The Smiths/Bradshaw meeting manifests the mood and temper of alienated men and women--skeptical, estranged, or withdrawn, or withered in feeling or affection. This dramatic meeting, which has incalculable effects, as evidenced in its immediate scenes and dialogue, leads Rezia to conveying her most frightening inner feelings of disenchantment and, ultimately, of disconnection: "Sir William was not a nice man." "He had failed them!" "They had been deserted."