According to Virginia Woolf, she to wanted to create a world that put “the sane and insane side by side”. In Mrs. Dalloway, it is suggested that Clarissa, a party hostess, represents the mentally sound while Septimus, a shell shocked World War I, struggles with reality and shows signs of schizophrenia. However, both are not as different as they may seem. They both show signs of depression, feel repressed by their surroundings, and blend fantasy/memory with reality. So, what truly separates the sane from the insane?
The key difference lies in Mrs. Dalloway’s ability to function in society while ignoring her internal turmoil and emotional fragmentation. Similar to Virginia Woolf’s dealings with mental illness, Mrs. Dalloway goes through the motions of life but is constantly grappling with an invisible enemy. Likewise, Virginia Woolf may have had bouts of hysteria but she was able to interact with human society during times of lucidity. Meanwhile, Septimus is trapped within the confines of his mind and his inability to tell separate fantasy and reality labels him insane. This line between sanity and insanity centers around the individual's perception of the real world.
In the case of Septimus, he experiences vivid visions and translates his emotions into physical metaphors. Similarly, within Mrs. Dalloway, we often find instances where Clarissa experiences moments of “insanity”. For example, “Since she was lying on the sofa, cloistered, exempt, the presence of this thing which she felt so obvious became physically extent; with robes of sound from the street, sunny, with hot breath, whispering, blowing out the blinds” (122). Her emotions take on physical meaning and perfectly blend the external and internal.
As a result, neither Clarissa nor Septimus fully represent the sane or insane. While I didn’t fully explore Septimus’s sanity, he and Clarissa both share qualities that make it hard to clearly label one normal and the other crazy.
Source:
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925. Print.
I think that this is a good point. While on the surface, Septimus and Clarissa being two separate characters seems to suggest that Septimus represent the insanity and Clarissa represents the sane, "normal" side of people. As you point out, this seems to be an oversimplification simply because Clarissa also experiences moments where she isn't acting normally, and is asking many of the same questions Septimus is asking, all be it in different ways. I think that by doing this, Woolf is showing that even if real and imaginary can be partially compartmentalized, there will always be some overlap.
ReplyDeleteIt would be interesting to keep going with this topic, to "explore Septimus's sanity," as you put it, because in some ways I think that's harder to see than these moments of Clarissa's "insanity" (she experiences her self as fragmented--as in the scene before the mirror--but she has the capacity to "pull it all together" into a coherent self to present to the world; which is what Septimus is unable to do). Relevant here might be Septimus's writings, which Rezia says are sometimes incoherent and obviously deranged, while others are strikingly beautiful. Or, we might look at some of his hallucinatory digressions: "there is no death" and "universal love" might sound like "crazy" tag-lines, but they could be seen to represent real and important ideas that Septimus struggles to convey. Especially his fateful rhetorical question, "Perhaps the world itself was without meaning" (which occurs right near the start of his breakdown)--indeed, many rather "sane" people were surveying the world in the years after WWI and came to similar conclusions, and many of them were artists and poets and writers. Septimus, it seems, is just a shade away from being the kind of troubled mind who is able to express that troubledness in the form of art.
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