Septimus and Clarissa

Having just finished the part of the book where Septimus commits suicide, I’m having difficulty understanding where he fits into the story, and I wonder whether or not Rezia will reappear before the end of the book. His story seems unfinished and his place in the world that Woolf has created is unexplained. So why does Woolf include Septimus?

One reason we touched on in class is that Woolf included Septimus to provide a sane-insane comparison. This is too simplistic a reason; Woolf’s characters are too complex to be one thing or another--we cannot say that one character is “this”, and the other is “that”, to paraphrase Clarissa.

Other possible reason is that Woolf is trying to show how serious shell shock, or PTSD, actually was. Perhaps she believed that shell-shock was a real phenomenon that could entirely alter the lives of soldiers who come home from the war, despite the fact that most medical authorities of her generation dismissed the symptoms as weakness or cowardice. 

But what is the connection between Clarissa and Septimus? It seems like the two main characters should be connected in some way. Otherwise, why would you have two main characters? It’s possible that Woolf is making the point that Clarissa and Septimus are actually much more similar than they seem. Both of them feel trapped and oppressed: Clarissa by the disappearance of her own identity and her place in society, and Septimus by his memories of the war and his hallucinations. Clarissa questions the choices she has made in her life throughout the book. She wonders whether she has married the right man, or whether she could have lived her life in a more fulfilling way if she had tried. Septimus, meanwhile, questions the meaning of life in general. Finally, both are not fully engaged in the world at present. Clarissa is constantly reminiscing about her youth at Bourton and Septimus is caught up in his memories of Evans and the war. Perhaps Woolf is drawing a connection between the two characters to show the vestiges of insanity in the normal, respectable Mrs. Dalloway and the underlying sanity in Septimus. Perhaps she is blurring the borders of consciousness simply to show that borders are always blurred.

I hope Woolf ties up the loose ends of Septimus’s and Rezia’s story, and connects them concretely to Clarissa in some way. I can understand why she wouldn’t though, because then it would be more true to life. In life, suicide is almost never explained in full, and the stories of people who commit suicide are often never fully understood; perhaps Woolf will take this route and leave us all waiting for an explanation that will never be provided.