They can be seen as each others opposites, at the same time as each others

doubles. Clarissa is portrayed as the sane female and Septimus as the insane
male
Clarissa and Septimus. Firstly, there is difference between how they look at themselves
and
how other people see them. Secondly, they have an internal as well as an external
perception
of the world, in terms of imagination and reality, which unite as wel
l as separate them.
Clarissa Dalloway is seen as a woman well adjusted to society; she is the perfect
hostess,
wife and mother belonging to the middle class. Even though this appearance is one she
desires
and tries to maintain, she is fragmented insid
e
.
She enjoys her situation in life, her family, her
parties, and the fact of being able to admire the beauty of the city: I love walking in
London, said Mrs Dalloway. Really, its better than walking in the country (Woolf 3).
Yet
she is ageing every
second, she wonders what life could have been like, had she made other
decisions when she was young. She thinks of herself as invisible, that her body has
become
nothing. She has even lost the connection between her body and her name; to other
people she
is no longer Clarissa, but instead Mrs Richard Dalloway (8
9). Her two images affect her
thoughts and experiences in the outside world.
Varying between being Clarissa and being Mrs Dalloway, she constantly sways between
memory and perception, between
past and present, as well as integrating the different sensations, creating a web of
consciousness, fantasy and reality. For one moment she is back
in her early twenties, in the countryside at Bourton, experiencing youth and love in the
company of Sally Se
ton and Peter Walsh. The next, she is back in London, cherishing life, yet
feeling depressed. Her emotions sway between longing to disappear from her present
life and
longing to be surrounded by people, to be a centre point.

On the outside, she

displays a composed, cold surface, but on the inside her mind works in order to turn
away
from the repressed passionate feelings of youth, and torments of life, that try to escape
from
her unconsciousness. This leaves her fragmented, divided between happiness and
sadness.
While her thoughts go to appreciating life, they also express a curiosity about death.
She thinks of it as an end as well as a beginning, because she feels that the dead
survive by
becoming a part of nature itself. She sees death as fulfilling, to be able to escape the
world, yet still remain in it.
Similar thoughts of death as liberation exist in the mind of Septimus Warren Smith. He,
like Clarissa, is fragmented and torn between his thoughts. From the outside, Septimus
is seen
as the brave war hero, who f
ought for his country. He is considered to be an able man who is
happily married and content with life. Yet, on the inside, that is far from the truth. After
the
death of his friend Evans, he suffers from shell shock and, by trying to return to a
normal life,
he discovers that he has lost the ability to feel anything. He can see no happiness in life;
where he sees beauty in nature, he sees cruelty in human nature. By going back to
everyday
life after the war, trying to live as usual, he has become depressed
and confused, and is
mentally unstable. His vision of life does not follow the norm, and his condition cannot
be
understood by society, here portrayed by two doctors, Holmes and Bradshaw. They try
to treat him in different ways, to figure him out, which makes him turn away from life
even
more, convinced that humans are brutal creatures. Without being able to feel, he
believes that he is deserted and deserves to die: The whole world was clamouring: Kill
yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes (93).
Septimus is so filled with repressed emotions that he thinks that
he cannot feel at all. The post-traumatic stress and the pretence that everything is the
way it
should be make him believe that he has lost his feelings for good. Just like Clarissa, he
creates
a web of imagination and reality when looking at the world. Yet, in Septimuss case, the
web

is more complex, and the different components are harder to separate, due to his
condition. He floats in and out of imaginings, once mistaking Peter Walsh for the dead
Evans.

What separates Septimus from Clarissa is :

In everyday life, Clarissa can manage, to some extent, to ignore her internal emotions
and focus on the external, beauty in life, in London. Septimus can
also appreciate outside beauty, but since he has not been given
the time to grieve, he cannot shut out his internal emotions the way Clarissa can.

What unites Clarissa and Septimus is their way of blending internal and
external, mixing fantasy and reality.

Double Trouble
In the introduction to the 1928 edition of Mrs Dalloway, Woolf explains outright that Septimus
and Clarissa are doubles. In fact, she originally planned to have Clarissa kill herself in the end.
Both Septimus and Clarissa are disturbed by the social structure and oppressions of British life.
They both love Shakespeare (think of the line they both recall from Cymbeline: "fear no more"),
are both very attuned to lifes deep meaning, and both have bird-like faces.
The two protagonists also share psychological qualities. Where Clarissa manages to feel nothing
after witnessing the death of her sister, Septimus is also initially pleased with his manly, detached
attitude toward the loss of Evans. Thoughts of death are central to both of them: Septimus thinks
about Evans death and Clarissa dwells constantly on her own. Both willingly participate in a
lifestyle that validates imperialism, nationalism, and war. And while Clarissa manages far better
than Septimus, they both manage to see beauty in the world in spite of the suffering and
isolation.
Septimus succeeds in slapping convention in the face, but is only able to do so by killing himself.
His death is experienced by Clarissa as an expression of defiance, a real communication of the
self, from which she can benefit, too:
A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her
own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was
defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the
centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone.
There was an embrace in death. (6.86)
Neither Woolf nor Clarissa consider Septimus' death a tragedy per se; its more like the ultimate
acknowledgment of the failures of the world around him a bold rejection of tyranny and the
only way to preserve himself. He therefore "plunges holding his treasure" (6.87), as Clarissa
describes it, which is to say that he has held on to part of himself and his dignity.

Autobiographical elements
Virginia Woolf was a miracle of self-invention and survival. She fought the abuse (literal and
figurative), repressive expectations and old-fashioned prejudice of her familial circle to become
one of the most significant editors, publishers, writers and stylists of the 20th century. Her
mother, Julia Prinsep Jackson, was a widowed mother of three, a noted beauty, and model for
members of the radical painting group the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Her father was Leslie
Stephen, himself a literary figure, member of a famously liberal family, widower of one of
Thackerays daughters (with whom he had a child, Laura), and host to some of the most
significant cultural people of his time. While this should have been an ideal background for a
future lady of letters, it was an alarmingly dysfunctional family. Virginia suffered abuse from at
least one of her step-brothers, a cousin also abused her, and her fathers influence she was to
say later was such that if he had lived, she would hardly have been able to write. She was
probably involved in a homoerotic relationship with her full-sister, Vanessa, too.
This deep complex of personal traumas naturally left its mark on her personality and her writing,
although in generally sublimated form. Despite several nervous breakdowns and lengthy spells
of illness, she managed to write criticism, essays, journals, diaries, short stories and novels
throughout her life. Her response to some of the social standards of her time was more direct:
before she married she owned a house which took several male lodgers, she published works
which others would not take on, she was an outspoken pacifist and she conducted a lesbian affair
over several years, for just a few examples. In short, rather than bow to the intolerable pressures
of her emotional world or the equally intolerable ones of the society she lived in, she defied them
with extraordinary strength and an imagination of astonishing individuality.
Her half-sister, Laura, was mentally unstable and was institutionalised in 1891. Virginia was also
profoundly affected by the sudden deaths of her mother and half-sister Stella, and suffered the
first of her nervous breakdowns in 1897. She herself was briefly in an institution after her
fathers death in 1904, and continued to suffer from the effects of some kind of severe mental
disruption throughout her life. She referred to herself as mad, would suffer delusions, hear voices
and see things. But whether this was a type of bipolar disorder, a consequence of the repressions
and abuse of her youth, or a reaction to being treated as if she were mad when she was merely
unpredictable or non-conformist is still a matter of great uncertainty and dispute. Whatever the
root of it, and whether or not Virginia had an illness or a mental instability that could be
diagnosed, her imagination and intelligence enabled her to create a new form of the novel.
She went to university at Cambridge, continued her studies in London, and in 1912 married the
writer, political thinker and civil servant Leonard Woolf. She had been writing articles for The
Times Literary Supplement for some years, and teaching, too; but in 1917 the two of them set up
their own publishing house, The Hogarth Press, which published T.S. Eliot and Katherine
Mansfield, among others, and which by the early 1920s had become a business rather than a
hobby.
Woolfs first two novels were in relative terms conventional. But thereafter she challenged
almost every aspect of the novel the form, the expectation of the reader, the nature of story,
authorial perspective and narration. Jacobs Room (1922) established in a novel the experimental

ideas she had shown in her short stories, but with Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse
(1927) and The Waves (1931) she created masterpieces of imaginative fiction. The standard
pattern of storytelling is subverted. In Mrs Dalloway, essentially the only thing that happens is
that the heroine gives a party. But the greatness of the work lies in its expressing fluidly and
accurately the thoughts of the characters and their internal lives; and in linking the various
protagonists through their actions and imaginations. This process, which could become selfobsessive and self-indulgent, in fact created a picture of inter-war England through its discussion
of the class system, the Empire, sexual identity, madness, the medical establishment, and much
more all of it expressed in language that is nearer poetry than prose.
There are unquestionably auto-biographical elements to the book. The delusions of Septimus
Smith are similar to those that Woolf herself suffered, and she also once threw herself from a
window; the homoerotic feelings of Mrs Dalloway towards Sally, and those possibly felt by
Doris Kilman for Elizabeth, even Septimus for his friend Evans, mirror Woolfs own ambiguous
sexuality. Her experiences of the medical profession are reflected in their presentation here as
being smug, unlistening, quick to offer pat solutions to issues they dont understand, almost
predatory, cocooned and wealthy. But there is also a deliberate literariness, an attempt to
reconfigure the novels form in conformity to a broader moral conviction that the internal life is
more significant than the external one. The events that have traditionally moved a plot forward
are here seen as merely the end-points of a more complex, intangible and ultimately more
meaningful journey through the thoughts of the protagonists. Peoples lives, their sense of
themselves and how they stand relevant to others are created by their thoughts and imaginings.
There is a greater sense of connection to these characters because of the access to their inner
selves, whether vain or deluded or honest or innocent. Woolfs insights into the personal and
social are as startling, illuminating and precise as her language.
Virginia Woolf committed suicide in 1941, filling her coat pocket with either a big stone or
several stones and walking into the River Ouse near her home in Sussex. She and Leonard had
had a suicide pact in the case of a German invasion (he was a politically active Jewish
intellectual, and they both knew what that would mean if the Nazis arrived), but for all the
immediacy of the war and the destruction of their London home in the bombings, and despite the
disappointments over her most recent book, the most likely cause of her suicide was the intensity
of her depression. It was the sort of thing she had gone through several times in the past; but this
time, it was too much, the fight too big. Having so assiduously created herself and her life, it was
perhaps inevitable that she should decide on the fact, the means and the method of her death.