By Emma Williamson
Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel, Mrs Dalloway, is formed out of the ruins of World War I. While the text has ostensibly been labelled just that, a war novel, with its central trauma long considered World War I and its devastating effects on the mind of Septimus Warren Smith, the reverberations of war were not the only source of devastation the novel and its author faced. Indeed, on the homefront, “Wood for the coffins ran out” due to another cataclysmic event: the Spanish Influenza pandemic (Outka, “Influenza” 301). Due to her social class and gendered position, “World War I was as far from Mrs Dalloway as from almost any person in England,” yet she is recovering from a near-deadly bout of influenza, the memory of which for many pandemic victims “was subsumed in that of the war” (Fernald xiii; Kelly 15). Despite her distance from the traumas of War, Clarissa, like Septimus, is a survivor. Her battlefield, however, is viral, having torn her apart from within, leaving lasting scars of irreconcilable damage unacknowledged and “subsumed” by the broader tragedy. After the close of World War I, there was often a disjunctive “gulf in experience, between those who had been in the war zones and those who had not” (Kelly 5). The homefront traumas women endured were “surfeited with the horrors of war,” as other forms of trauma were overlooked in the devastation of soldiers’ shell-shock upon returning home (Outka, Viral 110). Thus, traumas like those of Clarissa’s influenza battle, the correct and incorrect modes of maternal grieving represented in Lady Bexborough and Mrs. Foxcroft, and Rezia’s diasporic loss of identity supplanted by the need to tend to Septimus’s war trauma were figured at an imaginative distance from what was considered legitimate trauma. The post-War world left soldiers “the most obvious ghosts” though “women had become ghosts too” (Kelly 234). Even so, women’s traumas were left culturally unacknowledged. By representing different archives of female homefront trauma, Mrs Dalloway calls attention to and legitimizes multiple, unacknowledged traumatic valences interwoven within the broader wartime experience, unearthing the female “ghosts” left behind. Through the lenses of Mrs Dalloway, her 1926 essay “On Being Ill,” and her 1923 short story “Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street,” Woolf interrogates the archive of traumas deemed worthy of heroization and remembrance within the cultural imaginary and acknowledges the unspoken traumas survivors were forced to bear alone.
Despite “inflicting five to ten times more casualties than the First World War,” the influenza pandemic became the “shadowed twin to the war,” swallowed beneath the pre-existing psychological burdens of wartime trauma (Outka, “Influenza” 302). Through Clarissa Dalloway, however, Woolf disrupts the cultural sentiments that attempted to bury one cataclysm under another, innovatively writing illness into the fabric of her titular character and, by revealing her similarities to a shell-shock victim, legitimizing post-pandemic trauma alongside post-War trauma. Early in the narrative, Clarissa’s characterization is innately tied to her illness; Scrope Purvis describes her as “a charming woman […] though she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness” (Woolf, Dalloway 3). As Clarissa’s appearance “since” her illness has indelibly changed, Woolf “sets up a comparative link between illness and the war” as the trauma is mapped physically on the body, much like the scars of recent trench warfare (Outka, Viral 108). The before-and-after of such a trauma, manifested in Clarissa’s consequent “very white,” corpse-like appearance, symbolizes the ways in which Clarissa has become part of the living dead, much like the soldiers returning home from battle. As the influenza pandemic was culturally submerged beneath the catastrophe of the War, Woolf associates the trauma of Clarissa’s homefront illness with that of frontline war trauma to highlight their similar impacts. While she remains far beyond the battlefield, Clarissa’s illness precipitated a marred consciousness that made her feel “very young; at the same time unspeakably aged […] she always had the feeling that it was very dangerous to live even one day (Woolf, Dalloway 7). Where doctors found physical similarities between war and pandemic victims, as “the devastated lungs [of influenza victims], as many doctors noted, were eerily similar to the lungs of soldiers attacked by poison gas,” Woolf draws psychological parallels of similar traumatic consciousness between the two (Outka, “Influenza” 304). The annihilatory apprehension of living “even one day” while enduring the feeling of being “unspeakably aged” repositions Clarissa as a survivor whose body echoes that of a shell-shocked victim in the aftermath of war. Woolf thus legitimizes the post-pandemic body by associating its resonances with the war-torn soldier. Despite the cultural privileging of “the better known and more public status of a surviving solider,” Woolf emphasizes the pandemic victim’s own trauma by drawing on associations to wartime trauma greater understood within the cultural milieu (Outka, Viral 113).
Mrs Dalloway is not commonly read as a meditation on the wide-reaching effects of sidelined homefront traumas that added to the broader “well of tears” Woolf describes as present among “all men and women” post-War (Woolf 8). Instead, it is broadly considered “a war novel,” forged from the distinct trauma of World War I (Fernald xii). This analysis, however, reveals a cultural unwillingness to consider valences of loss outside of war. Indeed, Clarissa Dalloway’s character is struck by illness-induced carnage throughout the text, yet much criticism disregards this level of her character as merely a sickness “deliberately left unclear” (Samuel 62). By understanding Clarissa as a pandemic survivor, her character becomes an enriched archive of experience, rather than just the “perfect hostess” she performs on the surface (Forbes 39). Indeed, Clarissa’s bout of influenza was so severe that Richard took her “to the seaside in the middle of the session to recover from influenza” (Woolf, Dalloway 75). Peter Walsh, fearing she was close to death, considers how “she has been ill, and the sound expressed languor and suffering. It was her heart, he remembered […] No! No! he cried. She is not dead!” (36). The intensity of her illness causes Peter to reassure himself she is “not dead!” just yet. Meanwhile, Clarissa herself does not know her heart to beat consistently anymore: “Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza)” (4). Woolf remaps Clarissa’s body, interactions, and daily experiences through the eyes of her illness while foregrounding “the lingering physical and psychological damage the virus could inflict even months and years after the attack” (Outka, Viral 105). The lingering “psychological damage” of the virus not only affects Clarissa but also makes those around her hyper-aware of her new disease-shaped state. While Peter thinks of how “She’s grown older,” she believes he looked “exactly the same,” suggesting Clarissa is more forgiving than Peter when it comes to the changes of age, but also his acute sensitivity to what illness has done to her body (Woolf, Dalloway 30). Similarly, Elizabeth enters Clarissa’s room quietly because she “knew that her mother was resting,” silently acknowledging the inherent necessity for her mother to rest and recover daily post-influenza (86). The “vivid picture of the post-pandemic body” Woolf captures in the layers of illness awareness surrounding Clarissa, while widely unrecognized by critics until recently, unlocks a richer picture of Mrs Dalloway (Outka, Viral 105). The archive of such illness-borne trauma forged in the bedrock of Clarissa’s characterization throughout the novel precipitates a thematic re-conception of the novel as instead being built around a plurality of traumas, both on the homefront and on the front lines.
Rereading Mrs Dalloway through the lens of the Pandemic brings to light Woolf’s own archive of illness and the ways in which her own suffering was swallowed by the War. Woolf had personal experience with several episodes of influenza between 1916 and 1925, leading her to imbue Clarissa’s concealed illness with her own experience of the disease. The ways in which influenza, five years on, continues to echo in Clarissa’s body and her interactions demonstrates how, “as Woolf writes in ‘On Being Ill,’ “an attack of influenza may make ‘the world…change its shape” (Outka, Viral 121). Woolf’s world did indeed “change its shape” after influenza, with a newfound perspective on the “deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view” (Woolf, “Ill” 101). Since the pandemic arrived in the final year of the War, an “exhausted public had become accustomed to hearing about the deaths of young men,” and was unwilling to take on another level of awareness in “the cultural history of death” (Kelly 15). Thus, Woolf questions, “considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change it brings […] why has illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealously among the prime themes of literature[?]” (“Ill” 101). She problematizes the fact that something so profound in its own right has been subsumed by the broader themes of “battle” taking place around the outbreak. An over-saturated public’s inability to process another kind of death relegated those suffering from influenza to the sidelines as, for many, it “must have seemed like just another type of wartime loss” (Kelly 15). Lost in the broader currents of war death, pandemic victims did not face acknowledgement for their distinct traumas.
Woolf critiques this detached public perception in her essay, as despite illness’s ability to bring someone “down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads the public would say a novel devoted to influenza lacked plot” (Woolf, “Ill” 102). Like the pandemic’s inability to garner public attention in the face of an already overwhelming atrocity, Woolf pokes at the public’s continued indifference to the alternate trauma, which “lacked plot” in the face of the communally sanctioned, heroic narrative of death in battle. To circumvent this cognitive dissonance, she directly compares the kinds of death the twin traumas bring. She describes how during illness, “we cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright, we become deserters. They march to battle. We float with the sticks on the stream” (104). The lack of perceived heroism in illness, when compared to young men dying as they “march to battle,” conflates influenza deaths to that of shameful “deserters.” Instead, the “great wars which the body wages with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever […]float” like aimless sticks, dying without the same culturally sanctioned heroic purpose (102). Despite Woolf’s deployment of war-like language, which attempts to register the pain of such experiences on the same level as the sanctioned frontline trauma, the body wrought with experiences of homefront influenza remains in a solitary and individual “assault” in the face of the “public, collective mourning and the grand, national process of monument-making” dedicated to the broader, communal “great wars” (Kelly 218). Through Clarissa’s suppressed trauma and her own essay criticizing illness’s position as an unrecognized trauma and an unworthy literary topic, Woolf acts as a no-man’s land, standing between publicly perceived heroic and dishonourable kinds of trauma, and ties them together. She probes how perceived heroism determines what kinds of traumas are taken seriously by the public, and with the buried catastrophe of the influenza pandemic, left unacknowledged by an already overfull public capacity to mourn, she gives emotional credence to alternate, under-represented traumas.
Out of Clarissa’s influenza, Woolf also uneasily confronts the ways in which states of being ill and traumatic bodily experiences can actually be generative in noteworthy ways. There is a distinct unease in reading about how the trauma of this period, both on the frontlines and homefront, can have a positive emotional impact . However, the transcendent quality of feeling “the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels” has an interior resonance of visionary transcendence emerging out of that site of damage is also explored in Clarissa (Woolf, “Ill” 101). As Woolf describes, “How astonishing when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed,” Clarissa also discovers how illness can serve as a catalyst for introspection and creativity, having prompted her to reassess her perception amid appreciating the fleeting nature of health (101). The morality of life becomes that much more tangible after near-death, as Clarissa reminds herself, “Somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive” (Woolf, Dalloway 8). While emphasizing the criticality, above all else, that “she survived,” Clarissa “moves all day in the hovering shadow of death” (Benjamin 221). While what Clarissa “liked was simply life,” she also questions if it mattered when “she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely” (Woolf, Dalloway, 86;8). After her illness, Clarissa exists in a liminal zone between life and death. She acknowledges the ways death moves with her throughout her life and how, after her own “lights of health” have gone down, she gains the conscious ability to acknowledge death’s absolute grip on all who live (Garvey 66). Her trauma, in allowing her to see the ways “death ended absolutely,” is, in fact, consolatory. Despite the trauma of enduring illness, this transcendent vision of the balance between life and death is given a visionary, positive valencing in Clarissa’s post-influenza life.
Clarissa’s consciousness of her mortality and constant acknowledgement of life and death “expresses both her fear of and fascination with the ultimate end. She chooses life but remains constantly aware of the approach of annihilation” (Garvey 67). This expression of life, on the cusp of death, reigns over Clarissa’s illness-worn consciousness until the end of the novel, when she reaches beyond this binary through Septimus’s own trauma to experience an apotheosis. As Clarissa considers the death of someone who has undergone the twin trauma of her era, the frontline horror to her homefront hell, the intertwined nature of these two traumas comes together in her psyche. Septimus’s suicide, as a belated war death, goes against her staunch “apprehension of death, or any notion of throwing ‘it’ away” (Garvey 67). Yet as he does so, willingly, Clarissa thinks “the young man had killed himself; but she did not pity him,” instead “she felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away” (my emphasis) (Woolf, Dalloway 131). His willingness to confront the grip of inevitable death, the very thing they have fought so hard against throughout their traumatic experiences, “made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun” (131). Out of the site of their shared wartime trauma, Woolf intimates a positive valencing of Septimus’s suicidal psychology and thus allows Clarissa to rethink her own position as a survivor who has escaped the death drive that claimed Septimus. As the death of one allows the other to transcend the trauma and be reborn at the end of the text, “for there she was,” the visionary closeness to annihilation Septimus grants Clarissa allows her to see beyond the fear of death and rethink the “beauty” and “fun” of the “it” that is remaining life (137).
The intertwined nature of this transcendent experience, in which Clarissa asserts “she felt somehow very like him,” highlights the proximity of Clarissa’s homefront influenza trauma to that of the battlefront experience (131). As Clarissa sees herself, and her own death, in the war veteran, she asserts her suffering as equally profound, affirming her bid for legitimacy and finding recognition for her traumatic war experience. Woolf explores how both Septimus and Clarissa “take part in a debate between involvement in living and submersion in the void” (Garvey 70). Yet it is through Septimus’ giving in to “the void” that Clarissa frees herself of her own trauma. As Woolf allows Clarissa apotheosis through Septimus’s throwing “it” away, she allows Clarissa to re-discover what “it” is and grasp a hold of the other side of the life she still has yet to live. As Anna Benjamin searches for the meaning in Mrs Dalloway, she states: “We find a reassertion of the value of living life in its fullest as part of the universe, just where we might expect to find life at its most trivial, insignificant level: among the restricted privileged class” (223). Scorning the critics who have refused Clarissa’s trauma the same acknowledgement as Septimus’s, Benjamin reasserts what refusing to “throw it away” means: the “value of living life” (Woolf, Dalloway 131). They find a transcendent ability “to communicate” in death and their proximity to it during traumatic experiences (Woolf, Dalloway 130). As she finds herself (albeit disquietingly) positively reborn through his suicide, she is able to regain this “value” through Septimus’s own trauma response which has become intimately intertwined with her own. Through the intertwined traumas of Septimus and Clarissa, Woolf resists the idea that there is a chasm of difference between the frontlines and the homefront and that trauma is a solely negative experience.
As Woolf describes how “this late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all men and women, a well of tears,” she extends the plurality of homefront traumas away from Clarissa’s influenza to “all,” including other valences of traumatic experience and grief (Woolf, Dalloway 8). With their male relatives, sons, and husbands killed within the cataclysm of the war machine, women on the homefront become ghosts of their former selves under the weight of their own grief and trauma (Kelly 234). Despite taking place five years after the war ended, the echoes of war in Mrs Dalloway have not left anyone’s mind. The War still sits in close proximity to the front of collective consciousness. Clarissa attempts to declare “the War was over,” but “before the echoes of the thought have died in her mind, she thinks of two friends who still pay for the war” (Woolf, Dalloway 4; Fernald xiii). Immediately following up her assertion with a preposition, “except for—” Clarissa reminds herself of the mothers, Mrs Foxcroft and Lady Bexborough, who enduringly grieve for their sons (Woolf, Dalloway 4). This signals how, while the War was beginning to be evaded collectively and perceived as potentially “over,” individually the trauma still carried on through “bereaved civilians whose grief recognizes no Armistice” (Saint-Amour 112). The individual traumas sustained throughout the War are charted in this “except for,” as nationally and politically the War is “over,” yet conceptually the psychic structures associated with both homefront and frontline trauma continue to resound their presence and prevent this closure. As Clarissa continues to repeat the reality of the War’s cessation, to comfort her own anxiety while assuring the horrors have indeed ended, “but it was over; thank Heaven—over,” she also leaves a clause for the mothers who remain entrenched in the trauma of their dead sons and legitimizes the traumas those grieving on the homefront who endure a psychological state of never-ending War (Woolf, Dalloway 4).
While homefront wartime grief was distinctly gendered and “privilege[d] women, particularly mothers, as mourners,” there was also a culturally expected behaviour to perform while embodying the role of the grieving mother that oftentimes did not allow the adequate release required for such trauma (Kelly 3). Clarissa observes the mothers for whom the war will never end due to their trauma and grief:
Except for someone like Mrs. Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House must go to a cousin; or Lady Bexborough who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed (Woolf, Dalloway 4)
The presentation of Mrs Foxcroft and Lady Bexborough “juxtaposes two contrasting models of mourning,” as one releases their grief publicly and the other turns their grief into actionable class-based feminine charity (Kelly 218). Wealthy women “were not expected to contribute to the War effort much beyond opening bazaars” something that Lady Bexborough does even during the very genesis of her mourning, “telegram” still in hand (Fernald xiii). Valorizing Lady Bexborough’s ability to publicly suppress her grief, in contrast to Mrs Foxcroft’s inability Clarissa highlights “a particular class-based model of repression and uprightness concerning war grief” (Kelly 218). While Lady Bexborough was “the woman [Clarissa] admired most,” the physical manifestations of grief and public displays of emotion Mrs Foxcroft exhibits are, in contrast, the very thing Clarissa and post-War society look down upon (Woolf, Dalloway 8). While war casualties punctuate the text in scattered mentions, the women enduring the pain of this traumatic loss on the homefront were required to perform the gendered “respected, correct way” when dealing with their trauma (Kelly 218). The system of class also invades their grief as such valorized bazaars were an expensive display of patriotism while eating oneself sick to cope with the reality of losing one’s son and home was grotesque and shameful. Woolf thus forms a class-based critique of what kind of trauma-induced behaviour was publicly sanctioned and what was not. If public outpours of distress were inappropriate, and one could only funnel their pain into elaborate displays of wartime feminine performativity, there would be no outlet for the typical woman to escape their trauma and pain. Instead, they are forced to bottle it up until it comes loose in moments at the Embassy or in the streets, when “the ‘wax seal’ over societal grief” comes loose for only a moment, before being quickly snuffed out again by external judgement (Kelly 219). Women’s homefront trauma, and subsequently its cathartic release is refused acknowledgement of existence. If one cannot support the broader patriotic societal project through bazaars forged out of their pain, one is forced to bear it alone and, preferably, silently.
Mrs. Foxcroft’s pain similarly mirrors Clarissa’s forcibly repressed trauma, as both women attempt to hide their pain from a class-based system that disapproved of their traumas or their actions during such trauma. While Mrs Foxcroft cannot escape comparisons to Lady Bexborough, the shining image of a mother in mourning, Clarissa “feels she must hide her illness from Lady Bruton” which brings the hidden trauma of her “illness out of isolation and hiding,” while also highlighting Clarissa’s shame over her ongoing battle with illness (Outka, Viral 115). Clarissa feels as though Lady Bruton disapproves of her illness for having “prevented [Richard] from accepting posts abroad, and had to be taken to the seaside in the middle of the session to recover from influenza,” disrupting his professional career (Woolf, Dalloway 75). She fears Lady Bruton asking her husband, “How’s Clarissa?” at a lunch she was not invited to, and the potential that he will respond by revealing more of her failures and inability to suppress lingering malaise (75). As Clarissa idolizes both Lady Bexborough and Lady Bruton, characters who symbolize the class performativity and infallibility in the face of the wartime homefront traumas both Clarissa and Mrs Foxcroft fail to exemplify, their class and post-War suppression marks an impossible standard for women’s wartime trauma. They are the ultimate figures of the post-War heroic “Lady” who does not allow the recent horrors to bubble to the surface. In these characters, Woolf highlights the impossible position women are placed in as they are expected to deal with their unrecognized traumas silently or even ignore them completely.
This psychological archive of communal expectation, which imposed an impossible standard for suppressing women’s homefront trauma, is also foregrounded in Woolf’s short story “Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street,” which became the foundation for Mrs Dalloway. Serving as a foundational exploration for the novel, and published two years earlier, “Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street” focuses on a single moment in Clarissa’s life–shopping for gloves on Bond Street–and captures her experience in a very tight temporal frame. However limited the short story is in relation to Clarissa’s much broader existence within the novel, Woolf still explores the perceptions of women’s grief through the same characters in very similar passages. Highlighting Woolf’s early preoccupation with presenting the women as foils for each other, Clarissa muses on Mrs Foxcroft’s inadequate behaviour: “How people suffered, how they suffered, she thought, thinking of Mrs Foxcroft at the Embassy last night decked with jewels, eating her heart out, because that nice boy was dead, and now the old Manor House […] must go to a cousin” (Woolf, “Bond Street” 184). While she emphasised how “like a Queen at a tournament, raised, regal, was Lady Bexborough” who “opened the bazaar, they say, with the telegram in her hand” (188; 190) in the juxtaposition of these two women and their disparate styles of mourning, Woolf reveals the ways in which suffering under the weight of one’s trauma and bringing attention to that suffering by “eating her heart out” must be culturally avoided. Indeed, Mrs Foxcroft comes to mind as Clarissa considers “how people suffered” in the wake of the War’s catastrophe, yet, under the same conditions of loss, Lady Bexbourough is instead a vision of regality “like a Queen.” It is tears and suffering, made “unintentionally public,” while bringing attention to oneself “decked with jewels” that reflects the inability to preserve the “model of stoic repression (the ‘wax seal’ over societal grief)” which society cruelly shames Mrs Foxcroft for (Kelly 219). In both Mrs Foxcroft’s and Lady Bexborough’s cases, their “particular maternal grief represents a mode of female war trauma” (Kelly 235). Yet this stiff societal “wax seal” comes undone when Mrs Foxcroft exposes “female war trauma” externally in public displays of anguish. In these moments, an insurmountable wave of suffering brought on by the War and its entangled traumas break through. This breakthrough is the very thing Mrs Foxcroft represents and the very thing Lady Bexborough comfortingly refutes. Here, women’s suffering must be snuffed out of fear that if one begins to express it, no one will ever be able to stop. Society’s ability to open itself up to more layers of trauma, much like the pandemic response, was already “surfeited with the horrors of war” on the frontlines (Outka, Viral 110). There was no more cultural compassion to go around; an exhausted public needed people to unfairly repress their individual trauma without support in order to move forward through the pain of the surrounding cataclysms. Woolf thus reveals how women grappling with the trauma of lost loved ones, much like those in the midst of influenza’s traumatic hardship, were pushed to the sidelines, left unacknowledged unless they performed a socially sanctioned class-privileged form of grieving, like opening a bazaar.
Rezia, Septimus’ wife, also reflects a layer of individual trauma lost in the cataclysm of war as her diasporic suffering is subsumed by her husband’s post-War shell shock. While Clarissa’s trauma stems from her “difficult recovery from influenza, Rezia’s challenges as an immigrant who met her husband in wartime” are often left unexplored as a lens of homefront traumatic resonance as well (Fernald xvi). Rezia has become a ghost in her own life and, in giving up everything, she “has submerged her life in her husband’s, has identified herself completely with Septimus and forsaken her own family, country, language, even the possibility of motherhood” (Garvey 70). As Septimus plunges deeper into his shell-shocked psyche, Rezia becomes hyperaware of those around them, and growing loneliness thinking, “People must see. People, she thought, looking at the crowd […] the English people” (Woolf, Dalloway 12). As an Italian living abroad for the sake of her husband, she can ignore the “English people” who surrounded her with unfamiliar language and customs because she has Septimus and their marriage. Yet as Septimus slips further away from her, the distinctly “English” onlookers she once ignored “were ‘people’ now because Septimus had said, ‘I will kill myself’; an awful thing to say” (12). While “to love makes one solitary, she thought,” Rezia is no longer able to live in her own world with Septimus, nor fill that “solitary” realm with mutual love; she now existed in that realm alone (18). Forced to acknowledge the “people” around her because Septimus has left her alone in a foreign country without his support, “Horror! Horror! She wanted to cry. (she had left her people; they had warned her what would happen)” (20). Enduring her trauma solitarily without “her people,” she is left to care for Septimus surrounded by “English people” whom she must face alone.
The trauma of her isolated experience, caring for a husband who no longer wanted to live, in a land she could not exist comfortably in alone, is further marred by the precedent of her gendered requirement to take care of the one true trauma victim, Septimus. The culturally constructed position of the caring woman of the Great War followed the “immediate historical precedent: women were the primary carers around the nineteenth-century deathbed” (Kelly 3). Thus, subsumed in the role of “primary carer” for Septimus during his post-War trauma, she loses herself and her identity for Septimus while refused the opportunity to grapple with her own trauma in the process. Indeed, “She had asked for help and been deserted!” because Septimus’s trauma was the one that mattered, while hers was not culturally acknowledged nor willing to be helped (Woolf, Dalloway 71).
Septimus, too, notices the traumatic loss of self in Rezia’s role as his carer. As she says, “‘Just now!’” he notes, “She said that with her Italian accent. She said that herself” (101). Septimus detects the subtle change in her voice, distinguishing her role as a carer as she takes on her new identity. In fleeting moments of normalcy, when Rezia becomes “herself” again, she re-inhabits her “Italian accent,” the only tether she retains to her identity as an individual separate from Septimus. This psychological tension between her gendered post-War role and the way trauma “manifests itself physically” in her accent is “written on the body itself.” Her accent is her ability to use the voice that makes her “herself” decline and highlights the connection between her “trauma and performative gender” (Joseph 64). Rezia, in her post-War homefront experience, has been forced to subsume herself and her cultural identity in favour of supporting Septimus in a “performative gender” role, and thus her fate is “to be alone forever. That was the doom pronounced in Milan” (Dalloway 103). She has left Milan and her personal autonomy for a foreign post-War culture that confined her to a caretaker role. Without a self remaining, and with a husband who is no longer himself either, Rezia becomes “alone forever,” enduring a trauma that none of the “English people” she calls out to assist her in or are willing to hear (Woolf, Dalloway 12).
Left in the ruins of a post-War world, grappling with the ghosts of Septimus’s former self and the ghosts of her former self as well, Rezia faces the reality that because the homefront is not accorded any heroism, she must become the archivist of Septimus’s trauma while suppressing her own. Rezia insists on tying up Septimus’s poetry and papers, commemorating his war-torn psyche and archiving his heroism: “But Rezia laid her hands on them. Some were very beautiful, she thought. She would tie them up (for she had no envelope) with a piece of silk” (104). By tying his papers with a “piece of silk,” Rezia symbolically wraps the creative releases of Septimus’s shell-shocked trauma while losing herself in the process, caring for his mind and memory at the expense of her own. Indeed, as a hat maker, Rezia identified silk as an extension of her own body, of her own creativity and mind. It was part of what made her identity as she “looked (she was apt to lose things) for her silk. She was making a hat for Mrs. Filmer’s married daughter” (97). Thus, by wrapping his works with “her silk,” a part of herself, she psychically archives the memory of his trauma at the expense of her own life and memory. She yields to the culturally figured “gulf in experience, between those who had been in war zones and those who had not” and accepts her position as “primary carer” for the one whose trauma matters (Kelly 5). Wrapping Septimus’s archival trauma with a piece of herself, she leaves herself with nothing, yet in the process, she acknowledges what counts as a heroic response in her position. As someone who has endured homefront trauma that has gone unacknowledged and unsupported, Rezia knows that the only way she can exert autonomy in a world that does not accept her own emotional turmoil is to secure the trauma they do recognize. She archives Septimus’s heroism and trauma while knowing that no one will do the same for her, a motion that, in itself, is the only autonomous action she is able to perform within her position.
In the rubble of the post-War London landscape lies the ruins of women left behind from traumatic experiences on the homefront. These traumas are inherently intertwined with that of frontline traumas: Clarissa’s illness marks a transcendent, annihilatory consciousness similar to Septimus’s shell-shocked one, Mrs Foxcroft and Lady Bexborough endured trauma caused explicitly by what was lost on the front, and Rezia lost herself in attempting to re-find a Septimus that died on the frontlines with Evans. None of these women, however, were granted the comfort of having their traumas legitimized or acknowledged. Instead, sanctioned recognition and heroism were reserved for the men returning home. The political nature of the post-War world left society unable to acknowledge trauma they cannot justify within the broader military-industrial complex; only heroizing boys and bullets, as well as the women contributing to that cause through patriotic, class-exclusive bazaars. The pain Woolf foregrounds in the ruins of these women left to bear their pain alone gives them back their place in a post-War narrative and reveals the legitimacy of the traumas they were forced to suppress. In Mrs Dalloway, the imaginative chasm built between frontline and homefront traumas dissolves and the archives of individual post-War experiences acknowledge the previously unspoken traumas buried underneath the calamity of the War. Thus, she reminds the reader of the plurality of the cataclysm the early twentieth century endured across all class and nation-state lines. By shaping her own narrative archive of traumas, Woolf deems them worthy of heroization and remembrance, confronting the lack of cultural acknowledgement surrounding these homefront traumas to reveal their own buried, cataclysmic reality beneath: “for there she was.”
Works Cited
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