Mrs. Dalloway is generally a book that treats its characters evenly. We usually see both positive and negative portrayals of all of the characters, and when we see their point of view we are usually able to sympathize with them. The major exceptions, at least to me, were Septimus' two doctors, Dr. Holmes and Dr. Bradshaw. We see both of them as basically completely negative characters, who don't have a clue what they're doing. Even Clarissa dislikes Bradshaw when she sees him at the party, even though she can't explain it.
Since Woolf normally treats her characters so evenly, to treat two important characters so negatively is probably meant specifically to drive home her point. She wants to make completely sure that the readers understand what's wrong with the way war and soldiers have been treated, and that no one has any doubt that Septimus was really just a "coward." Those two characters are basically there less to serve a narrative purpose, like most of the others, and more to serve as a warning against a naive, idealistic view of war, based on ideas of toughness and masculinity without considering the suffering war causes, especially World War I.
In that way, the characters of Holmes and Bradshaw remind me a lot of Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut's first book. In Player Piano, the U.S. is run by an upper class of engineers who've invented machines to do almost all manual labor. The main antagonist, Dr. Kroner, is one of the top engineers, and the boss of the main character. He talks and acts almost exactly like the two doctors in Mrs. Dalloway, with a back-slapping enthusiasm for athletics and the masculine ideal. The parallels between Drs. Holmes and Bradshaw, who are meant to critique the simplistic masculine ideals of post-World War I Britain, and Dr. Kroner, who is meant to critique the simplistic masculine ideals of post-World War II America, are very interesting, and could probably be studied much more closely to talk about the more general similarities between cultures after major wars.
I would agree that the two psychiatrists came across more as plot drivers than people, which seems to go against Woolf's ideas about accurate portrayals of life in fiction. In Holmes' last appearance, he's nothing more than a hulking, dark shape against a window--a classic depiction of evil. With Bradshaw, however, we see perhaps a bit of redemption. True, he shows up to the party and apologizes for his lateness with the fact that Septimus just died. True, Clarissa dislikes him for no apparent reason. But before Clarissa leaves the room to contemplate death, we hear Bradshaw discussing shell shock and some new law with Richard, indicating that Septimus' death (and Bradshaw's failure to prevent it) may have forced Bradshaw to reconsider his own views on depression and psychiatry.
ReplyDeleteThat's a good point that I hadn't really thought much about. Bradshaw does seems to be reconsidering his views at the end of the book, it's just too bad that it took Septimus killing himself to shake him enough to change his mind.
DeleteI remarked in one of the recent panel presentations (was it yours? it might have been) that Bradshaw is the closest we come to a "villain" in the novel--both Septimus and Clarissa are in agreement that people like him "make life not worth living," and I agree that we see Woolf airing some of her own strong views on Victorian medicine and more modern psychology (with which she had a good deal of personal experience). The "rest cure" Bradshaw proposes for Septimus was prescribed for a young Virginia Woolf, and you're picking up on the fact that this topic is personal for her. She does have an axe to grind.
ReplyDeleteBut Arch is right to point out that we do see a willingness to do something about the problem of shell shock in Bradshaw at the party, and this could concede a willingness to change. At the same time, we do earlier get his views on "general practitioners" like Holmes, who screw everything up and deny things like shell shock exist. Bradshaw knows it exists--it's just that his idea of treatment is, in Woolf's view, wrongheaded.
As a character, though, she depicts him as arrogant, pompous, and dismissive of Rezia's concerns. And through his wife (who takes really excellent photographs, don'tcha know!), waiting outside in her luxury car, she depicts the world the Bradshaws inhabit as completely removed from that of the Warren Smiths. Likewise, we conclude, he can't possibly know what to do with a case like Septimus.