Is Septimus Really That Insane?

Today in class we talked about the character of Septimus Warren Smith, which really got me thinking. He's the most interesting character in the book to me, not so much because of his obvious delusions, but more because he seems like he's operating on a different level than everyone else in the book. When he sees something, he has a completely different reaction to it than Clarissa or Peter would. The obvious example is the car scene, where he doesn't even consider why the car is there, or even seem to register it at all until he gets caught up in the pattern of the blinds. When compared to the reactions of the people around him, who all get excited to see a fancy car and make up whole narratives about who could be in it and what they could be doing, Septimus seems like he's just a passive observer in the outside world. The problem is, he clearly isn't just some emotionless husk wandering around, feeling nothing. There are times when he gets intensely emotional, even to the point of tears when he sees the airplane early on. For all his talk about having no more feelings, it's pretty clear that he does, he just doesn't react to everything the same way a "normal" person would.

That's basically the crux of why he seems insane: he reacts differently than most people would to the same objects or events. But how can you expect anything else from someone who's been exposed to a world that's 180 degrees removed from anything Clarissa Dalloway has ever experienced? A lot of people talked about the way Septimus represents the effects of the war just a few years after it ended, which is probably a very accurate interpretation. Woolf comes from the time when PTSD was just starting to make itself popularly known, especially since the trench warfare of World War I was much more psychologically devastating than earlier methods of warfare. There's no doubt that Septimus is meant to be suffering from PTSD as it was understood at the time. But I also think that he represents something by himself, if you ignore his connections to the war.

I heard someone today bring up the point that Septimus seems self-centered, which in a sense he is. His whole worldview is completely removed from that of everyone around him, and he completely ignores the needs of his wife. He seems like he's so caught up in his own internal apocalypse that he can't be bothered with anyone else. Certainly on the outside, he seems simply cold and disinterested in other people. But having an insight into his thoughts, it's hard to say he's more self-absorbed than Clarissa Dalloway is. When he sees something that invokes a powerful reaction, he's reacting to it's natural beauty, or to what he thinks it means in the grand scheme of things (usually meaning its role in the ongoing destruction of the world). When Mrs. Dalloway has a strong reaction, it's always about what something means to her: how it reminds her of something in her life (usually Bourton), or how it means she has to act a certain way (chin held high for the queen's car). Outwardly, it seems like Clarissa is a less selfish person, because she holds parties and does people favors, but inwardly she seems to do these things more because they're what she enjoys; at some point she even says that her servants help her "to be like this, to be what she wanted, gentle, generous-hearted." In other words, she occasionally does menial tasks (like mending a dress) by herself to spare her servants the trouble, but only because it makes her feel like a gentle, generous-hearted mistress! It's hard to say that Mrs. Dalloway really sees the world through a less self-centered lens than Septimus when she seems to basically see things almost entirely through the lens of how they relate to her.

That's not to say that the way Mrs. Dalloway acts is wrong. She pretty clearly makes the people around her happier than Septimus does, and seems a good deal happier herself. But I do think there's some satire at the way Woolf compares her to someone who has a completely different perspective on things; by seeing someone who's worried about the end of the world and his own impending suicide, it makes Mrs. Dalloway's worries about how things could have gone otherwise at Bourton seem a lot more trivial, and helps to remind us a bit that, even though we've spent such a long time looking through Clarissa's eyes, and thinking the way she thinks, there are still other ways of looking at them that can be useful or interesting, and that really, the main conflicts in her life might not matter all that much.