Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith

Clarissa’s double persona in the novel is a man that she never meets, Septimus Smith. Their experiences and lives, though radically different, are mirror images of each other. Whereas Clarissa is rational, constantly seeking meaningful answers about life and identity, Septimus represents the irrationality of madness and death.

Septimus experiences an epiphany very similar to the one Clarissa has with Miss Pym in Mulberry’s (see Clarissa and Miss Pym). He is sitting in the park with his wife Rezia when he climaxes:

He lay very high, on the back of the world. The earth thrilled beneath him. Red flowers grow through his flesh; their stiff leaves rustled by his head. Music began clanging against the rocks up here. It is a motor horn down in the street, he muttered; but up here it cannoned from rock to rock, divided, met in shocks of sound which rose in smooth columns…and became an anthem…as he climbed higher… (67)

Septimus’ climax is one in which the outside sounds of life, such as the car’s horn, takes him further away from reality. It gets louder and louder, combining with the music of his already mad state. Clarissa, on the other hand, is brought back to reality by the noises in the street. She never completely abandons her grip on reality—she refuses to let go, as Septimus does, to hear the anthem. Unlike Septimus, she finds joy in life: “What she liked was simply life” (118).

Isabel Gamble in her essay “Clarissa Dalloway’s ‘Double,” claims that his madness “stems from a lack of self-recognition which…has become incurable (Critics on Virginia 54). She argues that Septimus is the one who holds the truth that Clarissa is seeking: “Septimus has recognized certain necessities evaded by Clarissa, or perhaps never encountered by her” (54). Septimus’ war experiences have set him apart from Clarissa. He has seen the dark side of humanity, watched one of his close friends die, and cannot recover from the tragedies of that world, a world in which people like Clarissa and Richard are blissfully unaware.

In fact, Septimus is equally affected by many of the same profound images that Clarissa experiences. In one scene, shortly after his climax, Septimus has reached a pinnacle of life in which the reader sees how much he really wants to live and be happy:

But he himself remained high on the rock, like a drowned sailor on a rock. I leant over the edge of the boat and fell down, he thought. I went under the sea. I have been dead, and yet am now alive, but let me rest still; he begged…before waking, the voices of the birds and the sound of wheels chime and chatter in a queer harmony, grow louder and louder and the sleeper feels himself drawing to the shores of life, so he felt himself drawing towards life, the sun growing hotter, cries sounding louder, something tremendous about to happen. (MD 67)

Yet, Septimus can never be happy unless he stays blissfully lost in his dream world. Reality puts a weight on him, “he had only to open his eyes; but a weight was on them; a fear,” that drives him mad (67). Time is a constant reminder that death is lurking, that he has seen horrific deaths in the war, and that the beauty of life, a beauty he once cherished, is as fleeting as a memory. He cannot reconcile his war experiences.

Clarissa and Septimus, though separately described and explained, both by doctors, friends, and their own chaotic minds, connect through Septimus’ death. Septimus, tired of trying to evade his doctor’s constant harassment, seeks the only escape open to him:

There remained only the window, the large Bloomsbury lodging house window, the tiresome, the troublesome, and rather melodramatic business of opening the window and throwing himself out. It was their idea of tragedy, not his or Rezia’s (for she was with him). Holmes and Bradshaw like that sort of thing. (He sat on the sill.) But he would wait till the very last moment. He did not want to die. Life was good. The sun hot. Only human beings—what did they want? Coming down the staircase opposite an old man stopped and stared at him. Holmes was at the door. “I’ll give it to you!” he cried, and flung himself vigorously, violently down on to Mrs. Filmer’s area railing. (145-46)

The truth about Septimus is revealed—he did not want to die. He liked life just as much as Clarissa. His problem with life was that he could not find his place in it anymore, especially after the war. He did not know how to please people, like Clarissa, and could not understand what others wanted from him, such as Holmes and Bradshaw. In fact, this scene appears to be Septimus’ final act of unselfishness, for, as he yells to the doctors, he was finally giving them what he thought they wanted of him, what they expected him to do.

Septimus’ death profoundly affects Clarissa even though she had never met him. In Virginia Woolf and the Real World, Zwerdling confirms that “Clarissa’s instant empathy with Septimus when his suicide is mentioned at her party is in marked contrast to the way her set usually deals with outsiders. His death shatters her composure and touches her in a profoundly personal way” (128). Hussey affirms this assumption about the relationship between Clarissa and Septimus: “His death leads her to think of death itself… for the first time in the novel, there is a sense that Clarissa has reached some sort of Pleatau; the death seems to have led her to a transcendence of identities; she becomes simply ‘Clarissa’ (Singing 29).

Clarissa’s death is twofold. First, she experiences Septimus’ actual death. She imagines what it must have felt like, describes it in vivid detail:

Always her body went through it first, when she was told, suddenly, of an accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt. He had thrown himself from a window. Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud, in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it. (MD 179)

It would appear that this is not the first time Clarissa has vicariously experienced the accident of another through herself. In fact, she implies that she always feels the accident first through her body before coming to any deeper meaning. Why does death, accidents even, affect Clarissa so strongly? What is it about the ending of a life that causes her to find herself? Clarissa explains it by reminding herself that death is just another form of communication:

They went on living (she would have to go back; the rooms were still crowded; people kept on coming). They…would grow old. 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. (180)

Clarissa recognizes what Septimus had preserved through his death—he had saved his self, his individuality. No one could take it once he had died. Clarissa and her friends will be forced to go on living. They will be forced to play the charade of life in which you hide the thing that matters the most while you are surrounded by “corruption, lies, and chatter.” Your true self is whittled away by the demands of society. Clarissa is doomed to play the role of the perfect hostess, her stigma, because this is what society expects of her; this is what her husband expects of her. Regardless of whether she wants to be a perfect hostess, she continues to throw parties that seem to mean nothing. Septimus preserved his true self through death. What is the centre that Septimus was unable to reach? Perhaps it was the centre of balance, the balance of your true self with your social self. However, Clarissa hints that the real fear is that you are alone—that there is no one else fighting this losing battle with you.

Death embraced Septimus. He was not alone. Clarissa, though she never met Septimus, speculates on the life of such a complicated man, a man who eerily resembles her. In the end, she asks an important question about Septimus: “But this young man who had killed himself—had he plunged holding his treasure?” (180). Clarissa, similarly, compares her idea of a treasure with Septimus’: “If I were now to die, ’twere now to be most happy…” (180). Clarissa would be happy to die because she has found her treasure, the truth behind life and death, the constant struggle to hold onto your identity in a society that deems you unfit or unstable. Septimus gave her the truth when he died. She reflected on him, in relation to her own life, and suddenly found meaning in her “self.” Hence, the novel is able to end on a somewhat happy note as Clarissa approaches Peter: “It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was” (190). Clarissa, for a brief moment in time, has reconciled her position in the world, with those around her. She has unified her many personas, her sense of other, and is now complete. How long the epiphany will last, is left unknown. However, Woolf emphasizes that these are the moments in life that people yearn and live for.

Works Cited

Hussey, Mark. The Singing of the Real World: The Philosophies of Virginia Woolf’s Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1986.

Latham, Jacqueline E.M. ed. Critics on Virginia Woolf. Coral Gables, FL: U of Miami P, 1970.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Orlando: Harcourt, 2005.

Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Los Angeles: U of California P, 1986.