The Importance of Septimus Warren Smith

In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, although the main character of the novel is Clarissa Dalloway, we find the spotlight constantly switching to other characters as well. Most of these other characters either have some sort of relationship with Clarissa or are one-off randos that we don’t hear from again. However, the one exception to this is Septimus (and Lucrezia, but I’m focusing on Septimus so that’s less important); he doesn’t have any obvious connection with Clarissa for the entirety of the novel, and yet the spotlight is repeatedly shone on him. In this post, I would like to talk about how, although Clarissa and Septimus live in different worlds, their similar experiences make Septimus an important character in the novel.

On the surface, Clarissa and Septimus are nothing alike. Clarissa, on the one hand, is an upper-class figure and prepares to host a party. She holds a respected position in society and is socially connected to people through her government-worker husband and friends from her teenage years. On the other hand, Septimus is a war veteran struggling with the war’s aftermath. Although he has Lucrezia and his hallucinations of Evans, Septimus doesn’t have anyone else in his life and is not understood by the doctors who try to treat him, as well as society.

However, beneath the surface, the two characters are actually relatively similar. For example, both characters feel isolated. Although Clarissa isn’t physically isolated, she feels emotionally distant from the people around her. As she walks along Bond Street, Virginia Woolf writes, “[s]he had the oddest sense of being herself invisible, unseen; unknown…not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway” (Woolf 10). This represents how Clarissa feels as if her socially connected side is Mrs. Richard Dalloway, but her true self, Clarissa, is isolated from everyone. In the same passage, she says “there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress” (10), which shows Clarissa thinking about how the remaining stage of her life is just aging. The awareness of these ideas causes her to think about death from time to time. Similarly, Septimus shows feelings of isolation from his appearance in the novel, such as when he sees the letters in the sky and thinks that it is a message that only he understands. Even Lucrezia, his partner who loves him dearly, doesn’t understand Septimus and feels as if she can’t reach him, as she says, “he saw faces laughing at him, calling him horrible disgusting names, from the walls, and hands pointing round the screen. Yet they were quite alone…Perfect nonsense it was” (65). Additionally, death is also something Septimus thinks about, as Lucrezia talks about the time when they were having a good time and then “[s]uddenly he said, ‘Now we will kill ourselves’” (65). 

An interesting moment occurs at Clarissa’s party after Sir William Bradshaw talks about Septimus’s death, and Clarissa leaves to go into an isolated room. In this scene, Virginia Woolf writes, “He had killed himself—but how? Always her body went through it first…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” (179). Even though Clarissa had only heard that the suicide was of a young man who had been in the army, she can picture Septimus’s death. Clarissa can do this, not because she is a psychic, but because of her unreal empathy for Septimus based on her own experiences.

By including Septimus, a character who never interacts with Clarissa at any point in his life, Virginia Woolf creates a parallel to Clarissa. Even with their different lives, they both experience struggles with isolation and thoughts of death, showing us how these problems aren’t just limited to certain types of people. Septimus’s death also shows a darker possibility of what could’ve happened to Clarissa with a more extreme version of isolation. Through Septimus, Woolf not only gives us another perspective on Clarissa, but also criticizes the society of her time that struggles to understand the people who suffer from mental health issues. 

        Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Hartcourt, 2005.