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Expressionism and the hallucinations of Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway


Throughout the course of Western literary history, there have always been writers attempting to innovate new forms of writing and new themes on which to write. One of the most renowned among them was Virginia Woolf. I will take the hallucinatory imageries of Septimus Smith --- a character in the novelist's Mrs. Dalloway --- to discuss Woolf's employment of expressionist elements, a style which is rarely associated with her, to depict what she thought should be the centre of literature, one's consciousness. This essay begins with discussing her desire to shift writers' focuses from the material world outside of us to people's interiorities, then arguing that Woolf adapts an expressionist approach to represent Septimus's fantasies, before explaining how she uses the expressionist style to create a clear and strong contrast between the exterior and interior of a person, while still building a subtle connection between the two instead of completely rejecting the former for the latter.


Virginia Woolf disapproved of the conventional realist writing style and theme. Traditionally, realist fiction such as that of Jane Austen's focused on giving an objective representation of the material world --- objects around us, people's appearances, and so on. Woolf found it disappointing that many years after Austen's time, her contemporary fellow writers such as H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy still adapted a similar approach in their works. She called them "materialists" and criticized them for being "concerned not with the spirit [in other words, one's thoughts and feelings] but with the body" ("Modern Fiction" 161)


She found the traditional realist techniques unhelpful:


And so they have developed a technique of novel-writing which suits their purpose; they have made tools and established conventions which do their business. But those tools are not our tools, and that business is not our business. For us those conventions are ruin, those tools are death.

(“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” 330)


She therefore desired to break through them and look for new methods of writing:


Thus it is that we hear all round us, in poems and novels and biographies, even in newspaper articles and essays, the sound of breaking and falling, crashing and destruction...think of the language, and the heights to which it can soar when free, and see the same eagle captive, bald, and croaking.

(333-4)


Thematically, what Woolf considered as more important was what happens inside the mind --- our emotions, our perceptions whether they are real or illusive, the process of how we think, our dreams and so on, things that were "commonly thought small" in realist literature. "Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall" (“Modern Fiction” 161). In contrast with older realist writings in which it is important to make sense, she believed that writers' depiction of one's interior world can be "disconnected and incoherent" (161).


In terms of the techniques of writing, while conventional realist writers abide by a certain set of rules, Woolf argued that there should not be any fixed forms: " Any method is right, every method is right, that expresses what we wish to express, if we are writers; that brings us closer to the novelist's intention if we are readers" (162). While Woolf is known for her glamorous use of the stream of consciousness method and interior monologues, in Mrs. Dalloway, she employs experimentally a kind of style that is rarely associated with her, expressionism, to depict Septimus Smith's fantasies. Septimus is a World War One veteran soldier who suffers from shell shock-induced mental illness and sees things in the park that do not exist, such as "see[ing] a dog become a man" ("Mrs. Dalloway", 54) and his deceased fellow soldier Evans (56).


It is noteworthy that Mrs. Dalloway, which was published in 1925, was in line with, or at least under the influence of, "the expressionist movement...during the turbulent decade of 1919 to 1920...as an avant garde and experimental movement" (Murphy 36). In expressionism, "the fantastic very often takes the form of a centrifugal projection from the protagonist onto the outside world, so that the 'exterior' reality that the subject (and the audience) encounters is a hybrid and subjectivized realm. The common forms of projection here involve a world that does not exist as an observable entity of the kind that might be recorded or represented in an objective fashion" (37).


The "protagonist" in our case is obviously not that of the novel, Clarissa Dalloway, but that of the parts of the book with which we are concerned, Septimus, his mind to be more specific. On the other hand, the "exterior" is his material surroundings, which includes plants, "leaves were alive; trees were alive ("Mrs. Dalloway" 54)", animals such as the dog, and his own body, "His body was macerated until only the nerve fibres were left (54)."


It is obvious that the collection of images represented in the text is an "observable entity of the kind that might be recorded or represented in an objective fashion" (Murphy 37), since most if not all of them --- Septimus's body macerating into nerve fibres, a dog transforming into a man (54), just to name a few --- are rarely seen in reality and difficult to describe in one's writing while trying not to sound unscientific. Yet one might doubt whether it is, as the definition above requires, a projection from Septimus, rather than simply his imaginations recorded. The answer is "yes" since Septimus's state of mind at that time and his fantasies are associated with the same common theme --- "the world". In the park, Septimus becomes emotional and feels strongly for a collection of things such as humanity, heaven, and the future which can be generalized under the concept of "the world".


--- Septimus, was alone, called forth in advance of the mass of men to hear the truth, to learn the meaning, which now at last, after all the toils of civilisation --- Greeks, Romans, Shakespeare, Darwin, and now himself --- world was entirely changed by them for ever --- Heaven was divinely merciful, infinitely benignant --- Why could he see ... into the future

("Mrs. Dalloway" 54-55)

Many elements in his imaginations, the earth, plants, rocks and so on, fall into the same category of meaning:

--- He lay very high, on the back of the world. The earth thrilled beneath him. Red flowers grew through his flesh; their stiff leaves rustled by his head --- Music began clanging against the rocks up here

(54)


To further confirm that the expressionist style is used, we can notice that two very common characteristics of expressionist writing are used in our text. Firstly, "the subject experiences the real world of twentieth-century modernity as overwhelming, alienating or threatening" (Murphy 37). Our character Septimus fits into this model since he is an eccentric mental patient isolated from anyone except his wife and doctors, and due to his being extremely sensitive he often feels that the exterior world, for instance other people, are threatening. His suicide as a result of Dr. Bradshaw threatening to take him away from his home is perhaps the best example (78). Secondly, "[a] major aspect of this projective mode in expressionism occurs in texts that transform the entire external world into an extension or correlative of the subject. This similarly takes the form of a projection outwards of the inner fears, anxieties and fundamental concerns of the individual" (38). In the park, Septimus thinks, or sees, that he was physically connected with trees:


...leaves were alive; trees were alive. And the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body, there on the seat, fanned it up and down; when the branch stretched he, too, made that statement. (54)


In this last part of the essay, I will discuss how Woolf, with the help of Septimus's hallucinations, creates a clear and strong contrast between the exterior and interior of a person, but at the same time not totally rejecting the former. As we have seen, according to Woolf, conventional realist writers tended to focus too much on what is outside of a person, in other worlds, the material "real" world; in contrast, Woolf was much more interested in one's inner world. For the ease of discussion below, let us notice that for Woolf the former contains senses such as artificiality, science and technology, accuracy and objectivity, as well as the coldness and inhumanity attached to them.


The "exterior" is represented by Septimus's wife Lucrezia, who repeatedly interrupts him while he is deep in his thoughts, emotions, and fantasies:


eparately."Look," she implored him, pointing at a little troop of boys carrying cricket stumps, and one shuffled, spun round on his heel and shuffled, as if he were acting a clown at the music hall. "Look," she implored him, for Dr. Holmes had told her to make him notice real things, go to a music hall, play cricket--that was the very game, Dr. Holmes said, a nice out-of-door game, the very game for her husband.

("Mrs Dalloway" 53)


While Septimus is immersed in his "interior" world, Lucrezia constantly urges her husband to "look", to "notice real things". The term "look" has a strong sense of addressing exterior entities, something real and existing, as compared with the term "see", because whether somebody sees something depends on his own perception, such as Septimus seeing his body connected with trees.

Also, it was Dr. Holmes who told her to "make him notice real things". Holmes in Mrs. Dalloway is a symbol of science, or applied scientific to be accurate. He, like other physicians in general, is well-educated in medicine and uses his professional skills to treat his patients. Yet such skills belong to the material, objective world, and he only relies on them in helping Septimus with his shell shock and mental illness, giving him routine suggestions without connecting with his interior world --- understanding what he thinks and feels.


--- Dr. Holmes examined him. There was nothing whatever the matter, said Dr. Holmes --- Why not try two tabloids of bromide dissolved in a glass of water at bedtime? --- Throw yourself into outside interests; take up some hobby

(66)


"Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide" (160). Although Woolf encouraged the exploration of one's interiority and lamented that her contemporary writers have been focusing wrongly on customary methods to depict the exterior, she did not seem to reject the objective exterior totally. In fact, her choice of using the expressionist style can be seen as a way to blend the interior and exterior. While traditional realist writers concentrates on representing an accurate exterior, she twists that in Mrs. Dalloway by Septimus's imaginations in order to highlight the importance of interior feelings and thoughts which had been neglected by many writers. We can see that in Septimus's fantasies things that belong to the objective exterior are transformed into those that have closer associations with one's emotions and interiority. For example, "[Septimus's] body was macerated until only the nerve fibres were left" (54). The body, an explicit object that can be seen by other people, an object that has been studied and "understood" to a certain extent for centuries with scientific methods, turns into nerve fibres, a symbol that represents one's senses, how one feels, which at Woolf's time was still an area of mystery with the discipline of psychoanalysis still relatively new (Freud 9). The trees and leaves becoming alive (54) is also an example. Plants have always been alive, yet they are often considered as dead objects, a part of the decoration of the Park. While reminding readers that plants are living organisms by making them "alive", Woolf metaphorically implies that a person is likewise --- not only with an observable body but also a lively consciousness full of feelings.

When a certain form of literary writing has been exhausted and can no longer be helpful to writers in expressing their thoughts, they experiment on new techniques and even themes to discover better options. Virginia Woolf was not completely against the conventional way of realist writing. She thought it was fine in Jane Austen's time ("Modern Fiction" 161), yet she felt that at the time she lived writers should explore new styles to depict what she believed as extremely important --- people's consciousness. An example was her employment of the rather advanced technique of expressionism to write about Septimus Smiths imaginations, or in other worlds, his inner world. It is not common of literary critics to associate Woolf with expressionism, yet she used it, not much, but on a few pages of at least one of her novels, Mrs. Dalloway, to connect the exterior and the interior of Septimus Smith. Perhaps more academic effort should be made on finding out whether and how modernist writers experimented with techniques that we do not usually associate them with in tiny corners of their work.

Works Cited:

  • Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams the Illustrated Edition. New York: Sterling Press, 2010. Print.

  • Murphy, Richard. "The Poetics of Animism". The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, ed. Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons and Brian McHale. London: Routledge, 2012. Print.

  • Woolf, Virginia. "Modern Fiction". The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Ed. McNeille, Andrew . London: The Hogarth Press, 1984. 157-164. Print.

  • Woolf, Virginia. "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown". The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Ed. McNeille, Andrew. London: The Hogarth Press, 1984. 328-338. Print.

  • Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt, 1983. Print.

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