- Who is Septimus Smith? What is distinctive about his inner landscape? Why might Woolf have chosen to feature this kind of character in her novel?
Septimus was introduced to the reader as a passerby when the car started making a loud noise. He is a World War 1 veteran with mental health issues that aren’t said but showed through his actions, his wife’s actions and the fact that his wife is trying to seek help from psychiatrists. His inner landscape is definitely different from the typical character. He experiences PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), shell shock, in the novel, though it is not named. He seems to live and exist in his own world, where more often than not, people are against him or attacking him— ‘people’ being the ghost of his late friend that passed in the war, Evans, that he sees from time to time, and the constant feeling that people are watching him and judging him. Septimus has removed himself from the physical world and instead lives in a world inside himself where he then sees and hears things that aren’t there in real life. What is noticeable about his thoughts is that he seems to notice the beauty in the world yet at the same time, Septimus is bothered and fears that human beings don’t have the capacity for honesty or kindness. His detachment from the world enables him to judge people in a harsher manner than Clarrisa, for example, and sees the world as threatening and offers little hope.
Though on surface level they seem very, very different, Clarissa and Septimus share many similarities. Both have a love for Shakespeare, have a fear for oppression, and even their noses share a similarity. Their differences in class, however, help the novel offer contrast between the ideas of struggle in the working class (that of Septimus being in the working class and a veteran) and the ignorance of the upper class to such struggles and even the horrors of war—something Septimus is familiar with, unfortunately, and Clarissa will likely never know. Ultimately, Septimus chooses to kill himself, which then becomes a topic at her party which she originally really dislikes because the wife of the doctor brought ‘death’ to her party by bringing up his suicide. Woolf’s choice to bring in Septimus’ character could be to provide a parallel to Clarissa’s character and thoughts. Septimus is so similar to Clarissa but the difference in their endings to the novel as well as the differences in their lives’ realities offer a comparison that the reader will be able to see if reading closely. Although they are both this similar, the differences in the pressures of their lives made the divide between them even greater. Living a working class life with the experiences of war embedded in your memories and your daily life cannot compare to that of a wealthy housewife getting ready for a dinner party. Septimus’ inner and outer struggle to free himself from the shackles of the trauma he faced shone light into the possibility of perhaps understanding mental illnesses more and thus being more understanding of those suffering from it on a daily basis, especially because Woolf herself fell victim to mental illness as well.
