Clarissa Dalloway

Of realities and coincidences in the happenings of lifetime events in the lives of two different people, it is hard to dispute the reasoning that situations can be so similar in people’s lives that it is easy to conclude that these people share a life. This phenomenon may be referred to as doubles. Some behavioral scientists may pinpoint meta-physics as the possible explanation to a person having the same feelings as another. From a metaphysics point of view, some happenings that seem like coincidences are actually not. They are natural happenings only that they are beyond human understanding. For instance, in Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel, Mrs. Dalloway, two characters, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith, have similar world views even though they are two different people who are not even known to each other. Ralph Samuelson maintains that the novel is about “life and death, sanity and insanity and is to be a criticism of the social system of England” (Samuelson, 60).

In the novel, Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway, a royal wife, shares almost similar views of the world with Septimus Warren Smith, a former soldier who fought in the World War I and now suffering from hallucination. These two characters share many things in common albeit the fact that they are not known to each other and they have not shared anything in their lifetimes. The novel is an in-depth “day-in-the-life” view of Mrs. Dalloway featuring what she thinks about her life, other people’s lives, her real feelings and the feelings of other people. She is told the story of a former World War I soldier and she takes her time to reflect in the man’s life and experiences. His life appears more like hers not in how they both live but their feelings, which is why I hold the view tha...

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... her feelings about the happenings of events in her life. She does not feel bad when she hears about Septimus’s death because she manages to convince herself that he committed suicide as a way of communicating his feelings about oppression.

On the other hand, Septimus is, of course, insane. Even though he was born sane and was sane until he went to war and returned, he is unable to control his emotions and by extension, his behavior. Contrary to Clarissa, who consciously makes images in her mind, Septimus unconsciously sees images and has feelings that do not actually exist. He is further not rational enough to try and find out the importance of the course for which Evans died. The author makes her audience believe that Septimus fears death but in the end he eventually takes his own life. This depicts him as irrational and unable to resist temptations on his own.