The Past and the Present

Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith both are haunted by their pasts, but in different ways corresponding to their personalities and lives. For Septimus Smith, it's more accurate to say he is possessed by his past than haunted by it. His undiagnosed PTSD makes every day a living nightmare as he hallucinates and, driving a wedge between him and his desperate wife. Septimus's past has a tighter grasp on him because of the trauma he's experienced, which is unlike the experience of any other character in the novel. Both leave matters from their pasts unresolved, but Septimus's past is filled with profound trauma that's too much for his mind to take, while Clarissa's relatively sheltered experience leaves more nostalgia and regret than anything else.

From Clarissa's eyes, the war is well and truly over. She may wonder about the events of her youth, but she has hardly been affected by WWI as an upper-class woman who never saw combat firsthand. She thinks "The War was over, except for some one like Mrs. Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House must go to a cousin; or Lady Bexborough who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed; but it was over; thank Heaven--over. It was June"(5). Her involvement in the war is limited to passing thoughts about a couple friends of hers, before she moves on to think about another topic.

Lucrezia has a different take on World War 1's effects on her, though she's still an outsider to Septimus's experiences and she struggles to understand him. She thinks " a great friend of Septimus's ... had been killed in the War. But such things happen to every one. Every one has friends who were killed in the War. Every one gives up something when they marry. She had given up her home", not grasping how Septimus's life differs from her own. She has lost many things, and while she isn't so naive as to assume that the war is over for everyone with few lasting effects, Lucrezia cannot make sense of Septimus's mental state. She thinks that Septimus could be happy if he wanted to, except that he let himself think about horrible things(which is a common myth about mental illness, especially for the time). Lucrezia tries to live in the present, but her husband is dragging her back into the past. "Yet Dr. Holmes said there was nothing the matter with him. What then had happened--why had he gone, then, why, when she sat by him, did he start, frown at her, move away, and point at her hand, take her hand, look at it terrified?" In a way, his past haunts her as well.

When it comes to Septimus's perspective, we get fewer specific memories of the past and more anguished chaos. The paragraphs from Septimus's point of view remind me strongly of the chapter from Beloved written in Beloved's perspective, though Septimus is a little more coherent. This style is fitting, though, considering how much Beloved has to do with ghosts of the past refusing to stay put. Both Beloved and Septimus speak more in images than narrative, leaving us to piece together what happened from other characters' accounts. Their past traumas consume them-- and neither will have a moment's peace no matter who tries to help them.