Virginia Woolf and Bradshaw

Septimus's struggles in Mrs. Dalloway are given a greater depth when we look at them through the lens of Virginia Woolf's own struggle with mental illness. Virginia Woolf probably had a severe form of bipolar disorder which went undiagnosed in her lifetime, and she suffered numerous mental breakdowns and suicide attempts before eventually killing herself at the age of 59. I think she's using the character Septimus Smith and his stream-of-consciousness style to reflect her own experiences, since the portions from his point of view are written drastically differently from the rest of the book.

The one thing uniting Septimus and Clarissa,the book's two main characters, is their hatred of Dr. Bradshaw. Septimus comes from a vastly different class background than Clarissa, and his struggles as a war veteran are completely different from anything she's experienced in her bubble of privilege, yet they both have an extremely visceral reaction to these mostly respected, celebrated doctors. Clarissa calls Bradshaw "a great doctor yet to her obscurely evil, without sex or lust, extremely polite to women, but capable of some indescribable outrage ... Life is made intolerable; they make life intolerable, men like that". Even though Clarissa's husband gets along well with Bradshaw and she invited him to her party, there's just something off about him under the surface. It's an interesting connection, considering Clarissa was supposed to be the character that committed suicide. Both of them have different viewpoints, but Woolf essentially uses them as a mouthpiece to voice her frustrations with the medical system of the 1920s.

Looking at Virginia Woolf's life, it's surprisingly clear where the parallels are. She jumped out a window once at age 22, and her psychiatrist Dr. Savage institutionalized her on no less than four occasions. After the last time, when she got a second opinion from another doctor who just told her to back to the sanitorium, she overdosed on veronal rather than return. She would have been dead like Septimus had a friend of hers not found her and gotten her medical help.

Most of the vitriol in Mrs. Dalloway is reserved for the doctors, which is especially important in a story filled with intersubjectivity. Every other character gets at least two points of view from other characters, so even the obnoxious Hugh has people who are fond of him. Mrs. Dalloway may hate Miss Kilman, but Elizabeth does not. But no one likes the Bradshaws. Dr. Holmes and Bradshaw are described in a both pointedly personal and incredibly scathing manner. Septimus says "Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is remorseless.", equating them to cruel vultures and the embodiment of human nature. Even in a paragraph mainly from Dr. Bradshaw's point of view, Woolf writes "Naked, defenceless, the exhausted, the friendless received the impress of Sir William's will. He swooped; he devoured. He shut people up". This is a very dark description of a man who's supposed to heal people and "do no harm" (according to the Hippocratic oath). I think Woolf based his character off of Dr. Savage she knew, who institutionalized her and forced her to isolate from everything.