Social System In Mrs Dalloway

Virginia Woolf, like the titular character of her novel Mrs Dalloway, held a unique position in the social system of the early twentieth century. As a member of the wealthy middle-upper class, she was simultaneously part of the societal Establishment, yet alienated from it by her position as a mentally ill, bisexual woman, and her role in the free-thinking Bloomsbury Group. It is the relationship between the unique individual and the dominating social system of the Establishment that forms the central conflict of Mrs Dalloway. Throughout the novel, Woolf’s portrayal of the social system is fascinating, as she looks at the political upper class who control it, and the ideas of patriarchy, empire, class, and emotion that it promotes, before sharply

Many of Woolf’s characters are placed outside of society’s strict rules and thus classified as ‘unusual’ and a threat to the social system. Septimius, Peter, Mrs Kilman, Clarissa and Sally in their youth, and even minor characters such as the ‘old Irishwoman’ who wishes to toss flowers in front of the Prime Minister’s car, compromise the rigidity of society, with its condemnation of expression of the individual. Mental illness, sexuality, male emotion, and poverty all set characters against the social system. Throughout Mrs Dalloway, we often see these characters suffer great unhappiness from the intense pressure to conform to the social system. The rejected Mrs Kilman, with her severe religious zealotry and unspoken attraction to Elizabeth, feels she has ‘suffered so horribly’ and ‘the pleasure of eating…the only pure pleasure left to her’ to fill the void. There is no place for her in the social system, just as there is no place for Clarissa and Sally’s love for each other, or Peter Walsh’s dreams of radicalism. Virginia Woolf’s social set was made up predominantly from artists, writers, and radicals, whose free-thinking mindset positioned them against societal rules. The pathos that she generates for her characters positions them as victims of society, unable to achieve the style of life advocated by the Bloomsbury

We can see him as a symbolic scapegoat or sacrifice, who is forced to suffer for the sins of the clearly repressive social system during the war, or immediately after as it attempts to cover up the past. This view of Septimius as a sacrifice, destined to suffer for social repression, links into his own view of himself as a messiah ‘lately taken from life to death, the Lord who had come to renew society’. He is clearly a threat to the stagnated, dominating social system. As a soldier, he is an unpleasant reminder of the hushed up war and its earthmoving impact, and is evidently suffering from the unseen disease ‘shell-shock’, now known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Post-war, Europe was swept by an epidemic of this ‘shell-shock’ as soldiers returned home and struggled to readjust to life after the conflict, but the medical establishment did not accept it as a real condition and soldiers who suffered from it were seen as weak. The stoicism encouraged of men during the war is evident in Septimius congratulating ‘himself at feeling very little and very reasonably’ after his comrade Evans’s death, but this attitude, like the social system itself, is unsustainable and in the case of Septimius led to total emotional atrophy and eventually a psychotic breakdown and eruption of delusional