His wife Rezia outright tells him, ‘”My hand has grown so thin…I have put in my purse’” (66). Through a tainted lens and processes information differently. He can’t distinguish the voices and events in his head from the ones in this world, and he ranges from powerful delusions of grandeur to crippling insecurities. Dalloway is rapidly losing touch with reality. The result of repressing these emotions is a mental breakdown years down the road the Septimus we meet in Mrs. “Septimus was one of the first to volunteer…he drew the appreciation of his officer, Evans by name… But when Evans…when Evans was killed, just before the Armistice, in Italy, Septimus, far form showing any emotion or recognizing that here was the end of a friendship, congratulated himself on feeling very little and very reasonably…The War had taught him” (84). Septimus Warren Smith served in World War I and never fully recovered from the things he saw, including the death of his friend and commander Evans. The character of Septimus, a decorated war veteran is plagued by post- traumatic stress disorder, once known as “shellshock.” In the post-war experience of Septimus, his treatment and demise, we are privy to Woolf’s criticism of mental illness treatment during the early 20th century. Dalloway, it is impossible to ignore Woolf’s sweeping, scathing indictment of England’s perception of mental illness in the years after World War I. So much has been said and written about Virginia Woolf’s struggles with bipolar disorder that it may be tempting to resort to reductive practices extended comparisons between Woolf and her characters, projections of her own life events mapped onto unrelated plotlines, etc. Mental Illness and its Representations in Mrs.
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