The Two Halves of Mrs. Dalloway

    In the novel Mrs. Dalloway, the story generally centers around two main characters: Clarissa Dalloway, a rich woman who buys flowers, wonders where her love truly lies, and throws a party, and Septimus Warren Smith, a philosophical man who struggles with PTSD in a time when he couldn't get the help he needed and jumps out of a window. The two never meet, yet Clarissa, in the middle of her party, grieves for this man (who wasn't even named!), creating the strangest and most moving moment in this novel. While they may seem extremely different at first glance, the entire book truly is built to make you feel like they are two halves of the same person.

    Woolf herself said that Septimus initially wasn't even part of the plan, and Clarissa was actually intended to die. Septimus arrived later as a man who could carry that fate, so Clarissa didn't have to. That means that Septimus isn't a side character or a subplot; instead, he's the road that Clarissa didn't take. He was made from the same cloth as Clarissa Dalloway.

    Woolf shows this pairing through the book's structure, cutting constantly between the two characters across London in the same hours. The backfiring car, for example, was an experience shared by both characters as strangers: "The violent explosion which made Mrs. Dalloway jump and Miss Pym ... came from a motor car ... [and inside] was the face of the very greatest importance," and "Edgar J. Watkiss ... said audibly, humorously of course: 'The Proime Minister's kyar.' Septimus Warren Smith, who found himself unable to pass, heard him" (Woolf 13-14). 

    Their resemblance goes deeper than coincidence of scenery: both are alert to a feeling of exposure. Clarissa Dalloway stated as she looked at the omnibuses in Piccadilly that "she had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had that feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day" (Woolf 8). If I didn't know any better, I would say that this sounded remarkably like Septimus Smith! Even so early in the book, once we are later introduced to Septimus Smith, we can see a lot of parallels between Clarissa and Septimus.

    Another similarity between the two lies in how they are both haunted by a sense of invasion and protection of their private selves. When Clarissa sees the old woman through the window in the middle of the novel, she says, "somehow one respected that - that old woman looking out of the window, quite unconscious that she was being watched. There was something solemn in it - but love and religion would destroy that, whatever it was, the privacy of the soul" (Woolf 123-124). This quote reflects how Clarissa guards what she calls her privacy, and she recoils from those who try to convert others to their way of seeing ("love and religion") (Woolf 124). In fact, Septimus commits suicide because of that very desire to protect his mind: he would rather kill himself with his own mind intact than be tortured by these doctors into a mind that wasn't truly his.

    So when Clarissa finally unintentionally hears about a young man from the army who had killed himself, when her assumptions about who this man was and how he died were very close to the truth, it was because she "felt somehow very like him - the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away" (Woolf 182). Clarissa understands why Septimus did it, because she herself detests those who try to push their worldview on everyone else (which we are reminded of when she observes the old woman again through the window). Where most others would pity him and mourn him deeply, Clarissa is glad that this man refused to let anyone take who he was away from him.

    By looking closer at both characters, it is clear that Septimus and Clarissa are two sides of the same coin - where they differ is in how they are able to survive this hostile world: Clarissa is able to perform through her parties, which she loved because "what she liked was simply life," and bringing people together (Woolf 118). Septimus on the other hand could not perform, and instead could only protect himself by committing suicide in a world that would never come to understand him. The book is called Mrs. Dalloway, not Mrs. Dalloway and Mr. Smith, and this is because both characters are in a way two halves of the Mrs. Dalloway whole, making for one of the most interesting aspects of this novel.