When he discovers that Septimus has flung himself from the window, Dr. Holmes disgustedly declares him a “coward.” Although he is shaken by his former patient’s suicide, Holmes remains as obtuse as ever regarding Septimus’s mental condition: “Who could have foretold it? A sudden impulse. . . . And why the devil he did it, Dr. Holmes could not conceive” (146). Of course, Holmes hasn’t understood the first thing about Septimus specifically or his shell-shocked condition more generally all along, so we aren’t surprised he’s so bewildered; this is the guy who recommended a couple of rounds of golf to get him over his “funk.” But Septimus’s suicide could indeed have been “foretold”—he has been announcing his intentions to take his own life for some time now. Although it is a shock at this moment in the narrative, since we’ve just, heartbreakingly, observed Septimus and Rezia clowning around, enjoying one another’s company, the reader has likely seen this coming. Even if Holmes is blind to the signs, we’re not.
By having Holmes paint Septimus’s suicide as an act of “cowardice,” Woolf links this subplot explicitly to the controversy surrounding the newly diagnosed condition of shell shock during and after the First World War. Many conservative commentators, within and outside of the military, were openly skeptical toward shell shock as a psychological condition: Weren’t these men merely cowards, breaking down in hysterics and refusing to fight the war? Wasn’t their problem merely an insufficiency of manhood? War is hell; deal with it. Not every soldier suffered from shell shock; perhaps it was only the weak ones. Aren’t we coddling these pathetic excuses for soldiers by treating their psychological wounds alongside those whose wounds are more visible? There was a stigma of shame associated with a diagnosis of shell shock, and this shame took on a gendered dimension: these young men were often made to feel that their masculinity itself had been damaged by the war—or that the war had “tested” them, and they had failed. Although he doesn't appear to have even heard the term “shell shock,” in his barely disguised disdain for Septimus’s “weakness,” Holmes stands in for this general view.
In her depiction of Septimus’s experiences before, during, and after the war, Woolf explicitly engages these gender issues. Before the war, as a promising young clerk in Mr. Brewer’s offices who fancies himself a poet and models himself after Keats (not exactly the pinnacle of rugged masculinity), Septimus is viewed with some concern by his employer. “Something was up” with him: “he looked weakly” (83-84). Mr. Brewer recommends football (by which he means soccer or rugby, although the analogies between American football and war are even stronger), but Septimus goes one better and enlists in the army at the outbreak of the war (“one of the first to volunteer” [84]). Woolf’s irony is palpable as she narrates, “There in the trenches the change which Mr. Brewer desired when he advised football was produced instantly; he developed manliness” (84). And what does “manliness” entail? Certainly not pining over one’s Shakespeare lecturer in florid verse! The long-established association of emotion with femininity and rigid stoicism and reason with masculinity is evoked by Woolf with bitter irony: when his dear friend Evans is killed, “Septimus, far from showing any emotion or recognising that here was the end of a friendship, congratulated himself upon feeling very little and very reasonably. The War had taught him. It was sublime” (84). Septimus is initially proud of his inability to feel; his feminine tendencies about which Brewer used to worry have been “corrected.” He’s now a “good soldier” and a culturally appropriate man.
But Septimus can’t maintain this stoicism. Paradoxically, he feels badly about the fact that he can “no longer feel”—some part of him is horrified at what the War has taught him, and this is portrayed by Woolf as the origin of the disorder that will claim his life. His repressed emotions will continue to resurface, quite literally once he starts hallucinating Evans rising from the bushes and walking toward him. By the time we meet him, on what will be his final day alive, Septimus’s proud stoicism has deteriorated and he has become hypersensitive, his nerves vibrating constantly, alert to the vibrations of the trees and the speech of birds, but, ironically and painfully, numbly detached from his wife, persecuted by doctors and “human nature,” and with no ability to connect with his fellow people. He feels too much and too strongly.
If Clarissa is in part straining under cultural expectations for women, through Septimus Smith Woolf is sharply critical of cultural expectations for men—and the all-male governments that ultimately bear responsibility for the war.
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