The literary response to World War I was not only to portray its horrors at the front, but also

the
reverberations of the war throughout society. Virginia Woolf, who had been a close friend of the
fallen poet Rupert Brooke, wove profound references to the war’s effects throughout her works.
In the setting of her acclaimed novel Mrs. Dalloway, the war has ended, but everyone remains
deeply affected by it, including one of the novel’s main characters, a veteran with severe shell
shock (now known as PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder).

Virginia Woolf makes only passing comments on the war in her diaries and letters, expressing
her dislike of patriotic sentiment and the senselessness of the militaristic mentality. Apart from
this, she comments on air raids, guns firing, Lytton Strachey’s tribunal, Sassoon’s poetry and
protest, and the Women’s Cooperative Guilds. Many members of Woolf’s circle were pacifists.
She met German prisoners, an experience which in itself contributed to a mood of depression in
her fiction. Tracy Hargreaves writes that “although the 1919 campaign medals bore the
inscription ‘The Great War Fought for Civilization,’ there was a belief (popular with
Bloomsbury) that, rather than upholding it, the war heralded the collapse of civilization”
(Hargreaves 138). Woolf embraced her husband’s widely publicized view to this effect. During
and after the war, however, Woolf admitted that she could not write about it, about something
she did not know at all. What she did achieve through her writing was the creation of an
impressive account of war trauma and madness., Lawrence strove to deal with the post-traumatic
effects of the war, effects which were repressed and channeled into other activities, but which
nevertheless managed to leak out, causing their vile Medusa poison to seep into everyday human
relationships, into mental states, assuming the force of a destructive agent. As for Woolf’s
Septimus Smith in Mrs Dalloway, I shall try to show how Woolf turns war trauma into a
symbolic image and a vehicle which affects the way that subjectivity is constructed for others (in
Friedman’s terminology), while also establishing the madness of Septimus as the sole truth
against which the lies of the sane society can be given figural comprehension.

Our aim is thus to examine – both literarily and psychologically – several characters of
Lawrence’s and Woolf’s fictions whose function is to represent a range of psychic phenomena:
witnessing, suffering, repression, and their inversions, remembering, re-creation, re-living, doing
so through the reversal of the traumatic experience. My purpose is to show how as writers they
depict the two stages in the formation of trauma in the psyche: during (or immediately before)
and after the war. I have thus chosen to focus on stories where Lawrence presents the reader with
two settings, proceeding in a non-chronological order. My aim is to show how Lawrence’s
characters and those of Woolf chart the beginning of madness, then the actual manifestation of
the various symptoms of trauma: speech impediments, silencing, non-narratability, etc., in the
returned soldier. Rather than focusing on plot, the analysis focuses on the psychic symptoms
manifested by the different characters, thus demonstrating a more universal truth of the human
psyche, by way of the charting of the various signs of its slow degradation. What is
psychological by nature is thus rendered by way of the discursive order of fiction, in an
endeavour to bring home to the reader the troublesome condition of a war-traumatized soldier,
and how the madness and trauma originate and function in the psyche. The choice of texts has
been dictated by the focus on the psychic modality of the traumatic registration of experience.in
the fiction of Virginia Woolf the rewards of this outlook were both profound and moving. In
short stories and novels of great delicacy and lyrical power, she set out to portray the limitations
of the self, caught as it is in time, and suggested that these could be transcended, if only
momentarily, by engagement with another self, a place, or a work of art. This preoccupation not
only charged the act of reading and writing with unusual significance but also produced, in To
the Lighthouse (1927), The Waves (1931)—perhaps her most inventive and complex novel—and
Between the Acts (1941), her most sombre and moving work, some of the most daring fiction
produced in the 20th century.

Together with Joyce, who greatly influenced her Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Woolf transformed the
treatment of subjectivity, time, and history in fiction and helped create a feeling among her
contemporaries that traditional forms of fiction—with their frequent indifference to the
mysterious and inchoate inner life of characters—were no longer adequate. Her eminence as a
literary critic and essayist did much to foster an interest in the work of other female Modernist
writers of the period, such as Katherine Mansfield (born in New Zealand) and Dorothy
Richardson.
 The First World War 1914 to 1918 was a defining moment in European and world history.
it had a profound effect on the cultural and literary sensibilities of a generation. The war itself
had spawned a new wave of literary output. Literature became the primary medium through
which the experience of modern warfare was articulated and disseminated. The war has ended,
but everyone remains deeply affected by it. writers of the period were acutely aware of the sense
that they were part of a cohesive modernist movement. Virginia Woolf, were profoundly self-
conscious about what they were trying to achieve, The First World War is reflected throughout
her works in novels such as Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) Woolf
explored this new technique, as she used the stream-of-consciousness technique to represent
modernity. Both novels are also intricately concerned with war. Mrs Dalloway novel is that no
actual warfare takes place. All we see is the aftermath – the trauma and the shell-shock, the
ripples of damage to those who survived, the story takes of a single day in the life of Clarissa
Dalloway, the wife of a British MP, as she prepares for a party that evening in her London home.
Septimus Smith, a shell-shocked British soldier, acts as a double to Clarissa Dalloway
throughout the novel, a character whom she never meets despite both sharing the same city on
the same day. According to Woolf’s own notes, she wanted to present “the world seen by the
sane and the insane side by side” but as the novel progresses it becomes clear how, in post-war
London, civilians and veterans alike are indelibly marked by war. The War is also a main theme
in To the Lighthouse novel, it is divided into three sections. As references to the first World
War begin to surface in the second and third section, it becomes rapidly apparent that Time
Passes is a metaphor for the war (The death of Mrs Ramsay’s son Andrew). War, in To the
Lighthouse, is something that happens offstage, a barely-registered event that nonetheless has a
profound effect on the action. Also It not only casts a shadow over the characters of the novel,
but also shepherds in a new era of social and cultural change.