Virginia Woolf chose to describe her characters not focusing on material

details from an external perspective, but focusing on the inner life of the
characters, with all the moods, emotions and thoughts that are in constant
change, as well as the memories. She connects all the characters’ inner worlds
in a coherent manner, transitioning between them using external elements like
the backfire of a car, a plane writing in the sky, or the sound of the Big Ben. Her
narrative switches between interior and exterior, and she uses free indirect
discourse which enables her to move constantly from exterior third person to
interior first person and vice versa. While doing some research, I found that in
her diary, Virginia wrote that she had made a discovery concerning the way she
wanted to describe her characters: “… I dig out beautiful caves behind my
characters; I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The
idea is that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present
moment…” Woolf called this her ‘tunnelling process’.

Septimus Warren Smith:

Even though Septimus is nothing like Virginia Woolf, the author wanted to
express through this character her own experiences with mental illness, so she
created Septimus Warren Smith, who is a tormented, shell shocked WWI
veteran. He is mentally ill and throughout the story we encounter numerous
episodes in which he is paranoid and has hallucinations like watching the trees
come alive or a dog become a man, as well as repeatedly seeing a dead soldier
he knew called Evans, who seems to haunt him:

“… a Skye terrier snuffed his trousers and he started in an agony of fear.

It was turning into a man! He could not watch it happen! It was horrible,
terrible to see a dog become a man! (...) Why could he see through bodies,
see into future, when dogs will become men.”

“‘For God’s sake don’t come!’ Septimus cried out. For he could not look
upon the dead. But the branches parted. A man in grey was actually
walking towards them. It was Evans! But no mud was on him; no wounds;
he was not changed.”

“It was at that moment (Rezia had gone shopping) that the great
revelation took place. A voice spoke from behind the screen. Evans was
speaking. The dead were with him. Evans, Evans! he cried. Mr. Smith was
talking aloud to himself, Agnes the servant girl cried to Mrs. Filmer in the
kitchen. Evans, Evans, he had said as she brought in the tray. She
jumped. She scuttled downstairs.”

Septimus is an ill, mad man surrounded by gloom, pessimism and death all
the time, as opposed to Clarissa, who reflects on her past and her
acquaintances while walking through the streets of London, buying flowers and
planning a party. However, Virginia Woolf wrote in her notes for the novel that
she wanted Septimus to “somehow see through human nature – see its
hypocrisy and insincerity, its power to recover from every wound, incapable of
taking any final impression. His sense that this is not worth having.” We can see
what she was trying to achieve, for example, in this in this quote:

“For the truth is (let her ignore it) that human beings have neither
kindness, nor faith, nor charity, beyond what serves to increase the
pleasure of the moment. They hunt in packs. Their packs scour the desert
and vanish screaming into the wilderness. The desert the fallen. They are
plastered over with grimaces.”

Septimus’ situation also offered Woolf the opportunity to harshly criticize the
incompetence of the doctors when treating mentally ill patients, most probably
related to her own experience. Rezia, despite having good intentions and
wanting to take care of her husband, follows the doctors’ instructions and wants
Septimus to rest and distract himself. She, as well as the doctors who are
supposed to offer professional help, does not understand what his husband is
actually suffering from. The doctors make her think that he is not really ill, and
that it’ll soon pass with just some resting and distraction:

“There was nothing whatever the matter, said Dr. Holmes. Oh, what a
relief! What a kind man, what a good man! thought Rezia.”

Woolf characterized Bradshaw, the other doctor, as follows:

“Proportion, divine proportion, Sir William’s goddess…Worshipping

proportion Sir William not only prospered himself but made England
prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalised despair,
made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too,
shared his sense of proportion…”

Clarissa Dalloway:

Mrs Dalloway, on the other hand, is a Tory politician’s wife and a famous
hostess in London. She is posh, and in the surface she may come across as
rather ignorant, although she sometimes reflects deeply on a number of things.
Clarissa is also rather self-centred, especially when people at the party are
talking about Septimus’ death and her first thoughts are that it is ruining her
party. However, later when she is alone she thinks critically about Septimus
killing himself and is deeply affected by it:

“Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here’s death, she

thought… She went on, into the little room where the Prime Minister had
gone with Lady Bruton .Perhaps there was somebody there. But there was
nobody. The chairs still kept the impress of the Prime Minister and Lady
Bruton… What business had the Bradshaws to talk of death at her party?
A young man had killed himself. And they talked of it at her party – the
Bradshaws, talked of death. He had killed himself – but how?”

“She felt somehow very much like him – the young man who had killed
himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away while they went
on living. The clock was stricking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.
But she must go back. She must assemble.”

Woolf’s sexuality and her relationship with her husband Leonard is also
reflected in the novel. Clarissa’s relationship with Richard is somehow cold but
they are very fond of each other. This gives Clarissa, just as it gave Virginia, the
right amount of independence she needed. This is the reason why she chose
Richard, since Peter was too physically and emotionally demanding.

As regards her sexuality, Mrs Dalloway vividly recalls one of the happiest
moments in her life, when her friend Sally Seton kissed her when they were 18
years old. It was a life changing moment for her and her feelings towards Sally
were strong, since she compares it to Othello’s feeling (Othello’s love for
Desdemona):

“She could not even get an echo of her old emotion. But she could
remember going cold with excitement, and doing her hair in a kind of
ecstasy (now the old feeling began to come back to her, as she took out
her hairpins, laid them on the dressing-table, began to do her hair), with
the rooks flaunting up and down in the pink evening light, and dressing,
and going downstairs, and feeling as she crossed the hall “if it were now
to die ’twere now to be most happy.” That was her feeling–Othello’s
feeling, and she felt it, she was convinced, as strongly as Shakespeare
meant Othello to feel it, all because she was coming down to dinner in a
white frock to meet Sally Seton!”

Mrs Dalloway also has a fear of the passing of time and ageing. She
constantly thinks about and reflects on death (especially at the end when she
thinks about Septimus’ suicide).

“Since her illness she had turned almost white. Laying her brooch on the
table, she had a sudden spasm, as If, while she mused, the icy claws had
had the chance to fix in her. She was not old yet. She had just broken into
her fifty-second year. Months and months of it were still untouched.”

“He had killed himself – but how? Always her body went through it,
when she was told, first, suddenly, of an accident; her dress flamed, her
body burnt. He had thrown himself from a window. Up had flashed the
ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went rusty spikes. There he
lay with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation of
blackness.”

“Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate, people

feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded
them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded; one was alone. There was an
embrace in death.”

A phrase from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline resonates in her head: “Fear no

more the heat o’ the sun,” which refers to death as a relief from life’s hardships
and the fact that death comes to everyone in the end. On the other hand, when
she remembers the times when she and Sally were close friends, she says: “If
now it were to die ‘twere now to be most happy,” from Shakespeare’s Othello,
making reference to death again as a way of preserving that precious feeling
forever and keeping it untouched. Mrs Dalloway seems to make peace with this
fear of ageing and death with her great party at the end of the novel:

“It was fascinating to watch her, moving about, that old lady, crossing
the room, coming to the window. Could she see her? It was fascinating,
with people still laughing and shouting in the drawing-room, to watch that
old woman, quite quietly, going to bed alone. She pulled the blind now.
The clock began striking. The young man had killed himself; but she did
not pity him, with all this going on. There! The old lady had put out her
light! The whole house was dark now with this going on, she repeated,
and the words came to her, Fear no more the heat of the sun.”