Only the dead can speak
In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, death functions as the ultimate act of communication in a realm of silence where spoken language has failed. Through Septimus Smith’s suicide, Woolf suggests death is the definitive form of language capable of breaking through the modernist crisis of human connection.
In the early twentieth century, modernist literature was shaped by a profound crisis of intimacy and representation of the self. Especially in post-war London, the rapid and continuous shift in urban life created an emotional distance between people, who found themselves overwhelmed by the external and internal stimuli of their environment. As Baldev Prasad puts it, “modern life, with its rigid institutions, mechanization, and emphasis on productivity, further alienates individuals by suppressing emotional expression and individuality.” Within this context, and in response to the established modernist crisis of human connection, Virginia Woolf perfected a narrative technique that favoured inner thoughts and a subjective perception of life over external actions and circumstances. In one of her essays, Woolf says, “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.” As a result, she was able to describe the complexity of human relations and human consciousness in Mrs Dalloway. We can experience each character’s innermost thoughts and desires through her masterful use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, because otherwise the pages would be blank, as nobody seems to be in the mood for talking or having any kind of verbal interaction in this novel.
This very technique evidences how language has failed society, resulting in isolated characters with deficient socialisation. Dialogue is extremely rare; in its place, we get silent musing, pondering, consideration, and reflection. We live inside the characters’ fragmented minds and get to see how little of it gets to be expressed. Richard fails to say “I love you” to Clarissa; Peter and Clarissa share a somewhat telepathic communication; Septimus cannot make himself understood; and both Dr Holmes and Dr Bradshaw miss every given opportunity to articulate Septimus's condition. Language falls short in the act of communication, leading to the collapse of verbal exchange.
Septimus serves as the personification of this fractured semiotics. As the novel progresses, our look into his mind is more and more tainted with a sense of anxiety and urgency. We, as readers, become silent witnesses to his mounting deterioration. Woolf not only makes us complicit but also impotent in this man’s demise. We do have the language Dr Holmes doesn’t. We can see what this so-called nonsense is, but are unable to name it for them. For obvious reasons, we cannot jump into the novel and diagnose Septimus ourselves, but the feeling this interaction evokes is the same feeling we get when we are watching a film and want to shout that the killer is behind the unsuspecting protagonist. Again, silence. Consequently, Septimus's suicide emerges as his final linguistic act. He uses death as an expression, and his suicide speaks louder than words. His death acts both as an act of communication and as the representation of how the community failed to provide a viable language for his trauma. It is in this realm of not only fragmented characters, but also fragmented language, that death speaks the loudest.
Every act of communication has a sender and a recipient, and the most overt recipient of this act is our very own Mrs Dalloway. She first has a physical reaction: “her dress flamed, her body burnt.” The woman, who has been on a quest to find her identity and feel less “invisible” in the midst of a semi-mute society, is shaken to her core by the death of a man she has never met. Plot reach? Maybe, but that is not on trial here. Clarissa puts her own life on trial and reflects on how it is cluttered with social performances, whereas Septimus has managed to keep something pure. Ultimately, she feels a deep bond with the stranger and finds a renewed appreciation for her life, albeit with not very ladylike thoughts (“She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun.") Maybe she should pay Dr Holmes a visit. On second thought, better not. From a linguistic perspective, there is communication beyond dialogue, and Clarissa is uniquely receptive because she herself experiences language as inadequate. She interprets this act and, unable to utter a response to a very dead Septimus, cages herself to have her much sought-after epiphany, perpetuating the isolated modernist individual trope in the process.
Mrs Dalloway’s world is filled with silence, with the rare exceptions we find in the scarce dialogue or the sound of Big Ben chiming. Unfortunately for Septimus, this lingering silence is pushed to its most extreme form: death. The novel suggests that in a fractured world, the deepest forms of understanding occur not through social verbal interaction, but through shared experiences of silence and existential vulnerability, making death the text’s most powerful form of discourse.
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Espeche, J; López, P.; Ortega, A.