Mrs Dalloway Mental Illness Essay

The novel, Mrs. Dalloway, purpose was to expose how shell shock and other mental illness was misdiagnosed by medical professions, who was supposed to acknowledge anything wrong with a patient. The novel had many good reviews about the message behind the novel, but many critics believed Virginia Woolf wrote the novel to deal with her own mental illness. In a way, the novel was a snippet of the author’s life because Woolf’s doctors did not understand her horror story with depression. The critic David Dowling saw the novel as a masterpiece because of the message of post-traumatic stress disorder, and the struggles of veterans back from the war zone. Dowling explained Woolf used the characters, Septimus Smith and Peter Walsh, to represent loneliness
There was an embrace in death” (Woolf,208). Septimus was a person with a damaged outlook on life because of the war, and the last resort for was death. The study of Sigmund Freud was used by Dowling to express how doctors saw post-traumatic stress disorder, but in Mrs. Dalloway, the mental illness was called shell shock. Freud’s claim was the doctors wanted to believe the mental illness, post-traumatic stress disorder, occurred from the fear and duty of the soldier. If the doctors keep believing in that idea, they could find a way to cure people with the disorder without understanding the pain. Sigmund Freud’s concept of death was “Thanatos” meaning the ultimate goal in life is death exactly like Septimus’ mentality slowly came to the idea. Septimus questioned the idea of seeking the truth and getting people to understand his struggle, and Woolf implied, “Miracles, revelations, agonies, loneliness, falling through the sea; down into the flames, all were burnt out...,” (Woolf, 160). The idea of death was all around Septimus, and the idea corrupts him while he sat and watched his wife, Lucrezia, work in their