In the novel, these experiences and the denunciation of their ineffectiveness find an adequate representation in the two doctors who deal with the Septimus case, Dr. The writer attributed these failures to their inability to listen to patients, both for a social issue that led them to diminish and marginalize psychiatric disorders, and for the actual lack of knowledge on the subject. Over the course of her life, Woolf was treated by many doctors, but without satisfactory results. Woolf was forced to rest, without being able to read or write, transferred to Richmond against her will. The therapies to which she has been subjected to are, in the perspective of today’s scholar and reader, comparable to real torture, especially considering the author’s personality. Following this last episode, she was locked into specialist clinics and kept in care for months. The first time by jumping out of a window, the second by ingesting an overdose of sleeping pill – the Veronal – which reduced her to a comatose state for a week. On two occasions, in 19, she attempted suicide.

Christiaan Tonnis – Virginia Woolf ‘Through the Looking Glass’įrom the early adolescence, the author suffered from manic-depressive crises, often coinciding with moments of stress.

Septimus, like Woolf herself, is part of a cultural context that works strongly on the individual, forcing by community into well-defined forms, regulating life choices and feelings, eliminating those who do not conform and thus making even more pressure, that in this particular case brings him the protagonist to death. “Her own experiences of excitement and depression are woven into the book, giving authenticity particularly to the portrayal of the ex-soldier and his states of mind.” (Jean Thomson, 2004) The condition of Septimus on that day of June 1923, which will lead him to kill himself in the evening, is presented in the text as the result of a journey that began some time before, during the Great War. In the development of the Septimus character, Woolf drew on him, her own personal experience: the realism of this character, his almost tangible madness, is not the result of a fine narrative mimicry but a profound process of reminiscence and analysis of a disease that cyclically overwhelmed the life of the author. Woolf herself, in the introduction to the novel written in 1928, was explicit in saying that Septimus was to be interpreted as Clarissa’s double. Woolf’s mental health influenced, at least from a structural point of view, the the novel’s ‘bipolar’ structure, which sees, in fact, the intertwining sensations, memories, points of view, perceptions and desperations of two characters, in particular, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, his double and opposite ideal.

Dalloway, published in 1925, is the one that deals with the theme of mental illness in the most direct and effective way. Among the whole production of the beloved English writer, the novel Mrs.

Dalloway novel