Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway, through Clarissa Dalloway’s and other parallel stories,
presents us with the situation of Septimus Warren Smith, a war hero who suffers shell-shock
and that due to his apparent madness is victim of constant threats from two physicians who
want to put him away because of his mental crises. He, in an attempt to preserve his soul
from the terrible embrace of human nature, decides to kill himself before he is arrested.
Taking into account this information, the topic of this thesis will be the treatment of madness
in Mrs Dalloway, understanding the figure of the mad person as a literary archetype which is
repeated with some consistency in English Literature, from classical to contemporary texts.
The main focus will be the development of the figure of Septimus as a visionary poet,
a modernist figure analogous to William Blake who, with his visionary poetic/pictorial work,
drew the paths to the following romantic company. A comparison will be drawn between the
two poets taking into account the evolution of the visionary poet from its pre-romantic sphere
to the modernist shadow of a mad person, showing that madness suffers transformations
from the ancient Greece to modernist times. One of the sub-topics will be the conception of
nature in contrast to human nature, and how they seem to be components of a dichotomy
that cannot be dissolved.
My intention is to work on madness as a literary archetype, along with an examination
of the mad person within the context of a modernist novel where it is manifest in the figure
of the visionary poet. I will try to see how this has changed from the Platonic perspective
of divine madness to the segregation and punishment of the Classic Epoch, and finally to
our modern(ist) sensibility. Tentatively, the social apprehension towards the mad person
would affect its characterisation in Mrs Dalloway, in which a post-war fragmented society
is presented.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UCHILE/oai:repositorio.uchile.cl:2250/109954 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Alfaro Pumarino, Manuel Lautaro |
| Contributors | Ferrada Aguilar, Héctor, Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades, Departamento de Lingüística |
| Publisher | Universidad de Chile |
| Source Sets | Universidad de Chile |
| Language | Spanish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Tesis |
| Rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Chile, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/cl/ |
Page generated in 0.0018 seconds