Eliot, Woolf, and Septimus

Septimus Warren Smith lives in the moral and emotional no-mans land which World War 1 placed upon him. The War, as it was known then, differed greatly from every previous war in that nearly an entire generation of young men were sacrificed in the name of nationalism. New technologies such as barbed wire, machine guns, and poison gas transformed war from a Romanized event where men could show valor and courage to one of massacre. These changes in attitude manifest themselves through the character of Septimus Warren Smith. In Mrs. Dalloway, the changes and mental instability of Smith mirrors that of the European population as a whole. Smith’s sentiments of disillusionment are common themes of writing during this era, including in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

It is easy to understand the sense of drastic changes brought about by World War 1. Take, for example, Smith. The text says, “He went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square. There in the trenches the change … was produced instantly; he developed manliness; he was promoted… But when Evans…was killed …far from showing any emotion or recognizing that here was the end of a friendship, [he] congratulated himself upon feeling very little and very reasonably.” (Woolf, 84) Here Smith can be taken as sort of a metaphor for what happened to all of Europe; what happened emotionally to Smith culturally happened to Europe.

Like Smith, Europe came into World War 1 enthusiastically, like Smith, Europe relied on Romanized notions of life and warfare, and like Smith, Europe was completely different what it was at the beginning of the war. The lack of emotion that Smith comes to show is expressed in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The first four lines in The Waste Land “APRIL is the cruellest month,/ breeding Lilacs out of the dead land,/ mixing Memory and desire,/ stirring Dull roots with spring rain” demonstrates how an emotional wasteland currently exists in modern culture. (Eliot) Whereas April would normally bring new life, April is described as cruel in that the promises of renewal go unfulfilled. What the inhabitants of the Wasteland are left with is an “arid plane” emotionally devoid of any life. (Eliot, 424)

Smith clearly inhabits the Wasteland that has become post-World War 1 Europe. In Mrs. Dalloway, the narrator describes Smith by saying, “But even Holmes himself could not touch this last relic straying on the edge of the world, this outcast, who gazed back at the inhabited regions, who lay, like a drowned sailor, on the shore of the world.” (90) The description of Smith as a drowned sailor draw parallels to the drowned sailor Phlebas the Phoenician in part IV of The Waste Land, Death by Water. Smith, like a drowned sailor, becomes removed from the worries of the world. As said in The Waste Land, “Phlebus…Forgot the cry of gulls,/ and the deep seas swell/ And the profit and loss.” (314-15) Phlebas and Smith are both described as drowned men who have forgotten the worries of this world; and similarly both have come to inhabit the Wasteland.

In Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus Warren Smith represents an inhabitant of the Wasteland as described by T.S. Eliot. Woolf’s metaphorical representation between Smith and a post-war Europe further this representation to include the culture of Europe as inhabitants of the Wasteland.

Eliot, T.S. "Eliot, T. S. 1922. The Waste Land." Bartleby.com: Great Books Online -- Quotes, Poems, Novels, Classics and Hundreds More. Web. 27 Feb. 2011.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc. 1925