Abstract
The scholarship in trauma theory during the 1900s derived its force from theoretical understanding of the thought and culture that followed on World War II. The historical and theoretical basis of this work has led critics of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) to critique protagonist Clarissa Dalloway for misappropriating and overidentifying with Septimus Warren Smith, a World War I veteran who commits suicide. This essay re-directs attention to the subtext of shell shock, the key neurosis whose treatment emerged from World War I, but which has been eclipsed by the articulation of WWII-based trauma theory. I historicize the war neurosis of shell shock to show how Victorian, patriarchal society and its medico-political biopower render impossible a solidarity between Clarissa’s hysteria and Septimus’s shell shock by intentionally obliterating the common ground of neuroses the two socially marginalized characters might share. In the novel, the characters never intersect, narratively dramatizing their sociocultural separation in 1925 London. Woolf disrupts this reality by connecting them via the literary device of epiphany: only a violation of realist convention can overcome this medico- political barrier. Linking the novel’s narrative dimension to the re-framing of shell shock, I argue that Mrs. Dalloway is a critical response to this social, cultural, and medical circumstance of the 1920s.
