『ダロウェイ夫人』における詩人の熱情

抄録

Why did Clarissa Dalloway call Septimus' soul a poet's passion, when she heard of his suicide and solved the meaning of his death? Among the main characters in this work there is an opposition between the members of the governing class and the outsiders to the governing class. The members of the governing class are not in the habit of reading poems, which shows their inclination of excluding persons with strong passions out of their circle or of correcting them. The outsiders write poems or have the habit of reading them, which symbolizes their way of living in accordance with their own feeling. As a poet Septimus is opposed to Sir William Bradshow, a psychoanalyst as well as a representative of the governing class, who has no habit of reading. Clarissa is also divided into two selves like these social classes and corresponds to this pattern of the opposition of the classes as to poems. One is her present self who enjoys her governing class life, which she got by marrying Richard, and the other is the self hidden under her present every day life who demands strong passions and is dissatisfied with the present self. This hidden self was displayed most strongly about thirty years ago at Bourton when she used to express her strong feelings in the language of Shakespeare's poems. Her self as a poet, hidden under the present governing class life, sympathizes with the agony of Septimus who is suffering under the control of the governing class. Virginia Woolf regards a poet as a person who lives in accordance with his own feeling and criticizes the unnatural social system ruled by the governing class.