TREE SYMBOLISM IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S MRS DALLOWAY

Eleanor Voak (OHS)

‘The supreme secret must be told to the Cabinet; first that trees are alive; next there is no crime; next love, universal love’.

These words seem mad. And indeed their speaker, the shell-shocked First World War veteran, Septimus, is struggling with his post-war fragmented vision of the world and his war experiences, particularly the death of his very close friend, Evans. In 1925 Freudian analysis was in its infancy and shellshock (and its potential cures) were just about to be investigated. In Mrs Dalloway both the doctors who treat Septimus, Dr Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw, do not allow for Septimus’s efforts to come to terms with his repressed memories of the horrors of war. The former simply claims that ‘there was nothing the matter with him’ and that he needed to be grounded in reality, while the latter correctly diagnoses him with shell shock only to prescribe rest and plenty of food in one of his sequestered homes, isolated from all that makes life in any way meaningful to Septimus. Strikingly, Septimus sees Holmes and Bradshaw as the embodiments of what he, in his greatest anguish, calls ‘human nature’ (within the confines of a patriarchal and oppressive society) as opposed to a natural unity of humans and nature, metonymically represented by trees. Septimus’s connection to trees allows him to access a world where he can potentially begin to heal: ‘leaves were alive; trees were alive. And the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body... sounds made harmonies with premeditation...’, where he can see his wife as a ‘flowering tree’ providing ‘sanctuary’ and where he can finally start to come to terms with Evan`s death: ‘Evans sang from behind the tree...But no mud was on him; no wounds’, not suppressing his thoughts and feelings anymore. Septimus, himself, however, even in such moments feels bound to the norms of ‘science’ which Holmes and Bradshaw represent by feeling the need to justify this sense of connectedness scientifically, and ultimately therefore not managing to complete the process of healing. While Septimus and Rezia, Septimus’s hat-making wife, reach a state of mutual though unspoken understanding when they create a hat together just before Septimus’s suicide (‘he would wait in this warm place, when, because of...some arrangement of the trees...warmth lingers’), neither of them can escape the clutches of Sir William; though Septimus makes an almost super-human effort to do so (‘If he communicated? Would they let him off then, his tortures?’). Ultimately and unsurprisingly, Septimus fails to communicate the complexity of his mental state of his thoughts (‘Love, trees, there is no crime—what was his message’)by breaking out into a stammer which only serves to convince Bradshaw further of the need to impose his ‘cure’ on Septimus. Failing to communicate with Bradshaw leads directly to Septimus’s suicide as the only way to escape ‘human nature’; as Bradshaw is coming to take him away, he throws himself out of a window, impaling himself on the spikes of the fence below. It is left to Clarissa Dalloway, whom Woolf saw as Septimus’s double and who is linked to him by tree symbolism (as are indeed many of the other characters), to have the final word on Septimus’s suicide: ‘A thing there was that mattered... This he preserved. Death was defiance.’

Bibliography

David Bradshaw, The British Library: 20th century, Mrs Dalloway and the First World War https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/ mrs-dalloway-and-the-first-world-war# (Accessed 1 September 2020) Sabina Dosani, Madness, mind-doctors and Mrs Dalloway, Hektoen International, vol.10, Issue 4 - Fall 2018

https://hekint.org/2018/03/06/madness-minddoctor-mrs-dalloway/ (Accessed 28 August 2020) André Viola, `Buds on the Tree of Life`: A recurrent mythological imagine in Virginia Wool`s Mrs Dalloway, Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 20, No 2 - Winter 1996, 239-247 https://www.jstor.org/ stable/3831479?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents (Accessed 26 August 2020) Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, Penguin Edition, 1992