Virginia in "Mrs. Dalloway"

From class discussion, I knew that Woolf had used some of her own experiences in Mrs. Dalloway but I had no clue just how much of her life she used. Watching that mini documentary of Woolf's life was really interesting and made me realize that the reason the thoughts Woolf wrote for each character were so realistic because many of them came from personal experience. Woolf bravely bares some of her innermost thoughts and fears with the millions of strangers that would come to read her book. It is both intriguing and sad to conceive that she went through much of the pain documented in the book.

First, Septimus' dealings with medical professionals and their treatments came directly from what she went through during one of her several severe mental breakdowns. Like Septimus, Woolf was drugged by doctors with many different "medicines" and powerful sedatives to calm her mind and help her to relax. The Rest treatment, a treatment in which the patient must lay in a dark room doing absolutely nothing and drinking milk and being fed on animal fat, was also prescribed to Clarissa, Septimus, and Woolf. Over her life, Woolf began to develop the opinion that medical professionals were inept and under educated. She feels the same dislike for them as Septimus does and shows it, using blatant sarcasm and disdain to describe her villainous doctors.

Woolf also brings in her experience as a heterosexually married bisexual woman to describe the bond between two women. Woolf uses Clarissa and Sally to present her feelings on homosexual relationships. Woolf has both Septimus and Clarissa talk extremely negatively about heterosexual relationships. Septimus is the stronger of the two in these views and he even goes so far as to say it is cruel to bring children into the a world of such atrocities. Virginia also had no children, perhaps for the same reasons.

World War One and the impending WWII also had an intense effect on Woolf as WWI had on Septimus. Both believe in universal love but Septimus, unlike Woolf, has no way to communicate it. The most striking similarity though, is that war was one of the causes of both of their suicides. Septimus commits suicide because he no longer can deal with the incompetent doctors treating his shell shock from the war. In the mix of Woolf's numerous rationalizations for suicide was the impending invasion of the Germans and the start of WWII. It's pretty creepy to think that Woolf created such a disturbed character as Septimus then, later, took her own life for some of the same reasons as her character.

Woolf obviously pours herself into every bit of the novel, even disclosing her most private problems and theories to all readers. There is a rationale for doing this though. She did it so that her opinions and ideas could be shared and she could live on after her body died. She would live through her words and through the threads that attached her to each reader.