Intro
Hey! We're no longer in the realm of horror! So, okay, Mrs. Dalloway isn't gothic, but it sure isn't your straightforward, run-of-the-mill story. Mrs. Dalloway is straight-up, no-holds-barred stream-of-consciousness writing.
Mrs. Dalloway, in other words, isn't messing around.
And this rigorous stream-of-consciousness style combines with a storyline that makes it irresistible to disability studies folks for a number of reasons. First, it's one of the first modern novels to deal deeply and seriously with "shell shock," or what we would now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
And alongside that are storylines that deal with both physical illness—such as heart disease severe enough to become terminal—and other mental illnesses (in the 1920s, when Mrs. Dalloway was written, these disorders were known by such names as "hysteria" and "neurasthenia," but we would today likely classify them as bipolar, mood, and anxiety disorders).
Mrs. Dalloway consists of two parallel storylines: that of the title character, Clarissa Dalloway, and her unlikely counterpart, Septimus Warren Smith.
The two characters never meet and their life experiences couldn't be more divergent. Clarissa is a well-bred, upper-class woman approaching her golden years. She has lived a life of comfort and esteem.
Septimus is a working-class bloke and a young veteran of that terrible war, WWI. He has endured the deprivations of poverty and has had to struggle to attain an education and a career.
But here's where it gets interesting: despite being polar opposites in class, gender, and life experiences as a whole, both Clarissa and Septimus know what it is to suffer in body and mind. Clarissa is recovering from a mysterious ailment that may be heart disease but may also be psychiatric in nature (the text is never clear, so we are left to wonder how real the separation of body and mind that we seem to take for granted actually is).
Septimus, likewise, is even more tortured. Suffering from "shell shock" (PTSD) brought on by his experiences in the war, Septimus hallucinates, he has delusions of grandeur, he experiences abject terror at threats that are not there, and he has, as a result, become completely incapacitated. The "promising career" that he had begun to forge before the war is now obliterated. He sits and talks to ghosts from the battlefield while his beautiful bride waits and watches for his recovery.
Quote
Sir William had a friend in Surrey where they taught, what Sir William frankly admitted was a difficult art—a sense of proportion. There were, moreover, family affection; honour; courage; and a brilliant career. All of these had in Sir William a resolute champion. If they failed him, he hard to support police and the good of society, which, he remarked very quietly, would take care, down in Surrey, that these unsocial impulses, bred more than anything by the lack of good blood, were held in control. And then stole out from her hiding-place and mounted her throne that Goddess whose lust is to override opposition, to stamp indelibly in the sanctuaries of others the image of herself. Naked, defenceless, the exhausted, the friendless received the impress of Sir William's will. He swooped; he devoured. He shut people up.
Analysis
If you haven't guessed by now, Sir William is a doctor. And not just any doctor, but the doctor. The Big Daddy of London doctors, so good he's got a practice on richy-rich-rich-rich Harley Street (where the Royals go, even today, BTW) as well as knighthood from the Queen. Not too shabby.
Which is all the more reason why the passage above should make your blood run cold, Shmoopers, because what's being described here is how Sir William, the knight, treats his patients. When Woolf says, "he shut people up" she doesn't mean that he makes them be quiet. No, she means he literally shuts people up—in asylums, that is, or worse.
The references to Surrey are, in fact, references to asylums where patients who had lost their sense of "proportion," that "Goddess" who demands that everything and everyone be made over in her image, would be locked up for weeks, or months, or sometimes for the rest of their lives.
This is done, as the passage above shows, less for the patient, who is described here as "naked, defenceless, the exhausted, the friendless," than for the grateful family, for "good society," and for police (in other words, for law and order). And because it was for the family, good society, and the police that Sir William sent his patients to Surrey, it was also by and with the help of the family, good society, and the police that this would be done.
As you also may have guessed, Sir William is Septimus' doctor and the treatments for young, working-class veterans suffering from shell shock—well, they weren't always humane.
You see, women and upper-class patients were most often prescribed the "rest cure," in which they were prohibited from any physical or mental exertion whatsoever. Often, this meant convalescing alone and far from home. And, as usual, the accommodations for the elite and the wealthy were pretty tricked out.
But even for those undergoing the rest cure, things weren't always so rosy. In fact, many women who had just given birth and were experiencing what we now would call post-partum depression were prescribed the rest cure. Restrictions were so severe, though, that these women were often forbidden from seeing their husbands or infants (anyone except the doctor, really) or even from reading, writing, or seeing the sunlight. All they were permitted to do, really, was to lie in a darkened room and sleep or eat.
Now, that's a pretty good gig for a day or two. But these cures went on for weeks and even months at a time and the isolation and boredom were so intense that the rest cure alone was enough to drive some people truly mad, as is the case in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's incredible short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper."
But things were even worse for poor guys like Septimus. Frequently, lower-ranking soldiers and working-class veterans who sought treatment for their shell shock (PTSD) were subjected to "therapies" that make the rest cure look like Mardi Gras. One such treatment was known as "torpillage," in which a series of electric shocks were given to the patient in order to "persuade" him to return to mental health.
Along with these, patients could be beaten, starved, and held against their will—all for their own good and for the good of society, of course.
This was Septimus' fate in Surrey, where the Goddess of Proportion waited to make him over in her image.
Not exactly Club Med, is it, Shmoopers?
Once again, cure/cover/kill is alive and well and living on Harley Street in Mrs. Dalloway.