The War is Over: Post World War I in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

War is an important theme in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), a post World War I text. While on the one hand there is the focus on Mrs. Dalloway’s domestic life and her ‘party consciousness’, on the other there are ideas of masculinity and “patriotic zeal that stupefy marching boys into a stiff yet staring corpse and perniciously public-spirited doctors” , and the sense of war reverberates in the entire text. Woolf’s treatment of the Great War is different from the normative way in which the War is talked about in the post world war I texts. She includes in her text no first hand glimpse of battlefield, instead gives a detached description. This makes it more incisive because she delineates the after effects in personal ordinary lives. Judith Hattaway remarks that “Woolf’s view of the war is different. It does not figure in terms of mud and barbed wire but rather through its points of contact with the ordinary life left behind and in its destruction of a secure past. Woolf actually looks at the ways in which the war has changed contemporary ways of looking at history, social structures, identity and boundaries.” Formally the war is over but in so many ways – the after effects, devastation that has not been compensated for, the horror that lingers in people’s minds – the war persists. As Mrs. Dalloway walks along the streets of London, she makes a very naïve statement, “for it was the middle of June. The War was over “but for people like Septimus Smith the war continues in the form of its everlasting destructive impact on their mind, their body, and their lives.

Alex Zwerdling states that “Woolf gives us a picture of a class impervious to change in a society that desperately needs or demands it. She represents the governing class as engaged...

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...tity. Woolf also condemns people like Bradshaw. Woolf may not be concerned with the mud and barbed wire of the war but her work is a political attack on those who managed the social and economic aspects of the war and kept its victims under control afterwards. Woolf herself states that “Septimus must see somehow through human nature, see its hypocrisy and insincerity, its power to recover from every wound, being incapable of taking any final impression, his sense that it is not worth having.”

Lois R. Robley remarks that “the horrors of war cannot be imagined by those of us who have not witnessed it. It is perhaps up to the poets, the writers, the movie directors, and the photojournalists to distill and recapture the images that remind us of the traumatic influence of war. Perhaps only then can we extinguish the need to be reminded and ready for war related PTSD.”