  since i got an --A-- on this paper (smirk), i thought i'd post the fucker up here. i know Paula will wanna read it.
excuse the formatting... i don't think a paste will allow it to come thru properly. The Language of Madness: Virginia Woolf and the Catharsis of Creation The role of the author in the creation of a work of literature cannot be overlooked or cast aside as irrelevant.
As in the case of the fiction of Virginia Woolf, the role of the author is an integral factor to understanding the foundation of her creations. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf engages in the catharsis offered to her by writing fiction. It offers her a mode of communication that allows her an opportunity to transform her madness into coherent language that others can read into. Through this work, Woolf uses the character, Septimus, as an embodiment of her experiences as a mentally ill person.
Through him, she is able to transmit her inner chaos to something outside of herself, and to find a counterbalance for her mood swings. The novel provides her with an opportunity to write back to the psychiatrists who lorded over her during the course of her time in treatment and ultimately to give a voice to the incoherent mind of Septimus and similarly affected manic-depressives. The unstable energy of Virginia Woolfs manic-depressive disposition offers both extreme distress as well as fits of brilliance as it fuels her creative drive. Her stuggles between these two extremes is captured in her personal writing, A Writers Diary. In it, she tackles the fluctuations by writing, both by her diary entries as well as her fictional endeavors.
In her diaries she writes, the mad part tries me so much, makes my mind squirt so badly that I can hardly face the next weeks at [The Hours] (WD 56). Here, she expresses the difficulty of managing the intensity of her energy to where she can continue to write within some bounds of comfort. On the polar end of this intense drive to pour out her thoughts onto paper are the bouts with depression that loom over her.
It makes her writing a challenge and a burden to her wavering disposition. She writes: ...this slight depressionwhat is it? I think I could cure it by crossing the channel and writing nothing for a week (WD 62). In an entry a single day later, she contradicts herself. But its a question of work. I am already a good deal pulled together by sticking at my books (WD 63). Her writing is the focal point of her life. It is both her outlet for channeling her energy as well as the activity she fears is contributing to her decline.
Yet, she continues on with it as a necessary means for her to give language to the exploration of her inner world. This ability to communicate her state of mind is at the core of her impetus to write her novel, Mrs. Dalloway. Through it, she is able not only to give language to her character, Septimus, but can also put words to her personal struggle so that she too will be heard. Septimus is Woolfs alter ego in many ways. In Roger Pooles work, The Unknown Virginia Woolf, he writes, Virginia has chosen in Septimus a perfect objective correlative for her own state of mind in 1912-13 (Poole 186).
He suffers from the unspoken and incommunicable elements of her own problem (Poole 186). In the novel, Septimus is at the mercy of the physicians in charge of his mental health. These physicians hold the virtue of being licensed by society to deem one sane or insane. Yet, Septimus is unable to make himself known to these men. His world can only be communicated through abstractions. This break from empirical thinking leaves the doctors at a loss. You served with great distinction in the War? The patient repeated the word war interrogatively. He was attaching meanings to words of a symbolical kind. A serious symptom, to be noted on the card.
(MD 96) Rather than attempt to read into the most transparent of these abstractions, the investigation is halted at the mere recording of the behavior. The attachment of meaning to words of a symbolical kind is not so much a symptom or a problem in and of itself; it is evidence that Septimus is in fact showing a glimmer of hope that he is reachable. But without the employment of insight, the doctors and we, the audience, cannot say with any certainty that this broader analysis would prove fruitful.
This experience parallels Virginias hospitalization and treatment by Henry Head in 1913 (Poole 188). She too was branded mad by a[n] institution of psychiatry that interpreted her philosophical despair as something physiological. This hopeless inadequacy of the medical community is made as a source of powerful contempt by Virginia. Through her character drawing of Septimus, she calls attention to the very foundation of what society considers madness. It is a label assigned to this man without consideration of how he came to appear so. The war and its trauma has scarred him, yet no investment is made into this line of analysis. Like the work of Michel Foucault states, civilization disciplines madness to suppress its truths while art recaptures truths branded madness to confront the world with the necessity of change (Froula 15).
Whatever truth may be hidden within the fragmented ranting spoken by Septimus is dismissed as nonsense. Woolfs art functions to recapture truth, as it appears to him, and turn it back onto the culture that discounts it. In doing so, she effectively challenges her world to reexamine the fundamental basis of naming someone as mad. These physicians embody the cultures refusal to examine the larger questions brought out by the war.
Like many Britons, they have turned the madness of the war onto the soldiers. It is treated as an individual illness, something that resides within the patient and is, in a sense, self-created. However, Woolf is extremely careful to give Septimus Smiths emotional anaesthesia a particular origin, a definite cause and a precise moment in time (Poole 187). Septimus is a victim of the war and is suffering from shell-shock or post-traumatic stress disorder. In doing this, she is able to answer back to her own physicians. She outlines how madness can have a direct correlation to specific events and not merely be of a physiological origin.
In Woolfs own life, it is the death of her mother, followed by many others, that signals the moment of departure from emotional stability. This was beyond her ability to speak about in 1913, but through the writing of Mrs. Dalloway, she is able to communicate it through Septimus character (Poole). Woolf sets up this binary character structure as a way of highlighting the contrast between the two as well as their unity. About her endeavor to create this in the novel, she writes: In this book I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticise the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense.
(WD 56) She goes on to say in The Hours: Sanity & Insanity. Mrs D. seeing the truth. S.S. seeing the insane truth. The pace is to be given the gradual increase of Ss insanity. On the one side; by the approach of the party on the other. (Froula 5) Both Septimus and Clarissa are character doubles for Woolf. Clarissa uses creation as a way of channeling herself; Septimus is torn asunder with troubling, disjointed thoughts, finally crying out in a fatal last gesture.
Among the differences between the two in the novel is the element in Clarissa that allows her, that compels her to keep going, to throw parties as a way of preserving the invisible web that joins lives together. And Woolf, by writing this novel, is in effect creating her own web of connections between lives. Septimus finds himself irreparably separated from this community and cannot cope with his inner anguish; Clarissa manages her despair by creating community; Woolf manages her experiences through her writing.
The catharsis of creation allows Woolf to channel her inner world into a coherent form, and by doing so, she follows the model set by Clarissa and continues to preserve the invisible web holding society together. 
