Epilogue: Continued Preoccupations—The Shell-Shocked War Veteran and Hysteria in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

The Epilogue focuses in on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway to consider how the British novel continued to be preoccupied with issues fundamental to nineteenth-century conceptions of the mind-body connection beyond Victoria’s reign. Anxieties around the morbid power of emotion, the porosity of the self, and lapses in will coalesce, but this time in the figure of the effeminate, traumatized male War veteran. Woolf uses Septimus’s suicide and the failure of his doctors’ cure to critique traditional medical ethics and propose a new model based on emotional connection and sympathetic listening. The novel suggests that modern medical discourse often blames the individual for their illness and lacks sympathy, which prevents a proper diagnosis and cure. Woolf argues that sympathy and emotional receptivity are necessary for treating hysteria, which was previously thought to be caused by these same qualities.