Virginia Woolf’s Tangled Forest

In Chapter 3 , reading Mrs. Dalloway alongside the shared assumptions on femininity, children, and primitivity in Octave Mannon, Sigmund Freud, Gustave Le Bon, and George Savage, one observes that Woolf is deeply aware of the presence of Empire in psychiatry. The chapter analyzes her satirical portrayal of two psychiatrists, Sir William Bradshaw and Dr. Holmes, and their passionate imperialist ideologies. The depiction of the imperialist psychiatrist in her novel challenges and rethinks the politics of sympathy in relational power dynamics and the fracturing experiences of different people under Empire and (empire)cism. Woolf explores this question of sympathy through the connections between Clarissa and Septimus and in her essay “On Being Ill.” She formulates an alternative non-empirical way of understanding interiority. She illustrates that there is an untouchable and vastly unique “tangled forest” within everyone’s minds. The chapter argues that Mrs. Dalloway and “On Being Ill” show the resurfacing of suppressed “illness” and the embrace of the absolute unknowability of the mind as a possible moment of resistance against Empire’s civilizing impulse.