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Melancholia of War: Mrs. Dalloway and ‘gendered’ neuroticism

This paper examines Mrs. Dalloway(1925) written by Virginia Woolf from the perspective of gendered neuroticism and tries to redefine the relationship between the war and human beings. The novel shows how gender ideology aggravates trauma of the war survivors and their family as well as the contemporary European people. The social norm that big boys don’t cry represses Septimus’ normal bereavement process after the loss of Evans and other comrades during the wartime. The prolonged mourning becomes pathological grief called melancholia and then ambivalent feelings towards the lost objects are developed. Clarissa also suffers from the postwar trauma as a contemporary individual person. The suffering enhances women’s oppressive realities in gendered society, the result of which is mental or physical illness. However, female hysteria works as a momentum for recognizing herself and can make her resistant woman subject to crack the patriarchal dominant ideology.