Septimus and PTSD

 

Septimus Warren Smith fought in World War I, and didn’t come out unscathed. While he suffered no physical scars from his time in the trenches, he did come out with subconscious lessons learned that hurt his own wellbeing in the long run. One of these important lessons he learned is that he should not feel. While he was in the war, he became great friends (one might even say lovers, it is ambiguous) with his officer Evans. However, right before the war ended, Evans was killed, and Septimus’ best friend was no more. When your average person sees your best friend, with whom you have struggled through horrors with, die in front of you, they feel sad, mortified, etc. etc. However, Septimus felt nothing at all (Woolf 84-85). This absence of emotion led him to marry his wife Rezia, and eventually drove him into a madness that ended in him killing himself (Woolf 146).

Septimus’ story is depicting a disorder called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or, as it was called at the time the book took place and was written, Shell Shock. Despite such limited knowledge on this then-underresearched condition, many of the symptoms were written well. One major symptom of PTSD is where your feelings feel numb, or far away. As stated in the previous paragraph, Septimus’ had distanced himself from his emotions to the point where he didn’t feel anything. Another symptom is sudden, overwhelming fear caused by something that reminds you of your trauma. After the car had some malfunction which made an explosion akin to the sound of a gun going off, Septimus is described as having a look in his eyes that made it seem like he was thinking “the world has raised its whip; where will it descend?” (Woolf 14). That fear after hearing a sound that sounds much like a gun, which reminded him of the war, matches that description of a PTSD symptom.

However, not everything that Septimus experiences seems like PTSD to me. One key symptom that Septimus experiences throughout the book is hallucinations, which is not a notable symptom of PTSD. One of his main hallucinations was of Evans, typically seeing him walking towards him (Woolf 68). He also seemed to experience delusions, believing that dogs were becoming people (Woolf 66) and that death was not real (Woolf 24). This discrepancy may come from the fact that Woolf, living in the 1920s, didn’t know much about PTSD, and so got some things about it wrong. Another reason might be that Septimus has both PTSD and another disorder that causes these psychosis-like symptoms, such as schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder. The third option is that those symptoms are just lesser-known symptoms of PTSD, in which case Woolf really did write an immaculate portrayal of the disorder.