"Fear no more the heat o' the sun / Nor the furious winter rages." This phrase first comes to Clarissa's mind when she sees it in a book. It "appears twice before it becomes a part of Septimus's thought, where it ironically reassures him just before his death."
Clarissa and Septimus are both sensitive individuals with deep emotional issues. While Clarissa is a "perfect hostess" who shows great creativity and social warmth in her parties, she is essentially a cold person. Peter recognizes this coldness as something "mortally dangerous" to Clarissa and says it is "the death of her soul"(Woolf, 77). Clarissa knows that she is cold: "She could see what she lacked. It was not beauty; it was not mind"(40). This coldness keeps her from the love and the openness with people that should otherwise come naturally to someone with her social skills.
Septimus lost the ability to feel when he came home from the war. His experiences destroyed him emotionally and he could no longer relate to other people and the world around him. Septimus is so sensitive that he could not accept a life without feeling. Afraid and confused by his emotional isolation, he retreats into a private world of madness. While Clarissa's ability to accept and live with her emotional voids gives her sanity, Septimus is pushed to insanity. Clarissa is able to interrupt her wandering thoughts, in order to escape negative thinking. Septimus has no such escape nor does he want interruptions. When his wife attempts to distract him, he thinks, "Interrupted again! She was always interrupting (Woolf, 82)."
Septimus and Clarissa are both overwhelmed by life (CliffNotes, 2004). When Clarissa hears of Septimus' suicide, she withdraws to consider the party's greater meaning for her. She considers his suicide and recalls that "she had thrown a shilling into the Serpentine, never anything more. But he had flung it away." Clarissa shares Spetimus' suicidal tendencies: "But this young man who had killed himself - had he plunged holding his treasure? 'If it were now to die, 'twere now to be most happy, she had said to herself once.." However, she only needs to die in her imagination to identify with Septimus. She is able to survive her suicidal instinct as she acknowledges that her subsistence is dependent on the death of Septimus, the darker side of herself, so she sacrifices it happily and recognizes the value in life, which was something that Septimus could never do.
Woolf had a history of mental illness on both sides of her family. It is widely believed that she suffered from manic depression, also called bipolar disorder. Unfortunately, little treatment was available to her at the time, and she eventually committed suicide at the age of 59.
The novel's...
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