The two doctors who attempt to treat Septimus for his PTSD are named Holmes and Bradshaw, with their very names summoning the empirical forensic detective of Conan Doyle’s short stories and the name of the ubiquitous railway timetable. On the one hand, Woolf’s novel is full of reminders of the attempt – especially the Victorian attempt – to render everything regular, orderly, and scientifically knowable. Of course, human beings had recently been treated like assembly-line objects in the first mass industrial war: the First World War, in which Septimus Smith had fought, was the war of the Ford motorcar generation: assembly-line slaughter.Īnd this points to another theme of Mrs Dalloway which is worthy of analysis: the tension or contrast between clock-like regularity and the free-flowing nature of subjective experience. Modernity, the novel seems to say, has rendered us like those production-line cars: we have lost our individuality and it has become more difficult to stand out. This is the world not only of the aeroplane but of the motorcar, which calls up Henry Ford, that pioneer of the production line and the man who (apocryphally) said that you can have his Model-T Ford car in any colour so long as it’s black. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land, a text that sets out to depict the modern world: a world of the metropolis (London, as with Eliot’s poem), motorcars, aeroplanes, and other recent phenomena. And if we were to attempt a comprehensive answer to the question, ‘What is Mrs Dalloway about?’, one could do worse than to answer, ‘The struggle to stand out as a meaningful individual in a world of fast-moving, faceless, and crowded modernity.’ Mrs Dalloway is, like another work of modernism, T.
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