Image: Clarke, Harry. “The dagger dropped gleaming upon the sable carpet.” The Masque of the Red Death, 1919. Wikipedia.org.

The dark climax of the book comes on the heels of one of its happiest reversals. Septimus, the ex-soldier struggling with “shell shock,” wakes up from a world of delusions for a golden minute of normalcy with his wife Rezia. Then like a messenger of cosmic irony, Holmes arrives, the smiling doctor who Septimus curiously calls “human nature” (Woolf 2207). Why human nature?

Because Holmes is a doctor, wearing a false mask of friendship. He’s supposed to make things right, but he can’t understand what’s wrong to begin with. The war was supposed to make things right too. But it only proved that humans are very good at destroying each other.

The ripples reach Clarissa at her party that night. She’s lost in her own dreamlike world, full of exotic birds and distinguished guests with bright plumage. All of them wear masks too: even Clarissa “had this feeling of being something not herself, and that every one was unreal in one way” (Woolf 2250). That social setting shows another side of human nature—we lie about who we are. Even to ourselves sometimes, we’re not willing to admit our weaknesses, our secret crushes, our taboo thoughts and hopes. Probably the only real people at the party are Sally, the uninvited but most welcome, and Ellie Henderson, the barely invited and most detested. Seeing Ellie provokes Clarissa to tempt fate. “Anything, any explosion, any horror was better than people wandering aimlessly…like Ellie” (Woolf 2249). Like Septimus, Clarissa loathes the reminder of her own vulnerability. Ellie is the embodiment of Clarissa’s profound insecurity.

And so death comes, like Poe’s Masque of the Red Death (a striking analogy), and Big Ben booms the last leaden circles into the air. But what does it mean? At this moment, death is a beginning for Clarissa. It shatters the illusion that she can hide from her own death. It gives her a chance to sympathize with the dead man she never knew. It exposes her to the raw exhilaration of real life.

And that is the most freeing feeling of all.

Sources:

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th ed., W.W. Norton & Company, 2012, pp. 2156-2264.