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Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway includes irrational characters- individuals whose lives are marked in various ways by their tendencies to be illogical or whose behavior seems based on an emotional response at the expense of a reasonable approach. Through these characters Woolf explores alternative possibilities of perception as well as the divergent significance of a private self in the public world.
However, where previously critics have argued that irrationality, when it is read positively, promotes a turn inward, I suggest that Mrs. Dalloway indicates that irrationality is propitious because it can help us to get out of damaging introspective tendencies. The discussion brings together current philosophical ideas on the twentieth-century self-relating subject and recent innovative interdisciplinary research into schizophrenia. I submit that Woolf advocates an acceptance of irrational impulses that restrain a compulsive and debilitating drive towards introspection and thus render more accessible to the outside world significant aspects of a private and productive inner self. In other words, without denouncing the positive possibilities associated with a rational approach to reality, Woolf indicates in Mrs. Dalloway through the physical and mental behavior of Septimus Smith that an acceptance of irrationality is indispensable to a healthy, functioning, and, indeed, socially adaptable psychology-a notion reinforced by the nature of Clarissa Dalloway's association with Septimus near the end of the narrative. On another level, Woolf's novel suggests that an irrational impulse must be incorporated into the formal arrangement of the genre that reflects an evolving and modernist subjectivity.
Mrs. Dalloway features what is perhaps the most obvious example in Woolf's oeuvre of irrational behavior. Septimus Smith, a recently married young man whose conduct before the war is vaguely described but already reveals an extreme sensitivity and perhaps even the beginnings of psychological trouble, moves towards a kind of madness after having served on the front lines of the Great War.1 The novel pictures Septimus mostly in his post-war traumatized state, and he is showcased as an individual critically unable to cope with his quotidian reality. Favorable interpretations of Septimus generally present him as someone who moves to a subjective realm in order to defy or directly escape the dominant or rational order-whether patriarchal or political.2 The turn is artistically spectacular but socially and personally debilitating, as Septimus's eventual suicide...