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Modernist literature is a literature of trauma: in the 1920s, it gave form and representation to a psychological condition that psychiatrists would not understand for another fifty years. Virginia Woolf's characterization of Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway illustrates not only the psychological injuries suffered by victims of severe trauma such as war but also the need for them to give meaning to their suffering in order to recover from the trauma. Septimus's death is the result of his inability to communicate his experiences to others and thereby give those experiences meaning and purpose. By bearing witness to his experiences and suffering, Septimus could edify others about not only war but also human nature and the social and political institutions that emerge from and reflect that nature. Septimus's war trauma, however, is perpetuated and its psychological damage aggravated by a culturally prescribed process of postwar reintegration that silences and marginalizes war veterans. To comprehend fully Septimus Smith's tragedy, one must understand the psychological effects of trauma and the process of recovery. Furthermore, critics studying modernist literary forms can enrich their understanding by exploring recent discoveries in the field of trauma psychology, which reveal why modernist forms are so well-suited for depicting the traumatized mind but ill-suited for depicting recovery.
The modernist narrative form of Woolf's novel brilliantly mirrors the mind of a trauma survivor like Septimus. In fact, the modernist literary works written in the decade after World War I constitute a literature of trauma: their forms often replicate the damaged psyche of a trauma survivor and their contents often portray his characteristic disorientation and despair. Imagist poetry and the experimental novels of the postwar decade, for example, reflect the fragmentation of consciousness and the disorder and confusion that a victim experiences in the wake of a traumatic event. Trauma inevitably damages the victim's faith in the assumptions he has held in the past about himself and the world and leaves him struggling to find new, more reliable ideologies to give order and meaning to his post-traumatic life. Like trauma survivors, the modernist writers suffered a similar loss of faith in the ideologies of the past and particularly in the literary forms that emerged from those ideologies. Their works depict in both form and content a...