Modernist and Postmodernist’s Appropriation of Traumatic Memory for Spiritual Liberation in Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” and Angela Carter’s “Nights at the Circus”

Modernist and Postmodernist’s Appropriation of Traumatic Memory for Spiritual Liberation in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus

Both modernist and postmodernist writers recognize the “human memory” as a crucial, cognitive phenomena in shaping one’s character and life.  Because the human mind traverses time and history by means of memory – connecting past, present, and future into a sequential continuity – one’s dysfunctional/distorted memory can disrupt one’s historicity and psychological soundness.  Both Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (the modern text) and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (the postmodern text) explore characters whose memories become dysfunctional due to traumatic past experiences.  For instance, in Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus’s uncontrollable mental replay of his horrid war experience leads to his ultimate corporeal demise.  On the other hand, in Nights at the Circus, Mignon’s atypical, refractive short-term memory due to severe traumatic experience acts as a buffer that enables her to reconstruct her previously debased identity into an honorable one.  Thus, due to debilitating war memory, if Septimus chooses suicide to liberate his spirit from the oppressive modern world, Mignon from the postmodern world gains her spiritual redemption by not only defying the very source of her painful memory (the patriarchal abuse and exploitation of her sexuality), but also by overtly espousing lesbianism.

Woolf depicts Septimus as a victim of modern-warfare indoctrinations.  Lamont, in her essay “Moving Tropes: New Modernist travels with Virginia Woolf,” informs that “Mrs. Dalloway is set in London, in 1923, a time of incredible flux and change for the city, brought about largely by the newly ended First World War” (Lamont 165).  Lamont’s turbulent depiction of postwar London, in part, can be microcosmically represented by one man of this city, Septimus, who suffers posttraumatic war syndrome.  Before the war, Septimus was an aspiring poet with an astute mental faculty.  He was also patriotic and “was one of the first to volunteer” as a soldier to fight for his country (Woolf 86).  However, he returns home disillusioned and labeled as a lunatic.  Still, irrespective of how society defines him, Septimus is not exactly insane.  He is what Woolf would diagnose as a victim of modernist’s misleading, militant ideology – a soldier who had witnessed human evil firsthand on the battlefield, and thus become disoriented and mistrustful of the human world. 

Whereas Septimus suffers from cognitive breakdown due to his convoluted war memories, Mignon, on the other hand, in her Carter-created postmodern world, is protected by her deflective short-term memory, minimizing the effects of patriarchal abuse in her life.  Like Septimus, who is deserted by the society as a lunatic, Mignon, an orphan in a patriarchal society, is marginalized and victimized because of her sex and class. She, for example, encounters numerous and potentially debilitating experiences, all instigated by the men in her life: The murder of her mother by her father and her father’s accidental death while trying to cover up his crime; her ensuing orphaned, homeless life as a street thief; an unanticipated separation with her younger sister who “she never s[ees]…again” (131); habitual beatings from her husband who had once thrown her out “half-naked on to the Russian winter streets” (127); and the physical and mental exploitations by her spiritualist employer and the male customers at the bar she worked, to bring up a few.  However, Mignon’s memory is a “peculiar and selective organ,” which represses traumatic events (144).  In other words, her memory of the tragic past, unlike Septimus, does not involuntarily replay the horror on its own.  In fact, it is so well kept that her “smile contain[s] her entire history and [is] scarcely to be borne” (144, emphasis added).  Mignon’s memory actively constricts her past tragedy into “an exceedingly short memory, which alone save[s] her from desolation” (141).   

If Mignon is physically pounded by the men in her life, Septimus is mentally enthralled by his participation in the patriarchal warfare.  As a war veteran, Septimus’s memory, unlike Mignon’s, involuntarily perpetuates in the past.  His mind revisits and lingers in a time of war, where he hears and sees Evans (his inseparable companion) and himself still in combat.  In Septimus’s delusional mind, “The word ‘time’ split its husk” and becomes “an immortal ode to Time!  He s[ings].  Evans answer[s] from behind the tree…There they wait…till the War [i]s over, and now the dead, now Evans himself…A man in grey [i]s actually walking towards [hi]m.  It [i]s Evans”(70).  His memory is indiscriminate to time and space, transfixed in one moment of his friend’s death for which he blames himself.  His future thus becomes forever eclipsed by his mental inability to completely return from the past (from the war) to the present. 

While Septimus’s unresolved memory that is transfixed in the past is both anachronistic and disruptive to his present existence, Mignon’s co-mingling of the past and present through theatrical staging as the dead for the spiritualist employer positively reconstructs the site of the past tragic memory.  For instance, when Mignon is “impersonat[ing] the dead” for the spiritualist and his clients, she is forced to reckon the photograph of herself in the act as a resembling image of her dead mother (138).  Upon seeing the photograph, Mignon’s usually repressed subconscious memory surfaces; “she [is] troubled.  For the face that sw[ims] out of the acid emerge[s] to her out of her memory in the same way. ‘Mother…’” (138, emphasis added).  Nonetheless, unlike Septimus, Mignon refuses to dwell in the past.  She laughs it off, as if it is a game, “How she giggle[s]!  It ha[s] never been anything more than a game to her” (139).  Because Mignon’s refractive mind refuses to introspect and analyze deeply like Septimus’s, each repetitive death-scene she plays – where her mind must re-associate the death of her mother (the past) – conversely produces a positive, psychological effect; it shatters her conscious/unconscious memory, thereby enabling an implantation of a new positive reality.  For example, to Mignon’s deflective mental faculty, “acting,” which is a “pretense of reality,” histrionically and psychologically re-presents and replaces the horrific reality of the past as a “pretense” – a mere mental fabrication.  Thus, symbolically and literally, Mignon’s dramaturgical revisitations of the past not only blur the very origin of her traumatic past, but more significantly, mitigate and reconstruct the very source of the harmful past memory.       

Unlike Mignon, who actively mitigates her past hurtful memories through creative means, Septimus internalizes the patriarchal tyranny imposed by his erroneous, un-empathetic doctors; he chooses suicide to sever himself from the modern world.  Septimus is confounded by Dr. Homes and Bradshaw’s scientific arrogance and misdiagnosis of his postwar symptoms.  Septimus disrespectfully epithets the doctors as “Like that sort of thing” (149), because, to him, they are the epitome of evil in “human nature” (140).  They represent the modern world that misappropriates divine omnipotence through science, eviscerating the mortal vitality of someone like Septimus.  “Holmes is on us,” Septimus would say, for “Dr. Holmes…stands for something horrible to him. ‘Human nature,’ he call[s] him” (140).  Septimus also has mental visions; he sees that “he [is] drowned” by forces unknown (140).  Septimus decides to materialize this vision of drowning (his suicide), because he believes that death is better than surrendering his soul to the modern cold-hearted scientists, who plot to lock him up in a mental institute.  When Dr. Holmes arrives, Septimus quickly weighs the two options of life or death for the last time, “He d[oes] not want to die.  Life [i]s good.  The sun hot…[but] what d[o] they [patriarchal authorities] want?…Holmes [i]s at the door. ‘I’ll give it you!’…and fl[ings] himself vigorously, violently down on to Mrs. Filmer’s area railings” (149).  Unlike Mignon, Septimus’s dysfunctional recollective faculty fails to reconfigure negative cognitive perceptions – the ills of modernity represented by the doctors.

While Septimus chooses death to liberate his spirit from the oppressive modern world, Mignon joins with the princess in love, creating a new social order for the women of postmodernism.  If Septimus is an insane, marginalized modern man, Mignon is an orphan forsaken by her postmodern society.  Mignon’s men in the past have exploited her female sexuality without genuine love.  However, in this Cartersonian world, she is able to invert the patriarchal tradition of female sexual-objectification.  By joining the princess in love, she revalorizes her commoditized value as a sexual object into an eminent human being, loved unconditionally by the princess.  Fevvers comments on her transformation, “Can this truly be the same ragged child who came to me for charity those few short weeks ago? …‘Love, true love has utterly transformed her’” (276).  Thus, unlike the stoic Septimus who pursues his vision of death rather than choosing the love of his wife, Mignon envisions love and claims life over death.  Quintessentially, however, it is “the redaction of her life-drama” stored in her memory that frees her mind from the horrors of the past, enabling her to ultimately transcend into a respected and beloved womanhood with the princess.

While Virgina Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway glorifies and sympathizes Septimus’s stoic decision to die in order to escape from the harsh modern world, Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, by showcasing Mignon’s resilience against patriarchal abuse, intuits the post-modernist’s fight against societal oppression by choosing life, not death.  As a modernist, Septimus is engrossed in incessant introspections over Evans’s death and his doubts about the power figures in the modern world, his fragmented mind forever in abeyance in utter isolation without panacea.  In contrast, Mignon’s postmodernist mentality goes further than introspection or questioning authority.  Her selective and reconstructive cognizance not only extrapolates the poisonous episodes from her history, but also, by overtly espousing lesbianism, creates a new feminist order in patriarchal society.    

Works Cited

Carter, Angela. Nights at the Circus. New York: Penguin, 1984.

Lamont, Elizabeth Clea. “Moving Tropes: New Modernist travels with Virginia Woolf.”   Journal of Comparative poetics (2001): 161- 184.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: A Harvest Book, 1981.