Septimus!

All right so I freaked a couple of people out when I said I had a man-crush on Septimus. But I just like the character. I think Woolf did a really good job of transcribing the effects of such a crippling but intangible mental problem. It's really hard to put something like this into words--heck freaking doctors have trouble describing what goes through a mentally ill mind--but Woolf pulls it off just as well as anyone I've ever seen. This makes sense, of course, when you remember Woolf's own battles with mental illness--it takes one to empathize with one.

I love her descriptions of Septimus' thought processes. You can tell this is a person fully believing in his own sanity while everyone around him knows something is wrong: "So he was deserted. The whole world was clamouring. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes. But why should he kill himself for their sakes?"  What makes this hit home is the almost detached, tranquil tone of the sentence and others like them. This isn't a person in the violent throes of passion that leads to a suicide a la Romeo and Juliet. This is a person who in their own mind is completely rational, contemplating the reasons why he should and should not kill himself. Equally disturbing is the hallucinations of transfiguring men and hellfire. Septimus feels almost like he has a God-like insight to humanity: he can sum up humanity's entire existence in the character of Mr. Holmes, whom he calls "human nature." And boy, does he hate human nature. He feels it is responsible for the terrible burden he's feeling; on that note, I think it's interesting that "Septimus" is Latin for "seven" or "seventh." It makes you wonder: seven what? The seven deadly sins of humanity, perhaps? Perhaps I'm reaching here, but I think this may be a viable reading of Septimus character. His mental trauma makes him more attuned to the sins of humanity, to its ever-burgeoning presence. Humanity presses in on him, cutting off his air, little by little; it is only when he focuses on one thing at a time that he can hand reality, as in 140-147. Even then, it's not enough.


I also feel strongly for Rezia, and I empathize with her predicament. It's difficult to deal with someone stricken with mental illness; in someways, it can be more hurtful to the people around the ill person than for the ill person himself. Rezia's torn between two desires. She has a flickering desire to just put him in a home somewhere and be done with him, but it's immediately staunched by the guilt of leaving a traumatized person to his own destruction. But what's the right decision? Should someone have to sacrifice their own sanity and life for another, especially if their little hope for recovery. Do people have to be burdened with a mindless glop of flesh lacking almost all ability of autonomy? Is that fair? But then again...what's the alternative? To stick this person somewhere and just forget about him? Isn't that the height of selfishness? Because certainly it's not the person's fault that his mind's this way; what does that make the people who decide to leave him to the dogs?

Equally accurate is Woolf's portrayal of the doctors; again, it comes as no surprise considering her own experiences, but it's still interesting to see. This doctor thinks nothing's wrong with him, he's just being silly; well, he's an idiot, so they go to Sir-what's his face. This doctor has more of a head on his shoulders, but he does little more than pull an extreme version of what the first doctor thought. More rest, more rest, more rest! Oh, and a sense of proportion. As if things could be so simplified. As Woolf wrote--and I'm paraphrasing here cause I don't remember the page--he was the type that wouldn't be satisfied until a person that went in weight six stone came out weighing twelve.

What makes this hilarious is that it's eighty years and nothing really's changed. The medicos still think the same way, except instead of rest, it's pills. Pills! Pills pills pills! Pills fix everything!Oh, you mean this pill is causing symptoms worse than the thing we were trying to fix? Well, here's another pill to fix that symptom! Oh, now that pill is causing injurious symptoms? Well here's yet another pills! Yes, Yes, guzzle your pills, twelve, thirteen, fourteen a day! Lithium depakote geodon lyrica klonopin! That'll cure you! Who needs a liver? Who needs an I.Q. over forty!? I'd almost prefer the original disorder. It's amazing how prescient Woolf is, and how well she gets to the bare root of human nature; I mean, seventy years after her death and we're still doing the same old crap that she was satirizing!

So yeah, that's why I like Septimus, cause his character is perfectly truthful, and the characters around him are perfectly truthful.