DeMeester, in addition, takes Clarissa and Septimus as examples to investigate the relation of trauma and recovery. He considers a paradoxical thinking that the psychological effects of trauma come to be the way of recovery. Clarissa and Septimus as trauma victims are repressed by past memories and society. The past memory to Septimus becomes the force of repression which haunts him and hampers him to communicate with others. As a trauma victim, Septimus does not get recovery from the loss in the battlefield due to his lack of identity in this society. Clarissa is not a trauma victim but a trauma survivor with her faith in reintegration of others through having a party.
In the respect of discerning the self, the subjectivity of human beings is retrieved in the process of tracing back to their trauma and is also constructed by social institutions, the social order, without separating trauma from social institutions. To Septimus, his personal trauma is one part of universal stigma. As a warrior, his neurosis after World War I presents the despair and desolation of all mankind. That is, all his personal symptoms in trauma rightly refer to the morbidity in the whole society. In DeMeester’s essay, Dr. Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw illustrating the dominance of culture “suggests that such conventional activities are more representative of reality and truth than what Septimus experienced and learned in war” (661). This statement seems that the author separates mankind’s psychological state from the social community when he discusses the trauma effects to Septimus. He merely focuses on one thing—Septimus’s trauma symptoms are the disturbance to communicate with others and on another thing—Septimus is resisted by members of the community. This kind of absolute binary opposition not only negates the truth that the subjectivity of men is constructed by both the inward psychology and the outward social ideology, but simplifies the complex of mankind. Human beings are sort of a social animal. Not just people’s consciousness but social rules including languages and laws inevitably can influence their signifying practices. In a word, psychological effects of trauma and repression and imperialism of patriarchal authority are interacted in human beings. Trauma causes the damage in the community and vise versa.
Unlike DeMeester’s viewpoint, the painful memory to Septimus and Clarissa, otherwise, becomes a reminder forcing them to face the trauma repressed in their unconscious and gets the chance to claim their subjectivity by this way. In the part of recovery, DeMeester reclaims that Septimus as a trauma victim destroys the meaningful recovery from the war. He also mentions that Clarissa as a trauma survivor returns to her party and recommit herself to a life. However, memory is the shadow of human life—a screen interwoven by sundry images of past time projects the reality of present life. Trauma discloses the “missing” subject of mankind in this dark space, and also generates men’s presence from the loss. By recollecting the fragmentary patterns of life in memory, one has a chance to realize the reality hidden in the subconsciousness. Hence, Septimus is the one who truly knows the brutality of a society and chooses to be his real self. Clarissa, nevertheless, who is perpetually under the authority of the community to conform the social ideologies, little discerns her self-identity to be an independent one. Though she tries to find her values from hosting a party, she is still unseen, unknown by social conventions to connect the feelings of one man to the other instead of concerning her own affections.
On discerning the self, this review essay puts psychological phases of trauma and ideologies of social community into consideration. The whole being of mankind is constructed by semiotic drives and symbolic orders interacted. In fact, DeMeester’s putting cause and effect on the relation of trauma and recovery is probably to make a monolithic conclusion in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. To Septimus, he has self-consciousness to aware the stigma made by the brutality of social rules and to think about the true meanings of life and death. By this viewpoint, Septimus is in the quest of discerning of his subject. Only clarifying the subjectivity of mankind with both psychological and social factors, can men regain recovery from the trauma. Through facing their trauma and past memory directly, men have chances to wake up from the past nightmares and to consummate themselves a whole human being.
Work Cited
DeMeester, Karen. “Trauma and Recovery in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.” Modern Fiction Studies 44 (1998): 649-673.