((Exploring Interiority and Insanity: A Psychological Study of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway))

Abstract

This paper analyzes Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925), mental distress is reconfigured to form a system of critique of the gendered norms and the medical paternalism of inter-war Britain. By comparing the repressed anxiety of Clarissa with the traumatic shell shock of Septimus Smith, the study demonstrates how Woolf's stream-of-consciousness technique and Bergson's temporality juxtapose the conformity of the public with the anguish of the self, revealing the violence inherent in normative social categories. The overlapping subjectivities within the novel, interpreted through the feminist and trauma theory, destabilize the authority of psychiatry represented by Dr. Bradshaw and his replacement of coercion, as embodied in the doctor, by empathy. Finally, the paper approaches it as a psychological map that demonstrates common vulnerabilities beneath broken realities, challenging pathologizing discourses of mental health.