Fulfilling Gendered Expectations in Mrs. Dalloway Anonymous College

The beginning of the twentieth century witnessed significant strides in the upheaval of gender bias and patriarchal standards. Women gained many more liberties, such as with the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, and the first wave of feminism was at its golden age. However, gender roles, or ideals of how the binary genders should act, still had a strong hold over societal expectations. When Virginia Woolf wrote Mrs. Dalloway in the 1920’s, she used it as a social critique of the strict gender roles in the time. The protagonists Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith both struggle to meet emotional gender expectations; however, only Clarissa can manage to hide her differences and remain a well-esteemed upper class woman.

When Septimus Warren Smith is a young adult, he volunteers for the army. However, when he returns it became clear that the war took a significant psychological toll on Septimus. His wife, Rezia, believes that “he was not Septimus now” (2350), recalling how he would “talk to himself, talk to a dead man” (2371). Septimus is showing signs of shell shock, a common diagnosis for a World War I veteran. However, such a disorder carried a complex stigma. Veterans showing symptoms of shell shock were thought to...