Mrs Dalloway : A Path towards Virginia Woolf’s Unconscious
What interests me is the latent content of the work, the fantasies and unconscious desires conveyed by the work. [I follow the path of Freud, [4] Green [5] and Anzieu .[ 1] Mrs Dalloway is a good example. Virginia Woolf describes places where she lived when a child and an adolescent and she stages characters to whom she gives life, body and soul. She has an extraordinary ability to put herself in the place of each of her characters and gives us their most secret and intimate thoughts and moods. The characters are seen from the inside and also from the outside by many other persons. The flow of ideas’ association is reminiscent of the flow of the words observed in bipolar patients, who maintain a certain exaltation outside their crises. The writer depicts all the strata of the society, from the most modest to the most affluent, with a lot of humor, sometimes biting irony and gives us a vision of a mental illness with delusion through the character of Septimus. Virginia Woolf married in 1912 at age thirty with Leonardo Woolf, a deceiving marriage (from my point of view), followed by three psychotic decompensations. Her husband was the editor of her works and read all her manuscripts. She masks elements of her biography consciously or unconsciously. This is the work of creation, similar to the one of dream. The novel looks like a day dream.
