When reading Mrs. Dalloway, I found myself waiting around for the appearance of a ghost. Having read The Turn of the Screw previously, I expected one of the characters to either see or become a ghost. However, neither of those things happened, which led me to ask “What makes this a haunted text?” The characters are not haunted by a physical ghost, but are haunted by their past as well as the things they either can’t or won’t say to those they care about. Clarissa is haunted by the way she treated Peter and her relationship with Sally. Clarissa and Peter are both haunted by their lack of communication over her refusal to marry him and his inability to get over her. Sally is haunted by the deterioration of her friendships with both Clarissa and Peter over the years. Septimus is haunted by his experiences of the war as well as what he wants to tell his wife and his doctor, but he fails to remember what that is. Even Mr. Dalloway is haunted by the fact that he can’t profess his love for Clarissa. This kind of haunting. the kind we can’t see and often struggle to confront, is more terrifying and true to life because every person is haunted by their past or something they wanted to say but didn’t.
ENGL 3630: Haunted Texts
Melissa McLeod
I would agree that this was not your typical ghost story, and Wolfe did play on the theme of haunting in different respects that one may deem usual. Though there where a few moments of ghostly or spiritual representation such as the scene following the death of Septimus in which the ghost of wind enter the window as Septimus’s soul would have left the world, it seems that what truly haunted the characters of this story was in there own minds – fear, the passed, issolation. It seems this story was written to be more thought provoking and psychological than truly ghostly or frightening.
“She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.”