Elaine Showalter agues: ‘For most ...

the anguish of shell shock included more general but

intense anxieties about masculinity [and] fears of acting effeminate. (…) When military doctors
and psychiatrists dismissed shell-shock patients as cowards, they were often hinting at
effeminacy or homosexuality. Karl Abraham, a hard-line Freudian, was one who argued that
war neurotics were passive, narcissistic, and impotent men to begin with, whose latent
homosexuality was brought to the surface by the all-male environment’. (Elaine Showalter,
1987. The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980. London, 171-
172).

Read the fragment of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and comment on the presentation of
Septimus Warren Smith. Is his masculinity affected by his mental instability? What are the
expectations concerning his proper behaviour (as expressed by his wife but also culturally).
Why do you think Virginia Woolf added Septimus as a character in her 1925 novel at all?