Read Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and Owen's "Mental Cases" (Essay Sample)

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Read Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and Owen's "Mental Cases"
Septimus acts as the double of Clarissa in the novel Mrs. Dalloway. In the novel, Septimus is represented as a shocked war hero who is suffering from mental illness. Just like Septimus, Clarissa is also facing her existential demons (Ganguly 1). Unlike Septimus, she carries through her daily activities with patience despite the self-doubt going on in her inner self. Septimus and Clarissa never meet, except for the mentioning of his suicide during the party. The intersection tries to compare how the sane and the insane perceive the world. Both characters suffer from brutality, loneliness and meaningless which was common in the modern British society (Ganguly 1). The normalcy and the insanity of the two characters are interchanged on numerous occasions in the novel. While men suffered from the horrors of war, women suffered from a psychiatric incarceration (Ganguly 2).
In the poem, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ Prufrock is a character who is unable to deal with the lack of hope and love in the 1914’s. Like Septimus, Prufrock is in an anomic situation which leads to desperation and disenchantment (Köseman 229). Peter is described as an enigmatic character (Köseman 235). Peter is a free spirit and one who seems to fail to grow in the novel. He is a romantic character who marries a girl he meets on his way to India and who begins a love affair with a married woman. Peter is impulsive and irresponsible, and he comes out as a failure in life. He failed at Oxford University among other aspects in his life (Klein). Like Peter, he is frustrated by love. He first expresses his interests in Clarissa, but Clarissa rejects his love because of his free attitude. The two characters suffer from psychological trauma and alienation from the society (Köseman 229). There is social disorganization due to feelings of futility, despair, emotional emptiness and lack of purpose (Köseman 232). These feelings arise from wartime experiences for Prufrock. Peter never recovered from th...