Shell Shock: The Silencing of a Generation

Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is on one level a commentary of a world war that shaped a generation.  With the character of Septimus, Woolf manages to give a voice to an entire generation of lost men.  Ironically, she creates this voice through the silences of Septimus, both in his inability to communicate with the world around him and in his suicide, which   silences him completely and permanently.

The term shell shock  is a layman's term for the medical condition of Neurasthenia, which was widespread amongst the soldiers of World War I.  Shell shock was first identified by doctors during the war when it was realized that the large numbers of soldiers who were being rendered incapacitated were not physically injured but had psychological wounds. Hospitals were built specifically to treat the hundreds of men who returned home with the mental wounds of war.  In Great Britain, the most famous of these was Craiglockhart, which was established  in 1916 to treat shell-shocked officers.

As a historian, I am interested in the literature of the age that gave a voice to the horrors of WW I.  Woolf's voice is interesting insofar as her gender necessitated that she wrote as an outsider to the intimate horror of trench warfare.  She is not, however, the only writer who gave a voice to the men who experienced  this war.  Poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon were just two of the poets who wrote about their experiences.

In his poem, "Survivors," Sassoon noted the connection between the war experience and language.  His survivors stammer and are disconnected in their speech and return home mad.