"Against Euphemism in Mrs. Dalloway: Virginia Woolf, the Psychiatrist, and the Lies"

Abstract

During the First World War, British social elites invented a style of euphemism in which the horror of war is concealed. As a historical witness who saw the terror of the Great War and the progress of euphemism, Virginia Woolf attacked the political usage of euphemism, especially in terms of war and trauma. Composed in the post-World War I period, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) conveys Woolf’s opposition to euphemism harnessed to disguise the true qualities of war and wound. In approaching the matter of euphemism, the fiction offers two divided groups of people, patients and doctors, and presents distinctions between their rhetorical styles; the doctors depend on euphemism while the patients avoid it. The novel suggests that the doctors’ usage of euphemism stems from sinister desires: the intention to hide the wounds of World War I and the intention to neglect ethical obligations toward patients and war victims. By focusing on Mrs. Dalloway, this paper examines Woolf’s critiques of war-related euphemism, a particular form of euphemism valorized to conceal the cruelties of war and re-victimize the patients affected by illness and trauma in the postwar climate. One assumption in this paper is that Woolf’s sexual trauma and the post-traumatic illness might have affected her complex attitudes toward war-related euphemisms. In the process of illuminating the link between trauma and euphemism, the present discussion also attends to Woolf’s autobiographical writings which raise the convoluted issues of war, post-traumatic disease, and euphemism.