How to breath underwater

suicide and creative adjustment in Virginia Woolf

Abstract

The following work intends to analyze possible biographical relationships of Virginia Woolf in the novel Mrs. Dalloway, 1925. In the author's vast literary bibliography, only in Mrs. Dalloway does a suicidal character appear, Septimus Warren-Smith, which leads us to reflect on Woolf's choices in the construction of the character and in his presentation in plot. According to the literary theorist, Maurice Blanchot, literature is a space of death, and considering this aspect, the character Septimus Warren-Smith could show signs of a premonitory event: the author's suicide a few years later. Virginia Woolf demonstrates, through some records, the importance of writing in her life by using the literary space as a cathartic exercise in her relationship with the world. The intention of the work is to identify a possibility of survival for the author from the death of Septimus Warren-Smith in the novel. To achieve this, the concept of creative adjustment of Gestalt Therapy was used, through the studies of Perls (1977); Hefferline (1997); Goodman (1997), with the aim of elucidating the author's relationship with her artistic work and her supposed survival, as well as Marice Blanchot's (1987; 2011) essays on literary activity and its correspondence with death. With the intention of enabling a comprehensive view of the facts involved – aesthetic and biographical – it was necessary to add to the methodological tools of the Theory of Literature, such as James Wood (2012), and Cultural Studies, such as Foucault (2001), aspects of psychoanalysis asserted by Freud (2010) and studies on biographical attributes elaborated by Bourdieu (2006).