Last week, I sat down with my senior students and asked them to circle up. I have small classes, so it’s easy to rearrange the furniture to suit my lesson plan. They dragged metal across tile, forming an oblong circle of desks, put their technology away, and took out Mrs. Dalloway – a difficult text I love teaching and many of them struggle with.

This year my teaching of the novel has felt particularly rushed. Thanks to scheduling anomalies and a series of snow days, our fourth quarter is several days shorter than it was last year, and days make a difference. I found myself assigning reading and not doing the material justice in our class discussions. Last Friday, I vowed to do better. I sat as an equal in their circle, pulled out my annotated text and said, “Where do we want to start?” A few students chimed in with questions or points of interest, and the conversation snowballed.

They offered insightful comments about Clarissa Dalloway, the main character – about her relationship with her husband, cold and steady at its center but sewn up at its fraying edges with compassion, warmth, and mutual respect. They wondered at this relationship – one that is initially so easy to judge but which turns opaque upon closer inspection. “I just don’t get it,” one student said, and I nodded.

They are eighteen. They don’t yet fully understand that you can like someone, even love them – hurt for them and be hurt by them, and feel at once entirely intertwined and hopelessly disconnected from them. That you can love two people at one time. That you can love an idea of someone – a wisp of memory – more than you could ever love the person they actually were or the person they’ve become.

They talked about Clarissa’s suffering – her struggle with her aging body, her disconnection from her daughter, her recurring, almost obsessive thoughts about the past – who she was then, who she could have been. They categorized her lovers – Peter had big dreams and chased them, Sally had big dreams and settled down to an average existence and five children, Richard had big money and provided privilege for Clarissa, but not passion. Perhaps no one can have it all? They mused. Perhaps each relationship in our lives fulfills something we need…or want? Perhaps we are the sum of the relationships we have – the connections we make? I nodded.

But, what about Septimus? I asked. Why Septimus? Septimus Warren Smith is a young WWI veteran. He is a closeted homosexual, paralyzed by shellshock and the death of his military superior and love of his life, Evans. He is weighed down by a terrified young wife and tortured by incompetent, even vindictive doctors who have decades before they will understand depression and mental illness. On the day of Clarissa’s party (the single day during which the novel is set), he throws himself out his apartment window, his broken body twisted lifelessly on the steps below. His landlady is appalled, his wife devastated, his doctors – angry. One calls him a coward.

It is no secret that Septimus is a foil for Clarissa – their characters are paired; he is the inevitable opposite side of her coin. He is everything she is not – young, poor, male, middle class, and incapable of behaving in a socially acceptable manner. Clarissa brings people together in her shining beacon of a home – Septimus drives them away with his incoherent mumbling and his vacant eyes. Yet they are connected; having never met the man, Clarisssa hears of his death from one of his doctors attending her party, and she is visibly, fundamentally shaken. Why Septimus? Because Septimus is suffering.

I asked my students again: why Septimus? How does Clarissa’s suffering compare to his? Does it even compare to his. They tipped their heads, looked down, thought hard. “Well, I suppose it depends on who you ask,” one girl said. Another answered, “Yes. It does compare. Suffering is suffering, and I hate when some people tell me I can’t be sad about something just because other people have it worse.” I nodded.

I asked my students this question because I don’t have an answer. Oh sure, I understand why Septimus is in the book. From a literary standpoint, he is a brilliant character, a perfect foil. I wrote a fifteen-page paper in grad school picking his character apart – reading him under the lens of Judith Butler’s theories of gender performativity magnified by the masculine theater of war.

Again and again, I’ve sat beside Septimus, searched his haunted eyes, listened to his garbled speech, parsed him into nouns and verbs, adjectives and adverbs. I’ve dissected his suffering – and still, I wonder. How does it compare? Does there, can there, exist an equation of suffering? Is Septimus’ pain more or less than Clarissa’s? I’ve always imagined her concerns shrinking and withering before his – laid bare as shallow, vapid. What is a disappointing marriage in the face of the overwhelming trauma of war? But who am I to judge. Pain is pain.

I’ve been thinking about these ideas quite a bit lately – not just on the pages of Virginia Woolf novels, but everywhere, in nearly every facet of my life. I have some thoughts – some metaphors of my own – but they’ll have to wait for another day. Tonight, I’ll mark up my last two sets of freshman essays for the year. Then I’ll get up early and get to school well before 7am to set up breakfast for my AP students before they take their exam. THE exam.

I don’t know what they’ll be asked to read and write on their exam, and like every single AP teacher in the world, tomorrow, I’ll question just about everything I ever taught them. But I’ll never question asking them to question. Why Septimus? Why Hamlet? Why Frankenstein? The monster? Raskolnikov? Nora Helmer? Edna Pontelier? Absalom Kumalo? I don’t have any answers, but I do have questions, and if they leave my class with a healthy set of their own – that’s more than good enough for me.

Until next time…