Trauma and literature: Virginia Woolf’s contribution to the study of PTSD

Abstract

Virginia Woolf's personal life has sparked an incredible amount of controversy throughout the years. Numerous speculations have been developed about her personal struggle with mental illness and the effect it had on her writing. This article argues that in Woolf’s case, writing took the form of “scriptotherapy”, which is regarded as an effective means of dealing with trauma. From another angle, the article aims to shed more light on yet another manifestation of Woolf’s genius: an intuitive but accurate description of a war veteran’s torment and subsequent suicide, as a consequence of dealing with untreated Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. When examining Septimus’ trauma, we identify similarities between his story and Woolf’s personal experience with the male-dominated psychiatric elite of her times (documented by her biographers). The study also investigates Virginia Woolf’s feminist perspective on trauma, through analysing societal norms’ profound influence on human suffering.

Keywords

• virginia woolf
• trauma
• ptsd
• shell-shock
• scriptotherapy