‘Human Nature is Remorseless’

Abstract

Post-traumatic stress is the subject of Avishek Parui’s essay. For Parui the male body emerges in Woolf’s novel as ‘the site where the biopolitical gaze enacts its corrective measures and its heavy-handed censorship of deviance’, and the broken spirit and destroyed mind of Septimus Warren Smith are marginalised by clear social and medical discourses of ‘proper’ masculinity as defined by a militarised culture. Smith is subject to a very clear disciplinary regime that reminds him of his duty to be a man: Parui suggests that this brings about not just suppression but erasure of the emotional life, making Smith less, not more, of a man. Ultimately the essay suggests that Woolf’s treatment of this coerced manliness represents an epistemic shift towards the more conscious engagement with the dual functions of interior and exterior selfhood that characterised the twentieth century.