Clarissa’s response to the news that a man killed himself surprised and confused me, but also helped me see the larger idea of unspoken understanding in this text and start to better understand the connection between Clarissa and Septimus. Though Clarissa knows very little about this man, I was surprised at how well she seemed to understand his motives for killing himself; she really hits the nail on the head when she muses that perhaps this man was a poet whose soul Bradshaw attempted to force (281). Clarissa understands, too, that “Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death” (280-1). This “impossibility of reaching the centre” shows the way in which both Septimus and Clarissa are, in a way, outsiders to this society. I am still not sure if I understand exactly what this “centre” is—possibly the negative foundation of society that Holmes and Bradshaw represent?

Furthermore, the passage depicting Clarissa’s reaction to Septimus’ death ties in nicely with the earlier passage about Clarissa’s theory “to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known” (231). She theorizes that “since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places after death… perhaps—perhaps” (232). I think that Clarissa’s reaction to Septimus’ death proves that her theory is correct. Clarissa fully understands Septimus’ decision to kill himself and she also benefits from the knowledge that a greater connectedness than that which she manufactures through her parties exists in the form of “an embrace” after death. This man’s death provides Clarissa with a newly optimistic outlook on life: “She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away…. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun” (283-4). Both Clarissa and Septimus have always appreciated the beauty of life and Clarissa recognizes that her position within society interferes with a greater value of human existence: “A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved” (280). Septimus serves as a sort of martyr for an Aesthetic recognition of beauty in life, and in doing so assures Clarissa that there is something of value beneath the corruption of the society to which she belongs.