Suicide

At the time of Woolf’s writing, suicide continued to hold a stigma in much of the Western world and yet Woolf chooses to end one of the main character’s lives through this stigma. Septimus feels so alienated from the society he fought so hard in the war to protect – sacrificing even his sanity for the cause; the only way he feels as though he can end this alienation and regain a shred of control over his life is by ending it. With this, Woolf was making a significant statement about the adaptations that had taken place in the world even in her lifetime. As people became more affluent and materialistic through the early 1900s, those individuals who held on to more traditional values of hard work, sacrifice, and dedication became increasingly rare as many within society considered them to be archaic and past their prime. Septimus serves as a warning handed down by Woolf as she observed the world around her; should society continue down its path, more and more people would become as alienated as Septimus and be driven to such extremes.