Death is a constant thematic in literature. In some works, it is related to a certain feeling of nonconformism or unfitness in society. This circumstance leads the literary character to death or to commit suicide. In this sense, death can be understood in two ways. Firstly, it can be seen as an exit as the individual is not able to accept and fit in the social reality. That is because he/she has a perception of reality that goes beyond the social patterns. Secondly, it can be understood as a punishment to the individuals, since the society can not deal with people who do not play a role in accordance with the established patterns. Their incapacity of following the social conventions is the crime by which they are punished. From this point of view, death in literature seems to be the resolution of a conflict between society and individual. We can observe this fact in The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of the Denmark, by William Shakespeare and in Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf. Death can be seen as the only solution for Hamlet, the unhappy son of the dead king, and for Septimus Warren Smith, a World War I veteran who becomes insane due to the effects of the war. In both cases, it is possible to perceive a nonconformism or unfitness feeling in relation to reality.

On Hamlet, nonconformism and unfitness stem from two events that are not narrated in the beginning of the play. They correspond to death of his father, the king of Denmark, and the marriage of Hamlet’s mother Gertrude to his uncle Claudius, the brother of the dead king:

God! / How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, / Seem to me all the uses of this world! […] But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two: / So excellent a king; that was, to this, / Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother / That he might not beteem the winds of heaven / Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth! / Must I remember? why, she would hang on him, / As if increase of appetite had grown / By what it fed on: and yet, within a month – / Let me not think on't – Frailty, thy name is woman! – / A little month, or ere those shoes were old / With which she follow'd my poor father's body, / Like Niobe, all tears: – why she, even she – / God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason, / Would have mourn'd longer – married with my uncle, / My father's brother, but no more like my father / Than I to Hercules: within a month: / Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears / Had left the flushing in her galled eyes, / She married. O, most wicked speed, to post / With such dexterity to incestuous sheets! / It is not nor it cannot come to good. (30-31)

As known, the marriage of Gertrude and Claudius seems to follow the natural order in that social system as nobody, excluding Hamlet, questions this event. For the disillusioned prince, this fact reveals how people are corrupt and the society is degrading. According to Barbara Heliodora, Shakespeare’s play in particular is a “masterly investigation about the human condition in society” (66). That is because it reveals how an individual is conditioned to accept certain values and patterns established by a group or by the whole society. In Hamlet’s case the fact that the prince does not consider the marriage of his mother with his uncle an acceptable event can be considered the fount of his inadequacy. “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” (48), as one of the officers notes.

Hamlet’s feeling of nonconformism and unfitness in relation to the events that have happened in the kingdom of Denmark is similar to Septimus Warren Smith’s feelings in relation to the English society. As we know, Septimus was a young man from a working class:

Lodging off the Euston Road, there were experiences, again experiences, such as change a face in two years from a pink innocent oval to a face lean, contracted, hostile. But of all this what could the most observant of friends have said except what a gardener says when he opens the conservatory door in the morning and finds a new blossom on his plant: — It has flowered; flowered from vanity, ambition, idealism, passion, loneliness, courage, laziness, the usual seeds, which all muddled up (in a room off the Euston Road), made him shy, and stammering, made him anxious to improve himself, made him fall in love with Miss Isabel Pole, lecturing in the Waterloo Road upon Shakespeare. (94)

In the first place, we can take for granted that Septimus used to be an idealist man. For that reason, he “was one of the first to volunteer” (95) to join up in the English armed forces in order to combat in the Great War. In this sense, Septimus embraces an attitude in accordance with what was expected by the English society:

He went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square. There in the trenches the change which Mr. Brewer desired when he advised football was produced instantly; he developed manliness; he was promoted; he drew the attention, indeed the affection of his officer, Evans by name. (95-97)

As this passage indicates, Septimus initially uses his male condition in order to ascend socially and become an active member in society. That is because he assumed his role by accepting to join up in the army and fight for his country. However, as Ann Ronchetti claims, “he is overwhelmed by the events of his young life, which dissipate his creative focus and ultimately destroy him” (52). Septimus becomes a war veteran whose deliriums identify him as a segregated individual socially as he does not fit in the established social group.

In both stories — Hamlet and Septimus’ —, it is possible to perceive a rupture with the social order as they move towards death. As a result, they feel unconformed and unfitted in relation to reality. The prince of Denmark, in his turn, reaches an understanding about the things that goes beyond the social reality:

To be, or not to be: that is the question: / Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, / And by opposing end them? / To die: to sleep; / No more; and by a sleep to say we end / The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation / Devoutly to be wish'd. […] For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, / The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, / The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, / The insolence of office and the spurns / That patient merit of the unworthy takes, / When he himself might his quietus make / With a bare bodkin? (81)

For Hamlet, the social life becomes unbearable as soon as he acquires consciousness of its corruption and degradation. In this sense, we may affirm that Septimus shares Hamlet’s desolate vision concerning the English society. This vision increases especially after Septimus has changed his perception towards life because of his experience in the Great War. He “had fought; he was brave; he was not Septimus now” (27), his wife notes. Thus, Septimus’ perception of society does not permit that he fits into the reality:

One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that. […] For the truth is (let her ignore it) that human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment. (99)

Due to the fact that the young man has a critical vision concerning his society, he is considered an ill man. In fact, Septimus is totally sceptic and disillusioned in relation to people and life. Therefore, the society sees Septimus as an insane person whose thoughts are disconnected from the bourgeois reality that he abominates so much. In this sense, although Septimus is a sensitive man who feels empty in relation to life, he is condemned to death by “human nature” because “he did not feel” (101) due to the fact that his vision did not fit into the established patterns of society.

Each one in their time and place, these literary works expose the inadequacy of the human being in society. It stems from the fact that some individuals seem to have an understanding of reality that goes beyond the boundaries established by social values and patterns. This is the case of Hamlet and Septimus whose lives are in conflict concerning reality. In relation to Shakespeare’s play, Arnold Hauser claims that the author “sees the world through the eyes of a rich man, whose mentality is liberal, sceptic and disillusioned” (421). To this effect, we can take for granted that Hamlet is an individual whose sceptic vision concerning the society is the fount of his nonconformism and disillusion. For that reason, he fights against the exploitation of society in relation to the individual:

Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! / You would play upon me; you would seem to know / my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my / mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to / the top of my compass: and there is much music, / excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot / you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am / easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what / instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you / cannot play upon me. (97-98)

In the same way that Hamlet does not permit anybody to play upon him, as we can perceive, Septimus fights against the English society, which is represented by the figure of Dr. Holmes:

Human nature, in short, was on him — the repulsive brute, with the blood-red nostrils. Holmes was on him. Dr. Holmes came quite regularly every day. Once you stumble, Septimus wrote on the back of a postcard, human nature is on you. Holmes is on you. Their only chance was to escape, without letting Holmes know; to Italy — anywhere, anywhere, away from Dr. Holmes. (102)

Although Septimus is considered an insane man, he reveals to be aware of the manipulation of society towards men. To this effect, Paul Strathern claims that Woolf’s objective by writing Mrs. Dalloway exposes the extension of her ambition, which was to criticize society. (45) According to Woolf’s diary, she wished to criticize the social patterns of her epoch. She wrote: "I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social system, and show it at work, at its most intense" (46). For sure, the narrator exposes in Mrs. Dalloway the conflict between individual and society by imprinting experiences and emotions on the inner of Septimus. That is because Septimus is not able to accept his reality since he feels unconformed and unfitted in relation to it.

As a final point, death is the solution for both cases. That is because Hamlet and Septimus go beyond the corrupted vision that society has about human relations. For that reason, they are suffocated by reality. That is, it is not possible to live in a world as they have experienced. In a battle for repairing the order of things, Hamlet witnesses the deaths of Ophelia, Gertrude and Claudius. However, it is not enough to modify his vision about the world. Hamlet will never fit into reality. Therefore, Shakespeare would not give another final to Hamlet since the prince of Denmark broke the vision conditioned by society.

O, I die, Horatio: / The potent poison quite o'er-crows my spirit, / I cannot live to hear the news from England; / But I do prophesy the election lights / On Fortinbras: he has my dying voice; / So tell him, with the occurrents, more and less, / Which have solicited. The rest is silence. (154)

Actually, before he is poisoned by Laertes’ sword, he was poisoned by reality. In the same way, we can say that Septimus feels poisoned by everything and everybody around him. This perception is the cause of his emptying. For that reason, filled by misunderstanding thoughts, he prefers to commit suicide rather than accept to live according to the abhorrent society that he is part of:

There remained only the window, the large Bloomsbury-lodging house window, the tiresome, the troublesome, and rather melodramatic business of opening the window and throwing himself out. It was their idea of tragedy, not his or Rezia’s (for she was with him). Holmes and Bradshaw like that sort of thing. (He sat on the sill.) But he would wait till the very last moment. He did not want to die. Life was good. The sun hot. Only human beings — what did THEY want? Coming down the staircase opposite an old man stopped and stared at him. Holmes was at the door. “I’ll give it you!” he cried, and flung himself vigorously, violently down on to Mrs. Filmer’s area railings. (164)

As these words indicate, death is the only solution to Septimus’ conflict since his way of understanding reality is totally opposite to the social values and beliefs.

All things considered, we can take for granted that some literary works expose how society punishes with death the one who commits the mistake of going beyond the conventional boundaries. On the other hand, they also show that death can be seen as the only exit for those who become aware of the corruption and degradation of the human relations in society:

How Shakespeare loathed humanity — the putting on of clothes, the getting of children, the sordidity of the mouth and the belly! This was now revealed to Septimus; the message hidden in the beauty of words. The secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair. (98)

As we can see in Septimus’ comment, this perception seems to be related to a certain comprehension about human relations which can be seen through many literary works produced in different epochs. In other words, this strong awareness of life refers to “the secret signal” (98) that is possible to see in the life of Hamlet and Septimus that shows us the eternal conflict between individual and society and its consequences.

References:

Hauser, Arnold. História Social da Arte e da Literatura. São Paulo: Marins Fontes, 1998. Ronchetti, Ann. The Artist, Society & Sexuality in Virginia Woolf’s Novels. New York & London: Routledge, 2004.
Heliodoro, Barbara. Por que ler Shakespeare. São Paulo: Globo, 2008.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet: the Prince of Denmark. London: Penguin Popular Classics, 1994.
Strathern, Paul. Virginia Woolf em 90 minutos. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2009.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. London: Penguin Popular Classics, 1996.