“For you should see the Milan gardens”: Recovering Lucrezia’s Immigrant Narrative in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

The writings of Modernist thinkers such as Virginia Woolf and Walter Benjamin contain a wisdom for our own “state(s) of emergency,” political and otherwise, challenging and handicapping the humanities in a time when they are needed most. Lucrezia Warren Smith, the Italian wife of the “shell-shocked” soldier Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs. Dalloway is rarely the subject of close critical attention, but when considered against the backdrop of our contemporary crises, her plight and voice seem to have found their moment, and necessitate a review. As the sole caregiver for Septimus, whose military training and post-war trauma have left him in a cycle of torment as he attempts to recover his lost feeling—his very humanity—Lucrezia is rendered homesick and alone, pining for Italy and the future she imagined with Septimus. While some critics have read her harshly, I contend Woolf’s writing of Lucrezia not only encourages sympathy for the caregiver, but also highlights the marginalization of soldiers and immigrants silently suffering long-term stress of WWI.

This paper seeks to draw out Lucrezia’s and Septimus’s narratives in their war against the oppressive, dominant voices of Septimus’s doctors, and London society at large—forces which prefer to focus on British national identity and heroism, and brush aside post-war problems faced by soldiers and their families. Alongside Susan Stanford Friedman’s recent book, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations of Modernity across Time (2015), I tease out a reading of Woolf’s writing against barbaric, nationalist voices through a global lens, ultimately recovering a feminism beyond borders.