In her novel Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf attacks the oppressive, dominant image of the "Angel in the House" by creating an awakening moment of "new significance" for her heroine, Clarissa Dalloway. Clarissa`s marriage and social life of oppression and abjection comes to a sudden halt when she encounters the meaningful and visionary suicide of a young war veteran, Septimus Warren Smith. Both Septimus and Clarissa are objects of patriarchy`s repression as a monster or an "Angel in the House," respectively, and Clarissa embraces Septimus`s suicide as a visionary plunge that breaks through the oppressive power that imprisons his soul within patriarchy`s social constructs. Through this, she experiences a rebirth of her own soul, which releases Gothic terror and ecstasy in the union of the living and the dead. In this spiritual encounter, Woolf conjures up Gothic sensation to challenge the dominant discourse of the patriarchal status quo by suggesting the possible transgression of the boundaries between the oppressive center and the peripheral others. In this way, she deconstructs the domestic angel and frees herself from its ghostly presence that interferes with her creativity.