One thing I intended to convey in my discussion of the party (but which I accidentally left out) was also how the party makes for a frivolous 'papering over' of the recent past and the collective trauma of war - but Septimus's death shows that violent past very much in evidence just below the surface, at times tearing through.
I'd like to say how monstrously enjoyable and intellectually stimulating I've found this whole discussion. I first read "Mrs. Dalloway" a year or so ago and thought it was a book I'd have to come back to some day, and the VW Reading Group offered the perfect opportunity to do so. So, many thanks to Tash for hosting this whole shenanigan and providing her own knowledge and insights into the writings of Virginia Woolf.
And many thanks as well to Alyssa the Nerdy Nurse and her weekly newsletter, without which I would never have heard of, let alone thought to look for, the VW Reading Group.
Oh! Excellent point! I never even thought of that angle, even though I've noticed how much the characters live in the past; except perhaps for nineteen-year-old Maisie Johnson "up from Edinburgh two days ago"--why not down from Edinburgh?
Anyway, Maisie, on her first trip to London imagines herself as an old woman fifty years in the future, thinking back to that day in Regent's Park when she saw that couple--Septimus and Rezia--sitting in chairs, the man "looking queer" and the young woman "seeming foreign". That's what she thinks will stick in her memory by the time Watergate is in the news.
I thought of Clarissa looking at the old lady across the way, but not knowing anything about her, as an example of the impersonal nature of modern day urban life: not knowing your neighbors even though you might live next to them for fifty years. But I agree that she could well be Clarissa's own future ghostly doppelganger. In that case, does Clarissa's future self look across the way and see her younger self?
If the old lady is her future then death has always been at the party. Clarissa is constantly thinking about death and aging. But perhaps Septimus is death made real?
I also thought about the relationship between strangers. We may no know each other but we impact each other, we’re connected in someway. Clarissa doesn’t know Septimus but his death infiltrates her party. I don’t quite know how to phrase what I’m thinking.
Maybe it's the Covid? Kidding, sort of. I think I know what you mean, though, about strangers affecting strangers, something like the butterfly effect, maybe?
Now I suddenly thought of Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death". Clarissa's party may be her way of putting off thoughts of death, just as Prince Prospero has a party to celebrate keeping the Red Death out of his palace. But the Red Death appears in the midst of the Prince's party anyway, just as death does when the Bradshaws begin talking of Septimus's suicide. And Clarissa has to go off by herself to compose herself, and also think of how Septimus died, and almost feel the spikes going through her own body, just as she imagines other people's ways of dying when she hears about them. Clarissa seeing her older self in the future ... it reminds me of a French film I watched yesterday, "Petite Maman".
As a nurse, no one would know that better than you; the finiteness of life, I mean. I admire tremendously the work you nurses do. Every time I go for bloodwork, I always tell the nurse as she slides the needle into my arm, "I hardly felt that", just as a small way of letting her--or sometimes him--know that they're good at what they do. Glad to hear you're getting over your Covid.
I think you've phrased it very well! Actually Ronald also discussed that theme of people not knowing one another in his comment below (or above?).
And that's interesting about the old lady through the window - I hadn't thought about her at all but I like that idea of her representing Clarissa's future. I also couldn't help but see that contrast of the individual vs group. You have Clarissa, her house full of people, looking across at a woman all alone.
There's an interesting parallel when Septimus commits suicide - an old man stops and stares at him - in an earlier manuscript the old man was looking across at Septimus through a window (as with the later scene with Clarissa), but in the final version, he's on the stairs.
"In her notes about the novel in November 1922, Woolf wrote: ‘Suppose the idea of the book is the contrast between life and death.’ ‘All must bear finally upon the party,’ she wrote in another note, ‘which expresses life in every variety & full of conviction..."
This is the heart of it for me, the theme. Yes, Woolf struggled mightily, I'd say heroically and fiercely, against her recurring mental breakdowns, so for her, this idea of contrast is crucial. She was literally navigating the abyss between sanity and insanity -- the ultimate contrast. And when she was in "sanity" mode, she was pure genius, able to render for the rest of us what this experience was like for her in using the metaphor of the party -- everything bears upon the party, every bit as much as when Hector is entering the arena, knowing he will lose to Achilles. But the fight must go on.
The party must go on.
This is the thematic crux upon which all of Woolf's novels rotate, and rotate they do, from one character to another, as she attempts to locate moments of being, moments of honesty, intimacy, of truth, in life itself. Thank you so much, Tash, for taking us all on this lovely trip through one of the most important minds of the 20th Century. And if you want to proceed toward "To the Lighthouse," I'm all in (smile).
But then of course, I will be from now on, in whatever other wonderful book you surprise us with! (There are so many, right? And only one lifetime!)
Yes, I think I find this novel of hers particularly compelling because in it she describes in such detail (through Septimus) her experience of severe mental illness - rendering in fiction those shades of sanity and insanity all overlaying each other and coming forward and backward in consciousness.
Thanks for taking part, Nancy! If we proceed with To the Lighthouse (which is still my intention, though it might take a little while to get there) I will have to consult you as a subject matter expert!
Sometimes writers write their way into a novel. They inhabit a particular character. If we apply this to Mrs. D., I would agree with you that Woolf is taking up residence in the character of Septimus. Woolf is Septimus, perhaps foreshadowing her own suicide.....
So happy to have found this VW reading group tonight thru @footnotesandtangents Thank you for taking the plunge Tash!
I am in Canada in the Great Lakes region. Either my secondary and post secondary education - Business degree- was lacking or I was sleeping since I have read only a handful of classics.
Now in my much later years I am on a literature quest! Read my first Virginia Woolf last summer - Mrs Dalloway then Orlando. Loved both!!
Yesterday I began listening to To the Lighthouse and realize I need a live book 😊 to ponder images, her sentences and make notes.
Looking forward to reading with all of you for a richer experience.
As far as Richard goes, I thought he was a bit of a humourless—his worst offence—stuffed-shirt prig at the beginning of the novel, but I warmed to his character as the story proceeded. I liked his interest in social justice causes, especially that scene where he fumes at the police for letting young children cross the street without escorting them to make sure they were safe.
There’s also the scene where Richard is walking through a park on his way home and sees a “female vagrant” reclining on the grass. At first, he views her condescendingly as a “poor creature”, but as he looks at the woman more closely, her essential humanity and individual personality come into focus—“impudent, loose-lipped, humorous” with her own ability “to observe curiously”—that is, to observe Richard curiously just as Richard is observing her—"to speculate boldly, to consider the whys and wherefores”, much as Richard does himself when considering, for example, “the problem of the female vagrant”.
Richard continues on his way past the woman lying on the grass, but “still there was time for a spark between them”, a moment of genuine person-to-person connection: “she laughed at the sight of him, he smiled good humouredly”. As we know from the plight of the homeless in our own day, that could well have been the only interaction with another human being the woman had that day, that week, or longer. I like that Richard has enough respect for the woman to acknowledge her presence, to look at her and give her a good-humoured smile, rather than walk by her expressionless and unseeing, with a distracted air and his eyes focused on the middle distance, as we often do with the urban homeless in our own time.
Briefly…this, as per Tom below, this has indeed been monstrously enjoyable and intellectually stimulating.
Time presses…but Indid want today one thing re Tash’s excellent point re the wind: in Greece there is a saying that the wind makes you mad. I think it is very true. Quite how it applies to Mrs D, I haven’t quite thought through. And, unfortunately, don’t have time at the moment.
Hopefully, I can come back and join Tash and everyone.
In the meantime, cheers to all for such a good experience.
On not knowing people: A lot of the time people are being described through the minds of other people, and a lot of the time those other people get it wrong! This struck me quite early on, then I found it explicit in the memory (perhaps faulty!) of Peter's of what Clarissa and he discussed on top of a bus long ago: "The feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could htey know each other?" (At point 75% in my Kindle.)
Notably: Peter thinks that Septimus and Rezia are lovers having a quarrel; Richard believes that Clarissa understands his gift of roses as a declaration of love; the two doctors assert their understanding of Septimus (and contradict each other); Clarissa's understanding of her daughter Elizabeth so different from Elizabeth's on experience on a different bus (the Strand rather than Shaftesbury Avenue). I was tending to think this, our partial and mistaken understanding of each other, was what the book is "about". But concluded rather that it's more part of VW's 'Modernist' technique , a core part of how she's telling the story.
But the big exception is where Clarissa, through intuition alone, in her solitary moment at her party, does understand and share the final experience of Septimus, his vision of beauty in Regent's Park. Flagged even more by their shared quotation 'Fear no more' 'Fear no more the heat o' the sun' from Cymbeline.
And this is also flagged by a quotation from the Shaftesbury Avenue bus pulled out by a commenter on the previous posting: "Our apprations, 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." Indeed, the unseen part of Septimus does 'somehow attach' to Clarissa. [Sorry, can't track down who that commenter was, but thank you whoever!]
And then I came across Clarissa using the same quotation much earlier on, in a less consequential moment, her disappointment at not being invited to Lady Bruton's lunch party. This might suggest reducing this to a 'shared sensibility' of Clarissa and Septimus. But I still think it's more than that, reluctant to downgrade Septimus to a mere 'mad avatar' of Clarissa.
Ah interesting. I seem to recall one of Clarissa's chief complaints about PW being how he is so utterly unaware of what others are thinking. And that one of Clarissa's strengths in her own mind is 'knowing people almost by instinct [...] If you put her in a room with some one, up went her back like a cat's; or she purred.' (It reminds me of Clarissa's dislike of Bradshaw - another instinctual reaction I think: 'But she did not know what it was about Sir William; what exactly she disliked. Only Richard agreed with her, 'didn't like his taste, didn't like his smell.')
But these are only instincts and the details of others thoughts and experiences remain largely unknown.
I can't help but think of that breakdown of understanding between Clarissa and Miss Kilman - you have that moment when Clarissa laughs as Elizabeth and Miss Kilman are leaving, and Miss Kilman takes great offense; and when Clarissa gives Miss Kilman gifts and hampers of food Miss Kilman seethes with indignation. Though despite their mutual lack of understanding, it's interesting that both feel pure and enduring hatred for the other. Their feelings are perfectly aligned. I wonder whether this is another example of Clarissa 'knowing people almost by instinct.' And although the details are misinterpreted, the wider factors are understood perfectly by each. Clarissa feels aggrieved at how Miss Kilman is stealing Elizabeth from her. Miss Kilman feels pleased to be stealing Elizabeth from Clarissa. They both compete for the same prize. Meanwhile, Elizabeth is her own person with her own agency.
Which then makes me think of Elizabeth. She and Clarissa are so different and struggle to know each other. Whereas Elizabeth and Richard are much more on the same wavelength.
On the afternoon of the party, Richard carries a bouquet of red and white roses home to Clarissa, fully intending to tell her that he loves her, “[b]ecause it is a thousand pities never to say what one feels, he thought”. When the moment comes, however, Richard finds he is speechless and he simply holds out the roses for Clarissa to take from his hands without saying a word.
For her part, the sight of Richard bearing flowers immediately makes Clarissa think of how she had “failed him, once at Constantinople”. It seems reasonable to conclude that Clarissa’s failure consisted of not responding to her husband’s sexual overtures, or of being unable to “feel what men felt” except when “she could not resist sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman”, a woman such as Sally Seton whom she recalls kissing her on the mouth one summer evening long ago at Bourton, which Clarissa thinks of as “the most exquisite moment of her whole life”.
At first reading, I thought that Richard’s inability to tell his wife he loves her was due to the discomfort many men feel in discussing their emotions, and his being a representative of the stiff upper lip class of British gentlemen. But then it seemed much more likely that Richard is well aware of Clarissa’s reluctance to give way to what she thinks of in one moment as “Horrible passion!” He is sensitive to the possibility that Clarissa will perceive his bouquet of roses, or any gift from him, as a sign that he is still sexually aroused by her.
Knowing how uncomfortable this will make Clarissa feel, he refrains from making the situation worse for her by speaking the words, “I love you”, trusting that, “She understood; she understood without his speaking; his Clarissa”. As far as having a physical relationship with his wife goes, Richard must content himself with holding hands: “He held her hand. Happiness is this, he thought.” And just so Clarissa won’t panic when he leaves the room and returns with a pillow and a quilt, ‘“An hour’s complete rest after luncheon,” he said. And he went.”’
With this apparent anxiety about intimacy, at least with Richard, one wonders how Clarissa ever came to be the mother of Elizabeth in the first place. But I think part of this desire to distance herself emotionally from other people is a development of Clarissa’s mature years. It’s the one thing she shares with Peter Walsh and Sally Seton, the belief that their happiness lies in devoting themselves to themselves, of enjoying the passing moment to the fullest, even to the extent of partially withdrawing their emotional investment from people who have the power to cause them disappointment or grief.
Perhaps what I liked best about Richard is the loving and uncomplicated relationship he has with his daughter Elizabeth. Watching Elizabeth and Richard at Clarissa’s party, Sally tells Peter, “one can see they are devoted to each other.” There almost seems to be a mysterious unseen emotional connection between father and daughter, for “Elizabeth had felt him [Richard] looking at her as she talked to Willie Titcomb.” Her response is to walk over to her father and stand beside him as the last guests leave the party.
For Richard, unlike Clarissa, there is no analyzing of his daughter’s appearance to speculate upon a “Mongol” ancestor in the family tree. (Did VW give credence to the popular idea of the Yellow Peril?) Richard only notices how lovely Elizabeth looks in her pink frock. Earlier in the day, Richard had wanted to tell his wife he loved her, but couldn’t find the words. Now there is the reverse situation with Elizabeth, when he expresses his feelings towards her without having intended to. “Richard was proud of his daughter. And he had not meant to tell her, but he could not help telling her. He had looked at her, he said, and he had wondered, who is that lovely girl? and it was his daughter! That did make her happy.”
One thing I intended to convey in my discussion of the party (but which I accidentally left out) was also how the party makes for a frivolous 'papering over' of the recent past and the collective trauma of war - but Septimus's death shows that violent past very much in evidence just below the surface, at times tearing through.
I'd like to say how monstrously enjoyable and intellectually stimulating I've found this whole discussion. I first read "Mrs. Dalloway" a year or so ago and thought it was a book I'd have to come back to some day, and the VW Reading Group offered the perfect opportunity to do so. So, many thanks to Tash for hosting this whole shenanigan and providing her own knowledge and insights into the writings of Virginia Woolf.
And many thanks as well to Alyssa the Nerdy Nurse and her weekly newsletter, without which I would never have heard of, let alone thought to look for, the VW Reading Group.
I'm so glad Tom. Thanks for joining in! I've so enjoyed reading your comments on the book.
Happy Canada Day!
Thanks, Tash!
Have we talked about Clarissa looking at the old lady in the window like she’s her future.?
Oh! Excellent point! I never even thought of that angle, even though I've noticed how much the characters live in the past; except perhaps for nineteen-year-old Maisie Johnson "up from Edinburgh two days ago"--why not down from Edinburgh?
Anyway, Maisie, on her first trip to London imagines herself as an old woman fifty years in the future, thinking back to that day in Regent's Park when she saw that couple--Septimus and Rezia--sitting in chairs, the man "looking queer" and the young woman "seeming foreign". That's what she thinks will stick in her memory by the time Watergate is in the news.
I thought of Clarissa looking at the old lady across the way, but not knowing anything about her, as an example of the impersonal nature of modern day urban life: not knowing your neighbors even though you might live next to them for fifty years. But I agree that she could well be Clarissa's own future ghostly doppelganger. In that case, does Clarissa's future self look across the way and see her younger self?
If the old lady is her future then death has always been at the party. Clarissa is constantly thinking about death and aging. But perhaps Septimus is death made real?
I also thought about the relationship between strangers. We may no know each other but we impact each other, we’re connected in someway. Clarissa doesn’t know Septimus but his death infiltrates her party. I don’t quite know how to phrase what I’m thinking.
Maybe it's the Covid? Kidding, sort of. I think I know what you mean, though, about strangers affecting strangers, something like the butterfly effect, maybe?
Now I suddenly thought of Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death". Clarissa's party may be her way of putting off thoughts of death, just as Prince Prospero has a party to celebrate keeping the Red Death out of his palace. But the Red Death appears in the midst of the Prince's party anyway, just as death does when the Bradshaws begin talking of Septimus's suicide. And Clarissa has to go off by herself to compose herself, and also think of how Septimus died, and almost feel the spikes going through her own body, just as she imagines other people's ways of dying when she hears about them. Clarissa seeing her older self in the future ... it reminds me of a French film I watched yesterday, "Petite Maman".
We’re all connected by the common thread of the finiteness a life. None of us will escape this fate. Every death is a reminder of our own mortality.
And yes, covid has made me slower than I was before. But it is getting better.
Love this: 'We’re all connected by the common thread of the finiteness a life.'
Exactly!
As a nurse, no one would know that better than you; the finiteness of life, I mean. I admire tremendously the work you nurses do. Every time I go for bloodwork, I always tell the nurse as she slides the needle into my arm, "I hardly felt that", just as a small way of letting her--or sometimes him--know that they're good at what they do. Glad to hear you're getting over your Covid.
Powerful memento mori, right in the middle of the party (life).
I think you've phrased it very well! Actually Ronald also discussed that theme of people not knowing one another in his comment below (or above?).
And that's interesting about the old lady through the window - I hadn't thought about her at all but I like that idea of her representing Clarissa's future. I also couldn't help but see that contrast of the individual vs group. You have Clarissa, her house full of people, looking across at a woman all alone.
There's an interesting parallel when Septimus commits suicide - an old man stops and stares at him - in an earlier manuscript the old man was looking across at Septimus through a window (as with the later scene with Clarissa), but in the final version, he's on the stairs.
"In her notes about the novel in November 1922, Woolf wrote: ‘Suppose the idea of the book is the contrast between life and death.’ ‘All must bear finally upon the party,’ she wrote in another note, ‘which expresses life in every variety & full of conviction..."
This is the heart of it for me, the theme. Yes, Woolf struggled mightily, I'd say heroically and fiercely, against her recurring mental breakdowns, so for her, this idea of contrast is crucial. She was literally navigating the abyss between sanity and insanity -- the ultimate contrast. And when she was in "sanity" mode, she was pure genius, able to render for the rest of us what this experience was like for her in using the metaphor of the party -- everything bears upon the party, every bit as much as when Hector is entering the arena, knowing he will lose to Achilles. But the fight must go on.
The party must go on.
This is the thematic crux upon which all of Woolf's novels rotate, and rotate they do, from one character to another, as she attempts to locate moments of being, moments of honesty, intimacy, of truth, in life itself. Thank you so much, Tash, for taking us all on this lovely trip through one of the most important minds of the 20th Century. And if you want to proceed toward "To the Lighthouse," I'm all in (smile).
But then of course, I will be from now on, in whatever other wonderful book you surprise us with! (There are so many, right? And only one lifetime!)
Ach! So so many and only one lifetime. Too true.
Yes, I think I find this novel of hers particularly compelling because in it she describes in such detail (through Septimus) her experience of severe mental illness - rendering in fiction those shades of sanity and insanity all overlaying each other and coming forward and backward in consciousness.
Thanks for taking part, Nancy! If we proceed with To the Lighthouse (which is still my intention, though it might take a little while to get there) I will have to consult you as a subject matter expert!
Sometimes writers write their way into a novel. They inhabit a particular character. If we apply this to Mrs. D., I would agree with you that Woolf is taking up residence in the character of Septimus. Woolf is Septimus, perhaps foreshadowing her own suicide.....
Hello all.
So happy to have found this VW reading group tonight thru @footnotesandtangents Thank you for taking the plunge Tash!
I am in Canada in the Great Lakes region. Either my secondary and post secondary education - Business degree- was lacking or I was sleeping since I have read only a handful of classics.
Now in my much later years I am on a literature quest! Read my first Virginia Woolf last summer - Mrs Dalloway then Orlando. Loved both!!
Yesterday I began listening to To the Lighthouse and realize I need a live book 😊 to ponder images, her sentences and make notes.
Looking forward to reading with all of you for a richer experience.
Very glad you found us Christine! Look forward to reading with you.
I'm still figuring out when and how I'm going to do To the Lighthouse, but of course I'll let you all know as soon as I've got a plan!
sounds good - enjoy your weekend!
As far as Richard goes, I thought he was a bit of a humourless—his worst offence—stuffed-shirt prig at the beginning of the novel, but I warmed to his character as the story proceeded. I liked his interest in social justice causes, especially that scene where he fumes at the police for letting young children cross the street without escorting them to make sure they were safe.
There’s also the scene where Richard is walking through a park on his way home and sees a “female vagrant” reclining on the grass. At first, he views her condescendingly as a “poor creature”, but as he looks at the woman more closely, her essential humanity and individual personality come into focus—“impudent, loose-lipped, humorous” with her own ability “to observe curiously”—that is, to observe Richard curiously just as Richard is observing her—"to speculate boldly, to consider the whys and wherefores”, much as Richard does himself when considering, for example, “the problem of the female vagrant”.
Richard continues on his way past the woman lying on the grass, but “still there was time for a spark between them”, a moment of genuine person-to-person connection: “she laughed at the sight of him, he smiled good humouredly”. As we know from the plight of the homeless in our own day, that could well have been the only interaction with another human being the woman had that day, that week, or longer. I like that Richard has enough respect for the woman to acknowledge her presence, to look at her and give her a good-humoured smile, rather than walk by her expressionless and unseeing, with a distracted air and his eyes focused on the middle distance, as we often do with the urban homeless in our own time.
Briefly…this, as per Tom below, this has indeed been monstrously enjoyable and intellectually stimulating.
Time presses…but Indid want today one thing re Tash’s excellent point re the wind: in Greece there is a saying that the wind makes you mad. I think it is very true. Quite how it applies to Mrs D, I haven’t quite thought through. And, unfortunately, don’t have time at the moment.
Hopefully, I can come back and join Tash and everyone.
In the meantime, cheers to all for such a good experience.
On not knowing people: A lot of the time people are being described through the minds of other people, and a lot of the time those other people get it wrong! This struck me quite early on, then I found it explicit in the memory (perhaps faulty!) of Peter's of what Clarissa and he discussed on top of a bus long ago: "The feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could htey know each other?" (At point 75% in my Kindle.)
Notably: Peter thinks that Septimus and Rezia are lovers having a quarrel; Richard believes that Clarissa understands his gift of roses as a declaration of love; the two doctors assert their understanding of Septimus (and contradict each other); Clarissa's understanding of her daughter Elizabeth so different from Elizabeth's on experience on a different bus (the Strand rather than Shaftesbury Avenue). I was tending to think this, our partial and mistaken understanding of each other, was what the book is "about". But concluded rather that it's more part of VW's 'Modernist' technique , a core part of how she's telling the story.
But the big exception is where Clarissa, through intuition alone, in her solitary moment at her party, does understand and share the final experience of Septimus, his vision of beauty in Regent's Park. Flagged even more by their shared quotation 'Fear no more' 'Fear no more the heat o' the sun' from Cymbeline.
And this is also flagged by a quotation from the Shaftesbury Avenue bus pulled out by a commenter on the previous posting: "Our apprations, 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." Indeed, the unseen part of Septimus does 'somehow attach' to Clarissa. [Sorry, can't track down who that commenter was, but thank you whoever!]
And then I came across Clarissa using the same quotation much earlier on, in a less consequential moment, her disappointment at not being invited to Lady Bruton's lunch party. This might suggest reducing this to a 'shared sensibility' of Clarissa and Septimus. But I still think it's more than that, reluctant to downgrade Septimus to a mere 'mad avatar' of Clarissa.
Ah interesting. I seem to recall one of Clarissa's chief complaints about PW being how he is so utterly unaware of what others are thinking. And that one of Clarissa's strengths in her own mind is 'knowing people almost by instinct [...] If you put her in a room with some one, up went her back like a cat's; or she purred.' (It reminds me of Clarissa's dislike of Bradshaw - another instinctual reaction I think: 'But she did not know what it was about Sir William; what exactly she disliked. Only Richard agreed with her, 'didn't like his taste, didn't like his smell.')
But these are only instincts and the details of others thoughts and experiences remain largely unknown.
I can't help but think of that breakdown of understanding between Clarissa and Miss Kilman - you have that moment when Clarissa laughs as Elizabeth and Miss Kilman are leaving, and Miss Kilman takes great offense; and when Clarissa gives Miss Kilman gifts and hampers of food Miss Kilman seethes with indignation. Though despite their mutual lack of understanding, it's interesting that both feel pure and enduring hatred for the other. Their feelings are perfectly aligned. I wonder whether this is another example of Clarissa 'knowing people almost by instinct.' And although the details are misinterpreted, the wider factors are understood perfectly by each. Clarissa feels aggrieved at how Miss Kilman is stealing Elizabeth from her. Miss Kilman feels pleased to be stealing Elizabeth from Clarissa. They both compete for the same prize. Meanwhile, Elizabeth is her own person with her own agency.
Which then makes me think of Elizabeth. She and Clarissa are so different and struggle to know each other. Whereas Elizabeth and Richard are much more on the same wavelength.
It was Tom, 28th June in previous post comments. Thanks, Tom!
On the afternoon of the party, Richard carries a bouquet of red and white roses home to Clarissa, fully intending to tell her that he loves her, “[b]ecause it is a thousand pities never to say what one feels, he thought”. When the moment comes, however, Richard finds he is speechless and he simply holds out the roses for Clarissa to take from his hands without saying a word.
For her part, the sight of Richard bearing flowers immediately makes Clarissa think of how she had “failed him, once at Constantinople”. It seems reasonable to conclude that Clarissa’s failure consisted of not responding to her husband’s sexual overtures, or of being unable to “feel what men felt” except when “she could not resist sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman”, a woman such as Sally Seton whom she recalls kissing her on the mouth one summer evening long ago at Bourton, which Clarissa thinks of as “the most exquisite moment of her whole life”.
At first reading, I thought that Richard’s inability to tell his wife he loves her was due to the discomfort many men feel in discussing their emotions, and his being a representative of the stiff upper lip class of British gentlemen. But then it seemed much more likely that Richard is well aware of Clarissa’s reluctance to give way to what she thinks of in one moment as “Horrible passion!” He is sensitive to the possibility that Clarissa will perceive his bouquet of roses, or any gift from him, as a sign that he is still sexually aroused by her.
Knowing how uncomfortable this will make Clarissa feel, he refrains from making the situation worse for her by speaking the words, “I love you”, trusting that, “She understood; she understood without his speaking; his Clarissa”. As far as having a physical relationship with his wife goes, Richard must content himself with holding hands: “He held her hand. Happiness is this, he thought.” And just so Clarissa won’t panic when he leaves the room and returns with a pillow and a quilt, ‘“An hour’s complete rest after luncheon,” he said. And he went.”’
With this apparent anxiety about intimacy, at least with Richard, one wonders how Clarissa ever came to be the mother of Elizabeth in the first place. But I think part of this desire to distance herself emotionally from other people is a development of Clarissa’s mature years. It’s the one thing she shares with Peter Walsh and Sally Seton, the belief that their happiness lies in devoting themselves to themselves, of enjoying the passing moment to the fullest, even to the extent of partially withdrawing their emotional investment from people who have the power to cause them disappointment or grief.
Perhaps what I liked best about Richard is the loving and uncomplicated relationship he has with his daughter Elizabeth. Watching Elizabeth and Richard at Clarissa’s party, Sally tells Peter, “one can see they are devoted to each other.” There almost seems to be a mysterious unseen emotional connection between father and daughter, for “Elizabeth had felt him [Richard] looking at her as she talked to Willie Titcomb.” Her response is to walk over to her father and stand beside him as the last guests leave the party.
For Richard, unlike Clarissa, there is no analyzing of his daughter’s appearance to speculate upon a “Mongol” ancestor in the family tree. (Did VW give credence to the popular idea of the Yellow Peril?) Richard only notices how lovely Elizabeth looks in her pink frock. Earlier in the day, Richard had wanted to tell his wife he loved her, but couldn’t find the words. Now there is the reverse situation with Elizabeth, when he expresses his feelings towards her without having intended to. “Richard was proud of his daughter. And he had not meant to tell her, but he could not help telling her. He had looked at her, he said, and he had wondered, who is that lovely girl? and it was his daughter! That did make her happy.”