'Heavens! The front-door bell!' exclaimed Clarissa...

A CLOSE LOOK at the scene in which we first meet Peter Walsh.

Hello friends!

Today (a little belatedly) a CLOSE LOOK at the scene in which Peter Walsh appears in the flesh, back from India, and pays Clarissa a visit.

Before we start, how are you going? Keeping up? It’s difficult for me to gauge, but I have to assume that, by about halfway, some of you will have fallen behind the reading schedule. It’s only natural — life is busy!

The good thing about today’s post is that it covers a scene from relatively early in the book (in my edition it starts on p 39) so even if you have fallen behind, you can probably still read and enjoy this post. And, of course, it’s also open to you to come back to these posts later and follow them at your own pace.

A CLOSE LOOK at the scene between Peter and Clarissa

Let me start by acknowledging how difficult it is to write about Woolf’s novels. Her writing is so abundant and my writing about her writing feels meagre by comparison. I want to gush at all the richness I see in Mrs Dalloway, all the layers and leitmotifs and poetry, but somehow as I try to hose my thoughts onto the page they arrive thinly; an ineffectual dribble! Perhaps there is a kink somewhere in my mind.

But there you have it. Let’s begin.

First impressions; Clarissa older; Peter Walsh just the same

Peter Walsh is back from India. He bursts in on Clarissa mending her dress in the drawing room. ‘She’s grown older,’ he thinks when he sees her. ‘I shan’t tell her anything about it, he thought, for she’s grown older.’ Whereas, Clarissa has the opposite impression of Peter Walsh:

Exactly the same, thought Clarissa; the same queer look; the same check suit; a little out of the straight his face is, a little thinner, dryer, perhaps, but he looks awfully well, and just the same.

Clarissa and Peter are the same age, so these different impressions of one another give an impression of time passing differently for each. Clarissa is the more aged. They are at different life stages. Peter will soon reveal that he is engaged to be married to a younger woman with two small children. Clarissa, on the other hand, feels she is long passed all that. Earlier, walking along Bond Street, she thinks of how:

She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them up Bond Street, this being Mrs Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs Richard Dalloway.

Time and memory

These differing experiences of time are further emphasised by how each relates to the past. Clarissa seems to orient herself towards Bourton and her youth when life was vital and contingent, while Peter orients himself towards the present and future (he needs to secure a divorce for his fiancee; he has plans to marry).

Strangely, one of the first things Clarissa says to Peter is: ‘Do you remember how the blinds used to flap at Bourton?’ It’s an odd remark and comes out of the blue. It’s telling that Clarissa turns immediately to the past.

For Clarissa, it’s a happy memory, for Peter a conflicted one, for it brings to mind breakfasting alone with Clarissa’s father who didn’t like him. Then Clarissa blunders.

‘But [Father] never liked anyone who—our friends,’ said Clarissa; and could have bitten her tongue for thus reminding Peter that he had wanted to marry her.

It’s too late. Peter is reminded of his grief at Clarissa’s rejection of him.

For why go back like this to the past? he thought. Why make him think of it again? Why make him suffer, when she had tortured him so infernally? Why?

But Clarissa continues to recall the past. ‘Do you remember the lake?’ she asks and imagines herself on the shores of the lake, showing her parents her life — what she has made of it:

For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents, and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, ‘This is what I have made of it! This!’

Again there is a sense of life having passed (no more marrying, no more having of children) and of the lake at Bourton representing a lost and mythical home. (‘‘Herbert has it now,’ she said. ‘I never go there now,’ she said.’) It exists in memory where deceased parents dwell and time folds back. But Peter does not wish to be oriented towards the past:

Stop! Stop! he wanted to cry. For he was not old; his life was not over; not by any means. He was only just past fifty.

We see this contrast between them again later in the scene when, after Peter has announced that he is engaged to be married, Clarissa thinks:

It was all over for her. The sheet was stretched and the bed narrow. She had gone up into the tower alone and left them blackberrying in the sun. The door had shut, and there among the dust of fallen plaster and the litter of birds’ nests how distant the view had looked, and the sounds came thin and chill (once on Leith Hill, she remembered), and Richard, Richard! she cried, as a sleeper in the night starts and stretches a hand in the dark for help.

Here again, the image of the narrow bed, along with a feeling of withdrawal from life, seclusion in a tower high up and far from life’s bright vitality. There is the stark contrast between life and good health (those ‘blackberrying in the sun’) and illness and ageing (a retreat into a tower ‘among the dust of fallen plaster and the litter of birds’ nests’ — the living element, birds, is absent). These are the thoughts of someone who is in close contact with her mortality.

Pointed things: Peter Walsh’s pocket knife; Clarissa’s scissors, needle

So what’s going on with that pocket knife? Really. I’m asking. I want to know. Is it what it appears to be — some sort of phallic symbol, a symbol of virility or even sexual frustration (he often appears frustrated when he opens and shuts it). Certainly, he displays sexual interest. He immediately tunes into Lucy the maid when she briefly enters the room — ‘charming, slender, graceful she looked, he thought’ — and later will follow a woman through the streets of London until she enters a house.

Clarissa, by contrast, is armed with scissors at first, then a needle as she mends her dress — tools of domesticity, tools to sever and bind. She is irritated by Peter’s knife:

For Heaven’s sake, leave your knife alone! she cried to herself in irrepressible irritation; it was his silly unconventionality, his weakness; his lack of the ghost of a notion what any one else was feeling that annoyed her, had always annoyed her; and now at his age, how silly!

Battle metaphor

Soon Peter and Clarissa enter a battle of wills. We have perhaps been primed to think of battles by an earlier moment when Clarissa returns home from buying the flowers:

[Lucy], taking Mrs Dalloway’s parasol, handled it like a sacred weapon which a Goddess, having acquitted herself honourably in the field of battle, sheds, and placed it in the umbrella stand.'

But now Peter has disturbed Clarissa in a moment of private repose.

But I too, she thought, and, taking up her needle, summoned, like a Queen whose guards have fallen asleep and left her unprotected (she had been quite taken aback by this visit—it had upset her) so that any one can stroll in and have a look at her where she lies with the brambles curving over her, summoned to her help the things she did; the things she liked; her husband; Elizabeth; her self, in short, which Peter hardly knew now, all to come about her and beat off the enemy.

The imagery here is so very lovely — Clarissa’s vision of herself as a Queen left unprotected by her guards, of herself at her repose ‘with the brambles curving over her’. (This called up an image of Rip Van Winkle for me, which is somewhat apt — Clarissa asleep and dreaming always of her life twenty years earlier.)

Clarissa now arrays her forces around her. She has sensed Peter’s judgement of her, of her life. As usual, he has made her feel frivolous, empty-headed, ‘a mere silly chatterbox.’ She must fight back.

So before the battle begins, the horses paw the ground; toss their heads; the light shines on their flanks; their necks curve. So Peter Walsh and Clarissa, sitting side by side on the blue sofa, challenged each other.

And now Peter must do the same, must amass his own forces. For he has also felt Clarissa’s judgement upon him, has recognised that Clarissa and Richard must view him as a failure.

His powers chafed and tossed in him. He assembled from different quarters all sorts of things; praise; his career at Oxford; his marriage, which she knew nothing whatever about; how he had loved; and altogether done his job.

A garland

We reach a climax, but at the critical moment Peter lays a figurative garland at Clarissa’s feet — he tells her he is in love with Daisy. There is an interesting repeating theme here involving offerings of flowers. First we have Peter laying this figurative garland before Clarissa, the garland comprising his love of another woman (appropriately named ‘Daisy’). Soon, though, Peter will burst into tears. His love for Clarissa, his grief at her rejection, is still near the surface. They have both been skirting around it during the entire encounter. (Peter’s grief is likened to a moon; Clarissa ‘still had the power as she came across the room, to make the moon, which he detested, rise at Bourton on the terrace in the summer sky.’)

Later, we will have Richard arriving to present Clarissa with roses (he bears them like a weapon) — he wants desperately to tell Clarissa that he loves her but, in the event, is unable to. Clarissa accepts the flowers kindly, but seemingly with little passion: ‘She understood; she understood without his speaking; his Clarissa.’

And in a strange, grotesque iteration, we will have pompous Hugh Whitbread presenting grand Lady Bruton with a bunch of carnations. At first Lady Bruton holds them ‘rather stiffly with much the same attitude with which the General held the scroll in the picture behind her’. Though a short while later, when Hugh obliges her by assisting with a difficult task, Lady Bruton ‘who seldom did a graceful thing, stuffed all Hugh’s carnations into the front of her dress, and flinging her hands out called him ‘My Prime Minister!’’

A moment of high emotion

Peter Walsh has confessed to Clarissa that he is in love with Daisy, a married woman he has met in India. He knows that Clarissa must judge him.

I know what I’m up against, he thought, running his finger along the blade of his knife, Clarissa and Dalloway and all the rest of them; but I’ll show Clarissa—and then to his utter surprise, suddenly thrown by those uncontrollable forces thrown through the air, he burst into tears; wept; wept without the least shame, sitting on the sofa, the tears running down his cheeks.

Later he will think: ‘That was what tortured him, that was what came over him when he saw Clarissa so calm, so cold, so intent on her dress or whatever it was; realising that she might have spared him, what she had reduced him to—a whimpering, snivelling old ass.’ And Clarissa seems to experience a similar line of thinking about the ‘what ifs’ of her life. When Peter weeps, she thinks: ‘If I had married him, this gaiety would have been mine all day!’

Clarissa leans forward and takes his hand and kisses him — and experiences a moment of intensity.

[Clarissa] […] actually had felt his face on hers before she could down the brandishing of silver-flashing plumes like pampas grass in a tropic gale in her breast…

But soon Clarissa’s daughter, Elizabeth, arrives and Clarissa and Peter are brought firmly back to the present. Elizabeth stands as incontrovertible evidence of the life Clarissa has actually lived and immediately the what-might’ve-beens are extinguished and the world returns to its usual colours.

Two final observations

First, I want to note how much the characters — their feelings and moods — change from moment to moment. This is not a case of this person is happy and that person is angry. No, every moment is marked by dynamism. Clarissa and Peter are by turns cheerful, irritated, nostalgic, defensive, emotional, at ease. The plotting of this scene is attuned to every modulation of the characters’ inner lives.

Second, I wanted to remind you of what I said in my first post about Woolf’s writing being so clogged with things — her talent for describing fleeting emotional states concretely. Look through the pages of this scene and note the richness of the imagery, the abundance Woolf has assembled. Two people have sat in a room together and yet we have encountered rampaging armies, moons rising over terraces, towers, lakes, birds’ nests, people blackberrying, Queens, brambles, garlands, statues, silver-flashing plumes, gloves and opera glasses, and so much more!

What’s next?

I invite you to share your own thoughts below, if you’d like to! Though it’s perfectly fine if you’d rather not! Just reading along is adequate!

Next, please read to the end of the novel and I’ll meet you back here on 28 JUNE. (Ten more days!) That’s right — I am leaving you in peace for a while. But I think it’s good to have some time alone with a book and not always have my voice in your ears. Take your time over it. Enjoy the vivid world Woolf has created and we will reassemble soon!