To me Peter's knife is a symbol of his own insecurities, he has this deep urge to be always on the offense, to strike before his enemies can. He needs to be in control. He's ashamed of failing at Oxford and feels out of place at Bourton, so he overcompensates by acting superior to the posh, conservative elites around him, putting on a socialist persona (despite being a literal colonizer for the British Empire), taunting Richard Dalloway for reading the Morning Post (Richard actually reads the Times) etc.
With Clarissa he's always on the attack too, despite being desperately in love with her, because he's desperately in love with her. He can't help himself. It's like he's putting her to test, she needs to prove him she's not like the other shallow people at Bourton and that she loves him and only him. He's so insecure he absolutely expects her to betray him, so he needs to check and check again that her eye doesn't wander. He decides she's gonna choose Richard over himself and basically pushes her into his arms. "Tell me the truth, tell me the truth," he intimates at the fountain, he wants her to confess that she loves Richard (if he wasn't so much in his own head he would have realized Sally was a bigger danger at this point). This is when Clarissa knows that being with him is going to be impossible, and mind you, she does love him and she'll regret this decision, but it's not sustainable to have a partner you always need to reassure, a partner that doesn't trust you and has to go to battle against you at every interaction.
Peter is proud to look at the future and never at the past, it's ironic because understanding his past would help overcome his own immaturity. Woolf calls him a child more than once, a child waving at his old nurse, a child walking on the park, a baby asleep near the knitting woman. And that breathtaking parallel with the teen soldiers leaving a wreath in front of a memorial like he left his wreath in front of the ideal of a woman. He loves Clarissa because she's maternal, she's full of love and joy and she's willing to hug him and let him cry and comfort him, but that's silly. He's an adult. Why he even burst into into tears he doesn't know, it must be Clarissa's fault, we all know women are sentimental like that. What was his own mother like, I wonder.
Ah, how interesting. I like that idea of the pocket knife being a symbol of insecurity. That brings added weight and poignancy to this moment right before he bursts into tears: '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 Clarissa refers to the pocket knife as being a feature of PW's unconventionality - which is another defensive manoeuvre on PW's part I think. Being 'unconventional' allows PW leeway, allows him to armour himself against societal expectation, against charges of failure from the Clarissas and Dalloways.
I agree with you that Clarissa does love Peter, inasmuch as she's capable of fully loving anyone, and that she'll regret not marrying him, as he'd be the sort of husband willing and able to express his love for her "most ardently" in way Richard does not.
I think of Clarissa coming home from her shopping trip to find that Richard has accepted Lady Bruton's invitation to lunch and gone without her. She feels the "shock" of Lady Bruton excluding her from her invitation, and is hurt that Richard has gone without her. Whatever faults Peter may have, I find it difficult to imagine him acting as Richard did. After receiving such a solo invitation to come to lunch at Lady Bruton's, I think Peter would have RSVPed by informing Lady Bruton that he and Clarissa would be pleased to attend.
At the same time, I agree that Peter would have been a high maintenance partner.
I'm with you on the density of VW against any commentary of ours. I hoped to make my comments on 'The Symbol' shorter than the 1200 word story itself. Failed (1500 words). And still only scratched the surface of some gossip... (About Mountains on Wednesday for Woolf's 'The Symbol')
Peter's knife: given the severe warning in VW's letter to Roger Fry I'm very wary of seeing anything as a symbol. Phallic or otherwise. I see the needles scissors ✂️ and knife as metaphorical weapons. Asleep under the brambles - Sleeping Beauty surely?
Richard's roses: R knows Clarissa will understand the roses as the declaration of love he can't bring himself to make. But she doesn't, not really. Some wise person from an earlier post comment says the book is about that: how people think we understand each other but don't at all.
Oh, Sleeping Beauty! Ha. I suppose it's a reflection on the books I read most as a kid that I immediately thought of Rip!
Hmmm. About VW's purported dislike of symbols - I read over that quote you shared (it took me a while to find it!) and I'm not sure it's a total dismissal of the idea of symbols and archetypes. I felt that VW was simply saying that her writing practice does not involve lining up a whole lot of symbols and wedging them into the story - this would result in too heavy-handed an approach to making art. She says only that all sorts of feelings accrue and she refuses to think them out. I love this. And I think art can be ruined when it's intentionally loaded up with all these other meanings by the artist. It's too controlling of the reader and their autonomy and freedom to interpret. But that's the critical part - 'by the artist'. What about 'by the reader'? I think that thinking about symbols or 'the feelings that accrue' is a helpful way for readers to engage with a text like Mrs Dalloway, as long as we accept that there is no right interpretation of the pocket knife! We can think about 'the feelings that accrue' for us. We can find images and objects in the text and make them 'the deposit for our own emotions' - one of us 'thinking it means one thing, another another.'
Well Rip van W not so much part of our awareness here in UK. Though Sleeping Beauty is problematic - would seem to imply Clarissa is expecting some kind of sexual awakening from Peter. Really??
On VW's attitude to symbolic interpretation (specificially of the lighthouse in To the Lighthouse) the link is here http://www.woolfonline.com/?node=content/contextual/transcriptions&project=1&parent=48&taxa=49&content=6374&pos=27 or Google "I meant nothing by the lighthouse" with the inverted commas. VW acknowledges that readers have placed and will place will place symbolic interpretations on her lighthouse. But "directly I’m told what a thing means, it becomes hateful to me", I do read that as a pretty definite repudiation of such interpretataions... But then, I'm already in a position of preferring not to interpret A as a symbolic representation of B, so maybe I'm reading too much into this.
Anyway I think we're saying the same thing: the pocket knife has associations, and metaphorical value, without having to be a coded stand-in for something else.
Hey Ronald and Tash, for me the knife is a problem. I think, Tash, it’s because of the point you make about VW about not things up and then getting them into the text; because, it reads a bit like that to me. Which is weird. I just asked myself why on earth is this guy, this grown up guy, messing around with his knife like a runaway from Swallows and Amazons. It really jars for me, maybe the only aspect of the story that does Unless, it’s about trying to summon up the Peter of the past, but even then…he was hardly likely to sit down for breakfast with Clarissa’s dad and start messing around with his pocket knife.
One of the things, for me, in reading Woolf (the novelist, not the essayist…or, eg, on the basis of The Symbol the short storyist) is how lumpen my mind can feel in the face of hers. It’s an almost physical sensation: it’s sometimes not comfortable to stomp through her pages in a pair of size ten boots. Interesting, yes, but not always easy.
it looks like I get the first go at this - given it's the middle of the night in Australia just now...
My Dad aged 99 used to constantly fiddle with his Swiss army knife, so I don't find this so odd (and I'm a fan of Swallows & Amazons for that matter). (It's very natural that Peter should carry a pocket knife, a 1920s gentleman usually would.) Tash thinks the knife might be a phallic symbol, I think it might be a metaphorical weapon, but I bet if we were able to ask VW she'd say it was just part of what Peter W does, of who he is. We know she used observations of her family and acquaintance to incorporate into her characters, I'd guess this was some quirk of a friend of hers that she found was right for Peter.
If I saw this in a real-life person, I'd be suspecting possibly a sign of insecurity.
I do find Peter an unattractive character, very self centred, class-conscious even by the standards of middle class 1920s, and by today's standards a sexual predator (dubious even within 1920s morality). If he does feel a bit insecure in himself and defensive, so he jolly well should! Peter thinks he would have made a wonderful husband for Clarissa but i don't think we the readers should necessarily share that opinion. I certainly don't...
Well put! You pretty much said everything I would have Ronald.
I think I possibly have a slightly more charitable view of Peter, though I agree that he probably would not have made a very good husband for Clarissa.
Hey, yes I get the 1920s gentleman carrying his pocket knife thing; and, I think I’m with you on it as VW’s writerly way of adding dimensions to Peter as a character: all those additional bits of information writers give readers.
And yes, Peter is unattractive as a character…self satisfied in that unquestioning way one imagines was typical of the period.
I agree. The only thing I would add (to support points made by you Nicolas and Ronald) is that there is evidence VW based Peter in part on her cousin Harry Stephen who had retired from the Indian Civil Service near the end of the war. In her diary, VW wrote that Harry Stephen was 'an undoubted failure...He still takes out an enormous pocket knife, & slowly half opens the blade, & shuts it.'
So there was a real person in VW's life who had a pocket knife that he played with. The pocket knife is not invented just for Mrs Dalloway but was, as Ronald guessed, something she incorporated from observations of a family member.
I actually find Peter to be a sympathetic character. From personal experience, I know what it’s like to be an aging male with all the associated worries—about getting older, about looking older, about declining virility, being less attractive to women, with the occasional yearning for the ghost of a lost love or two thrown into the mix and haunting the halls of your memory.
As I said in another comment, Peter following an attractive young woman down the street to her home is definitely “creepy” behaviour, but I don’t think that makes him a sexual predator. A sexual predator is usually defined as someone who commits violent sexual offences, and I haven’t come across anything in the text to suggest Peter is guilty of such behaviour.
Certainly, Peter has an eye for attractive young women, but even Richard Dalloway walking through a park on his way home with an armful of roses for Clarissa has time for a look and a brief exchange with a female vagrant lying on the grass: “Richard Dalloway approached her; intent he passed her; still there was time for a spark between them—she laughed at the sight of him, he smiled good humouredly, considering the problem of the female vagrant; not that they would ever speak.” I can’t help but think that Richard could have considered ‘the problem of the female vagrant’ without walking so close as to be within ‘sparking’ range of this particular example.
I thought of the brambles as representing Clarissa's own psychological defenses against too great an intimacy with Peter, or possibly anyone else. As I recall, towards the end of the novel Clarissa decides that you can have love or happiness, but not both. So the brambles could be her defense against the power of love in order to preserve her own happiness.
Fascinating, and not at all meager. The curving brambles made me think of Millais' painting of Ophelia, which doesn't make good sense, but there we are. I love your description of C's scissors & needle as "tools to sever and bind." Poetic.
Apologies for going off topic, Tash, but have you considered buying one of those medication dispensers used by many humans to ensure you don't overdose or underdose your dog, or yourself? I don't have one myself, but as I understand it, the plastic meds dispenser is subdivided into little compartments for each day of the week. At the start of the week, you fill up the compartments with the meds you will need to take for each day of the week. Then as the week progresses, you take your meds as needed. If you're unsure whether you've taken your meds on any particular day, all you have to do is check to see whether the compartment for that day is empty or full.
'She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now'. Woolf would have been gratified to learn how much things will change in the next hundred years ... yes?
I hope she would have been pleased that women are no longer chased out of libraries at Oxbridge! But I can't help feel that, notwithstanding all our gains thanks to the women's movement etc, women in middle age and later middle age still experience that feeling of being invisible and unseen...
It can also be a matter of being infantilized, such as when you're at a coffee shop--or shoppe--and the cashier calls you "Dear" or "Sweetie", as in, "Will that be all, dear?" or "Here's your change, sweetie". It's the same thing with grocery store cashiers. Sometimes I wonder whether the staff in such places are carrying out company policy, or maybe they're just trying to be friendly, but it can come across as condescending and patronizing, like a metaphorical pat on the head for being a good boy and not drinking out of the toilet.
Something that has nagged me a bit whenever I read it: "But [Father] never liked anyone who—our friends, ..." The nag: how many proposals did Clarissa have? Or suitors? I always assumed there was Peter, then Richard, with Sally tossed in as unimaginable. Maybe there were more (?).
It's amazing though it's lightly edited. Just so you know. I've listened to several chapters of it this morning.
But two things I wanted to address, with the first being this idea of these two characters playing with sharp objects -- Peter's pocket knife and Clarissa's scissors, as well as that needle she keeps piercing the fabric with (an aside here, too, about the fact that just like selecting the flowers herself, she is also mending this dress herself. I'm now paying closer attention to the duties Clarissa is taking on that would otherwise belong to the servants...). I love what Ellie is saying below about the knife being a kind of symbol for his own insecurities, albeit phallic, and he keeps opening it and closing it; he's not just leaving it be. He's playing with it. Or if not playing, it's a kind of patriarchal movement, back and forth, up and down (also sexual perhaps, because nowhere in Woolf's canon do we see blatant sex going on between men and women; it anything, it's more between women). But he's obviously anxious and uncomfortable. In contrast, Clarissa is at home with the scissors and needle. For her, these instruments represent the power to take back agency inasmuch as she is using them to mend something, her dress.
The other thing I wanted to bring up is something I think I brought up somewhere else previously, but it's this idea of how Woolf takes the everyday objects and activities of life and uses them to attain the same kind of valor we see in traditionally masculine texts/stories. Instead of guns, weapons, overt violence, we have these two characters sitting on a sofa while warlike images surround them. Even the flowers that Peter brings are likened to weapons. The horses are tossing their heads, they are pawing the ground; this sounds like an ensuing battle scene, yet it's the most domestic scene in the world, too. Very ordinary, two people having a discussion. But nothing for Woolf is simply one thing. All of life is contrast for her. So you have this symbolic battle scene cast against the background of an otherwise normal looking domestic experience. These sharp objects then also double as weapons in this symbolic war, and one has the distinct impression that only one of these characters is going to come out intact.
First of all, thank you for the link to the recording! Brilliant! And one of the segments covers exactly this scene!
Second, I'm really enjoying hearing how you're unpacking these scenes of domesticity, of Clarissa taking back agency, of being at home with needle and thread (while PW is not at home at all). But then this fascinating contrast between the setting (a drawing room, a woman mending a dress) and a battle - the warlike imagery, the sharp objects. And then at the end, Clarissa refers to the scene that's just finished as having been like a five act play. So you have a sort of marriage of the two (battle scene + indoor setting) finally in the reference to the play. '...it was as if the five acts of a play that had been very exciting and moving were now over and she had lived a lifetime in them and had run away, had lived with Peter, and it was now over.'
Yes, this is so cool, Tash. It's what I love most I think about Woolf. She uses the domain of the feminine and somehow elevates its importance, its significance -- she's basically saying this domain is every bit as relevant, significant, as any masculine realm, or way of being. She takes on the symbolism of warfare, of the ur-masculine domain and repurposes it, or appropriates it for her own use in a different context (that being the indoor domestic settings). It's a fascinating -- and rebellious -- act. But this is of course what she is also known for. That flying in the face of the patriarchy!
I was struck by the fact that Clarissa has chosen the Memoirs of Baron Marbot, a French General of Cavalry during the Napoleonic Wars, for her bedtime reading. “She had read late at night of the retreat from Moscow”, we are told, in her narrow bed in her attic room (shades of Mrs. Rochester!) because Richard had insisted “that she must sleep undisturbed.” Undisturbed by her husband’s company in bed, we assume, “[a]nd really she preferred to read of the retreat from Moscow. He knew it.” It must be tough to have a dead French general as a rival for your wife’s attention at the traditional canoodling time of day.
Coincidentally, with regard to the retreat from Moscow, it was on this day—June 24th—that Napoleon and his Grand Army crossed the River Nieman into Russia in the year 1812.
Speaking of Richard Dalloway, I wonder if VW knew that it was an inside joke in Jane Austen’s family that there was something inherently ridiculous about the name Richard. Thus, at the opening of “Northanger Abbey” we read of the heroine, Catherine Morland, that: “Her father was a clergyman … and a very respectable man, though his name was Richard—and he had never been handsome.”
I’m inclined to doubt whether VW would have placed Baron Marbot’s Memoirs in Clarissa’s hands if she hadn’t read them herself, or at least sampled them here and there. One reason for her interest in the Baron’s experiences might have been because the Napoleonic Wars were the last major cataclysmic event in European history on a scale to match the recent Great War, though the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars lasted over twenty years compared to the four years of the 1914 to 1918 global conflict. In fact, VW and her generation were about as distant—or as close—in time from the Napoleonic Wars as we are from the First World War.
There’s also the fact that the Baron’s Memoirs make quite interesting reading. They’re available on the Internet Archive where one can read the lively details of the Baron’s adventures in war and peace, including occasional meetings with the Emperor Napoleon himself while campaigning across Europe.
I have to admit that I was a little confused about the timeline of “Mrs. Dalloway”, or more precisely, about how much contact Clarissa and Peter have had with each other over the years. After his visit with Clarissa near the beginning of the novel, Peter goes for a stroll through Regent’s Park, where he remarks to himself on the changes he sees in London and Londoners “after five years”, meaning the five years he was away serving in India. These five years Peter specifies as “1918 to 1923”, so we know that “Mrs. Dalloway” takes place on a June day in 1923.
Peter seems to spend as much time as Clarissa reminiscing about the past, and it is from him that we learn that it was “that summer, early in the ‘nineties”—the year was 1893—when he was so in love with Clarissa that he asked her to marry him during one of his visits to her family’s summer home at Bourton. When Clarissa turns down Peter’s offer of marriage, Peter realizes, “It was over. He went away that night. He never saw her again.”
Never again? Really? To take Peter’s statement literally, it would have been a full three decades from the last time Clarissa saw Peter that summer evening at Bourton to the morning in June 1923 when he suddenly arrives at her door unannounced after his return from India. But during Peter’s visit with Clarissa, there is no sense that the pair have not seen each other for a full three decades. The observations they make about each other looking older are much more consistent with a five-year separation than a thirty-year one.
Later in the novel, we catch Peter “[l]ooking back over that long friendship of almost thirty years” when thinking of Clarissa, the “almost thirty years” seeming to apply to the time period after she rejected him that evening at Bourton, when the possibility of a romantic relationship between them was replaced by one of friendship. There is also the fact that Clarissa describes Peter’s letters as “awfully dull”, which clearly indicates continued correspondence between the two over the years. It seems strange to me, though, that Peter would write Clarissa such “dry sticks” of letters, unless he assumed that Richard would be reading them as well.
It’s also difficult not to think that Clarissa and Peter would have continued to travel in the same social circles, seeing each other occasionally at gatherings and social events, as well as keeping informed of each other through mutual friends and acquaintances. Would Clarissa and Richard have invited Peter to their wedding?
To me Peter's knife is a symbol of his own insecurities, he has this deep urge to be always on the offense, to strike before his enemies can. He needs to be in control. He's ashamed of failing at Oxford and feels out of place at Bourton, so he overcompensates by acting superior to the posh, conservative elites around him, putting on a socialist persona (despite being a literal colonizer for the British Empire), taunting Richard Dalloway for reading the Morning Post (Richard actually reads the Times) etc.
With Clarissa he's always on the attack too, despite being desperately in love with her, because he's desperately in love with her. He can't help himself. It's like he's putting her to test, she needs to prove him she's not like the other shallow people at Bourton and that she loves him and only him. He's so insecure he absolutely expects her to betray him, so he needs to check and check again that her eye doesn't wander. He decides she's gonna choose Richard over himself and basically pushes her into his arms. "Tell me the truth, tell me the truth," he intimates at the fountain, he wants her to confess that she loves Richard (if he wasn't so much in his own head he would have realized Sally was a bigger danger at this point). This is when Clarissa knows that being with him is going to be impossible, and mind you, she does love him and she'll regret this decision, but it's not sustainable to have a partner you always need to reassure, a partner that doesn't trust you and has to go to battle against you at every interaction.
Peter is proud to look at the future and never at the past, it's ironic because understanding his past would help overcome his own immaturity. Woolf calls him a child more than once, a child waving at his old nurse, a child walking on the park, a baby asleep near the knitting woman. And that breathtaking parallel with the teen soldiers leaving a wreath in front of a memorial like he left his wreath in front of the ideal of a woman. He loves Clarissa because she's maternal, she's full of love and joy and she's willing to hug him and let him cry and comfort him, but that's silly. He's an adult. Why he even burst into into tears he doesn't know, it must be Clarissa's fault, we all know women are sentimental like that. What was his own mother like, I wonder.
Ah, how interesting. I like that idea of the pocket knife being a symbol of insecurity. That brings added weight and poignancy to this moment right before he bursts into tears: '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 Clarissa refers to the pocket knife as being a feature of PW's unconventionality - which is another defensive manoeuvre on PW's part I think. Being 'unconventional' allows PW leeway, allows him to armour himself against societal expectation, against charges of failure from the Clarissas and Dalloways.
I agree with you that Clarissa does love Peter, inasmuch as she's capable of fully loving anyone, and that she'll regret not marrying him, as he'd be the sort of husband willing and able to express his love for her "most ardently" in way Richard does not.
I think of Clarissa coming home from her shopping trip to find that Richard has accepted Lady Bruton's invitation to lunch and gone without her. She feels the "shock" of Lady Bruton excluding her from her invitation, and is hurt that Richard has gone without her. Whatever faults Peter may have, I find it difficult to imagine him acting as Richard did. After receiving such a solo invitation to come to lunch at Lady Bruton's, I think Peter would have RSVPed by informing Lady Bruton that he and Clarissa would be pleased to attend.
At the same time, I agree that Peter would have been a high maintenance partner.
I'm with you on the density of VW against any commentary of ours. I hoped to make my comments on 'The Symbol' shorter than the 1200 word story itself. Failed (1500 words). And still only scratched the surface of some gossip... (About Mountains on Wednesday for Woolf's 'The Symbol')
Peter's knife: given the severe warning in VW's letter to Roger Fry I'm very wary of seeing anything as a symbol. Phallic or otherwise. I see the needles scissors ✂️ and knife as metaphorical weapons. Asleep under the brambles - Sleeping Beauty surely?
Richard's roses: R knows Clarissa will understand the roses as the declaration of love he can't bring himself to make. But she doesn't, not really. Some wise person from an earlier post comment says the book is about that: how people think we understand each other but don't at all.
Oh, Sleeping Beauty! Ha. I suppose it's a reflection on the books I read most as a kid that I immediately thought of Rip!
Hmmm. About VW's purported dislike of symbols - I read over that quote you shared (it took me a while to find it!) and I'm not sure it's a total dismissal of the idea of symbols and archetypes. I felt that VW was simply saying that her writing practice does not involve lining up a whole lot of symbols and wedging them into the story - this would result in too heavy-handed an approach to making art. She says only that all sorts of feelings accrue and she refuses to think them out. I love this. And I think art can be ruined when it's intentionally loaded up with all these other meanings by the artist. It's too controlling of the reader and their autonomy and freedom to interpret. But that's the critical part - 'by the artist'. What about 'by the reader'? I think that thinking about symbols or 'the feelings that accrue' is a helpful way for readers to engage with a text like Mrs Dalloway, as long as we accept that there is no right interpretation of the pocket knife! We can think about 'the feelings that accrue' for us. We can find images and objects in the text and make them 'the deposit for our own emotions' - one of us 'thinking it means one thing, another another.'
Well Rip van W not so much part of our awareness here in UK. Though Sleeping Beauty is problematic - would seem to imply Clarissa is expecting some kind of sexual awakening from Peter. Really??
On VW's attitude to symbolic interpretation (specificially of the lighthouse in To the Lighthouse) the link is here http://www.woolfonline.com/?node=content/contextual/transcriptions&project=1&parent=48&taxa=49&content=6374&pos=27 or Google "I meant nothing by the lighthouse" with the inverted commas. VW acknowledges that readers have placed and will place will place symbolic interpretations on her lighthouse. But "directly I’m told what a thing means, it becomes hateful to me", I do read that as a pretty definite repudiation of such interpretataions... But then, I'm already in a position of preferring not to interpret A as a symbolic representation of B, so maybe I'm reading too much into this.
Anyway I think we're saying the same thing: the pocket knife has associations, and metaphorical value, without having to be a coded stand-in for something else.
Hey Ronald and Tash, for me the knife is a problem. I think, Tash, it’s because of the point you make about VW about not things up and then getting them into the text; because, it reads a bit like that to me. Which is weird. I just asked myself why on earth is this guy, this grown up guy, messing around with his knife like a runaway from Swallows and Amazons. It really jars for me, maybe the only aspect of the story that does Unless, it’s about trying to summon up the Peter of the past, but even then…he was hardly likely to sit down for breakfast with Clarissa’s dad and start messing around with his pocket knife.
One of the things, for me, in reading Woolf (the novelist, not the essayist…or, eg, on the basis of The Symbol the short storyist) is how lumpen my mind can feel in the face of hers. It’s an almost physical sensation: it’s sometimes not comfortable to stomp through her pages in a pair of size ten boots. Interesting, yes, but not always easy.
it looks like I get the first go at this - given it's the middle of the night in Australia just now...
My Dad aged 99 used to constantly fiddle with his Swiss army knife, so I don't find this so odd (and I'm a fan of Swallows & Amazons for that matter). (It's very natural that Peter should carry a pocket knife, a 1920s gentleman usually would.) Tash thinks the knife might be a phallic symbol, I think it might be a metaphorical weapon, but I bet if we were able to ask VW she'd say it was just part of what Peter W does, of who he is. We know she used observations of her family and acquaintance to incorporate into her characters, I'd guess this was some quirk of a friend of hers that she found was right for Peter.
If I saw this in a real-life person, I'd be suspecting possibly a sign of insecurity.
I do find Peter an unattractive character, very self centred, class-conscious even by the standards of middle class 1920s, and by today's standards a sexual predator (dubious even within 1920s morality). If he does feel a bit insecure in himself and defensive, so he jolly well should! Peter thinks he would have made a wonderful husband for Clarissa but i don't think we the readers should necessarily share that opinion. I certainly don't...
Well put! You pretty much said everything I would have Ronald.
I think I possibly have a slightly more charitable view of Peter, though I agree that he probably would not have made a very good husband for Clarissa.
Well only just reached THE END and Peter's conduct at Clarissa's party redeems him somewhat.
Hey, yes I get the 1920s gentleman carrying his pocket knife thing; and, I think I’m with you on it as VW’s writerly way of adding dimensions to Peter as a character: all those additional bits of information writers give readers.
And yes, Peter is unattractive as a character…self satisfied in that unquestioning way one imagines was typical of the period.
I agree. The only thing I would add (to support points made by you Nicolas and Ronald) is that there is evidence VW based Peter in part on her cousin Harry Stephen who had retired from the Indian Civil Service near the end of the war. In her diary, VW wrote that Harry Stephen was 'an undoubted failure...He still takes out an enormous pocket knife, & slowly half opens the blade, & shuts it.'
So there was a real person in VW's life who had a pocket knife that he played with. The pocket knife is not invented just for Mrs Dalloway but was, as Ronald guessed, something she incorporated from observations of a family member.
I actually find Peter to be a sympathetic character. From personal experience, I know what it’s like to be an aging male with all the associated worries—about getting older, about looking older, about declining virility, being less attractive to women, with the occasional yearning for the ghost of a lost love or two thrown into the mix and haunting the halls of your memory.
As I said in another comment, Peter following an attractive young woman down the street to her home is definitely “creepy” behaviour, but I don’t think that makes him a sexual predator. A sexual predator is usually defined as someone who commits violent sexual offences, and I haven’t come across anything in the text to suggest Peter is guilty of such behaviour.
Certainly, Peter has an eye for attractive young women, but even Richard Dalloway walking through a park on his way home with an armful of roses for Clarissa has time for a look and a brief exchange with a female vagrant lying on the grass: “Richard Dalloway approached her; intent he passed her; still there was time for a spark between them—she laughed at the sight of him, he smiled good humouredly, considering the problem of the female vagrant; not that they would ever speak.” I can’t help but think that Richard could have considered ‘the problem of the female vagrant’ without walking so close as to be within ‘sparking’ range of this particular example.
Hey Tash, see my reply above to Ronald.
Good one! And sorry for my slow reply! Life is busy!
I thought of the brambles as representing Clarissa's own psychological defenses against too great an intimacy with Peter, or possibly anyone else. As I recall, towards the end of the novel Clarissa decides that you can have love or happiness, but not both. So the brambles could be her defense against the power of love in order to preserve her own happiness.
Interesting!
Fascinating, and not at all meager. The curving brambles made me think of Millais' painting of Ophelia, which doesn't make good sense, but there we are. I love your description of C's scissors & needle as "tools to sever and bind." Poetic.
Apologies for going off topic, Tash, but have you considered buying one of those medication dispensers used by many humans to ensure you don't overdose or underdose your dog, or yourself? I don't have one myself, but as I understand it, the plastic meds dispenser is subdivided into little compartments for each day of the week. At the start of the week, you fill up the compartments with the meds you will need to take for each day of the week. Then as the week progresses, you take your meds as needed. If you're unsure whether you've taken your meds on any particular day, all you have to do is check to see whether the compartment for that day is empty or full.
This sounds like very sage advice. Thank you Tom :)
I'm old enough to feel a sort of science fictiony tingle at the idea of being in instantaneous contact with someone on the other side of the world.
'She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now'. Woolf would have been gratified to learn how much things will change in the next hundred years ... yes?
I hope she would have been pleased that women are no longer chased out of libraries at Oxbridge! But I can't help feel that, notwithstanding all our gains thanks to the women's movement etc, women in middle age and later middle age still experience that feeling of being invisible and unseen...
Yes, exactly! Sorry, I was being (too subtly) facetious.
Haha. Oh darn! I thought you were but couldn't tell!
It can also be a matter of being infantilized, such as when you're at a coffee shop--or shoppe--and the cashier calls you "Dear" or "Sweetie", as in, "Will that be all, dear?" or "Here's your change, sweetie". It's the same thing with grocery store cashiers. Sometimes I wonder whether the staff in such places are carrying out company policy, or maybe they're just trying to be friendly, but it can come across as condescending and patronizing, like a metaphorical pat on the head for being a good boy and not drinking out of the toilet.
Something that has nagged me a bit whenever I read it: "But [Father] never liked anyone who—our friends, ..." The nag: how many proposals did Clarissa have? Or suitors? I always assumed there was Peter, then Richard, with Sally tossed in as unimaginable. Maybe there were more (?).
Good point!
There is so much to say here, folks, but to begin, my best friend sent me a link to an audio version that I'll paste here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0013r0z
It's amazing though it's lightly edited. Just so you know. I've listened to several chapters of it this morning.
But two things I wanted to address, with the first being this idea of these two characters playing with sharp objects -- Peter's pocket knife and Clarissa's scissors, as well as that needle she keeps piercing the fabric with (an aside here, too, about the fact that just like selecting the flowers herself, she is also mending this dress herself. I'm now paying closer attention to the duties Clarissa is taking on that would otherwise belong to the servants...). I love what Ellie is saying below about the knife being a kind of symbol for his own insecurities, albeit phallic, and he keeps opening it and closing it; he's not just leaving it be. He's playing with it. Or if not playing, it's a kind of patriarchal movement, back and forth, up and down (also sexual perhaps, because nowhere in Woolf's canon do we see blatant sex going on between men and women; it anything, it's more between women). But he's obviously anxious and uncomfortable. In contrast, Clarissa is at home with the scissors and needle. For her, these instruments represent the power to take back agency inasmuch as she is using them to mend something, her dress.
The other thing I wanted to bring up is something I think I brought up somewhere else previously, but it's this idea of how Woolf takes the everyday objects and activities of life and uses them to attain the same kind of valor we see in traditionally masculine texts/stories. Instead of guns, weapons, overt violence, we have these two characters sitting on a sofa while warlike images surround them. Even the flowers that Peter brings are likened to weapons. The horses are tossing their heads, they are pawing the ground; this sounds like an ensuing battle scene, yet it's the most domestic scene in the world, too. Very ordinary, two people having a discussion. But nothing for Woolf is simply one thing. All of life is contrast for her. So you have this symbolic battle scene cast against the background of an otherwise normal looking domestic experience. These sharp objects then also double as weapons in this symbolic war, and one has the distinct impression that only one of these characters is going to come out intact.
First of all, thank you for the link to the recording! Brilliant! And one of the segments covers exactly this scene!
Second, I'm really enjoying hearing how you're unpacking these scenes of domesticity, of Clarissa taking back agency, of being at home with needle and thread (while PW is not at home at all). But then this fascinating contrast between the setting (a drawing room, a woman mending a dress) and a battle - the warlike imagery, the sharp objects. And then at the end, Clarissa refers to the scene that's just finished as having been like a five act play. So you have a sort of marriage of the two (battle scene + indoor setting) finally in the reference to the play. '...it was as if the five acts of a play that had been very exciting and moving were now over and she had lived a lifetime in them and had run away, had lived with Peter, and it was now over.'
Yes, this is so cool, Tash. It's what I love most I think about Woolf. She uses the domain of the feminine and somehow elevates its importance, its significance -- she's basically saying this domain is every bit as relevant, significant, as any masculine realm, or way of being. She takes on the symbolism of warfare, of the ur-masculine domain and repurposes it, or appropriates it for her own use in a different context (that being the indoor domestic settings). It's a fascinating -- and rebellious -- act. But this is of course what she is also known for. That flying in the face of the patriarchy!
I was struck by the fact that Clarissa has chosen the Memoirs of Baron Marbot, a French General of Cavalry during the Napoleonic Wars, for her bedtime reading. “She had read late at night of the retreat from Moscow”, we are told, in her narrow bed in her attic room (shades of Mrs. Rochester!) because Richard had insisted “that she must sleep undisturbed.” Undisturbed by her husband’s company in bed, we assume, “[a]nd really she preferred to read of the retreat from Moscow. He knew it.” It must be tough to have a dead French general as a rival for your wife’s attention at the traditional canoodling time of day.
Coincidentally, with regard to the retreat from Moscow, it was on this day—June 24th—that Napoleon and his Grand Army crossed the River Nieman into Russia in the year 1812.
Speaking of Richard Dalloway, I wonder if VW knew that it was an inside joke in Jane Austen’s family that there was something inherently ridiculous about the name Richard. Thus, at the opening of “Northanger Abbey” we read of the heroine, Catherine Morland, that: “Her father was a clergyman … and a very respectable man, though his name was Richard—and he had never been handsome.”
I’m inclined to doubt whether VW would have placed Baron Marbot’s Memoirs in Clarissa’s hands if she hadn’t read them herself, or at least sampled them here and there. One reason for her interest in the Baron’s experiences might have been because the Napoleonic Wars were the last major cataclysmic event in European history on a scale to match the recent Great War, though the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars lasted over twenty years compared to the four years of the 1914 to 1918 global conflict. In fact, VW and her generation were about as distant—or as close—in time from the Napoleonic Wars as we are from the First World War.
There’s also the fact that the Baron’s Memoirs make quite interesting reading. They’re available on the Internet Archive where one can read the lively details of the Baron’s adventures in war and peace, including occasional meetings with the Emperor Napoleon himself while campaigning across Europe.
I have to admit that I was a little confused about the timeline of “Mrs. Dalloway”, or more precisely, about how much contact Clarissa and Peter have had with each other over the years. After his visit with Clarissa near the beginning of the novel, Peter goes for a stroll through Regent’s Park, where he remarks to himself on the changes he sees in London and Londoners “after five years”, meaning the five years he was away serving in India. These five years Peter specifies as “1918 to 1923”, so we know that “Mrs. Dalloway” takes place on a June day in 1923.
Peter seems to spend as much time as Clarissa reminiscing about the past, and it is from him that we learn that it was “that summer, early in the ‘nineties”—the year was 1893—when he was so in love with Clarissa that he asked her to marry him during one of his visits to her family’s summer home at Bourton. When Clarissa turns down Peter’s offer of marriage, Peter realizes, “It was over. He went away that night. He never saw her again.”
Never again? Really? To take Peter’s statement literally, it would have been a full three decades from the last time Clarissa saw Peter that summer evening at Bourton to the morning in June 1923 when he suddenly arrives at her door unannounced after his return from India. But during Peter’s visit with Clarissa, there is no sense that the pair have not seen each other for a full three decades. The observations they make about each other looking older are much more consistent with a five-year separation than a thirty-year one.
Later in the novel, we catch Peter “[l]ooking back over that long friendship of almost thirty years” when thinking of Clarissa, the “almost thirty years” seeming to apply to the time period after she rejected him that evening at Bourton, when the possibility of a romantic relationship between them was replaced by one of friendship. There is also the fact that Clarissa describes Peter’s letters as “awfully dull”, which clearly indicates continued correspondence between the two over the years. It seems strange to me, though, that Peter would write Clarissa such “dry sticks” of letters, unless he assumed that Richard would be reading them as well.
It’s also difficult not to think that Clarissa and Peter would have continued to travel in the same social circles, seeing each other occasionally at gatherings and social events, as well as keeping informed of each other through mutual friends and acquaintances. Would Clarissa and Richard have invited Peter to their wedding?