Regarding the various couplings, I think D was in love with Sally, physically, romantically, totally. But that wasn't possible (both for reasons of convention, and I wonder if Sally reciprocated, or if she was just free-spirited). At the same time, she had an intense relationship with Peter, but broke it off because she cared enough for him to know that she would never reciprocate all his feelings for her. And Richard, well, he's safe and conventional and, after all, Clarissa is conventional (throwing parties). And there's something in there about her failing Richard, is it twice?, which I haven't understood yet. She lives like a nun now, in her little room in a small bed reading biographies into the night, hearing her husband creep in late. So, there was passion (Sally), a responsible rejection (Peter, to keep him from an unhappy marriage to her), and convention (Richard), which leaves her like a bird in her old age (yikes! She's 52!). As for Septimus and Evans, I'm of two minds, and I think S. was too. I think his attachment to Miss Poole was genuine, but helped along by the thrill of Shakespeare and being in London, while his attachment to Evans was much more deep-seated. We don't hear much about their experiences in war, but I can imagine there was horror, which bound them to each other in a unique way.
Yes, I think I agree with all of your take on Clarissa's relationships. Except, my sense is that she turned PW down for her own happiness also, not just his. He was too intense for her. Too difficult. Too demanding.
In terms of her comment about failing Richard, I had read this as an admission that she had failed him sexually; that she was not very sexually receptive to him, possibly due to being more sexually attracted to women. There are a few references to her being 'cold' which I read as a euphemism for sexual frigidity. She refers to this virginity that continues to 'cling to her like a sheet.' In the bit you mention about failing Richard, she thinks: 'Lovely in girlhood, suddenly there came a moment - for example on the river beneath the woods at Clieveden - when, through some contraction of this cold spirit, she had failed him. And again at Constantinople, and again and again. She could see what she lacked. [...] It was something central which permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together. For THAT she could dimly perceive.' (Sorry, caps in place of italics.)
In this bit, I understood her to be remembering occasions (on the river at Clieveden; at Constantinople; on other occasions) when Richard tried to initiate sexual or physical intimacy and she held herself back from him - she failed him.
Later in the same paragraph, she describes sexual arousal and attraction to women which leads her to think of Sally Seton.
Yes Tash, I too read D's refusal of PW's proposal as not entirely unselfish. I can't remember exactly how VW put it but I think D imagined a marriage to PW as having the potential to engulf her -- that she might cease to exist as an individual. Did I imagine that? Did PW feel like a soul-mate and she feared the intensity of a union with him? Whereas she knew that she and R could simply co-exist and stay out of each other's way to a great extent. Especially in bed, it seems!
No you didn't imagine it. In fact, you're spot on. From p 7 in my edition:
'For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between two people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him. [...] But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into. And it was intolerable...'
D says she was forced to break things off with PW, '...or they would have been destroyed, both of them ruined, she was convinced...'
Hey Tash and everyone, I wasn’t sure how to reply to everyone…so thought going with Tash, … you know … to give her one more thing to work with while she holds all this together for us … , was easiest.
So, thanks for such an interesting line of thinking. My sense is that Clarissa isn’t into sex with anyone: neither Peter nor Richard nor Sally (and that may be why her love for Sally remained unfulfilled - rather than perceptions of impropriety….I think many lesbians in Clarissa’s class and time formed meaningful relationships in a way that was different, perhaps more discreet, than for queer men) because, as Jen and Tash say she found it too difficult to share herself. I have a sense that Woolf herself may have had similar anxieties (and, that, perhaps the received wisdom of a bohemian Bloomsbury may not have extended itself to her own sexual expression…but, I could well be wrong). There’s a great line, which I think Kevin is thinking of in his comment, ‘The sheets were clean, tight stretched in a broad white band from side to side. Narrower and narrower would her bed be’. So no sex there, then.
Richard and she seem to have reached some accommodation, and while Clarissa understands, maybe welcomes, the role Millicent plays because it relieve her from pressure, I think she may still wish she were more sexually free, that she did not suffer from ‘this cold spirit’.
Yes, I agree that Clarissa probably wishes that she didn't suffer from that 'cold spirit.' But you're right, she's found accommodation with Richard, she sleeps in that narrow bed alone.
You mention that perhaps VW had her own anxieties in relation to sexual expression and so on. I think that's right - see Tom's comment just below about VW and her sister experiencing sexual abuse as teenagers.
What Clarissa wants in her marriage to Richard reminds me of a poem by the Irish writer, Brendan Kennelly, called “De Valera at Ninety-Two”. Eamon De Valera was Taoiseach (Prime Minister) and later President of the Republic of Ireland for most of the 20th century. The first verse of the poem reads:
“To sit here, past my ninetieth year,
Is a joy you might find hard to understand.
My wife is dead. For sixty years
She stood by me, although I know
She always kept a secret place in her heart
For herself. This I understood. There must always be
A secret place where one can go
And brood on what cannot be thought about
Where there is noise and men and women … “
I also came across this comment on Instagram the other day: “You need your own life to live on. Sometimes loving someone isn’t enough.”
I think of Clarissa as one of those Victorian wives who, when called upon to perform their conjugal duties, would close their eyes, lie back, and think of England. But seriously, as a retired child protection worker, I'm always thinking of the sexual abuse that VW and her sister Vanessa suffered as children and young women from their two half-brothers, and how it affected VW for the rest of her life.
For Clarissa, intercourse occurs preferably at the intellectual/conversational level. As Peter recalls from his last visit to Bourton: "They sat on the ground and talked--he and Clarissa. They went in and out of each other's minds without any effort. And then in a second it was over." There seems to be sexual undertone to Peter's recollection.
Actually, Kevin, Clarissa is only 51, as “She had just broken into her fifty-second year.” Since her unspecified illness, her hair has just about gone white, giving her a prematurely aged look; at least, a prematurely aged look from our present-day point-of-view.
When Peter Walsh comes calling at Clarissa’s, the maid Lucy answers the door to allow him to enter and thinks of him as “the elderly man in the hall.” Nevertheless, the elderly man is capable of “running upstairs ever so quickly” to see Clarissa. As for Peter, he thinks to himself that, “he was not old … He was only just past fifty.” Yet a page or so later, Clarissa thinks to herself, “he’s six months older than I am!” In any case, the pair sit and converse politely while giving each other the side-eye once-over to assess the toll the years have taken since they last saw each other.
Online sources say the average lifespan for British men and women in the 1920s was about 56 years for men and 59 years for women, though I imagine Clarissa and Peter would have a very good chance of exceeding those markers given their social background and access to the best medical care of the time. Clarissa is actually younger than Jennifer Connolly, Sandra Bullock, and Jennifer Aniston, and no-one would consider that those three actors have entered the distinguished dowager phase of their careers.
To have the full emotional effect I think VW intended her readers to feel from this meeting of two old friends and almost-lovers, we would have to think of them as being about ten years older than they are in the novel. As it is, plenty of people these days would see Clarissa, and especially Peter—because men always come off better in these age-related things—as being in the prime of life.
Average life span includes infant mortality. Having reached 50 life expectancy would be greater. I agree for these upper-middles adding 10 years about right. Clarissa's illness: maybe will be explained later but I am suspecting the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-20 which was worse than the one we just had and killed younger people.
I’m a bit behind but I’m plowing on! This read I’ve been struck by all the references to time - the clocks striking the hours, our characters moving fluidly from past to present, the reflections on life then and life now in England. The clocks chime at seemingly random intervals grounding us in the moment after we’ve been caught up in the minds of our characters. Every time I’m read this I’m struck by how brilliantly it’s constructed.
I totally agree! And like you, this was not something I tuned in to as much during previous reads.
Also, I just love this description of the tolling of Big Ben: 'The sound of Big Ben striking the half-hour struck out between them with extraordinary vigour, as if a young man, strong, indifferent, inconsiderate, were swinging dumb-bells this way and that.'
For me, the periodic tolling of Big Ben and other clocks are constant reminders of the inexorable passage of time and the characters' diminishing store of it, as well as the question of how best to use the time they have left. I try to put myself back into that time period and imagine how the memory of the millions who died in the Great War would still be haunting the thoughts of the survivors, even those in posh social classes such as Clarissa, Richard, and Sally; I'll include Peter, too. The sound of the bells in the novel has funereal overtones for me, as in, "Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee."
But I see your point. It's as if the sound of bells takes the place of chapter headings as you read the novel.
I'm thinking about Clarissa and Septimus and the queerness that links them. To label it is not important, I don't care who's homosexual, who's bi, who's asexual. Being queer, different, unable to fit in, is a shared experience, parallel and more often than not intermingled with disability. There's the safe kind of different, the invisible kind, Clarissa who has managed to blend in, lonely, observing from her iron tower more than partaking, feeling guilty about her supposed shortcomings. And there's the kind you cannot hide, Septimus, chewed up and spat out by a world that always misunderstood him, wounded and abandoned, no one realizing he's drowning. I find nothing funny about doctor Holmes' casual dismissal.
The isolation from being different is a big theme among the many, many themes in this book, every line could spawn essays.
Lovely comment. Yes, I think it's instructive to set Clarissa and Septimus side by side because they are two sides of the same coin in many ways but their experiences manifest so differently. But the common theme is isolation - I agree. I'm reminded of Clarissa imagining herself alone in a tower, having left everyone blackberrying in the sun.
So far, Ellie--and I emphasize, so far--I haven't come across anything in the novel to suggest to me that Septimus is gay. I think of how he falls in love with his teacher, Miss Isabel Pole, and worships her from afar. That's before the war. During the war, he becomes close to Evans, his comrade-in-arms, but I think this is the sort of close bond that often develops among men sharing danger, in war or elsewhere. When Evans is killed just before the end of the war, Septimus sees this as "the end of a friendship", not a relationship, and he soon marries Lucrezia. I may find reason to change my opinion later on, but that's how I feel about Septimus at around the halfway point in the novel.
The character of Septimus reminds me of the film, "Benediction", that came out a few years ago. It tells the story of the British war poet, Siegfried Sassoon, who fought in the Great War and was awarded a Military Cross for bravery. But when he spoke out against the war, he was quickly bundled off to a military hospital to be treated for shell shock. There he met with some sympathetic military doctors, one of whom revealed to Sassoon that he was not alone in being attracted to men. The film's story doesn't arrive at a resolution so much as it just ends, and the final scene reminds me very much of Septimus sitting on a bench in Regent's Park struggling to make sense of his thoughts and feelings.
Notice how I haven't called him gay and used no labels. He is the mirror image of Mrs. Dalloway and they are both mirroring Woolf herself, who was queer and had a mental disability, and I'm not labeling either of those either, only recognizing the personal circumstances she obviously wanted to talk about in this book through these characters.
I agree that VW used her own experiences with mental health problems in describing Septimus' state of mind. When Septimus hears the birds in Regent's Park singing in Greek, it's exactly the hallucination that VW had as a young woman.
I think I became confused over your use of the term queer. One definition I found online states that queer "serves as an umbrella label for individuals who don't exclusively identify as heterosexual or cisgender. Some people use it to describe their sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression." But reading your comment more carefully, I see now that you intend it to mean, "Being queer, different, unable to fit in", which certainly describes Septimus after his experiences in the war. I'm not so sure, however, that it applies to Mrs. Dalloway who fits into her particular social strata quite well, it seems to me. I also can't help but wonder if calling someone queer isn't giving them a label. Perhaps we'll just have to agree to disagree, or I may change my thinking as I progress through the last half of the novel.
Like I said, Mrs. Dalloway fits well because her differences are invisible compared to Septimus', which doesn't mean she feels perfectly at ease in the world she lives in. We'll have to agree to disagree, but I'd suggest reading up on these subjects, they're worth discovering and exploring ❤️
For lack of a better term, I think Peter is going through a mid-life crisis. He’s finally coming home to England after loyally serving the Crown in India for the past five years, having been responsible for the administration of “a district twice as big as Ireland.” (There’s Ireland again.)
When Peter and Clarissa first meet at her home, she asks him, “Well, and what’s happened to you?”, meaning what’s he been doing in India. Peter replies enthusiastically, “Millions of things!”, chief of which turns out to be falling in love with a young married woman with two small children. He goes on to explain that he’s come home to sort out the details of the divorce, and then suddenly bursts into tears while Clarissa does her best to comfort him. Later, when Peter recalls the “Millions of things!” he accomplished in India, he realizes that Clarissa knows nothing whatsoever about any of them; and likely never will, we think.
My sense of this scene is that Peter is suddenly overwhelmed by the burden of emotions he’s been carrying all the way from India. He’s been longing to see Clarissa again, likely in the vain hope that the sight of him will rekindle whatever affections she used to feel for him. Yet at the same time, he knows that his decision to inform Clarissa that he’s in love with this young woman Daisy and is going to marry her will surely put the final nail in the coffin of whatever fantasies he may have entertained of he and Clarissa ever being together in some way. He’ll be ringing down the curtain on the emotionally fraught scene between himself and Clarissa that began by the fountain at Bourton thirty years earlier.
After Peter leaves Clarissa and goes strolling through Regent’s Park, we learn of the other stressors acting upon him. There’s his age, which he now acknowledges to be fifty-three, though he persuades himself that he hasn’t felt so young in years. Earlier, he had recalled with pleasure the sight of the attractive young women on shipboard during his passage home on from India. Now Peter does something definitely creepy: he starts following a young woman down the street, “stealthily fingering his pocket-knife”. It’s difficult not to see the pocket-knife as anything but a phallic symbol, not only in this instance, but in the scene back at the Dalloway home where Peter was constantly fiddling with his knife during his visit with Clarissa. Fortunately, Peter calls off the chase once the young woman reaches her home.
There’s also the fact that Peter will need a job to support his newly acquired family. He, who used to control a countryside and its people “twice as big as Ireland”, will now have to approach men younger than himself in powerful positions to cadge for a job “teaching little boys Latin”, or some other job in a secretary’s office “at the beck and call” of some senior bureaucrat. It’s all a big comedown for Peter and nothing that will make him shine in Clarissa’s eyes. It will only confirm that she made the right call when she decided to marry Richard Dalloway.
Exactly. Well said! And I see that I've echoed your thoughts about the pocket knife in my more recent post (though I'd missed that bit about 'stealthily fingering his pocket-knife' - cripes!). Yes, there seems to be quite a lot of internal strife within PW about his status - he's clearly very smart (he's so dismissive of Dalloway 'getting up on his hind legs' to talk about Shakespeare and airing views that can be read of a morning in the Morning Post), he's passionate and unconventional, he's irritated by snobbery and social convention but then also seems to crave some recognition by the establishment as well. His perceiving that he is viewed as a failure I think is difficult for him - much as he dismisses Hugh and Dalloway (and all the rest) and what they stand for. And now, as you say, he must go cap in hand and ask for work which must do further damage to his ego.
The idea of Peter carrying around a pocket-knife for all these years, from his summers at Bourton up to his visit with Clarissa after returning from India, seemed kind of odd to me. Why would he need a knife? Does he expect to be attacked by a Bengal tiger on his way to visit Clarissa on his return from India? Even Clarissa wonders about it: “What an extraordinary habit it was, Clarissa thought, always playing with a knife.”
There’s also the fact that Peter carries his knife in his trousers’ pocket as opposed to his suit coat pocket. We’re talking about a pocket-knife as opposed to a smaller pen-knife, so I can't help but think the weight of it would adversely affect the drape of his trousers, something I think Peter would be concerned about.
On the principle that you should write what you know about, I assumed that VW gave Peter his pocket-knife with its folding blade that he periodically extends because she didn’t feel qualified by experience to talk about “tumescent members”, or to go the Vladimir Nabokov route and have Peter rhapsodize about “the sceptre of his passion”. So, VW gave Peter a knife instead.
But if you can trust what you read online—not always the case—it seems that it was common in the 1920s for men of Peter’s social class and above to carry knives as an everyday fashion accessory. They were called gentlemen’s knives and were designed to go with dress or formal wear. The practice continues today with companies manufacturing gent’s or dress knives, with fancy blades and handles made of ebony, briarwood, or other expensive materials. There are even knives specially made for women with handles of “pink giraffe bone”. One spokeswoman for a company explained, “Our gent’s knife is good for everyday carry. You can open an envelope, a parcel, cut a fruit. It is the knife you need when you find yourself saying, ‘If I had a knife …’”
My father, born in 1926, carried what he called “a pocket knife” but which by its size might qualify as what you call a pen knife, in his pocket pocket for his whole life. He did not ever fiddle with it in his pocket or, being a Westerner, in conversation in “a drawing room” but used it to open mail, cut rope and string, pare his fingernails (alone in the morning at home or while camping) and open boxes.
When I was a young boy attending a three-room country school with other kids who had chores to do in the morning and would arrive in class with boots or shoes smelling of cow manure, we boys all had penknives which we brought to school every day. We whittled sticks at recess or played various games involving throwing your knife at the ground and having it stick in blade first, which hardly any of us were ever able to do. I don't recall ever having any problems with our teachers about having knives at school. The idea of using them as weapons never occurred to us and would have seemed absurd. I still have a couple of pocketknives rattling around in a junk drawer somewhere, but when I open an envelope or a parcel, I usually reach for whatever's handy from the knife block on my kitchen counter, not the best way to treat good knives, I admit.
Jokes? In V Woolf?? We look to be getting into some grim stuff now, with Septimus anyway and things aren’t great with Peter Walsh either. But what really surprised me so far was the playfulness. I mean, we don’t think of Woolf as a bundle of fun, but I did find myself (not laughing out loud but) pausing to smile at Clarissa – okay, she’s no book-lover – pausing to consider whether a suitable gift for the invalid Evelyn Whitbread might be ‘Big Game Shooting in Nigeria’. (I did search the Internet for this book, it doesn’t seem to exist, surely it would be called the more euphemistic ‘Big Game Hunting’ and anyway there appears to be no big game hunting in Nigeria. Wrong side of Africa.) Then: when Clarissa returns with her parasol and Lucy the maid receives it “like a sacred weapon which a Goddess, having acquitted herseof honorably in the field of battle, sheds” – and puts it in the umbrella stand. That absurd simile could be PG Wodehouse.
The scene where Clarissa’s got the wrong name for Richard and is introducing him to everyone else as ‘Wickham’ – and Richard's too polite to correct her at first but then she keeps on doing it… Wickham? The seducer from ‘Pride and Prejudice’? Just what is going on there?
Oh, and ‘The spirit of religion was abroad, with her eyes bandaged tight and her lips gaping wide’ – as an atheist I did smile at that one.
Even Dr Holmes – I know that bit’s read as a searing indictment of mental health practices in the 1920s – but for me there’s an element of satire there. Angry satire, yes. But ‘”Didn’t that give [Rezia] a very odd idea of English husbands?” and recommending porridge and a hobby. And then the exact opposite advice from the other doctor. Unlike other characters in the novel, the two Drs are presented almost as grotesques. But suppose some pal of Bertie Wooster from the Drones Club, deeply cut up about some girl, an officious aunt calls in the doctor, two doctors: wouldn’t first one say ‘porridge and golf, plenty of activity in the open air’ and second one says ‘bed rest, darkened room for six months’. I know it’s absurd to compare Woolf with Wodehouse…
I was nodding along to everything you say in this comment Ronald. I think there absolutely is a playfulness in Woolf's writing (and the line about Clarissa returning from the field of battle was the first thing that sprang to mind, but you pipped me to the post on that one). There are lots of funny details (Hugh Whitbread's 'well-covered, manly, extremely handsome, perfectly upholstered body' comes to mind. In fact, VW is very good at taking the mickey out of silly pompous Hugh.)
And Wickham! Yes! I was wondering if anyone would bring up Clarissa accidentally calling Dalloway Wickham. I took the appearance of that name as a means of evoking a feeling of Dalloway as 'The Wrong Guy'. ie, Clarissa has tried to be very sensible in her choice of husband but has perhaps blundered by allying herself with nice, unbrilliant Richard... Or perhaps not. Perhaps she knew exactly what she was doing. In any case, there is a feeling of what-might've-been casting its faint pall over the proceedings.
The Wickham label seems to fit Peter Walsh better. At the time, thirty years earlier, he might have fit the profile of the flashy, good-looking young man with a grudge against his betters and prospects less than stellar. You're right about the 'faint pall of what-might-have-been' that's cast over the proceedings. I think it covers the whole novel, at least as far as Clarissa and Peter are concerned.
If Richard Dalloway isn’t George Wickham, Sally Seton is a close match for Charlotte Lucas. After Peter returns from India, he remembers having recently received a letter from Sally Seton, a friend of his and Clarissa’s from their youthful days of the 1890s. Sally he remembers as a precocious free-spirit—“like a child who has been in mischief”—with whom he shared “a great bond” because of the dislike they both inspired in Clarissa’s crusty old father due to their shared and scarcely concealed disdain for social conventions.
So far in “Mrs. Dalloway”, I can’t recall ever reading anything to suggest that Peter or Sally ever considered each other as a possible match, perhaps because they both come from cash-poor family backgrounds, though they would seem to be a natural and compatible couple. As for Clarissa, when she thinks of Sally, she remembers how she envied her exuberant personality, characterized by “a sort of abandonment, as if she could say anything, do anything”.
But getting back to Sally’s letter to Peter and the relevance it has for the character of Charlotte Lucas in “Pride and Prejudice”, Charlotte is the best friend of the heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, though not blest with the same degree of physical attractiveness. When Elizabeth rejects the proposal of the “irksome” but well-to-do Mr. Collins, Charlotte catches him on the rebound, even though she doesn’t love him any more than Mr. Collins loves her. Elizabeth is shocked and disappointed that her friend “would have sacrificed every better feeling for worldly advantage”, though Charlotte reminds Elizabeth that, “I am not a romantic, you know”, and that Mr. Collins’ offer of marriage and a comfortable home is too good to turn down.
Peter’s reaction to Sally’s letter is much the same as Elizabeth’s feelings about Charlotte’s decision to wed Mr. Collins. For Sally has now married and settled down, and become the matronly sort of woman capable of writing a “long, gushing letter” enthusing over blue hydrangeas. “It was Sally Seton,” he realizes, “the last person in the world one would have expected to marry a rich man and live in a large house near Manchester, the wild, the daring, the romantic Sally!” Peter is gobsmacked. “[O]f all that ancient lot, Clarissa’s friends”, he thinks, “Sally was probably the best”. And now she’s surrendered the ideals and values she shared with Peter in their youth and gone over to the enemy.
The reader is left with the impression of how isolated Peter has become, and not just because of the five years he’s spent in India. Clarissa married Richard Dalloway and moved on with her life. So did the Whitbreads and the rest of the people Peter knew in his youth. And now he’s learned that even Sally the rebel, at some point in the past, recognized that it was time to put away childish things and behave as a responsible adult; or at least, get married because, as Charlotte Lucas could have told her, it was the best way to obtain long-term financial and social security.
Of course, Peter is planning to get married, too; but from what we know of the circumstances of his prospective wife, it sounds like a rushed, bungled affair, with the complications of a divorce and two small stepchildren added to the mix. Somehow, I don't see Peter as a natural fit for the fatherhood role, but then I recall him amusing the little girl in Regent's Park with his pocket-watch. In any case, we are still left with Peter as an example of arrested development, a bit of an outsider, someone stuck in the past, still carrying a torch for Clarissa, and still unable to accept and move on from her rejection of him a full thirty years ago.
I'm not sure I see a parallel between Sally Seton and Charlotte Lucas - in my mind they are so different from one another! (Though, I have to admit that it's been a while since I read P&P.) However, the last two paragraphs of your comment ring very true - of Peter having bungled things, having been somewhat left behind. It brings a lot of poignancy, I think, to his thought in Regent's Park that Clarissa might have saved him from all this (if she'd married him).
Towards the end of the novel, Clarissa is in the midst of her party but takes a moment to ponder Dr. Bradshaw's likely clientele: "For think what cases came before him--people in the uttermost depths of misery; people on the verge of insanity; husbands and wives." Notice VW saves the worst for the last.
I'm already SO BEHIND (I read the first page, got excited, and then a heatwave started and I lost all will to read or focus or do anything but chug ice water — what I'd give to have scarf weather!) but I am hoping this next week gifts me all the reading time I've lost the last week or so. Thanks for the shout!!
Oh don't worry about being behind! You've got enough on your plate I'm sure with Wharton and all the fabulous comments pinging around at Closely Reading. Yes, I read about a big heatwave in the US in the news this morning! Keep chugging that ice water!
Thinking about the flowers ... I'm not with you Tash on their being mementos mori (or whatever the heck the plural is of memento mori, let's not get into the Latin grammar). Woolf's lover was Vita Sackville West the leading gardener of her time and Sissinghurst is not a place of death. Flowers are obviously important in the novel right from the first sentence but the way I see it is, exploring the different ways the characters use or are involved with flowers. (Just as they might react in different ways to one of the human characters.) Richard's roses for Clarissa are a (failed) declaration of love. Septimus's ones are visions of ecstatic beauty. Clarissa's are conventional decorations for a dinner table.
Also - the novel's stream-of-consciousness form has a tendency to fly apart into a dozen separate pieces. Could the flowers be a technical device, a sort of linking thread? (Woolf says this explicitly about the lighthouse in To the Lighthouse.)
Yes, I love that idea of the flowers as a linking thread.
How the different characters relate to them is also interesting. For example, the way Sally Seton brings together unusual combinations of flowers and clips off their heads to float them in water; how she tears apart the head of a rose while talking to PW and admires the cabbage leaves in the moonlight. All of this nicely captures her wild, original nature.
Rezia, on the other hand, buys roses from a poor man in the street - they are almost dead already but she arranges them nonetheless. So in Rezia's case, the flowers draw out her nurturing of something (someone) sick / tired / spent.
I can sympathize, Tash, with your complaints about the cold. Today, June 13th, was the first day this week that I didn't have to turn my furnace on in the morning to take the chill out of the air inside my house. Not something you expect in southeastern Ontario at this time of year. But it's winter in the Antipodes, is it not?
Thanks for the book plug Tash! Wasn't expecting that. The book is UK based. And the overlap between V Woolf and mountain climbing is surprising me as much as anyone. It's there in To the Lighthouse too. (But not in Mrs D so far...) Also it's blooming cold in Scotland too just now. Snow in June on some hilltops.
Regarding the various couplings, I think D was in love with Sally, physically, romantically, totally. But that wasn't possible (both for reasons of convention, and I wonder if Sally reciprocated, or if she was just free-spirited). At the same time, she had an intense relationship with Peter, but broke it off because she cared enough for him to know that she would never reciprocate all his feelings for her. And Richard, well, he's safe and conventional and, after all, Clarissa is conventional (throwing parties). And there's something in there about her failing Richard, is it twice?, which I haven't understood yet. She lives like a nun now, in her little room in a small bed reading biographies into the night, hearing her husband creep in late. So, there was passion (Sally), a responsible rejection (Peter, to keep him from an unhappy marriage to her), and convention (Richard), which leaves her like a bird in her old age (yikes! She's 52!). As for Septimus and Evans, I'm of two minds, and I think S. was too. I think his attachment to Miss Poole was genuine, but helped along by the thrill of Shakespeare and being in London, while his attachment to Evans was much more deep-seated. We don't hear much about their experiences in war, but I can imagine there was horror, which bound them to each other in a unique way.
Yes, I think I agree with all of your take on Clarissa's relationships. Except, my sense is that she turned PW down for her own happiness also, not just his. He was too intense for her. Too difficult. Too demanding.
In terms of her comment about failing Richard, I had read this as an admission that she had failed him sexually; that she was not very sexually receptive to him, possibly due to being more sexually attracted to women. There are a few references to her being 'cold' which I read as a euphemism for sexual frigidity. She refers to this virginity that continues to 'cling to her like a sheet.' In the bit you mention about failing Richard, she thinks: 'Lovely in girlhood, suddenly there came a moment - for example on the river beneath the woods at Clieveden - when, through some contraction of this cold spirit, she had failed him. And again at Constantinople, and again and again. She could see what she lacked. [...] It was something central which permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together. For THAT she could dimly perceive.' (Sorry, caps in place of italics.)
In this bit, I understood her to be remembering occasions (on the river at Clieveden; at Constantinople; on other occasions) when Richard tried to initiate sexual or physical intimacy and she held herself back from him - she failed him.
Later in the same paragraph, she describes sexual arousal and attraction to women which leads her to think of Sally Seton.
Yes Tash, I too read D's refusal of PW's proposal as not entirely unselfish. I can't remember exactly how VW put it but I think D imagined a marriage to PW as having the potential to engulf her -- that she might cease to exist as an individual. Did I imagine that? Did PW feel like a soul-mate and she feared the intensity of a union with him? Whereas she knew that she and R could simply co-exist and stay out of each other's way to a great extent. Especially in bed, it seems!
No you didn't imagine it. In fact, you're spot on. From p 7 in my edition:
'For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between two people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him. [...] But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into. And it was intolerable...'
D says she was forced to break things off with PW, '...or they would have been destroyed, both of them ruined, she was convinced...'
Hey Tash and everyone, I wasn’t sure how to reply to everyone…so thought going with Tash, … you know … to give her one more thing to work with while she holds all this together for us … , was easiest.
So, thanks for such an interesting line of thinking. My sense is that Clarissa isn’t into sex with anyone: neither Peter nor Richard nor Sally (and that may be why her love for Sally remained unfulfilled - rather than perceptions of impropriety….I think many lesbians in Clarissa’s class and time formed meaningful relationships in a way that was different, perhaps more discreet, than for queer men) because, as Jen and Tash say she found it too difficult to share herself. I have a sense that Woolf herself may have had similar anxieties (and, that, perhaps the received wisdom of a bohemian Bloomsbury may not have extended itself to her own sexual expression…but, I could well be wrong). There’s a great line, which I think Kevin is thinking of in his comment, ‘The sheets were clean, tight stretched in a broad white band from side to side. Narrower and narrower would her bed be’. So no sex there, then.
Richard and she seem to have reached some accommodation, and while Clarissa understands, maybe welcomes, the role Millicent plays because it relieve her from pressure, I think she may still wish she were more sexually free, that she did not suffer from ‘this cold spirit’.
Yes, I agree that Clarissa probably wishes that she didn't suffer from that 'cold spirit.' But you're right, she's found accommodation with Richard, she sleeps in that narrow bed alone.
You mention that perhaps VW had her own anxieties in relation to sexual expression and so on. I think that's right - see Tom's comment just below about VW and her sister experiencing sexual abuse as teenagers.
Yes absolutely.
What Clarissa wants in her marriage to Richard reminds me of a poem by the Irish writer, Brendan Kennelly, called “De Valera at Ninety-Two”. Eamon De Valera was Taoiseach (Prime Minister) and later President of the Republic of Ireland for most of the 20th century. The first verse of the poem reads:
“To sit here, past my ninetieth year,
Is a joy you might find hard to understand.
My wife is dead. For sixty years
She stood by me, although I know
She always kept a secret place in her heart
For herself. This I understood. There must always be
A secret place where one can go
And brood on what cannot be thought about
Where there is noise and men and women … “
I also came across this comment on Instagram the other day: “You need your own life to live on. Sometimes loving someone isn’t enough.”
I think it's explicit that Clarissa and Richard no longer have sex - she is in a narrow bed in the attic.
I think of Clarissa as one of those Victorian wives who, when called upon to perform their conjugal duties, would close their eyes, lie back, and think of England. But seriously, as a retired child protection worker, I'm always thinking of the sexual abuse that VW and her sister Vanessa suffered as children and young women from their two half-brothers, and how it affected VW for the rest of her life.
Yes, absolutely. I think that early abuse had a huge impact on VW and how she wrote and thought about sex.
For Clarissa, intercourse occurs preferably at the intellectual/conversational level. As Peter recalls from his last visit to Bourton: "They sat on the ground and talked--he and Clarissa. They went in and out of each other's minds without any effort. And then in a second it was over." There seems to be sexual undertone to Peter's recollection.
Actually, Kevin, Clarissa is only 51, as “She had just broken into her fifty-second year.” Since her unspecified illness, her hair has just about gone white, giving her a prematurely aged look; at least, a prematurely aged look from our present-day point-of-view.
When Peter Walsh comes calling at Clarissa’s, the maid Lucy answers the door to allow him to enter and thinks of him as “the elderly man in the hall.” Nevertheless, the elderly man is capable of “running upstairs ever so quickly” to see Clarissa. As for Peter, he thinks to himself that, “he was not old … He was only just past fifty.” Yet a page or so later, Clarissa thinks to herself, “he’s six months older than I am!” In any case, the pair sit and converse politely while giving each other the side-eye once-over to assess the toll the years have taken since they last saw each other.
Online sources say the average lifespan for British men and women in the 1920s was about 56 years for men and 59 years for women, though I imagine Clarissa and Peter would have a very good chance of exceeding those markers given their social background and access to the best medical care of the time. Clarissa is actually younger than Jennifer Connolly, Sandra Bullock, and Jennifer Aniston, and no-one would consider that those three actors have entered the distinguished dowager phase of their careers.
To have the full emotional effect I think VW intended her readers to feel from this meeting of two old friends and almost-lovers, we would have to think of them as being about ten years older than they are in the novel. As it is, plenty of people these days would see Clarissa, and especially Peter—because men always come off better in these age-related things—as being in the prime of life.
Average life span includes infant mortality. Having reached 50 life expectancy would be greater. I agree for these upper-middles adding 10 years about right. Clarissa's illness: maybe will be explained later but I am suspecting the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-20 which was worse than the one we just had and killed younger people.
I’m a bit behind but I’m plowing on! This read I’ve been struck by all the references to time - the clocks striking the hours, our characters moving fluidly from past to present, the reflections on life then and life now in England. The clocks chime at seemingly random intervals grounding us in the moment after we’ve been caught up in the minds of our characters. Every time I’m read this I’m struck by how brilliantly it’s constructed.
I totally agree! And like you, this was not something I tuned in to as much during previous reads.
Also, I just love this description of the tolling of Big Ben: 'The sound of Big Ben striking the half-hour struck out between them with extraordinary vigour, as if a young man, strong, indifferent, inconsiderate, were swinging dumb-bells this way and that.'
So apt. I can hear EXACTLY what VW means.
For me, the periodic tolling of Big Ben and other clocks are constant reminders of the inexorable passage of time and the characters' diminishing store of it, as well as the question of how best to use the time they have left. I try to put myself back into that time period and imagine how the memory of the millions who died in the Great War would still be haunting the thoughts of the survivors, even those in posh social classes such as Clarissa, Richard, and Sally; I'll include Peter, too. The sound of the bells in the novel has funereal overtones for me, as in, "Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee."
But I see your point. It's as if the sound of bells takes the place of chapter headings as you read the novel.
I'm thinking about Clarissa and Septimus and the queerness that links them. To label it is not important, I don't care who's homosexual, who's bi, who's asexual. Being queer, different, unable to fit in, is a shared experience, parallel and more often than not intermingled with disability. There's the safe kind of different, the invisible kind, Clarissa who has managed to blend in, lonely, observing from her iron tower more than partaking, feeling guilty about her supposed shortcomings. And there's the kind you cannot hide, Septimus, chewed up and spat out by a world that always misunderstood him, wounded and abandoned, no one realizing he's drowning. I find nothing funny about doctor Holmes' casual dismissal.
The isolation from being different is a big theme among the many, many themes in this book, every line could spawn essays.
Every line could spawn essays. EXACTLY!
Lovely comment. Yes, I think it's instructive to set Clarissa and Septimus side by side because they are two sides of the same coin in many ways but their experiences manifest so differently. But the common theme is isolation - I agree. I'm reminded of Clarissa imagining herself alone in a tower, having left everyone blackberrying in the sun.
So far, Ellie--and I emphasize, so far--I haven't come across anything in the novel to suggest to me that Septimus is gay. I think of how he falls in love with his teacher, Miss Isabel Pole, and worships her from afar. That's before the war. During the war, he becomes close to Evans, his comrade-in-arms, but I think this is the sort of close bond that often develops among men sharing danger, in war or elsewhere. When Evans is killed just before the end of the war, Septimus sees this as "the end of a friendship", not a relationship, and he soon marries Lucrezia. I may find reason to change my opinion later on, but that's how I feel about Septimus at around the halfway point in the novel.
The character of Septimus reminds me of the film, "Benediction", that came out a few years ago. It tells the story of the British war poet, Siegfried Sassoon, who fought in the Great War and was awarded a Military Cross for bravery. But when he spoke out against the war, he was quickly bundled off to a military hospital to be treated for shell shock. There he met with some sympathetic military doctors, one of whom revealed to Sassoon that he was not alone in being attracted to men. The film's story doesn't arrive at a resolution so much as it just ends, and the final scene reminds me very much of Septimus sitting on a bench in Regent's Park struggling to make sense of his thoughts and feelings.
Notice how I haven't called him gay and used no labels. He is the mirror image of Mrs. Dalloway and they are both mirroring Woolf herself, who was queer and had a mental disability, and I'm not labeling either of those either, only recognizing the personal circumstances she obviously wanted to talk about in this book through these characters.
I agree that VW used her own experiences with mental health problems in describing Septimus' state of mind. When Septimus hears the birds in Regent's Park singing in Greek, it's exactly the hallucination that VW had as a young woman.
I think I became confused over your use of the term queer. One definition I found online states that queer "serves as an umbrella label for individuals who don't exclusively identify as heterosexual or cisgender. Some people use it to describe their sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression." But reading your comment more carefully, I see now that you intend it to mean, "Being queer, different, unable to fit in", which certainly describes Septimus after his experiences in the war. I'm not so sure, however, that it applies to Mrs. Dalloway who fits into her particular social strata quite well, it seems to me. I also can't help but wonder if calling someone queer isn't giving them a label. Perhaps we'll just have to agree to disagree, or I may change my thinking as I progress through the last half of the novel.
Like I said, Mrs. Dalloway fits well because her differences are invisible compared to Septimus', which doesn't mean she feels perfectly at ease in the world she lives in. We'll have to agree to disagree, but I'd suggest reading up on these subjects, they're worth discovering and exploring ❤️
For lack of a better term, I think Peter is going through a mid-life crisis. He’s finally coming home to England after loyally serving the Crown in India for the past five years, having been responsible for the administration of “a district twice as big as Ireland.” (There’s Ireland again.)
When Peter and Clarissa first meet at her home, she asks him, “Well, and what’s happened to you?”, meaning what’s he been doing in India. Peter replies enthusiastically, “Millions of things!”, chief of which turns out to be falling in love with a young married woman with two small children. He goes on to explain that he’s come home to sort out the details of the divorce, and then suddenly bursts into tears while Clarissa does her best to comfort him. Later, when Peter recalls the “Millions of things!” he accomplished in India, he realizes that Clarissa knows nothing whatsoever about any of them; and likely never will, we think.
My sense of this scene is that Peter is suddenly overwhelmed by the burden of emotions he’s been carrying all the way from India. He’s been longing to see Clarissa again, likely in the vain hope that the sight of him will rekindle whatever affections she used to feel for him. Yet at the same time, he knows that his decision to inform Clarissa that he’s in love with this young woman Daisy and is going to marry her will surely put the final nail in the coffin of whatever fantasies he may have entertained of he and Clarissa ever being together in some way. He’ll be ringing down the curtain on the emotionally fraught scene between himself and Clarissa that began by the fountain at Bourton thirty years earlier.
After Peter leaves Clarissa and goes strolling through Regent’s Park, we learn of the other stressors acting upon him. There’s his age, which he now acknowledges to be fifty-three, though he persuades himself that he hasn’t felt so young in years. Earlier, he had recalled with pleasure the sight of the attractive young women on shipboard during his passage home on from India. Now Peter does something definitely creepy: he starts following a young woman down the street, “stealthily fingering his pocket-knife”. It’s difficult not to see the pocket-knife as anything but a phallic symbol, not only in this instance, but in the scene back at the Dalloway home where Peter was constantly fiddling with his knife during his visit with Clarissa. Fortunately, Peter calls off the chase once the young woman reaches her home.
There’s also the fact that Peter will need a job to support his newly acquired family. He, who used to control a countryside and its people “twice as big as Ireland”, will now have to approach men younger than himself in powerful positions to cadge for a job “teaching little boys Latin”, or some other job in a secretary’s office “at the beck and call” of some senior bureaucrat. It’s all a big comedown for Peter and nothing that will make him shine in Clarissa’s eyes. It will only confirm that she made the right call when she decided to marry Richard Dalloway.
Exactly. Well said! And I see that I've echoed your thoughts about the pocket knife in my more recent post (though I'd missed that bit about 'stealthily fingering his pocket-knife' - cripes!). Yes, there seems to be quite a lot of internal strife within PW about his status - he's clearly very smart (he's so dismissive of Dalloway 'getting up on his hind legs' to talk about Shakespeare and airing views that can be read of a morning in the Morning Post), he's passionate and unconventional, he's irritated by snobbery and social convention but then also seems to crave some recognition by the establishment as well. His perceiving that he is viewed as a failure I think is difficult for him - much as he dismisses Hugh and Dalloway (and all the rest) and what they stand for. And now, as you say, he must go cap in hand and ask for work which must do further damage to his ego.
The idea of Peter carrying around a pocket-knife for all these years, from his summers at Bourton up to his visit with Clarissa after returning from India, seemed kind of odd to me. Why would he need a knife? Does he expect to be attacked by a Bengal tiger on his way to visit Clarissa on his return from India? Even Clarissa wonders about it: “What an extraordinary habit it was, Clarissa thought, always playing with a knife.”
There’s also the fact that Peter carries his knife in his trousers’ pocket as opposed to his suit coat pocket. We’re talking about a pocket-knife as opposed to a smaller pen-knife, so I can't help but think the weight of it would adversely affect the drape of his trousers, something I think Peter would be concerned about.
On the principle that you should write what you know about, I assumed that VW gave Peter his pocket-knife with its folding blade that he periodically extends because she didn’t feel qualified by experience to talk about “tumescent members”, or to go the Vladimir Nabokov route and have Peter rhapsodize about “the sceptre of his passion”. So, VW gave Peter a knife instead.
But if you can trust what you read online—not always the case—it seems that it was common in the 1920s for men of Peter’s social class and above to carry knives as an everyday fashion accessory. They were called gentlemen’s knives and were designed to go with dress or formal wear. The practice continues today with companies manufacturing gent’s or dress knives, with fancy blades and handles made of ebony, briarwood, or other expensive materials. There are even knives specially made for women with handles of “pink giraffe bone”. One spokeswoman for a company explained, “Our gent’s knife is good for everyday carry. You can open an envelope, a parcel, cut a fruit. It is the knife you need when you find yourself saying, ‘If I had a knife …’”
My father, born in 1926, carried what he called “a pocket knife” but which by its size might qualify as what you call a pen knife, in his pocket pocket for his whole life. He did not ever fiddle with it in his pocket or, being a Westerner, in conversation in “a drawing room” but used it to open mail, cut rope and string, pare his fingernails (alone in the morning at home or while camping) and open boxes.
When I was a young boy attending a three-room country school with other kids who had chores to do in the morning and would arrive in class with boots or shoes smelling of cow manure, we boys all had penknives which we brought to school every day. We whittled sticks at recess or played various games involving throwing your knife at the ground and having it stick in blade first, which hardly any of us were ever able to do. I don't recall ever having any problems with our teachers about having knives at school. The idea of using them as weapons never occurred to us and would have seemed absurd. I still have a couple of pocketknives rattling around in a junk drawer somewhere, but when I open an envelope or a parcel, I usually reach for whatever's handy from the knife block on my kitchen counter, not the best way to treat good knives, I admit.
Jokes? In V Woolf?? We look to be getting into some grim stuff now, with Septimus anyway and things aren’t great with Peter Walsh either. But what really surprised me so far was the playfulness. I mean, we don’t think of Woolf as a bundle of fun, but I did find myself (not laughing out loud but) pausing to smile at Clarissa – okay, she’s no book-lover – pausing to consider whether a suitable gift for the invalid Evelyn Whitbread might be ‘Big Game Shooting in Nigeria’. (I did search the Internet for this book, it doesn’t seem to exist, surely it would be called the more euphemistic ‘Big Game Hunting’ and anyway there appears to be no big game hunting in Nigeria. Wrong side of Africa.) Then: when Clarissa returns with her parasol and Lucy the maid receives it “like a sacred weapon which a Goddess, having acquitted herseof honorably in the field of battle, sheds” – and puts it in the umbrella stand. That absurd simile could be PG Wodehouse.
The scene where Clarissa’s got the wrong name for Richard and is introducing him to everyone else as ‘Wickham’ – and Richard's too polite to correct her at first but then she keeps on doing it… Wickham? The seducer from ‘Pride and Prejudice’? Just what is going on there?
Oh, and ‘The spirit of religion was abroad, with her eyes bandaged tight and her lips gaping wide’ – as an atheist I did smile at that one.
Even Dr Holmes – I know that bit’s read as a searing indictment of mental health practices in the 1920s – but for me there’s an element of satire there. Angry satire, yes. But ‘”Didn’t that give [Rezia] a very odd idea of English husbands?” and recommending porridge and a hobby. And then the exact opposite advice from the other doctor. Unlike other characters in the novel, the two Drs are presented almost as grotesques. But suppose some pal of Bertie Wooster from the Drones Club, deeply cut up about some girl, an officious aunt calls in the doctor, two doctors: wouldn’t first one say ‘porridge and golf, plenty of activity in the open air’ and second one says ‘bed rest, darkened room for six months’. I know it’s absurd to compare Woolf with Wodehouse…
I was nodding along to everything you say in this comment Ronald. I think there absolutely is a playfulness in Woolf's writing (and the line about Clarissa returning from the field of battle was the first thing that sprang to mind, but you pipped me to the post on that one). There are lots of funny details (Hugh Whitbread's 'well-covered, manly, extremely handsome, perfectly upholstered body' comes to mind. In fact, VW is very good at taking the mickey out of silly pompous Hugh.)
And Wickham! Yes! I was wondering if anyone would bring up Clarissa accidentally calling Dalloway Wickham. I took the appearance of that name as a means of evoking a feeling of Dalloway as 'The Wrong Guy'. ie, Clarissa has tried to be very sensible in her choice of husband but has perhaps blundered by allying herself with nice, unbrilliant Richard... Or perhaps not. Perhaps she knew exactly what she was doing. In any case, there is a feeling of what-might've-been casting its faint pall over the proceedings.
The Wickham label seems to fit Peter Walsh better. At the time, thirty years earlier, he might have fit the profile of the flashy, good-looking young man with a grudge against his betters and prospects less than stellar. You're right about the 'faint pall of what-might-have-been' that's cast over the proceedings. I think it covers the whole novel, at least as far as Clarissa and Peter are concerned.
Oh yes - you're right!
If Richard Dalloway isn’t George Wickham, Sally Seton is a close match for Charlotte Lucas. After Peter returns from India, he remembers having recently received a letter from Sally Seton, a friend of his and Clarissa’s from their youthful days of the 1890s. Sally he remembers as a precocious free-spirit—“like a child who has been in mischief”—with whom he shared “a great bond” because of the dislike they both inspired in Clarissa’s crusty old father due to their shared and scarcely concealed disdain for social conventions.
So far in “Mrs. Dalloway”, I can’t recall ever reading anything to suggest that Peter or Sally ever considered each other as a possible match, perhaps because they both come from cash-poor family backgrounds, though they would seem to be a natural and compatible couple. As for Clarissa, when she thinks of Sally, she remembers how she envied her exuberant personality, characterized by “a sort of abandonment, as if she could say anything, do anything”.
But getting back to Sally’s letter to Peter and the relevance it has for the character of Charlotte Lucas in “Pride and Prejudice”, Charlotte is the best friend of the heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, though not blest with the same degree of physical attractiveness. When Elizabeth rejects the proposal of the “irksome” but well-to-do Mr. Collins, Charlotte catches him on the rebound, even though she doesn’t love him any more than Mr. Collins loves her. Elizabeth is shocked and disappointed that her friend “would have sacrificed every better feeling for worldly advantage”, though Charlotte reminds Elizabeth that, “I am not a romantic, you know”, and that Mr. Collins’ offer of marriage and a comfortable home is too good to turn down.
Peter’s reaction to Sally’s letter is much the same as Elizabeth’s feelings about Charlotte’s decision to wed Mr. Collins. For Sally has now married and settled down, and become the matronly sort of woman capable of writing a “long, gushing letter” enthusing over blue hydrangeas. “It was Sally Seton,” he realizes, “the last person in the world one would have expected to marry a rich man and live in a large house near Manchester, the wild, the daring, the romantic Sally!” Peter is gobsmacked. “[O]f all that ancient lot, Clarissa’s friends”, he thinks, “Sally was probably the best”. And now she’s surrendered the ideals and values she shared with Peter in their youth and gone over to the enemy.
The reader is left with the impression of how isolated Peter has become, and not just because of the five years he’s spent in India. Clarissa married Richard Dalloway and moved on with her life. So did the Whitbreads and the rest of the people Peter knew in his youth. And now he’s learned that even Sally the rebel, at some point in the past, recognized that it was time to put away childish things and behave as a responsible adult; or at least, get married because, as Charlotte Lucas could have told her, it was the best way to obtain long-term financial and social security.
Of course, Peter is planning to get married, too; but from what we know of the circumstances of his prospective wife, it sounds like a rushed, bungled affair, with the complications of a divorce and two small stepchildren added to the mix. Somehow, I don't see Peter as a natural fit for the fatherhood role, but then I recall him amusing the little girl in Regent's Park with his pocket-watch. In any case, we are still left with Peter as an example of arrested development, a bit of an outsider, someone stuck in the past, still carrying a torch for Clarissa, and still unable to accept and move on from her rejection of him a full thirty years ago.
I'm not sure I see a parallel between Sally Seton and Charlotte Lucas - in my mind they are so different from one another! (Though, I have to admit that it's been a while since I read P&P.) However, the last two paragraphs of your comment ring very true - of Peter having bungled things, having been somewhat left behind. It brings a lot of poignancy, I think, to his thought in Regent's Park that Clarissa might have saved him from all this (if she'd married him).
I admit I was being maybe a little facetious with the Charlotte Lucas/Sally Seton comparison, but I couldn't resist indulging myself.
Towards the end of the novel, Clarissa is in the midst of her party but takes a moment to ponder Dr. Bradshaw's likely clientele: "For think what cases came before him--people in the uttermost depths of misery; people on the verge of insanity; husbands and wives." Notice VW saves the worst for the last.
I would say both Woolf and Wodehouse "endeavour to give satisfaction."
I'm already SO BEHIND (I read the first page, got excited, and then a heatwave started and I lost all will to read or focus or do anything but chug ice water — what I'd give to have scarf weather!) but I am hoping this next week gifts me all the reading time I've lost the last week or so. Thanks for the shout!!
Oh don't worry about being behind! You've got enough on your plate I'm sure with Wharton and all the fabulous comments pinging around at Closely Reading. Yes, I read about a big heatwave in the US in the news this morning! Keep chugging that ice water!
Thinking about the flowers ... I'm not with you Tash on their being mementos mori (or whatever the heck the plural is of memento mori, let's not get into the Latin grammar). Woolf's lover was Vita Sackville West the leading gardener of her time and Sissinghurst is not a place of death. Flowers are obviously important in the novel right from the first sentence but the way I see it is, exploring the different ways the characters use or are involved with flowers. (Just as they might react in different ways to one of the human characters.) Richard's roses for Clarissa are a (failed) declaration of love. Septimus's ones are visions of ecstatic beauty. Clarissa's are conventional decorations for a dinner table.
Also - the novel's stream-of-consciousness form has a tendency to fly apart into a dozen separate pieces. Could the flowers be a technical device, a sort of linking thread? (Woolf says this explicitly about the lighthouse in To the Lighthouse.)
Yes, I love that idea of the flowers as a linking thread.
How the different characters relate to them is also interesting. For example, the way Sally Seton brings together unusual combinations of flowers and clips off their heads to float them in water; how she tears apart the head of a rose while talking to PW and admires the cabbage leaves in the moonlight. All of this nicely captures her wild, original nature.
Rezia, on the other hand, buys roses from a poor man in the street - they are almost dead already but she arranges them nonetheless. So in Rezia's case, the flowers draw out her nurturing of something (someone) sick / tired / spent.
Thanks for developing my idea much better than I did myself!
Thanks for the mention! I'll be ready for the Cather conversation whenever you are :)
Just want to say that this is fantastic Tash - thank you 🙏
Oh thank you Sandy!
Just want to say that this is fantastic Tash - thank you 🙏
I can sympathize, Tash, with your complaints about the cold. Today, June 13th, was the first day this week that I didn't have to turn my furnace on in the morning to take the chill out of the air inside my house. Not something you expect in southeastern Ontario at this time of year. But it's winter in the Antipodes, is it not?
Thanks for the book plug Tash! Wasn't expecting that. The book is UK based. And the overlap between V Woolf and mountain climbing is surprising me as much as anyone. It's there in To the Lighthouse too. (But not in Mrs D so far...) Also it's blooming cold in Scotland too just now. Snow in June on some hilltops.