Clarissa vs Mrs Dalloway - the Private and the Public Self of the Perfect Hostess - Essay Example

? Dalloway Virginia Woolf born in London, and permanently settled in Bloomsbury, had distinct views on art, especially on the craft of fiction .Her novels are psychological in their approach, employing a narrative technique called stream of Consciousness ‘method”. The novel Mrs. Dalloway is about the story of the main character, Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Wolf takes the readers continuously through the thoughts and feelings of Mrs. Dalloway – The stream of Consciousness of Mrs. Dalloway. We see Clarissa as a girl, as aw wife, as a mother, as a woman and as a conventional hostess. We see her not only as she is Mrs. Dalloway today but as Miss Clarissa thirty years ago. As Mrs. Dalloway walks or shops or talks or dresses or dines, we are inside her mind, seeing as she sees herself and knowing the past as she knows. We also see Clarissa through her own stream of Consciousness as well as that of others, Peter Walsh, Sally Seston and Richard Dalloway. The events of the novel are confined to the duration of a day in London, beginning with Clarissa Dalloway going out in the morning to buy some flowers for her party in the evening. This restricted frame work might lead us to the inference that the novel is slender but it is not the case however. The novel is composed of the recollections of the main characters ranging far back in time. Clarissa goes out to buy some flowers for her party. The fresh morning reminds her of her similar mornings in the past and her association with her former lover, Peter Walsh. Reminiscing over the past, she enters Regan’s Park and meets Hugh Whitbread an old friend. Inevitably she draws a comparison between Whitbread and Peter. When she thinks of Peter Walsh, scene after scene from her early married life comes to her mind. She remembers how she loved Peter Walsh but accepted Richard Dalloway by rejecting Peter Walsh. In the midst a glove shop on the way triggers her memory of her daughter, Elizabeth, and her likes and dislikes. Back at home, after buying flowers, she learns from her maid that Richard Dalloway will dine with lady Bruton in the evening, her mind travels back towards Peter. Had she married him, all the joys would have been hers. He would not have left her to dine with Lady Bruton. She is now Clarissa who loved Peter Walsh. Clarissa’s love for Peter is irrepressible. But She wanted to be left alone. But Peter always kept inquiring into her goings on. She felt that Peter was too demanding and wanted her to share every one of her feelings with him. Richard Dalloway the states man was not so demanding and so she married Richard which was a surprise to Peter. Clarrisa reflects on certain events in the past. After the marriage with Richard only she realized to her great horror that she was incapable of warmth towards him. Her relationships with Richard are dry and love less even though he is very kind to her. It came to her mind, the first introduction of Dalloway to her shyly and awkwardly “My name is Dalloway”. Clarissa’s friends Sally joking about it and so on. The then Clarissa is different from the present Mrs. Dalloway. Mrs. Dalloway is now thinking about Peter Walsh who is now a colonial officer in India. Her love and regard for Peter still fume and simmer in the depth of her heart. She feels that she is responsible for the wastage of Peters’ life. Peter return to London in order to consult a lawyer on how to obtain a divorce for his fiancee. But his real motive is to renew and resuscitate his relations with Clarissa. But both are inhibited. Neither has the courage to articulate their inner longings. He barges into her house without any previous information, and is surprised to see her unchanged, wearing a torn dress and busy making arrangements for parties. As for Peter he also does not seem to have undergone any change, fidgeting with his pocket knife and leaving of sentences unfinished. Clarissa sits by his side on the sofa. Unable to control himself he kisses her on her hands impulsively. (Now also he does not have the courage to kiss her on her lips). . He tells her that he is in love with a girl in India. Clarissa feels bit disappointments because Peter wants to tell her indirectly that he does not love her. Clarissa‘s indomitable egotism plays well here .So she does not show any displeasure to the words of Peter. She calmly asks him to tell her more about the girl he is in love with. He says that she is the wife of a major in Indian Army and has two small children. Peter feels that he had successfully wounded Clarissa who had wounded him earlier by rejecting him and marrying Richard. He feels a curious ironical sweetness as he says this to Clarissa. But Clarissa pities him but does not verbalize her feelings. She thinks that the Major’s wife has hooked him by flattering him and that he has completely wasted is life. The Mrs. Dalloway is sometimes the old Clarissa of Peter. Mrs. Dalloway and Peter have the same intimacy and attraction now also in their fifties. But still now she shows some irritation towards his behavior. The careless fiddling with his pen knife annoys her much. Clarissa is slightly jealous of him. Peter feels that by falling in love with a married woman, he has achieved something of note and that he has shown to Clarissa, Richard and all others what he is capable of. But this is only a superficial feeling born out of his vanity. He feels in his heart of hearts that he has wasted his life. Quite unexpectedly, he burst into tears. His feelings for Clarissa are revealed now. Clarissa is touched. She draws him to herself and kisses him passionately to assuage his grief. She is quite happy to have kissed him. She feels that if she had married him, this gaiety would have been hers all day. But she does not verbalize her feelings. This gives her a feeling that she had lived with him a life time. Peter is ashamed of having revealed his feeling. He gets up and goes up to the window. The reunion is momentary. As usual he wants to ask her about her relation with Richard, but her daughter enters. Clarissa ‘s words, while introducing her daughter, “here’s my Elizabeth?” haunts Peter as characteristic of Clarissa’s pride.” Why my Elizabeth? Why not Elizabeth simply.” thinks Peter. So he bids good bye to her and goes away without paying any attention to her request to attend the party that night. Mrs. Dalloway is the old Miss Clarrisa only when she arranges parties to the upper class people which are disliked both by her husband Richard and her lover Peter. Through the technique of stream of consciousness the thought s and feelings surging through the mind of Mrs. Dalloway is revealed. Thus the then Clarissa and the present Mrs. Dalloway are portrayed successfully. Thus one thought triggers another thought and one feeling merges with another feeling creating comparable or contrastive patterns. Even at one point she thinks about her own character. She says that she can be both involved and uninvolved. She can slice like a knife through everything and at the same time remains outside, looking on. She is haunted by a feeling of loneliness of being out, out far to sea. She has no bookish knowledge worth mentioning, but has an instinctive capacity to understand people. She remembers all her friends, particularly Sylvia, Fred and Sally Seton. She remembers even trivial matters such as having thrown a shilling into the Serpentine many years ago. She believes that even after death she will survive having become part of her dilapidated house at Bouton and the trees there, of her lover Peter and even of the people she has never met. Having stopped bearing children and being no more marrying Clarissa is haunted by the feeling that she has lost her identity. She feels that she is not Clarissa anymore but only Mrs. Dalloway. She wishes to be born again so that she can live like Lady Boxborough, slow, stately and interested in politics like a man. She hate s her narrow Pea-stick figure and her little face, beaked like a birds. The Clarissa is a different person in her attitude. She enjoys anything and everything the wind blowing, the flower s swaying, the motor cars tooting their horns. Big Ben ringing and creating ripples in Time, the duck silently swimming in the pond in Hyde Park, everything pleases her. In the same way she bestows her sympathy on all. She is kind to her maid servants. Instead of overtaxing her maid servant Lucy, she herself goes to market to buy flowers for her party. Her heart goes out in sympathy to Septimus whom she has not even seen. When the Bradshaw’s callously talk about the suicide of Septimus, she visualizes his body falling down with a thud and being torn to pieces by the spikes below. Clarissa is sympathetic and sensitive. All the above mentioned events which molded the future of Clarissa obviously show that she was struggling constantly to balance her internal world and external world. Her World consists of gleaming face such as fashion, parties, and high society. But when she moves through that world she search underneath for new deeper meanings. Clarissa yearns for privacy and introspects to derive emotional stability. All her external actions were to confine herself in the tight cell of her heart. She let all her emotional patterns out through her appearance and other worldly affairs. Clarissa suffers from the overlapping of her past and present. She strives hard to bring together her memories. She is not sure about her decision to marry Richard, instead of Peter Walsh which shaped her life. She strongly feels that she sacrificed passion for the security and tranquility of an upper class life. But we see that towards the end of the party, Peter unexpectedly waits there for Clarissa. She slowly walks towards him. She cannot hide the real Clarissa, but unveils her passion towards him. Peter, as always experiences a terror, ecstasy and extra ordinary excitement. He is upset. He does not know how to face and what to talk to her. But the present Mrs. Dalloway prevents her from expressing the love of Miss Clarissa towards Peter. The positive and negative aspects of one’s own personality are successfully revealed in this novel by the eminent writer Virginia Wolf. The culminating event in the book, Clarissa Dalloway’s party, is the way to go back to her previous life that still exists in her personality. The possibilities of isolation and communicativeness that leads Clarissa to become Mrs. Dalloway is well portrayed in the novel. According to Virginia “look within the life, it seems, is very far from being like this. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives myriad impressions trivial, fantastic, evanescent or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, incessant shower of innumerable atoms, and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the account falls differently…life is a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of the consciousness to the end.” Work cited Wolf Virginia, (1925), Mrs. Dalloway ,Hogarth Press, United Kingdom Read More