Mrs. Dalloway

Upon her return home from her shopping excursion, Clarissa learns that her husband, Richard, will be “lunching out” (26) with Lady Millicent Bruton, “whose lunch parties were said to be extraordinarily amusing” (26). Clarissa was not invited, and being excluded from the event shocks her; she goes upstairs, “[l]ike a nun withdrawing, or a child exploring a tower” (27). In her attic room, she thinks about how she has failed Richard because she lacks “something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman” (28). Clarissa acknowledges to herself that “she could not resist sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman” (28), an experience that leads her to “undoubtedly then feel what men felt” (28). Her thoughts move to Sally Seton, a beautiful woman who spent a summer at Bourton with a much younger Clarissa, when she and Clarissa “sat up till all hours of the night talking” (29). Sally, whose “charm was overpowering” (30) and whose voice “made everything she said sound like a caress” (31), once kissed Clarissa “on the lips” (31) moments before Peter Walsh interrupted them.

As she remembered the horror of Peter’s intrusion, Clarissa wonders how he will find her when he sees her next, as many years have passed. She selects a green dress in need of mending from her collection to wear during the party, just as Lucy, the housekeeper, enters with silver and crystal knickknacks cleaned especially for the party. Lucy offers to repair the dress, but Clarissa does it herself, and “[q]uiet descended on her, calm, content, as her needle, drawing the silk smoothly to its gentle pause, collected the green folds together” (35). Suddenly, the doorbell sounds, and within moments, Peter Walsh appears at the attic room door. As Peter realizes that Clarissa has grown older, she observes that he is “[e]xactly the same” (36), playing with his pocket-knife and gesturing with it as he had always done.

As they banter, they both recall their time together at Bourton and Clarissa’s rejection of Peter, who becomes “overcome with his own grief” (38). Clarissa tries to change the subject, but grows tearful herself, while Peter sits among the trappings of Clarissa’s privileged married life and ruminates on his perception of himself as a failure. Clarissa engages in a battle with “the enemy” (40), fighting to assert herself as her own person and not just the wife of Richard Dalloway, and Peter responds by telling her he is “in love with a girl in India” (40), a younger woman who is married to a Major in the Indian Army. As Peter explains that he is in London to see about how to arrange a divorce for the woman he loves, he fiddles ceaselessly with his pen knife, which annoys Clarissa, only to “burst into tears[…]wept without the least shame, sitting on the sofa, the tears running down his cheeks” (42). Clarissa feels at ease with his emotion and reflects at this moment that “[i]f I had married him, this gaiety would have been mine all day” (42); after all, Richard is “[l]unching with Lady Bruton” (42) and “I am alone forever” (42). Elizabeth enters the room just as Peter asks Clarissa if she is happy, and Clarissa introduces her daughter “emotionally, histrionically, perhaps” (43). Peter leaves abruptly as Clarissa reminds him to come to her party that evening.

Peter hears Big Ben in the distance as he walks the streets of London, thinking about India and the fact that he “was now really for the first time in his life, in love” (44). He feels shame at his outburst, remembering that “Clarissa refused me” (45) and reflecting on his own age and the experiences of his youth. Near Whitehall, Peter observes “[b]oys in uniform, carrying guns” (46) and marching, and while crossing Trafalgar Square, Peter feels a sudden sense of intoxicating freedom: “I haven’t felt so young for years!” (48). He spies a woman he finds attractive, “young, but stately; merry, but discreet; black, but enchanting” (48) and soon, in his imagination, “she became the very woman he had always had in mind” (48). Peter follows her, imagining himself “a romantic buccaneer” (49) from India, until she lets herself into a building with a key, ending his fantasy. He walks on to Regent’s Park, sits on a bench with a lighted cigar, and falls asleep. As soon as Peter wakes up, he is struck by memories of Bourton, “when he was so passionately in love with Clarissa” (54). He remembers Sally Seton, who was daring and attractive, and then he remembers the details of the evening when Clarissa turned him down forever, when he “felt that he was grinding against something physically hard; she was unyielding” (59). That night, he realized Clarissa would marry Richard Dalloway, and after Peter went away, “[h]e never saw her again” (59).