Mrs. Dalloway is a unique novel in that it takes place in a single daya Wednesday in mid-June 1923. It covers one day from morning to night in one woman's life, Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class housewife, walks through her London neighborhood to prepare for the party she will host that evening. When she returns from flower shopping, an old suitor and friend, Peter Walsh, drops by her house unexpectedly. The two have always judged each other harshly, and their meeting in the present intertwines with their thoughts of the past. Years earlier, Clarissa refused Peter's marriage proposal, and Peter has never quite gotten over it.
The book commences with the sentence, "Mrs. Dalloway said that she'd buy the flowers herself."(3) It is an immediate and assertive portrayal of Clarissa Dalloway as a wealthy and fully self-motivated person. It is a one sentence paragraph, and indeed could stand alone as a sort of summary of the entire book. Clarissa is a woman who has decided to never let the "wolf" of necessity near her door, and, through her ambitious nature ("she had wanted success": 282), made the firm decision to seek and assure her own material well-being. Hence, in the course of her life as depicted in her narrated memories, she moves from one safe house and garden to another. The passages on Clarissa move back and forth between reoccurring memories of Bourton from the first and last pages of the novel (" - she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air.."(3) - "And once she had walked on the terrace at Bourton":282) and her present actions in the well-established Dalloway residence over which she presides. She moves safely and consciously from her father's house to Richard's house: indeed, it is within the walls and gardens of Bourton that Clarissa makes her firm decision against marrying Peter and then to marry Richard.
To marry Peter would have been an impecunious choice, although it seemed potentially more romantic and contained an intimacy that was in the moment of Clarissa's decision painful to give up (" - she had borne about with her for years like an arrow sticking in her heart the grief, the anguish - ": 10). But, Clarissa realizes that this overwhelming intimacy would have been a problem in the long-term. Her choice of spouse, Richard, comprehends a need for personal intellectual and emotional space: "For in marriage, a little license, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him."(10). With Peter, she would never have the means nor the spatial allowances to achieve "a room of her own."
That the house is conceived of as a larger personally and psychically protective shell somewhat congruent to the personally-protective room(s) it encloses is illustrated in Clarissa's opening excursion out into the wider world of London. Here, in the public streets, Clarissa is preoccupied with her and Peter's miraculous "survival"(12) in this hostile environment: "She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out on the sea and alone; she had always had the feeling that it was very dangerous to live even one day."(11). The world outside of her house brings disorientation , violence in "a pistol shot on the street outside" (19: a "shot" foreshadowing Septimus's death, actually the sound of the car backfiring that serves as a link, through a chain of events, to the characters of with Lucrezia and Septimus in the next pages - Septimus, in turn, shows that there are in fact somehow do not survive in "the wide world", and the danger that Clarissa perceives is very real), discordant thoughts and echoes of a war just past (5). It is a wider world that perhaps tempts Clarissa, as she was tempted to marry a man who eventually settled in India, and when Peter returns she spontaneously thinks: "Take me with you, Clarissa thought impulsively, as if he were starting directly upon some great voyage - "(70).
From the outer city world, then, the break into the haven of her home is clear cut: "The hall of the house was cool as a vault - she felt like a nun who has left the world and feels fold round her the familiar veils and the response to old devotions. .. [she] felt blessed and purified - as if some lovely rose had blossomed for her eyes only - "(43). The excursion into the external world of the city was in fact only a brief foray made in order to procure flowers for this same abode. Her entry into the flower shop is the most extreme point she reaches in her excursion into "enemy territory", is a portrayal of the happiness she finds in this alternate haven: " - turning her head from side to side among the irises and roses and nodding tufts of lilac with her eyes half closed, snuffing in, after the street uproar, the delicious scent, the exquisite coolness. And then, opening her eyes, how fresh like frilled linen clean from laundry laid in wicker trays the roses looked."(18). It is odd, interesting and appropriate that this oasis of flowers in the middle of the outer, dangerous world is full of flowers that only evoke images of beautiful and ordered domesticity: it is Clarissa's house where the main activities take place, for which her flowers are destined and on which our attention should be fixed.
Then, it is Clarissa's room proper where the place where she has some "moment" (47) of personal revelation. Here is Mrs. Dalloway's most direct intersection with Woolf's later essay: this is literally a room of Clarissa's own that this married woman has strangely acquired, after "her illness" and Richard's insistence (46). Woolf is enforcing an ideal of female solitude, space and intellectual privacy (Clarissa reads Baron Marbot's Memoirs deep into the night: 46) , that Mrs. Dalloway achieves despite being a married woman and a mother. Clarissa, in contrast to Sally Seton's production of a brood of five, has only one child: this makes her formally a mother, but a very controlled one. Further, she retains her "virginit despite her marriage, motherhood and age: " - she could not dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth - that clung to her like a sheet" (46). The motif of Clarissa as a sort of devotional nun (she ascends to her attic room "like a nun withdrawing, or a child exploring a tower - ": 45) fits with the metaphor of life as a visit in a difficult cell ("There was an emptiness about the heart of life - narrower and narrower would her bed be - ": 45), that yet allows for the production of spiritual fruits: "It was a sudden revelation - like a match burning in a crocus" (47).
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