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Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce Excerpt 1: pages 3-4 |
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| The following scene is the first in the novel. At this point in time, Stephen is very young. He is enjoying time with his mother, father, Uncle Harry, and their family friend Dante. Note Joyce's use of sensory imagery to convey Stephen's perspective. Also note the effects of nonstandard punctuation, rhyming, and nonsense words. | |
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Once upon a time and a very good time it was
there was a moocow coming down along the road
and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens1
little boy named baby
tuckoo. |
1 nice |
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His Father told him that story: his father looked at him through a
glass2. He had a hairy face. |
2 a child's way of describing glasses |
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He was a baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne
lived: she sold
lemon platt3. |
3 candy |
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O the wild rose blossoms He sang that song. That was his song. O, the green woethe botheth4 |
4 nonsense words |
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When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell. His mother had a nicer smell than his father. She played on the piano the sailor’s hornpipe for him to dance. He danced: Tralala lala Tralala lala Tralala lala. Uncle Charles and Dante clapped. They were older than his father and mother but Uncle Charles was older than Dante. Dante had two brushes in her press. The brush with the maroon velvet
back was for Michael
Davitt and the brush with the green velvet back was for Parnell. Dante
gave him a cachou5 every
time he brought her a piece of tissue paper. |
5 a cashew nut |
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The Vances lived in number seven. They had a different father and mother. They were Eileen’s father and mother. When they were grown up he was going to marry Eileen6. He hid under the table. His mother said: --O, Stephen will apologise. Dante said: --O, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes.
Pull out his eyes, Apologise, Apologise, Pull out his eyes.
Apologise, Pull out his eyes, Pull out his eyes, Apologise. |
6 Joyce implies that Eileen's family is protestant. Stephen's family is Catholic, and cannot imagine him marrying a protestant, even if it is just the wishful thinking of a child. |
| Excerpt 2: pages 98-102 | |
| In this excerpt, Stephen is an adolescent. He has traveled with his father to his father's hometown of Cork, Ireland. Stephen's father has returned to auction off property because the family is in desperate need of money. Stephen is embarrassed by his dad, who feels the need to talk to everyone they run into. The tensions between the two mount that evening as Stephen follows his father from bar to bar, and listens to him recount the "glories" of his youth. The next morning, they go to a coffee shop. Stephen is again embarrassed because is father is clearly hungover from drinking the night before. Stephen increasingly sees his father as detached from reality. | |
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Stephen heard his father's voice break into a laugh which was almost a sob. --He was the handsomest man in Cork at that time, by God he was! The women used to stand to look after him in the street. He heard the sob passing loudly down his father's throat and opened his eyes with a nervous impulse. The sunlight breaking suddenly on his sight turned the sky and clouds into a fantastic world of sombre masses with lakelike spaces of dark rosy light. His very brain was sick and powerless. He could scarcely interpret the letters of the signboards of the shops. By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard in it an echo of the infuriated cries within him. He could respond to no earthly or human appeal, dumb and insensible to the call of summer and gladness and companionship, wearied and dejected by his father's voice. He could scarcely recognize as his own thoughts, and repeated slowly to himself: |
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--I am Stephen Dedalus. I am walking beside my father whose name is Simon Dedalus. We are in Cork, in Ireland. Cork is a city. Our room is in the Victoria Hotel. Victoria and Stephen
and
Simon. Simon and Stephen and Victoria. Names.1 |
1 Stephen recites names and locations as a way to clear his thoughts and distract himself from his current situation. |
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The memory of his childhood suddenly grew dim. He tried to call forth some of its
vivid
moments but could not. He recalled only names. Dante, Parnell, Clane, Clongowes. A little boy
had been taught geography by an old woman who kept two brushes in her wardrobe2. Then he had
been sent away from home to a college, he had made his first communion and eaten slim jim
out of his cricket cap and watched the firelight leaping and dancing on
the wall of a little bedroom in the infirmary and dreamed of being dead,
of mass being said for him by the rector in a black and gold cope, of
being buried then in the little graveyard of the community off the main
avenue of limes. But he had not died then. Parnell had died. There had
been no mass for the dead in the chapel and no procession. He had not
died but he had faded out like a film in the sun. He had been lost or
had wandered out of existence for he no longer existed. How strange to
think of him passing out of existence in such a way, not by death but by
fading out in the sun or by being lost and forgotten somewhere in the
universe! It was strange to see his small body appear again for a
moment: a little boy in a grey belted suit. His hands were in his
side-pockets and his trousers were tucked in at the knees by elastic
bands. |
2 a reference to Dante |
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On the evening of the day on which the property was sold Stephen followed his father meekly
about the city from bar to bar. To the sellers in the market, to the barmen and barmaids, to the
beggars who importuned him for a job Mr. Dedalus told the same tale--that he was an old Corkonian, that he had been trying for thirty years to get rid of his Cork accent up in Dublin
and that Peter Pickackafax beside him was his eldest son but that he was only a Dublin jackeen. |
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They had set out early in the morning from Newcombe's coffee-house, where Mr. Dedalus's cup had rattled noisily against its saucer, and Stephen had tried to cover that shameful sign of his father's drinking bout of the night before by moving his chair and coughing.3 One humiliation had succeeded another--the false smiles of the market sellers, the curvetings and oglings of the barmaids with whom his father flirted, the compliments and encouraging words of his father's friends. They had told him that he had a great look of his grandfather and Mr. Dedalus had agreed that he was an ugly likeness. They had unearthed traces of a Cork accent in his speech and made him admit that the Lee was a much finer river than the Liffey. One of them, in order to put his Latin to the proof, had made him translate short passages from Dilectus and asked him whether it was correct to say: TEMPORA MUTANTUR NOS ET MUTAMUR IN ILLIS or TEMPORA MUTANTUR ET NOS MUTAMUR IN ILLIS.4 Another, a brisk old man, whom Mr. Dedalus called Johnny Cashman, had covered him with confusion by asking him to say which were prettier, the Dublin girls or the Cork girls. --He's not that way built, said Mr. Dedalus. Leave him alone. He's a level-headed thinking boy who doesn't bother his head about that kind of nonsense. --Then he's not his father's son, said the little old man. --Ay, or thought of, said Mr. Dedalus. |
3Stephen tries to cover up signs of his father's drinking the night before. 4 Two different ways to say: "The times change and we change in them" |
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--We're as old as we feel, Johnny, said Mr.Dedalus. And just finish what you have there and we'll have another. Here, Tim or Tom or whatever your name is, give us the same again here. By
God, I don't feel more than eighteen myself. There's that son of mine there not half my age and I'm a better man than he is any day of the week. |
Stephen's father at first protects Stephen from Cashman's teasing. Eventually, his pride gets the best of him, and he calls himself a better man than his son. |
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--Draw it mild now, Dedalus. I think it's time for you to take a back seat, said the gentleman who had spoken before. --But he'll beat you here, said the little old man, tapping his forehead and raising his glass to drain it. |
It is ridiculous for Stephen's hungover, bloated father to even consider racing Stephen, who is young and fit |
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--Well, I hope he'll be as good a man as his father. That's all I can say, said Mr. Dedalus. --If he is, he'll do, said the little old man. --And thanks be to God, Johnny, said Mr. Dedalus, that we lived so long and did so little harm. --But did so much good, Simon, said the little old man gravely. Thanks be to God we lived so long and did so much good. |
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Stephen watched the three glasses being raised from the counter as his father and his two cronies drank to the memory of their past. An abyss of fortune or of temperament sundered him from them. His mind seemed older than theirs5: it shone coldly on their strifes and happiness and regrets like a moon upon a younger earth. No life or youth stirred in him as it had stirred in them. He had known neither the pleasure of companionship with others nor the vigour of rude male health nor filial piety.6 Nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and loveless lust. His childhood was dead or lost and with it his soul capable of simple joys and he was drifting amid life like the barren shell of the moon. |
5 Stephen sees himself as an old soul, more mature in some ways than his father and his father's friends 6 A son's loyalty to his father |
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Art thou pale for weariness Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,Wandering companionless... ? He repeated to himself the lines of Shelley's fragment. Its alternation of sad human ineffectiveness with vast inhuman cycles of activity chilled him and he forgot his own human and ineffectual grieving. |
Stephen recites a bit of a Shelley poem about the lonely moon wandering in the night sky; this reflects his feelings about his own state. |
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Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf Excerpt 1: pages 1-11 |
Notice Woolf's use of punctuation. What is the effect of her recounting this conversation within the paragraph, rather than the conventional way of separating conversations from the rest of the text? |
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Woolf's novel starts very abruptly, as Clarissa Dalloway recalls
telling her maid Lucy that she would "buy the flowers herself." In this
excerpt, Clarissa walks through the London Market, her thoughts flitting
from one memory to another. Though Clarissa married her husband
Richard Dalloway long ago, her thoughts constantly return to her former
love, Peter Walsh. |
The freshness of the morning makes Clarissa think of a similar moment she spent with Peter Walsh during her youth. |
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Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach. What a lark! What a
plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak
of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French
windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm,
stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the
flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl
of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there
at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at
the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks
rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing
among the vegetables?”—was that it?—“I prefer men to cauliflowers”—was
that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone
out on to the terrace—Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of
these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully
dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his
smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly
vanished—how strange it was!—a few sayings like this about cabbages. | |
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She stiffened a little
on the kerb1, waiting for Durtnall’s van to pass. A charming woman,
Scrope Purvis thought her (knowing her as one does know people who live
next door to one in Westminster); a touch of the bird about her, of the
jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and
grown very white since her illness. There she perched, never seeing him,
waiting to cross, very upright. | 1 curb The perspective changes |
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For having lived in
Westminster—how many years now? over twenty,— one feels even in the
midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a
particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but
that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big
Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the
hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such
fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only
knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it
round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their
downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts
of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people’s eyes, in
the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the
carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and
swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and
the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved;
life; London; this moment of June. | The striking of Big Ben reminds Clarissa of the fleeting nature of time and how much she loves life. |
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For it was
the middle of June. The War2 was over, except for some one like Mrs. Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that
nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House must go to a cousin; or
Lady Bexborough who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her
hand, John, her favourite, killed; but it was over; thank Heaven—over.
It was June. The King and Queen were at the Palace. And everywhere,
though it was still so early, there was a beating, a stirring of
galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh and
all the rest of it; wrapped in the soft mesh of the grey-blue morning
air, which, as the day wore on, would unwind them, and set down on their
lawns and pitches the bouncing ponies, whose forefeet just struck the
ground and up they sprung, the whirling young men, and laughing girls in
their transparent muslins who, even now, after dancing all night, were
taking their absurd woolly dogs for a run; and even now, at this hour,
discreet old dowagers were shooting out in their motor cars on errands
of mystery; and the shopkeepers were fidgeting in their windows with
their paste and diamonds, their lovely old sea-green brooches in
eighteenth-century settings to tempt Americans (but one must economise,
not buy things rashly for Elizabeth), and she, too, loving it as she did
with an absurd and faithful passion, being part of it, since her people
were courtiers once in the time of the Georges, she, too, was going that
very night to kindle and illuminate; to give her party. But how strange,
on entering the Park, the silence; the mist; the hum; the slow-swimming
happy ducks; the pouched birds waddling; and who should be coming along
with his back against the Government buildings, most appropriately,
carrying a despatch box stamped with the Royal Arms, who but Hugh
Whitbread; her old friend Hugh—the admirable Hugh! |
2 World War I England is slowly returning to normalcy after the war. |
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“Good-morning to you, Clarissa!” said Hugh, rather extravagantly, for they had known each other as children. “Where are you off to?” “I love walking in London,” said Mrs. Dalloway. “Really it’s better than walking in the country.” | |
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They had
just come up—unfortunately—to see doctors. Other people came to see
pictures; go to the opera; take their daughters out; the Whitbreads came
“to see doctors.” Times without number Clarissa had visited Evelyn
Whitbread in a nursing home. Was Evelyn ill again? Evelyn was a good
deal out of sorts, said Hugh, intimating by a kind of pout or swell of
his very well-covered, manly, extremely handsome, perfectly upholstered
body (he was almost too well dressed always, but presumably had to be,
with his little job at Court) that his wife had some internal ailment,
nothing serious, which, as an old friend, Clarissa Dalloway would quite
understand without requiring him to specify. Ah yes, she did of course;
what a nuisance; and felt very sisterly and oddly conscious at the same
time of her hat. Not the right hat for the early morning, was that it?
For Hugh always made her feel, as he bustled on, raising his hat rather
extravagantly and assuring her that she might be a girl of eighteen, and
of course he was coming to her party to-night, Evelyn absolutely
insisted, only a little late he might be after the party at the Palace
to which he had to take one of Jim’s boys,—she always felt a little
skimpy beside Hugh; schoolgirlish; but attached to him, partly from
having known him always, but she did think him a good sort in his own
way, though Richard was nearly driven mad by him, and as for Peter
Walsh, he had never to this day forgiven her for liking him. | Despite the fact that Clarissa has known Hugh for a long time, he still makes her feel a bit uncomfortable. |
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She could
remember scene after scene at Bourton—Peter furious; Hugh not, of
course, his match in any way, but still not a positive imbecile as Peter
made out; not a mere barber’s block. When his old mother wanted him to
give up shooting or to take her to Bath he did it, without a word; he
was really unselfish, and as for saying, as Peter did, that he had no
heart, no brain, nothing but the manners and breeding of an English
gentleman, that was only her dear Peter at his worst; and he could be
intolerable; he could be impossible; but adorable to walk with on a
morning like this... |
Her thoughts return to Peter and their time at Bourton. |
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(June had
drawn out every leaf on the trees. The mothers of Pimlico3 gave suck to
their young. Messages were passing from the Fleet to the Admiralty.
Arlington Street and Piccadilly seemed to chafe the very air in the Park
and lift its leaves hotly, brilliantly, on waves of that divine vitality
which Clarissa loved. To dance, to ride, she had adored all that.) |
3 A neighborhood in London. |
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For they
might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a
letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If
he were with me now what would he say?—some days, some sights bringing
him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was
the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of
St. James’s Park on a fine morning—indeed they did. But Peter—however
beautiful the day might be, and the trees and the grass, and the little
girl in pink— Peter never saw a thing of all that. He would put on his
spectacles, if she told him to; he would look. It was the state of the
world that interested him; Wagner, Pope’s poetry, people’s characters
eternally, and the defects of her own soul. How he scolded her! How they
argued! She would marry a Prime Minister and stand at the top of a
staircase; the perfect hostess he called her (she had cried over it in
her bedroom), she had the makings of the perfect hostess, he said. | Clarissa remembers Peter fondly, but still recalls the downsides of his personality, especially his criticisms of her and her life choices. |
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So she would still find herself arguing in St. James’s Park, still
making out that she had been right—and she had too—not to marry him. 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. (Where was he this morning for instance?
Some committee, she never asked what.) But with Peter everything had to
be shared; everything gone into. And it was intolerable, and when it
came to that scene in the little garden by the fountain, she had to break with him or they would have been destroyed, both of them ruined, she was convinced; though she had borne about with her for years like an arrow sticking in her heart the grief, the anguish; and then the horror of the moment when some one told her at a concert that he had married a woman met on the boat going to India! Never should she forget all that! Cold, heartless, a prude, he called her. Never could she understand how he cared. But those Indian women did presumably— silly, pretty, flimsy nincompoops. And she wasted her pity. For he was quite happy, he assured her—perfectly happy, though he had never done a thing that they talked of; his whole life had been a failure. It made her angry still. |
She believes that Peter would have been too smothering as a husband. Independence is important to Clarissa, even in her marriage to Richard. Clarissa feels angry at Peter because she believes that he has never accomplished his dreams in life. |
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She had
reached the Park gates. She stood for a moment, looking at the omnibuses
in Piccadilly. She would not say of any one in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary. How she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Fräulein Daniels4 gave them she could not think. She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that. |
4 her German governess (teacher and nanny) |
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Her only
gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If
you put her in a room with some one, up went her back like a cat’s; or
she purred. Devonshire House, Bath House, the house with the china
cockatoo, she had seen them all lit up once; and remembered Sylvia,
Fred, Sally Seton—such hosts of people; and dancing all night; and the
wagons plodding past to market; and driving home across the Park. She
remembered once throwing a shilling into the Serpentine. But every one
remembered; what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat
lady in the cab. Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards
Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely;
all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become
consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in
the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she
survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was
positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all
to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being
laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on
their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread
ever so far, her life, herself. But what was she dreaming as she looked
into Hatchards’ shop window? What was she trying to recover? What image
of white dawn in the country, as she read in the book spread open: |
Although she hated Peter for telling her she would make the "perfect hostess," Clarissa also recognizes that she has a gift for interacting with people and bringing them together, as a hostess does. |
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Fear no more the heat o’ the sun Nor the furious winter’s rages.5 |
5 bits of a song from William Shakespeare's tragi-comedy, Cymbeline, King of Britain |
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This late age of the world’s
experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears.
Tears and sorrows; courage and endurance; a perfectly upright and
stoical bearing. Think, for example, of the woman she admired most, Lady Bexborough, opening the bazaar. | |
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There were Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities; there were Soapy Sponge and
Mrs. Asquith’s Memoirs and Big Game Shooting in Nigeria, all spread
open. Ever so many books there were; but none that seemed exactly right
to take to Evelyn Whitbread in her nursing home. Nothing that would
serve to amuse her and make that indescribably dried-up little woman
look, as Clarissa came in, just for a moment cordial; before they
settled down for the usual interminable talk of women’s ailments. How
much she wanted it—that people should look pleased as she came in,
Clarissa thought and turned and walked back towards Bond Street,
annoyed, because it was silly to have other reasons for doing things.
Much rather would she have been one of those people like Richard who did
things for themselves, whereas, she thought, waiting to cross, half the
time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people
think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew (and now the policeman held
up his hand) for no one was ever for a second taken in. Oh if she could
have had her life over again! she thought, stepping on to the pavement,
could have looked even differently! |
Clarissa's thoughts switch to what books she might take to Evelyn in the nursing home. Clarissa thinks about the kind of person she would have liked to be, if she had her choice. |
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She would
have been, in the first place, dark like Lady Bexborough, with a skin of
crumpled leather and beautiful eyes. She would have been, like Lady Bexborough, slow and stately; rather large; interested in politics like
a man; with a country house; very dignified, very sincere. Instead of
which she had a narrow pea-stick figure; a ridiculous little face,
beaked like a bird’s. That she held herself well was true; and had nice
hands and feet; and dressed well, considering that she spent little. But
often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture),
this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing—nothing at all. She
had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there
being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this
astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond
Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being
Mrs. Richard Dalloway. | She feels that her existence is mainly tied to her status as Richard Dalloway's wife, and this makes her feel rather empty. |
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Excerpt 2, pages 43-47 | |
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Clarissa returns from her errands, and reflects on her solitary
state. She has slept alone since she was sick with influenza, and no
longer feels romantic love for her husband. This disturbs her, but she
also enjoys her aloneness. Peter Walsh stops by unexpectedly,
interrupting her thoughts about life, relationships, and solitude. There
is immediate tension. Peter notices Clarissa is preparing for a party,
and he judges her for it. Clarissa feels that Peter thinks she is silly,
concerned with only social gatherings. He believes she thinks he is a
failure. Clarissa asks Peter if he remembers a moment they shared at the
lake. The memory brings up mixed emotions for both, as they think of the
lost dreams of their youth. She looked at Peter Walsh; her look, passing through all that time and that emotion, reached him doubtfully; settled on him tearfully; and rose and fluttered away, as a bird touches a branch and rises and flutters away. Quite simply she wiped her eyes. | |
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“Yes,” said Peter. “Yes, yes, yes,” he said, as if she drew up to the
surface something which positively hurt him as it rose. Stop! Stop! he
wanted to cry. For he was not old; his life was not over; not by any
means. He was only just past fifty. Shall I tell her, he thought, or
not? He would like to make a clean breast of it all. But she is too
cold, he thought; sewing, with her scissors; Daisy would look ordinary
beside Clarissa. And she would think me a failure, which I am in their
sense, he thought; in the Dalloways’ sense. Oh yes, he had no doubt
about that; he was a failure, compared with all this—the inlaid table,
the mounted paper-knife, the dolphin and the candlesticks, the
chair-covers and the old valuable English tinted prints—he was a
failure! I detest the smugness of the whole affair, he thought;
Richard’s doing, not Clarissa’s; save that she married him. (Here Lucy
came into the room, carrying silver, more silver, but charming, slender,
graceful she looked, he thought, as she stooped to put it down.) And
this has been going on all the time! he thought; week after week;
Clarissa’s life; while I—he thought; and at once everything seemed to
radiate from him; journeys; rides; quarrels; adventures; bridge parties;
love affairs; work; work, work! and he took out his knife quite
openly—his old horn-handled knife which Clarissa could swear he had had
these thirty years—and clenched his fist upon it. |
Peter wonders if he should tell her the real reason he is in London--to arrange a formal divorce for his fiancée, who is still technically married to her first husband. This would be Peter's second marriage as well. |
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What an extraordinary habit that was, Clarissa thought; always
playing with a knife. Always making one feel, too, frivolous;
empty-minded; a mere silly chatterbox, as he used. But I too, she
thought, and, taking up her needle, summoned, like a Queen whose guards
have fallen asleep and left her unprotected (she had been quite taken
aback by this visit—it had upset her) so that any one can stroll in and
have a look at her where she lies with the brambles curving over her,
summoned to her help the things she did; the things she liked; her
husband; Elizabeth; her self, in short, which Peter hardly knew now, all
to come about her and beat off the enemy. |
The point of view switches suddenly. |
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“Well, and what’s happened to you?” she said. So before a battle1 begins, the horses paw the ground; toss their heads; the light shines on their flanks; their necks curve. So Peter Walsh and Clarissa, sitting side by side on the blue sofa, challenged each other. His powers chafed and tossed in him. He assembled from different quarters all sorts of things; praise; his career at Oxford; his marriage, which she knew nothing whatever about; how he had loved; and altogether done his job. “Millions of things!” he exclaimed, and, urged by the assembly of powers which were now charging this way and that and giving him the feeling at once frightening and extremely exhilarating of being rushed through the air on the shoulders of people he could no longer see, he raised his hands to his forehead. Clarissa sat very upright; drew in her breath. |
1 Woolf uses the metaphor of knights dueling to describe the feel of the conversation between Clarissa and Peter. |
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“I am in love,” he said, not to her however, but to some one raised up in the dark so that you could not touch her but must lay your garland2 down on the grass in the dark. “In love,” he repeated, now speaking rather dryly to Clarissa Dalloway; “in love with a girl in India.” He had deposited his garland. Clarissa could make what she would of it. “In love!” she said. That he at his age should be sucked under in his little bow-tie by that monster! And there’s no flesh on his neck; his hands are red; and he’s six months older than I am! her eye flashed back to her; but in her heart she felt, all the same, he is in love. He has that, she felt; he is in love. But the indomitable egotism which for ever rides down the hosts opposed to it, the river which says on, on, on; even though, it admits, there may be no goal for us whatever, still on, on; this indomitable egotism charged her cheeks with colour; made her look very young; very pink; very bright-eyed as she sat with her dress upon her knee, and her needle held to the end of green silk, trembling a little. He was in love! Not with her. With some younger woman, of course. “And who is she?” she asked. |
2 a reference to the formalities of duels |
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Now this statue3 must be brought from its height and set down between them. “A married woman, unfortunately,” he said; “the wife of a Major in the Indian Army.” And with a curious ironical sweetness he smiled as he placed her in this ridiculous way before Clarissa. (All the same, he is in love, thought Clarissa.) “She has,” he continued, very reasonably, “two small children; a boy
and a girl; and I have come over to see my lawyers about the divorce.” |
3 Peter's love; Clarissa is trying to make her more human, rather than an object of wonder. |
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There they are! he thought. Do what you like with them, Clarissa!
There they are! And second by second it seemed to him that the wife of
the Major in the Indian Army (his Daisy) and her two small children
became more and more lovely as Clarissa looked at them; as if he had set
light to a grey pellet on a plate and there had risen up a lovely tree
in the brisk sea-salted air of their intimacy (for in some ways no one
understood him, felt with him, as Clarissa did)—their exquisite
intimacy. |
Peter knows that Clarissa is judging both him and his fiancée. |
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She flattered him; she fooled him, thought Clarissa; shaping the woman, the wife of the Major in the Indian Army, with three strokes of a knife. What a waste! What a folly! All his life long Peter had been fooled like that; first getting sent down from Oxford; next marrying the girl on the boat going out to India; now the wife of a Major in the Indian Army—thank Heaven she had refused to marry him! Still, he was in love; her old friend, her dear Peter, he was in love. “But what are you going to do?” she asked him. Oh the lawyers and solicitors, Messrs. Hooper and Grateley of Lincoln’s Inn, they were going to do it, he said. And he actually pared his nails with his pocket-knife. For Heaven’s sake, leave your knife alone! she cried to herself in
irrepressible irritation; it was his silly unconventionality, his
weakness; his lack of the ghost of a notion what any one else was
feeling that annoyed her, had always annoyed her; and now at his age,
how silly! |
Clarissa judges Peter's fiancée to be a flattering and shallow. |
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I know all that, Peter thought; 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 then to his utter surprise, suddenly thrown by those uncontrollable forces thrown through the air, he burst into tears; wept; wept without the least shame, sitting on the sofa, the tears running down his cheeks. And Clarissa had leant forward, taken his hand, drawn him to her, kissed him,—actually had felt his face on hers before she could down the brandishing of silver flashing—plumes like pampas grass in a tropic gale in her breast, which, subsiding, left her holding his hand, patting his knee and, feeling as she sat back extraordinarily at her ease with him and light-hearted, all in a clap it came over her, If I had married him, this gaiety would have been mine all day! |
Peter cannot take the pressure of Clarissa's judgments.
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