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.
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Summary
Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class, fifty-two-year-old
woman married to a politician, decides to buy flowers herself for
the party she is hosting that evening instead of sending a servant
to buy them. London is bustling and full of noise this Wednesday,
almost five years after Armistice Day. Big Ben strikes. The king
and queen are at the palace. It is a fresh mid-June morning, and
Clarissa recalls one girlhood summer on her father’s estate,
Bourton. She sees herself at eighteen, standing at the window, feeling
as if something awful might happen. Despite the dangers, and despite
having only a few twigs of knowledge passed on to her by her childhood
governess, Clarissa loves life. Her one gift, she feels, is an ability
to know people by instinct.
Clarissa next runs into her old friend Hugh Whitbread.
Hugh and Clarissa exchange a few words about Hugh’s wife, Evelyn,
who suffers from an unspecified internal ailment. Beside the proper
and admirable Hugh, Clarissa feels self-conscious about her hat.
Past and present continue to intermingle as she walks
to the flower shop. She remembers how her old friend Peter Walsh
disapproved of Hugh. She thinks affectionately of Peter, who once
asked her to marry him. She refused. He made her cry when he said
she would marry a prime minister and throw parties. Clarissa continues to
feel the sting of his criticisms but now also feels anger that Peter did
not accomplish any of his dreams.
She continues to walk and considers the idea of death.
She believes she will survive in the perpetual motion of the modern
London streets, in the lives of her friends and even strangers,
in the trees, in her home. She reads lines about death from a book
in a shop window. Clarissa reflects that she does not do things
for themselves, but in order to affect other people’s opinions of
her. She imagines having her life to live over again. She regrets
her face, beaked like a bird’s, and her thin body. She stops to
look at a Dutch picture, and feels invisible. She is conscious that
the world sees her as her husband’s wife, as Mrs. Richard Dalloway.
Clarissa looks in the window of a glove shop and contemplates her
daughter, Elizabeth, who cares little for fashion and prefers to spend
time with her dog or her history teacher, Miss Kilman, with whom
she reads prayer books and attends communion. Clarissa wonders if
Elizabeth is falling in love with Miss Kilman, but Richard believes
it is just a phase. Clarissa thinks of her hatred for Miss Kilman,
which she is aware is irrational, as a monster.
A car backfires while Clarissa is in the flower
shop, and she and several others turn to observe the illustrious
person passing in a grand car. They wonder if it is the queen or
the prime minister behind the blinds. The car inspires feelings
of patriotism in many onlookers.
