Had Clarissa chosen Peter over Richard, her life would have been miserable. Where Richard can provide her with comfort, stability, and a room of her own, Peter would have consumed her life, ate up her vitality and stamped out her virtues. Peter, always toying with his knife, appears to me to be irregular and downright fanciful; he loves Clarissa, to be sure, but his love for her is hurting her. "Are you happy?" he had asked of her, but what kind of question is that to address to a married woman with a grown daughter and thriving household? He later stalks a young woman (a prostitute?) through the streets for the fun of it, and he enjoys an affair with Daisy, another married woman. The way he longs after Clarissa is as if she belongs to him and Richard has stolen her away; his love for her is selfish, almost despicable.
Many would sympathize with Peter's passionate, romantic soul, but his overwhelming emotions would have suffocated Clarissa who, like Woolf herself, enjoyed life at a distance. Where Richard feels lucky to have Clarissa, Peter takes great glee at picking apart her faults. Although there was a period in her life when Clarissa was undeniably radical, even Peter is forced to observe that she would likely marry Richard because of her conventional core. For someone with her delicate sensibilities and empathy, a marriage with the wild and untamable Peter would have been stifling. Even if we pretend that it was Clarissa's refusal of Peter's marriage proposal which was the catastrophic event that altered him forever, his dramatic removal to India seems to me rather histrionic. This act belies an overly dramatic personality that is unchangeably Peter's.
1 comment:
You make really good points here, Annie. I especially like that you bring up the fact that Peter is chasing other women even though he claims to be in love with Clarissa. (Perhaps he is trying to find happiness elsewhere, but the fact that he seems to be chasing after Clarissa, and gets upset by her "coldness" every time he sees her makes him a much less sympathetic character.)
I also love that you compare Clarissa to Virginia Woolf, especially in light of what we watched in class today; I remember the documentary mentioning that Woolf felt uncomfortable with being someone's sexual partner and didn't have a "normal" sex life...it definitely seems like Clarissa's views and feelings about marriage reflect this aspect of Woolf's personality. I would imagine that Peter would expect more passion from Clarissa that she simply did not have to give, and that Woolf may not have had either.
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