Clarissa + Septimus = Survival 101?

Wrapping up Mrs. Dalloway, I close this delightful book with only one regret. It's a small nagging burst of thought that I can't suppress - what if Clarissa and Septimus had met? Would they have been friends? Could they have fallen in love? Would she have been able to save him, or am I naive for wishing so? They are so impossibly similar and yet their fates are infinitely different. Whereas he chose to leap to his death in defiance, she paused, wondered, and lived.

Comparing the two, it's possible to see parallels: for instance, they were both victims of excruciating loneliness despite the comfort of their respective situations - he a favored worker and she a successful housewife - and the love they receive from their spouses. They each experienced a sort of past trauma - he the death of a close friend and she the death of a talented sister. And they both approach life with a unique perspective - he from the eyes of a poet and she with the theory that all life was interwoven. The one significant aspect on which they diverge is the ability to feel; whereas Clarissa is overflowing with empathy, Septimus despairs his stoic personality. This, combined with the joyous celebration of life that swirls around him in central London, overwhelms him to madness.

Yet, think for a moment, pretend Clarissa was a central figure in Septimus's life (just as she had been in Richard's life in The Hours), would she have been to help him move on from the struggles of life? The movie doesn't believe so, but that is only one interpretation. I personally believe (maybe because I'm passionately optimistic) that such a happy ending would have been possible. For while Virginia Woolf was a poetically wonderful writer, she was also a victim of suicide trapped in an unhappy marriage, and there are times when I think she underestimates the human resilience. That Septimus may have lived had he a Clarissa-like figure is the dream I hold on to.

"Are you happy?"

There is something striking about Peter's statement on page 46. It's the question that ends this soul-wrenching interview between him and Clarissa after years of separation. But what does it mean? What can it mean? Peter, the passionate suitor whom Clarissa rejected years ago but still harbors a distinctive affection for, asking her, the married woman, holding her hand, crying earnestly before her - what does it tell us? He goes on to ask "Does Richard-" but here we get interrupted, purposefully, from ever knowing the completion of his thoughts. Now enters Elizabeth, "my Elizabeth" Clarissa calls her much to Peter's annoyance, the living, breathing proof of Clarissa's marriage to Richard. An anchor perhaps, even a reminder for her of what her life has become.

But of Peter? He's so impossibly memorable. His letters boring, his mind radical, and his life a mockery. Why does Richard feel so unthreatened by him, clearly the more dynamic rival of the two? In the history between Clarissa and Peter, we see her happy, joyous, even different! There was a time when she too was a radical, reading Plato, Morris and Shelley "by the hour;" it makes us wonder why she would settle for a bland, conservative Richard? For me, Clarissa is insecure. She loves adventure, and like Septimus, she wants to do something meaningful with her life; yet she is frightened. It might be the misogynistic society that has torn away her independence or it might be her inner fear, but whatever it is, it's holding her back.

Richard provides the comfortable house in Westminister while Peter offers the exciting journey into the horizon. We know the path Clarissa chose, but was it the right one?