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What is Peter Walsh's significance to Mrs. Dalloway in Mrs. Dalloway?
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Peter Walsh's significance to Mrs. Dalloway lies in his role as a past love and a catalyst for self-reflection. His reappearance in London stirs memories and emotions in Clarissa, making her reassess her life choices. Peter embodies an alternative, more daring path she could have taken, contrasting with her conformist life with Richard. Ultimately, he represents Clarissa's internal conflict between self-assertion and external influence.
Peter Walsh reappears in London from India after an absence of about six years. He is a youthful suitor of Clarissa Dalloway from many years ago and is still in love with her after all these years. Clarissa is startled by his sudden reappearance, which also awakens memories in her as she accomplishes tasks for a party she is giving that evening. He is a wilder alternative to Richard, Clarissa's kind, respectable, conformist husband with a high-status political job (the prime minister comes to the party). Peter, a socialist and would-be writer, was always more edgy and daring—or wanted to be.
Peter critiques Clarissa and her conformist life, feeling she could have found greater use for her talents than raising a daughter and throwing parties. Yet he loves her, which throws into question his supposed reason for being in London, which is to arrange to marry a much younger Indian...
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woman. Peter tends to lie to himself, for instance, thinking of himself as
an adventurer, reckless, he thought, swift, daring, indeed (landed as he was last night from India) a romantic buccaneer, careless of all these damned proprieties, yellow dressing-gowns, pipes, fishing-rods, in the shop windows
He is more simply, a failed man.
Peter is a character whose thoughts cannot be wholly trusted, though he does supply us with information. He shows Clarissa in a positive light despite all his criticisms of her. He is part of Woolf's project of undermining what is to her the aggravating, God-like assurance of the authorial voice in the Victorian and Edwardian novel. Since her novel is stream-of-consciousness, there is no authoritative narrator to tell us what to think. Peter's subjective voice becomes one among many other competing voices, leaving us as readers to decide what is going on.
Peter's significance to Clarissa is complicated. On the one hand, he is significant as her past love, the passion forever relinquished. On the other hand, during the time-frame of the story, his significance is to help confirm her place and choice in life: she has a talent and ability and it is valuable in its own right, even if she doesn't always contemplate "Wagner and Pope."
She did think it mattered, her party [...] The curtain with its flight of birds of Paradise blew out again. And Clarissa saw--she saw Ralph Lyon beat it back, and go on talking. So it wasn’t a failure after all! [...] they went on, they went into the rooms; into something now, not nothing,
In a greater sense, Peter is significant because he is the embodiment of Clarissa's life conflict of self against a powerful external influence, that influence being Peter himself.
Clarissa says Peter was always thinking of what was wrong with Clarissa's soul and disagreeing with her about what was important in life: "the defects of her own soul. How he scolded her! How they argued!" They argued so about it that, on one day Clarissa reminisces about, Peter made her cry alone in her bedroom: "she had cried over it in her bedroom."
Yet Peter charms her and has an emotional influence over her: "he could be intolerable; ... but adorable to walk with on a morning like this." Her challenge as a young woman was to exert her self or to sacrifice her self to Peter's influence and yield to his power. Clarissa won the conflict: "she had to break with him or they would have been destroyed." She rejected Peter and chose to marry Richard who gave her independence ("in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be") and respect.
Richard allowed Clarissa to exercise her gits for what they were as she knew best how to use them: "[she] couldn’t help feeling that she had, anyhow, made this [party] happen." Clarissa's self won the conflict against Peter's influence. What was lost while self was gained was gaiety.
all in a clap it came over her, If I had married him, this gaiety would have been mine all day!