Looking At Love Effects.

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Troy Neeley

ENGL 201

11-5

Looking At Love Effects

        It is one thing to look at the relationships and the love shown in those relationships, but it is another thing to look at the effects love had throughout Mrs. Dalloway. 

“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.” (MD 7) Marriage is not about passionate love for Virginia Woolf -- it is a partnership with quiet love, caring for one another, keeping the other going. One partner gives care and sympathy and the other accepts it gracefully and sparkles for them. This reciprocal relationship allows both parties a safe place in the scary world to retreat to when overwhelmed by the company. Marriage is a part of life, but not all of life.   In the beginning of Mrs. Dalloway, we are first informed that “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself,” (MD 3) and then, “thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning-fresh as if issued to children on a beach.”   Is Clarissa Mrs. Dalloway’s daughter?  Sister?  Cousin?  Is she someone else entirely? Both titles turn out to refer to the same person but Clarissa is the one who thinks and feels and Mrs. Dalloway is one of her control mechanisms for her own life. She choose to become Mrs. Dalloway for the structure it gives her, the companionship without competition, and the mutual admiration.    

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“So Peter Walsh and Clarissa, sitting side by side, challenged each other.” (MD 44) While constantly challenging each other, neither would have found any peace. Their lives would have both been devoted completely to each other. “But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into. And it was intolerable, and when it came to the 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.” (MD 8)

Clarissa thinks that Peter is a failure because “he had never done a ...

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