A few days ago in class, we were discussing Clarissa's relationship with Sally, and someone mentioned that it seemed "out of character" for Clarissa to look up to Sally so much. I guess this depends on how you define "character"--generally when we read books we consider characters on primarily a surface-level basis. Many novels that we are used to reading for pleasure, that are much more plot-based than Mrs Dalloway (not that Mrs Dalloway is plot-less), don't go into as much depth about their characters as Mrs Dalloway does. I don't think that even The Mezzanine, which was more lacking in plot than Mrs Dalloway, explored the character of Howie as fully as Mrs Dalloway explores Clarissa.
When we read The Mezzanine, we are certainly in Howie's mind, getting to hear some of his most private thoughts (which are not private because they are secret, but rather because by the nature of these thoughts, it is not common to share them with people), but we do not hear about his worries, regrets, what-ifs, and insecurities the way we do for Clarissa in Mrs Dalloway. Especially in light of Virginia Woolf's comments about characters requiring more depth in order to be realistic, I definitely think that it is her goal to create a character who is not seemingly perfect like Howie, but to break down the illusion of happiness and a nice marriage and show the reader what really goes on in the deepest corners of Clarissa's mind. Perhaps we haven't gotten to those really deep corners quite yet, but I expect that by the end of the book we will understand Clarissa in a way that we were never able to understand Howie by reading The Mezzanine.
So is it really out of character for Clarissa to be thinking of Sally, or even for her to have looked up so much to Sally previously? I would argue that it is completely in character, in fact more so than even her marriage. The fact that she cannot let go of Sally in her mind and that when she thinks of love, her first impulse is to consider her relationship with Sally, shows us that Sally is important to her in a way that nobody else is. Everyone else that Clarissa interacts with lives their life within boundaries the way that she always has; however, she has always been infatuated with the idea of being free-spirited like Sally (ironically though, Sally is now in the same sort of position as Clarissa--married with children). This is what her mind keeps going back to. This is a huge part of the person Clarissa really is. Yes, Clarissa appears to be an upper-class snob with a perfectly satisfying life, but since we are deep inside her mind, we understand that that is not all she is. She is still the 18-year-old girl who envied freedom of spirit and looked up to Sally Seton.
I really wish I could make this a footnote, but I just wanted to touch on Sally's current role in life in comparison to Clarissa's. I find it really interesting that both women ended up as what you could call "the perfect hostesses," especially Sally, who is expected to be the more outgoing, free-spirited one in life, who does not end up conforming to social "rules." I wonder if this is meant by Woolf to be commentary on the way that societal expectations and rules can stifle a person's true character. Sally probably wasn't raised with quite the expectations as Clarissa, but those expectations seem to have still affected her life and possibly her personality just the same, if not more, than they did for Clarissa. I would assume this would be worse for women, especially in the time period that this book takes place, but I would expect some degree of this to be true for men too, and even true for people in general today.
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And when considering the extent to which it is "in character" for Clarissa to look up to Sally, we have to emphasize the fact that she was *eighteen years old* at the time, and very impressionable. And Woolf's view of character, as you note, holds that no one is ever just one thing at any given point in their life--we all do or think things that are "out of character" (as, indeed, everyone judges our character slightly differently, and so no one has a definitive purchase on what *is* "in character" for anyone else!). How much more this is true when we contrast an eighteen-year-old with a woman in her early fifties. Clarissa and Sally have both changed, and both of their lives have entailed a "settling," a compromise of their youthful idealism and enthusiasm to occupy traditional feminine roles. Does this feel like a loss, or a diminishment? Depends who you ask. Peter would say yes; Clarissa, I suspect, would say no. Life is hard, sometimes tedious and lonely, but she *loves* it intensely.
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