Peter the Stalker, Peter the Buccaneer
Peter Walsh, self-professed “romantic buccaneer,” leaves his former love Clarissa’s house and goes on a brief adventure of self-discovery through the streets of London. And what better activity, when in the midst of contemplation, than to single out a young lady from the crowds, plaster onto her the character of his ideal woman, and follow her around for a while? Yep, Peter Walsh does just that on pgs. 51-53 of Mrs. Dalloway, and I want to try and make sense of it. Of course, stalking a pretty young woman around the city is textbook creep behavior. However, I'm going to *try* to dig deeper into this act, and extract from it some information about Peter himself.
First, let’s retrace Peter’s steps. He knows he’s fantasizing when he begins to imprint his concept of the “ideal lady” onto this girl; Woolf writes that the woman “seemed… to shed veil after veil, until she became the very woman he had always had in mind.” Peter is reverting to a younger version of himself, creating a character out of a real person and using this whole scenario as some kind of self-indulgent adventure. Perhaps he's doing this because he often has short-lived obsessions with young women and follows them around (and I don't even want to think about the implications of that.) But also, might he be going on this twisted "adventure" to escape the part of him that’s resurfacing, the part of him that still loves Clarissa?
I say this because Peter’s fantasy as he follows the woman is very quickly interrupted by thoughts of Clarissa; he even sizes up the woman in direct comparison to her. Nevertheless, he continues, stepping back into the mindset of the “romantic buccaneer” (man, what a way to describe yourself), exotifying the woman he’s trailing by describing the “colour in her cheeks” and “mockery in her eyes.” Peter gets to keep indulging in this bizarre, perverted game of make-believe for a while, pursuing his made-up “anti-Clarissa,” until she disappears, leaving him with nothing but the echoes of Clarissa’s voice, telling him not to forget her party, in his mind.
Even though he clearly knows that this whole little escapade was just make-believe, Peter doesn’t tell us why he follows this girl around. However, from the context of him just leaving Clarissa’s house and reminiscing about how much he loved her, and the way that Clarissa keeps popping up in his head all throughout, we can pretty well guess that it has to do with Clarissa. Also, the way he characterizes the woman— “black, but enchanting,” with “mockery in her eyes,” and himself as the “buccaneer” in pursuit of her — is the complete opposite of the way he thinks of Clarissa at this moment, telling him to remember her party in a “frail and thin” voice. To me, the whole affair seems to say “look, I totally don’t have any feelings for Clarissa! Look how enchanted I am with some girl who is the opposite of Clarissa! I’m a romantic buccaneer, of course I’m not heartbroken!”
TL;DR: I think Peter stalked some random girl to try and distract himself from the feelings for Clarissa that were bubbling up from somewhere deep inside him. (And, of course, none of this excuses the fact that stalking is creepy and wrong.)
Let me know what you guys think! :)
-NC
I think it's interesting to see Peter's pursuit of the girl from his perspective, since I've been on the other end of that scenario multiple times. Because he is idealizing this girl almost as an object, he's completely unaware of her actual feelings or intentions outside of what he projects on her. The whole chase becomes an elaborate way to avoid facing his feelings, just like how he "fell in love" with some random lady who he forgets to think about for days at a time.
ReplyDeletePeter's obsession with women and his inability to hold them down in any serious capacity is an interesting aspect of his character for sure. He even thinks about Daisy that he doesn't even necessarily want her all that badly, he just doesn't want anyone else to have her. It's a special sense of entitlement that Peter has where he thinks that he deserves every woman that he "knows" and it might be an entitlement Clarissa saw through enough not to marry him, even if he still manages to get on her nerves in other ways,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the TL;DR, it made my job way easier. Just kidding! I read the whole thing and you did a great job digging into a scene that I initially didn't dwell on (though it was pretty disconcerting to read). I think you are absolutely right that Peter is still super into Clarissa, but he hates how much his love for her controls his life. That is NO EXCUSE however for him to just follow a random woman on the street. This is extremely predatory behavior and the way that Peter romanticizes it is gross and unacceptable.
ReplyDeleteIn eighth period, as we were discussing Peter, someone in my breakout group brought up the possibility that the woman Peter may only exist in Peter's mind (meaning that she isn't actually real and Peter is imagining her). It's true that Woolf never really confirmed that this woman actually did exist, but the general consensus in our group was that this likely was a real woman that Peter was projecting his desire onto (which, I agree, is probably the case). I just thought the possibility that Peter had "conceived" an "ideal woman" was really interesting and kind of similar to the way the "solitary traveler" in his dream "endowed" the sky and branches with "womanhood."
ReplyDeleteI agree that Peter stalked some poor girl to get his mind off Clarissa. I think that these few, uncomfortable pages are telling of how Peter has decided to cope with Clarissa's rejection. We know from what other characters say about Peter that he falls for women very easily and very often. Peter himself indicates that though he claims to be in love with Daisy, he hardly even thinks about her, suggesting that even she is just another fling. I think that Peter enters relationships with so many women as a way to distract himself from Clarissa, the one woman he was actually in love with.
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