I find the character of Richard Dalloway to be both extremely cute and extremely irritating. In order to explain these somewhat conflicting sentiments, I'm going to examine one of the only scenes in the book where we get a clear picture or Richard. Which of course is when Richard and Hugh are out and Richard gets fed up with Hugh and decides that he needs to show his wife some romantic gesture and tell her "in so many words," that he loves her. This brings me to a small tangent; "in so many words" what significance does this phrase have? The phrase "I love you" only has three words, and it's a fairly basic way of putting it. There aren't a lot of ways to paraphrase "I love you." That is about as simple as it's going to get.
Moving on from that small point of digression, Richard shows a lot of adorable, timid middle-school-boy-like qualities in this scene. He goes into the jewelry store with Hugh, who is being very annoying, and decides that he can't let Hugh upstage him since he's being such a jerk. He looks at some jewelry thinks about getting something for Clarissa, but then he puts it back and doesn't buy it because he doesn't trust his judgement in those kinds of matters. At this point I was a little disappointed. I wanted Richard to buy the jewelry for Clarissa, especially since Clarissa had been rethinking her choice in marriage all throughout the day, and was visited by Peter. It was brought up in Clarissa's thoughts/conversations that Richard was never spontaneous or as emotionally diverse as Peter, and I wanted Richard to use buying the jewelry as a way to overcome these thoughts about him. But, alas, he decides not to buy the jewelry and instead decides to buy flowers. I found it very cute how excited he is to give Clarissa these flowers and tell her that he loves her, especially since they aren't strangers to each other by any means. They have been married for quite some time and have a daughter who is almost grown up-- they should be comfortable around one another. Nonetheless, I picture Richard as having an endearingly nervous/excited bounce in his step as he's walking home with the flowers, thinking about how he's going to tell Clarissa that he loves her.
But, when he actually gets to her, he chickens out! I am very irritated by the fact that he can't tell his own wife, the mother of his child, that he loves her after all those years. Some people mentioned in class discussions that they thought it was cute how he was too nervous to do the deed, but I do not share those sentiments. I wanted Richard to tell Clarissa that he loves her as much-- maybe more-- than I wanted him to buy the jewelry for her.
I thought that in general, Richard was definitely more likeable and cuter than Peter, but I still got very frustrated with some of his actions toward his own wife.
It is possible to read this as a "failure" on Richard's part, or even a satirical view of an upper-class British marriage more generally--a stereotype of the famous English reserve on overdrive. But I'm not totally sure he fails. The key phrase throughout is "in so many words," which, colloquially, often connotes communication *without* words. Clarissa seems to "understand" when he presents the flowers to her, and what follows is a brief window onto their peculiar relationship. It's not a passionate one--they don't embrace, kiss, or even compliment one another. But they do talk easily about the events of their day, and they seem fully comfortable in one another's presence. They even talk about the potentially emotionally charged topic of Peter's visit, and there's no palpable tension, suspicion, jealousy. It is what it is. And, in this brief scene, it seems pretty nice.
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