Mourning Clarissa Parry

Mourning Clarissa Parry

By Ruby Mitchell

When Clarissa Dalloway refers to herself as “being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa anymore; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway,” it sets the tone for the slightly melancholic, deeply sentimental thoughts she will be having throughout the rest of the novel (Woolf 10). In this passage, Clarissa is mourning the loss of her individual identity, and contemplating the person who she has become: a person who’s life and identity exist in relation to her husband. She seems unsatisfied or unhappy in some way with this identity she has to live with every day–one that she doesn’t necessarily identify with. The question of Clarissa’s happiness is an underlying theme throughout Mrs. Dalloway, and is even brought up explicitly by Peter Walsh, when he directly asks her: “are you happy, Clarissa?” (Woolf 46). This very emotionally charged conversation shades the rest of this novel with the question: is Clarissa Dalloway happy? As Peter questions Clarissa’s happiness, he begins to expand by specifically asking her whether her husband, Richard, is making her happy. I find it interesting that the question of Clarissa Dalloway’s happiness was always intertwined with her love interests, with the assumption that she isn’t satisfied with her current marriage. The question is always about who she would have been happiest marrying, or whether she has made the right choice about who to marry, but I believe the root of Clarissa’s unhappiness and dissatisfaction is not her marriage, but rather the loss of the person she could have become had she stayed single. 

For someone who thinks back to their past as much as Clarissa does, it's hard not to get caught up on what could have been. During her time at Burton, Clarissa describes herself staying up late, reading philosophy, and discussing ways that she could change the world. Contrasting this to her current day self, who “knew nothing; no language; no history; [and] scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed,” it's clear that Clarissa feels like she wasted the potential she had to be some sort of intellectual (Woolf 8). She struggles with feeling out of place in the world of her husband’s job in politics, feeling like she can’t add anything of substance to the conversations, and getting slightly insecure and offended when she isn’t invited to events with him, assuming she is being excluded because people don’t find her interesting enough. Clarissa is constantly trying to justify her current life and get away from the “perfect housewife” narrative that Peter Walsh placed on her, and she feels insecure about having lived up to his expectations of what she would become. 

Peter Walsh openly claims that Clarissa has wasted her potential by marrying Richard, and I believe Clarissa subconsciously agrees with him. But I don’t think the solution to this problem would be to marry Peter; she would not be happier with him, she would just feel trapped playing a different character, an extension of him rather than Richard. The root of Clarissa’s dissatisfaction with her life is not a problem with who she married, but rather a problem with getting married in general. Once she got married to Richard, her life and reputation became partly dictated by him, and this would hold true for a marriage to Peter. The day Clarissa Parry got married, and became Clarissa Dalloway, she lost a little piece of herself. This is the thing she finds so comforting about looking back on her past, and this is the thing she misses about her life before marriage. She does not wish she married someone different, and she’s not necessarily dissatisfied with her current marriage, but being a married woman, whose identity is intertwined with her husband’s, she has to mourn the loss of the person she was, and the person she could have become had she stayed Clarissa Parry.

Works Cited

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Harcourt, 2005.

The Bleak Life (and Death) of a Jiffy Pop Inventor

The Bleak Life (and Death) of a Jiffy Pop Inventor

By Ruby Mitchell

Out of all of the footnotes in The Mezzanine, my personal favorite comes on page 107, interrupting Howie's account of his on-a-whim popcorn purchase during his lunch break. Similar to the rest of the footnotes, this one starts off with a very passionate tangent about a very mundane product. In this specific footnote, Howie is singing the praises of Jiffy Pop Popcorn, hailing it as "one of the outstanding instances of human ingenuity" (Baker 107). Obviously, this isn't new for Howie. He feels this way about a myriad of different mundane products that most people overlook in their daily lives. Howie praises the work of the unknown engineers behind escalators, paper towel dispensers, perforated paper, and in the case of this particular footnote, Jiffy Pop. In this Jiffy Pop-oriented footnote, he begins by describing–in excruciating detail–the process of cooking Jiffy Pop and how the innovations in its design have made cooking popcorn so much easier! He goes on to describe that his obsession with Jiffy Pop’s design went so far that he was moved to visit a local university library to look up who exactly the great mind behind this invention was. Once Howie finds the inventor, Frederick Mennen, he finds a picture of him from 1960 “smiling sad-eyedly in his factory in La Porte, Indiana,” and even goes so far as to look up his home phone number (Baker 107). He then decides to call Mr. Mennen’s home phone to say how big of a fan he is and how impressed he is with Mennen's genius, but after a couple of rings, he decides to hang up, “dreading a widow’s frail answer” (Baker 107).

This is one of the few bleak moments in this novel where–just for a few sentences–Howie’s usual excitement about life and happy-go-lucky persona drops and we get to see a hidden side of him; a side that is slightly more grounded in the harsh reality that everything isn’t interesting and exciting all the time. People die, and not only that, but those people often die completely unrecognized for any of their achievements, without leaving any significant mark on the world. This fact is a hard one for Howie to wrap his head around as someone who spends a majority of his day wondering and researching about these exact people. At this moment, as he’s deciding to hang up, Howie is coming to terms with the bleak reality that this man that he adores so much is most likely dead. 

This isn’t the only time we see Howie grapple with the sobering reality that is death, and the idea that any one of us might not matter as much as we might think we do. Later in the novel, Howie harshly criticizes Aurelius’s idea that nothing really matters in the end, because we’re all going to die, and that life is “transient and trivial […] one day a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of spice and ashes” (Qtd. in Baker 120). Howie, naturally, is very critical of this take on human life, because in his eyes, everything about human life is interesting and worth celebrating, and none of it is trivial in the slightest. While Howie would likely die on the hill that Aurelius is completely wrong, this moment in the footnote on page 107 is one where Howie actually has to come to terms with the transient and trivial nature of life that he disagrees with so valiantly. He has to face the fact that this man, Frederick Mennen, is completely anonymous to the general public, and likely died completely unrecognized for his achievements. No matter how relevant to modern society Howie might believe Mennen is, he won’t be showing up in any history books anytime soon, most people will continue to make jiffy pop completely unaware of his existence, and he, along with the rest of Howie’s engineering heroes, will likely never be given the recognition Howie thinks he deserves. 

Works Cited 

Baker, Nicholson. The Mezzanine. Grove Press, 1998