Is Richard Dalloway the new L.?

 I found that, as I was reading Mrs. Dalloway, I started making a connection between the mysterious Richard Dalloway and the mysterious L. from The Mezzanine. Both characters, despite their lack of initial depth as characters due to a lack of description from the main character/narrator, come across by the end of the book as the sign of stability for the main character, for better or for worse. They both, L. and Richard, represent a sweet domesticity between themselves and the main character. 

I wrote in a previous blog post that I wish we had gotten more perspective from L. as a character. In fact, I would’ve enjoyed Howie even telling the reader anything more about L., besides the fact that they get along with one another (a sign of similar thinking). Richard, I believe, is the result of my argument for L., as in he is essentially the faceless entity with no personality given a voice in the story. 

L. is essentially only described in relation to Howie. And while this does offer insight into their relationship and is telling of the compatibility between the two characters, it doesn’t tend to offer the best look into the personality of L. herself. In my other blog post about L., I talk about how I would have liked to see Howie’s same types of observations through a more nuanced lens, a lens that automatically comes with not being a straight white guy. The interesting thing about Richard is that that more authentic and nuanced view that I believe would be so abundant coming from L. flows from Richard in such a way that it really does mirror what I believe L. would bring to the table. Richard’s compassion for others, despite his rather stuffy title as a “conservative politician” when first introduced to the reader, practically replaces the setback of being a straight white guy. Clarissa, although she doesn’t initially appear to think of him as anything more than a husband and perhaps even a status in society, really does understand him to a certain extent, and he understands her.

Both L. and Richard are by no means major characters within their respective books (although there is an argument to be made that Howie is the only major character in The Mezzanine), but both are important in providing a backdrop via which we can measure the main character. Both characters are almost so lacking in personality apart from their relationship to the main character (at least for the first half of the book in the case of Mrs. Dalloway) that they provide the “clean background trick” for the main characters of their novels. When the main character is doing or thinking something odd or nostalgic, it usually tends to connect back to our love interest, L. or Richard. However, their difference does emerge in how they are shown to compare to their main character. Where L. will often mirror Howie in a shared oddness, Richard and Clarissa will often only mirror in a shared respectability, but yet differ when it comes to their concerns about the world (triviality to Richard might seem like the big picture to Clarissa). 

Do you feel that L. are more similar or more different? Are they different in character and similar in their role, or vice versa? Or neither? 

Sally Seton and Societal Suggestion

I think that Sally’s character is one of the most relatable and interesting characters in the book, even when compared to the 21st century. She is a female character that tends to act of her own accord and is quite daring compared to the rigid Victorian ideals that she grew up knowing. She even is said, by Peter, to have “suddenly lost her temper, flared up, and told Hugh that he represented all that was most detestable in British middle-class life. She told him that she considered him responsible for the state of ‘those poor girls in Piccadilly’”, when getting into an argument with Hugh about his conservative views on women’s rights. 

Not to belabor the point, but just to prove how unconventional Sally is in relation to her rather stuffy and conservative fellow characters at the age of 18, she: “ran along the passage naked” and “bicycled round the parapet on the terrace; smoked cigars” and, perhaps most notably, Clarissa describes how Sally “kissed her on the lips”. Clarissa characterizes Sally as “reckless” and “absurd”. At this point in the book, the only thing I wanted to know about was: what happened to Sally Seton? Was she traveling around pulling similarly daring stunts? Did she have some kind of career? No. Sally Seton was married. 

Now I don’t have the best personal 20th century gauge for how surprising it is that Sally settled down with a nice, rich, conservative husband and life. The reader, however, at least has Peter’s commentary on the situation: “It was Sally Seton--the last person in the world one would have expected to marry a rich man and live in a large house near Manchester, the wild, the daring, the romantic Sally!”

Ultimately, I think Sally’s story is very telling about the limited pathways for women in the late 19th and early 20th century. Even in relation to what happened to Clarissa, what Clarissa and Peter keep imagining what Clarissa could have been and how she could have possibly become like Sally instead of becoming the naive and proper “perfect hostess”. Contrasting young Clarissa and young Sally is easy and almost instinctual to the reader in that they are almost perfect opposites that are, like opposites do, attracted to each other (as friends or otherwise). 

And yet, they both end up at about the same station in life when all is said and done in middle age. The question I pose then is this: why does Sally have to settle into the life she never apparently wanted in her younger years? Why give up her freedom and strong morals just to get married? And did she really have a choice?