It is far more interesting to consider the tutor, Miss Kilman, than it is to consider Elizabeth Dalloway. Perhaps this is true because Virginia Woolf, like Milton and many other writers, produces tour de force creations in her villains. And certainly Miss Kilman is a villain — and a magnificently created one. She is the counterpart of the doctors in the Septimus scenes; they are after Septimus' soul, she is after Clarissa's.
When Mrs. Dalloway was out for flowers this morning, she thought of death — and tried not to fear it; it seemed to promise an end to fearing. Far more than death, we realized when the scene was ended, Mrs. Dalloway fears Doris Kilman. She thinks of the tutor as a tyrant, as a blood-sucking, nocturnal spectre. A monster, she calls her, with "hooves" that threaten "that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul." She is like a heathen invader and it is apropos that when we first meet Miss Kilman she is on the landing, outside Clarissa Dalloway's door. She is outside the Dalloway's social class — and fiercely jealous of their easy manners, their money, and their position. She is a bulky, mackintoshed bundle of hate and self-deception.
Doris Kilman's self-deception has two poles — the secular and the sacred: concerning the first, she was hired to teach history to Elizabeth, theoretically a subject for objectivity, but Miss Kilman lacks all sense of objectivity. She is convinced she has a right to all that the Dalloways possess. Why? For one reason: because she is poor. Her reasoning is that Mrs. Dalloway does not deserve money or social position because her life has been full of vanity and deceit. If this were true, however, Miss Kilman could not logically claim the Dalloway prize either because she herself is fiercely vain. She is a reverse snob. She wears her old, smelly mackintosh as a proud insignia — to show that she is poor and that she is not trying to look as though she belongs to another, higher, social class. The impression is fraudulent.
