By comparing herself with Lady Bexborough, Clarissa (not Virginia Woolf) tells us about herself. We learn about Clarissa's physical appearance and we learn her thoughts as she compares herself with a woman whom she considers ideal. Clarissa would, for instance, gladly exchange her own pale and smooth complexion for Lady Bexborough's dark and crumpled one. She would like to have a face with more visible character. She would like to move more slowly and stately, not lightly; she feels that she is too flighty, too pointy-featured, and too insincere. Clarissa, it would seem, would like to be less feminine; more masculine, perhaps. At least she would like to have a more serious mien and be interested in, say, politics. She does not find her pallor or smooth skin attractive — or even natural. She talks of her body as being a "nothing" that she "wears." The only features that she approves of are her hands and feet. Otherwise, she is not happy with her outward appearance — the thin, white, bony sack that contains Mrs. Dalloway.
Perhaps these seem like unusual, contradictory thoughts — this despair at aging, and at aging unattractively, while Clarissa is very obviously enjoying being in the hurry and noise of the London morning. Without a doubt, Clarissa is thrilled to be in this colorful London stream; our first view of her is filled with her excited responses to being a part of the city's thoroughfare again. Her moods do alternate however; in one paragraph she is troubled and worried, in the next she is sparkling. Yet Virginia Woolf did not insert these changes of mood merely to be whimsical or lyrical.
Consider this: Clarissa's flashes of worry about aging are not at all unnatural; she has already said that she wishes she were not so delicate and brooding. Also, Clarissa has been ill, has become even more delicate, and has had too much time to think. No doubt her doctor and husband and friends commented on her looks and Clarissa would probably have consulted, first of all, her mirror as she searched for signs of illness in her over-fiftyish face. In addition, one must remember in assessing Mrs. Dalloway's fluctuations of moods that if Clarissa was confined to bed during her illness she would, like most people past fifty and confined to bed, have reflected on life. She would have recalled and pondered. Recovered now, and back in the stream of London traffic, her sick-bed seriousness would not have been immediately flushed away. There would be this natural residue of seriousness in the midst of all the wonder of this morning.
