Virginia Woolf is not manipulating, for sheer effect or merely for exposition, Clarissa's present-to-past-to-present changes of mood and thought. There is valid motivation for Clarissa's ebb and flow of mood and time. The transitions are indeed swift, but our own minds can be every bit as mercurial. Human beings seem geared to clock time as it continuously moves forward, but in fact they are not. Within themselves, their minds ignore clock time and obey a different sense of time. Virginia Woolf has used Clarissa to imaginatively approximate a mind's natural course.
We discern that Mrs. Dalloway has been ill, has been resurrected, and is again enjoying the smells and sights of this busy London morning. Sharp-featured, angular-jointed, she is almost intoxicated by the noisy goings-on and, at turns, lost in thought about decisions she has made during her lifetime and about her physical shortcomings. She has been ill but has returned to the life of London and has plunged into its traffic. Now, as she makes her way up the streets, we make our own way — into Mrs. Dalloway. We have learned what she looks like from Scrope Purvis' image; then we were given Clarissa's verification. Listening to her negative comments about herself, we learned certain of Clarissa's quirks — plus one very important clue to her character. From Clarissa's minor dissatisfactions with her looks and personality grows one of the novel's major concerns: is Mrs. Dalloway satisfied being "Mrs. Dalloway"? Piecemeal, we are to learn the circumstances and the results of Clarissa's decision to become Mrs. Dalloway — this decision on a husband, the most important decision in a woman's life.
Returning to Peter Walsh, it is important to consider that we hear of him long before we hear about Richard Dalloway. This is a novel about Richard Dalloway's wife, yet it is not Richard that we learn about first; it is Peter. We discover that Clarissa, very rationally, chose to break off her relationship with Peter Walsh and, very rationally, to become Mrs. Richard Dalloway. The title of this novel and its first words are one and the same: Mrs. Dalloway. Our first impression is a double-barreled emphasis on Clarissa's married state. But already on the first page we see that Clarissa is concerned not with her husband, but with remembering a wry comment Peter Walsh, her former beau, made long ago as he caught Clarissa gazing into space.
