The answer is simple: Clarissa, by nature, is responsive and spontaneous but she has learned to conceal her responses and feelings. She allows a loose rein to her senses but only in this way: London is a collection of noises, colors, smells, and people, and Clarissa can walk amidst them, can savor them, yet not have to merge with them. She can smile lovingly, and ironically, at the follies of old ladies and at the follies of young lovers, but she does so with a love that keeps its distance. She appreciates London as she might appreciate a lovely, familiar painting come to life. London — a living work of art — is like a salve to Clarissa's feeling of isolation and to the post-effects of her illness. Clarissa's doctors said that her heart might have been affected by influenza, but this is only another way that Virginia Woolf underscores for us the fact that, figuratively, Clarissa's heart has already been weakened. It was weakened by disuse long before influenza felled her. Clarissa has been too careful with her heart's affection.
Mrs. Dalloway is not a simple person. She is most complex. She is fascinating in that she realizes that her "self" changes, that it modifies to a certain degree, depending on whom she is with. With Richard, she is a little different than she is with Elizabeth; and she is different in another way when she is with Hugh Whitbread. Unlike Clarissa, most people think that they are always the same, regardless of whom they are with. In truth, few people remain constant: we all change, reacting with different parts of our personality to the many different people we spend time with.
Mrs. Dalloway also appraises people differently than most people do. When she meets Hugh Whitbread, she comments on his "well covered ... handsome, perfectly upholstered" body. She is referring rather novelly to how Hugh's clothes fit. But, besides Clarissa's showing us a different way of looking at someone, we learn more about Clarissa. She thinks of Hugh's clothes as she thinks of her own clothes and body: as covering, distinct from the inner self under the "upholstery." This idea of a body's being upholstered is unusual and interesting, and it reinforces our notions about Clarissa's complexity. Already she has remarked about feeling "outside, looking on." She walks through life; she is inside her body, yet she feels apart from life and alien to her body. Not only does she have these feelings but she is lucid about them — and Clarissa is not a learned woman. She is not a college graduate; she has little formal education: she is merely a woman, sensitive and intuitive — with a special sensibility. Her emotions are very intense despite the fact that she would like them, like her world, to be carefully guarded and within boundaries. She would like her world of marriage and motherhood to be cool and quiet like the cool and serene park she crosses through this morning.
