Expressing your feelings to someone is not as simple as one may think or imagine. For love to grow and prosper, it demands to be expressed and felt all the time. One may have hidden affection for someone but it will fade away if it is only one sided. In the novel Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, there are some characters who find it difficult to express their love, have hidden feelings or have their feelings fading away slowly. Richard and Clarissa are married but their marriage is more of a showoff to the public than actual marriage. Peter once proposed Clarissa but got rejected, while Lucrezia's love is fading away as Septimus's mental health worsen. .
Clarissa is well known only because of his husband who is member of Parliament in the Conservative government. Although he loves Clarissa but he always struggles to tell her that like if something prevents him in doing so. He blames Clarissa for that and thinks that she is too difficult and complicated to be understood. He is very shown to be very dominant in the novel. "She had failed him, once at Constantinople; and Lady Bruton, whose lunch parties were said to be extraordinarily amusing, had not asked her" (115). He makes Clarissa feel guilty as if she has never lived up to his expectations. Although they have been married for years, he does not know her that well yet. He only sees her during the mealtimes but have no idea what she does for rest of the day. He just feel blessed to be married to her "he repeated that it was a miracle that he should have married Clarissa; a miracle-his life had been a miracle" (113). Despite the fact that he is pretty dominant towards her, he accepts what she had done for him and his career. She is his perfect hostess. .
Peter Walsh is more of a free soul. He does whatever he wants to do which cost him a lot in the past. He was deeply in love with Clarissa when they were young. He proposed Clarissa but she rejected him.
Because according to him, the only way that the men and the women will not be alone, is love and love's base is sexuality. ... His writings are what he aspired to achieve but often could not express in reality, so "male love" was his ideal expression in literature. ...
