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Psychological Analysis of Peter Walsh – Mrs.Dalloway Essay

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Psychological Analysis – Peter Walsh p. 154-158

Right before the beginning of this passage in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs.Dalloway on pages 154-158 we experience Peter returning home to his hotel room while day dreaming about his recent run in with Clarissa and about their long rocky past together. While on his walk to the hotel, he was a witness to the aftermath of Septimus’s suicide and as the sound of the ambulance sirens ring through his head (Woolf, 151). Peter does not know who is riding in the ambulance, nor does he know what state they are in, whether dead or alive. He is just one of the many people that happened to be out on the street at the time of the suicide, and even this does not seem to be able to clear his mind of Clarissa. …show more content…

The external Peter is in a state of repression. He has so much pent up love, or at least infatuation or obsession, with Clarissa, causing him to be in a constant reel of memories and fantasies. In the passage after returning to his hotel room and finding that he has received a letter from Clarissa, and he instantly dives into this inner mania thinking of all the reasons why she wrote him and what she was thinking as she wrote him. Within a couple moments he is back reliving memories of “something he had once said-how they would change the world if she married him…”(Woolf, 155). And even later on in the passage, we find him also thinking about the great life he could have with Daisy, wondering “Suppose they did marry? For him it would be all very well, but what about her?” (157). But even as his mind swirls with all these fantasies and scenarios, externally he shows nothing. He was a smooth gentleman, attractive to women, who was always reading a book and even had a suave way of knocking ashes out of his pipe (156). He repressed all his desires for Internally, however, Peter was in a state of isolation. Both of these women are married to different men, and Peter has not had any successful long term monogamous relationship with either of them, yet somehow that does not faze him. Instead of being upset that Daisy is in a relationship and has two children with her husband, he continues to think about the times

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