1. Camille Taylor
Prof. Raiskin
WGS 352: Gender, Literature, & Culture
January 14, 2014
Essay #1: Woolf Narration Exercise
The morning of Clarissa’s party—as Priscilla could never regard her as old
Mrs. Dalloway—for she knew the girl since the vulnerable age of 9 when her father
was run over by a horse drawn carriage speeding through the streets of London.
Priscilla gave credit to and appreciated her dear, dear Clarissa for consoling her long
after the incident and soaking her in a bath of carefree delight. Yes! She cried inside
herself. This was an occasion, perhaps the only, that Priscilla was looking ahead to
with eager delight. She had hoped to muster the courage that coming evening to
leave her frigid self in the dust beneath her bed and absorb the intoxicating effects
of catharsis in a social situation. For this is incredibly rare as a young adult.
Suddenly, a flock of birds, maybe 20, sprang out from behind a tall tree and passed
through Gower Street, Mrs. Dalloway’s dining room window as she sipped tea
cautiously, and even caught Peter Walsh’s eye as they swam through air effortlessly
past his bedroom lookout. Why had Priscilla acted so foolishly that spring afternoon
on my terrace? Was what came across Peter Walsh’s thoughts as he was rummaging
through his cherry wood trunk glancing picture after picture of the olden days. She
had always been such a frigid little girl, he thought with a mixture of attraction and
repulsion to her gangly figure, hard to tame red hair, long neck, and clumsy

2. approach to life. AHA! I’ve found it! The photograph of Priscilla and I caught rather
unexpectedly as she was holding the button that came undone after getting her
blouse caught on the spiky table edge. Her pathetic embarrassment only made the
lunch party worse, he thought bitterly, because Clarissa insisted on taking her under
her wing the rest of that day and he could not grab her attention, let alone her eyes.
Why couldn’t Priscilla just have the grace of a lady, like my poised Clarissa did? It
was a minimum requirement for a lady, after all, and what man gives his life’s
earnings to sustain an impetuous creature like Priscilla? She had no direction at all,
he remembered. Peter, now recollecting that spring memory, gives more sympathy
still to the poor table corner that punctured, rather deliciously, the immaculately
buttoned up blouse of Priscilla Proust.
Oh well. These simple words seemed to her a healthy resignation of the
humility she suffered in their little social circle. For Priscilla had tried to extinguish
everyone from her intimate life after that summer, except for Clarissa, of course. She
always felt there was one pair of compassionate eyes ‘round the circle, the table,
amidst the scattering of bodies in a smoke-filled, drunken room—and these eyes,
these wide, unassuming, tender eyes belonged to Clarissa and penetrated Priscilla’s
soul, and relieved it if only momentarily from the judgments of the jealous. Now she
could exclaim, like she did to the obnoxiously blue-lit sky that morning—you see!
It’s all going to change tonight. Is she anticipating our reunion as much as I, though?!
And Priscilla shrieked this out loud in her extravagant home on Gower Street. But
just as she said it she began to sink into the typical wallowing a single lady gives into
after age 50. Loneliness was something her mind had naturally adjusted to—even

3. the swift brush of a stranger’s forearm walking down the street gave her an ecstasy
that permeated her body throughout. Marriage was something her mind pursued
fantastically and longed for deep into the night, as she lay beneath her virgin sheets
in the hot summer at the fresh 18 years. Those innocent and youthful days were
occupied with luncheons and shopping and strolling through Regent’s Park and
giggling harmoniously with Clarissa, and the birds that always seemed to hover
above them like a reassuring halo signifying perpetual youth, friendship, and beauty.
But at night, Priscilla became enchanted with a life that could tie her down. Unlike
Clarissa, she yearned for a structured time and place in her life to exert control over
her impulsive and imprudent ways. Oh poor me, poor ugly girls who haven’t a
chance against the sufferings of single life about to ensue. For she was relatively
talentless and graceless, even her mother knew this and so prayed each night for a
revelation to happen in her daughter’s mind—one in which the inspiration to dance
or read or outwit someone verbally came across her almost as if it had been inborn.
This is what Priscilla did night after night—a kind of self-deprecating that gave her
the utmost pleasure. And although this ugliness shines from the inside out, cried her
mother to God beside the bed that night, she is the most divine fairy that suffers and
she deserves a love. Carrying this load around seemed worse than her daughter’s
miserable angst, for her husband had unwillingly left her 9 years going on yesterday.
I ought to smite God for a change, murmured Hugh Whitbread facetiously
when his head perked up to a small light inside a vine-covered manor in the
distance. God had obviously caused the mud from last night’s summer rain to splash
his boots mercilessly. As he strode closer to the estate he noticed, in a rather cynical

4. and disappointed way, that it was Priscilla Proust’s house. He had visited her home
once for her father’s funeral 9 years past and wondered if the lit window was to her
room. He was surprised by his own sudden curiosity when his feet appeared to be
taking large but quiet strides toward the light, like a fruit fly captured by a lamp;
determined to stay engulfed.