Clarissa New Dress

Accessorizing Clarissa: How Virginia Woolf changes the clothes and the character of her lady of fashion
Mark Gaipa

When we peer into the origins of Mrs. Dalloway and reflect upon the first words Virginia Woolf wrote about Clarissa Dalloway’s day, we encounter a small but vexing problem that has the potential to alter how we think about the published novel. The problem concerns a specific word Woolf uses in the opening line of her short story “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” which she wrote in the summer of 1922 before she realized Clarissa’s story would become a book.1 As readers of Woolf know quite well, that first sentence, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the gloves herself,” provides the very line Woolf would use to start the novel – with the exception of the word “gloves,” which Woolf would replace with “flowers.” And anyone who has read these two texts side by side has undoubtedly felt how consequential this substitution is: as we move from story to novel, the new purpose for Mrs. Dalloway’s trip to Bond Street seems part of a broader change that Clarissa’s character has also undergone, from snobbery to sympathy. I will have much to say in this essay about Woolf’s removing Clarissa’s gloves in her novel, but the word in the story’s first line that troubles me is not “gloves” so much as the one that follows it – “herself.” Quite simply, what meaning can this word have – along with the sentence in which it appears, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the gloves herself” – when pages later in the story we find Clarissa at the counter of a glove shop trying on different pairs of gloves? We may debate what Clarissa’s initial utterance in Woolf’s novel – that “she would buy the flowers herself” – says about her, but everyone can agree that the statement makes good sense, since buying flowers is something that someone else can easily perform on her behalf. The same