The Pseudo-Homeric World of Mrs. Dalloway - Critical Essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Jan, 1999 by Molly Hoff

India eventually provides a "Penelope" for Peter - Daisy, a married woman who is being courted by two suitors in his absence, Major Orde and Major Simmons. In her letter Daisy gives an account of their meetings and, like the elegiac Penelope of Ovid's Heroides I, line 91, "said it to make him jealous" (121). Like Penelope, Daisy is as crafty as Odysseus: "She flattered him; she fooled him" (Odyssey 2.88; MD 68). Peter, preeminently enamored of married women, is apparently expecting to settle with Daisy in London. His age suggests that she, an elegiac puella stereotype, would be a "widow with a past one of these days, draggling about in the suburbs" (239), suggesting the Roman subura, the red-light district, which reflects upon Peter as a strumpet's fool - "look at the women he loved" (192). Having returned to London, however, he visits Clarissa and tells her of Daisy and, as though he is begging leave of Calypso to return to his wife, he bursts into tears, following the elegiac imperative and the weeping Odysseus. Peter's visit with Clarissa also parodies another Homeric allusion, however.

It begins in Clarissa's drawing room, simulating Odysseus's visit in Helen's chamber when he reveals the Greek strategy, presumably the Trojan Horse (Odyssey 4.251-56). As Odysseus creeps into the city in disguise, recognized only by Helen, not the defenders, before the conclusion of the Trojan War, Peter suggests: "Nobody yet knew he was in London" (77). Peter makes a clean breast of it, not of the wooden horse but of Daisy, and marks the cryptic Homeric source by saying he "told her everything as usual" before the battle (64-73). Clarissa's persona as Helen has been planted in Peter's mind by none other than Sally Seton, who "implored him, half laughing of course, to carry off Clarissa, to save her from the . . . 'perfect gentlemen' who would 'stifle her soul'" (114), reminiscent of the abduction of Helen (25). This is the same Helen whose powers of imitation and deception are still remarkable 20 years later (Odyssey 4.277-89). Clarissa introduces yet another propempticon. "As if he were starting directly upon some great voyage," she responds with her conventional propemptic plea: "Take me with you" (70).

Clarissa's ad hoc personae encompass another formidable Mediterranean divinity suggested when Peter thinks, "Clarissa had sapped something in him permanently" (241). The comparison implies that Peter will not be able to string Odysseus's bow (Adams 21). Although Odysseus fears that Circe would unman him, not make him a pig as she did his crew (Odyssey 10.301,341), Peter is victim to the fate the hero escaped; the boating on the lake is encoded intercourse, giving an incongruous impression of Peter's imitation of antiquity's favorite superstud: "Richard rowed them back" (94-95).(20) This reminiscence concludes with an echo of the quarrel over a girl between Agamemnon and Achilles in the Iliad: "He deserved to have her" (74-75) (the word have bears the same sexual connotations in antiquity as it does today). As in Homer's Circean episode, transformations of men to swine represent an initiation that restores youthfulness: "he had not felt so young for years" (78). "To have been a sacred animal . . . is to have been given a second chance of sorts" (Skulsky 19, 23, 227n20); it appears that Peter's second chance will be justified, if not his youthfulness. Oddly, Peter's view of Clarissa, whether as Helen, Calypso, or Circe, makes of her an elegiac mistress "with the tears running down her cheeks" when it is he who sheds elegiac tears (69, 236).