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Peter Walsh and fake feminism

 I don't think I'm the only one who really dislikes Peter Walsh. He's arrogant, rude, selfish, and just plain annoying. However, the part about him that I despise the most is the way that he makes Clarissa feel. Every time he's around, and even sometimes when he's not, Clarissa feels Peter's judgement. He's living rent-free in her head, and the shame that he makes her feel is unjustified.

Now, I'm sure that Peter Walsh would consider himself to be a feminist. His whole issue with Clarissa is that he feels that she has so much wasted potential. He knew her when she was young and radical, and he doesn't seem to be able to comprehend how she ended up as a housewife married to a conservative politician. He looks down on her for the way her life has turned out, and this is where we run into some issues. 

It's one thing to support and uplift someone who has been forced to compromise their lifestyle because of the patriarchy - it's another thing to shame someone for choosing a more traditionally feminine lifestyle if that's actually what they want to do. Initially, I can accept Peter questioning Clarissa's choices, because they seem sharply in contrast to how she was when they were 18 (similar to us questioning how Sally Seton has married a rich man in Manchester when we first learned about it). However, Clarissa didn't want to keep being that person that she was 30 years ago, and Peter is unable to recognize that. His constant condescending comments about her being the perfect housewife and being at her worst when throwing a party are frankly disgusting. 

Peter is part of the problem. Feminism isn't just supporting women who want to do more "masculine" things - it's supporting ALL women, because it's okay to want to be a housewife. And anyways, how are we ever going to tear down the patriarchy if we're not all working together? :)

Comments

  1. Eliza D. Terziev3 October 2020 at 17:37

    I cannot express enough how much that rubbed me the wrong way. I completely agree that his constant degradation of her choices was cringeworthy to read. I also think that we have to put the extent of his audacity into perspective: this was the early 1900s. Being an academic(?), or whatever Peter envisioned to be her destiny, wasn't really an option, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with choosing the lifestyle she chose in the first place. Yeah she might have had different interests in her youth, but she grew up and what she wanted changed. I think he needs to understand that she wouldn't have made the choices she did if she wasn't happy with them or thought they were for the best.

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  2. Stefania 5 October 2020 at 22:40

    I completely agree with you here, and I too didn't like how Peter, as well as some of our own class discussions, viewed Sally and Clarissa's choices to become housewives. It was selfish and unrealistic for Peter to project his own options and interests onto Clarissa just because he thought she would be better off that way. In the end she was perfectly reasonable when she went for the safe and stable choice of marrying Richard, and while she sometimes seemed to regret not marrying Peter, it is him as a person she potentially wanted, not the lifestyle she would have had with him.

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  3. Ariana15 October 2020 at 20:29

    Charlotte I agree with you. Even with Peter's lack of '"masculinity" he sure knows how to be a chauvinist! He has what we call a severe case of fragile masculinity", I think he was so insecure about his lack of a constant life, that he felt the need to shame Clarissa for her choice in marrying Richard, and settling for Victorian convention.

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  4. Lucas Wood16 October 2020 at 15:14

    Peter, it seems is mostly projecting his own insecurities onto those around him and in particular Clarissa. He sees her as a representative of a life he could've had and holds some sort of resentment for not getting it.

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  5. Mitchell24 October 2020 at 11:02

    Connected to all of this is the fact that Clarissa is certain that Peter completely misconstrues the nature and significance of her parties: in her mind, they are *not* evidence of her frivolity or conventionality, but a meaningful way for her to contribute in the world. Woolf is pointedly compelling a reader to reconsider and revalue the "feminine domestic sphere" in this novel: she doesn't focus on a Lady Bruton or a Miss Kilman for a reason. Clarissa is a conventional woman of her time in many ways, and Woolf is deliberately opening up the complexity (and even "feminism") of even such a conventional position. Clarissa's line about how marriage requires "a little license and independence" to explain how she and Richard have separate rooms is not too far from what Woolf argues in her important feminist essay "A Room of One's Own."

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