What if you could relive your life? Would you make different decisions? How would those different decisions affect your life today? For Clarissa Parry, the commitment to marry Richard instead of Peter would forever change her into a new identity of Mrs. Dalloway. While the marriage seemed right at first, Mrs. Dalloway started to realize how dull her relationship with Richard was. Was she even in love? But at the same time, she respected the space and freedom she was allowed from Richard. On the other hand, Peter would be involved in her every move but their relationship was definitely more intimate. Combining the two might have been perfect for Clarissa but life—even with the overflowing free will—can't do that.
Virginia Woolf conveys the frustrating reality of never being able to know how it would've been if Clarissa had married Peter Walsh. Woolf wants to use the character of Clarissa to remind us that the question of "What if?" is prevalent in everyone's lives. The sad truth is that everyone has regrets and makes mistakes that they wish to fix. Or even worse, like Clarissa, you never even know what the outcome might've been if you had taken another path.
What's more, for Clarissa, there honestly isn't even a serious conflict in her and Richard's relationship. But their relationship is so plain that she assumes that she has failed him: "... suddenly there came a moment—for example on the river beneath the woods at Clieveden—when, through some contraction of this cold spirit, she had failed him" (Woolf, 31). Because of this emptiness in her heart for Richard, she is more inclined to remember the times with Peter.
You don't realize what you have until it's gone. Clarissa, now Mrs. Dalloway, to a certain extent implies that she misses when she was with Peter. What seemed annoying and pestering about Peter long ago, now brought her even closer to Peter. From his strange, judgmental comments to his pocket-knife habit, these unique characteristics induce the thought of "What would Peter do or say in this situation?" into Clarissa. It's a feeling of nostalgia almost rather than truly missing him out of love. I believe Carissa would have been in a similar situation if she had married Peter and not Richard. This all traces back to the question of "What if?"; at the end of the day, no matter what decisions Clarissa made, those decisions shaped her into the person she is right now—and if her past was different then she would be a distinct person shaped from that past. Thus, the question of "What if?" is one that is hard to answer and forever unsolvable. We will never know what would've happened if we took the other road but we know that if we did, we would be in a different place(be a different person) today.
