Virginia Woolf creates interesting contrast within the character of Clarissa Dalloway using
             stream of consciousness narration in her novel Mrs. Dalloway. Clarissa's inner thoughts
             reveal a contrast between her lack of attraction to her husband due to her lesbian feelings
             and her fear of loosing him as a social stepping stone. These contrasts and many others
             can be seen throughout the novel using the literary device of stream of consciousness
             narration.
             Clarissa's character reveals to us early in the book her lack of attraction to her
             husband. This revelation can be seen in the passage that states: "...through some
             contraction of this cold spirit, she had failed him...she could see what she lacked...it was
             something central which permeated...." The "cold spirit" that she talks of is her sexuality,
             in being attracted to women, and her lack of understanding why she is this way. This is
             the main reason for her lack of attraction. She feels that she has let him down because she
             cannot complete her duties as his wife. Clarissa had lost both a sexual relationship and
             sexual attraction with her husband since the birth of her teenage daughter Elizabeth:
             "...she could not dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth which clung to her like a
             sheet."
             Clarissa tells us of her true sexuality as she remembers her girlhood friend Sally
             Seton. Sally is the only person that Clarissa has ever had any real passionate feelings for.
             "But this question of love, this falling in love with women. Take Sally Seton; her relation
             in the old days with Sally Seton. Had not that, after all, been love?" Although Sally held
             her heart, her homosexual feelings were not socially acceptable. Clarissa is therefore
             obliged to enter into a marriage to Richard Dalloway for social purposes.
             A contrast to Clarissa's lack of attraction to her husband is seen in her fear of
             loosi...