Protagonist

Character Role Analysis

Virginia Woolf, Laura Brown, Clarissa Vaughan

We've got three interconnected plotlines here, folks, so don't be surprised that we've got three—count 'em—protagonists to deal with.

If these protagonists were like the Three Fates, Virginia Woolf would be Clotho—the Fate in charge of spinning the thread of life. As a spinner of tales, and as the original author of Mrs. Dalloway, her writing plays an instrumental role in the other protagonists' lives.

Laura Brown, on the other hand, is a young woman living in the same era as Marvel's Peggy Carter, but with none of Agent Carter's sense of purpose or fulfillment. She gets it—sort of—from none other than Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway.

As a late twentieth-century counterpart of Virginia Woolf's own Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Vaughan is a force to be reckoned with. Brimming with unstoppable joie de vivre, she is the happiest and most optimistic of the novel's three protagonists.