Because Clarissa remains humble and unassuming about her own power, she fails to actually wield it to create change in her life. She understands that relationships in British society are fixed, based on "business and power" more than on genuine emotional connectness and empathy, which is why she waxes poetic about Sally and about Peter as well (Littleton 36)
As Smith points out, the bereaved woman is usually depicted as "mentally unbalanced," not the man (310). "Because women had traditionally been the primary mourners, they became the primary patients of rest cures and talking cures," (Smith 310)
She understands Septimus's pathos so poignantly precisely because she also feels the "death of the soul" in her own life. Whereas the patriarchal point-of-view pathologizes feelings like Clarissa's and Septimus's "viewed in a context of female experience, the capacity for opening up to identification and fusion reveals revolutionary and renewing powers," (Wyatt 115)
Both Septimus and Lucrezia exist outside of the boundaries of conventional English decorum, precisely why Woolf weaves the couple into the narrative. Through the juxtaposition of Septimus and Lucrizia's marriage with that of Clarissa and Richard, Woolf achieves the central goal of "criticizing the social system and to show it at work, at its most intense," (Zwerdling 69)