In Mrs. Dalloway, we constantly see characters make assumptions about each other. Clarissa says she can judge the character of a person just by looking at them; Peter frequently claims to know by feel Clarissa's intentions; and the first time we even see Septimus he is freaking out because he thinks everybody is looking at him. This isn't inherently a bad thing; it can sometimes be used for good. Clarissa's gut feelings about people are usually confirmed by her friends (Peter says something to the extent that she was always a good judge of character). Peter has known Clarissa for a long time, and even if he is not right he can still push Clarissa to do better in a situation. But it's troublesome when these assumptions directly drive people's feelings and actions.
Let's take a look at the scene between Clarissa and Miss Kilman when Elizabeth and Miss K are getting ready to go to the Army and Navy Stores. We already know Clarissa has built up a whole backlog of feeling against Miss Kilman, that she more or less hated the very idea of her. I can't find the passage now, but I think Clarissa even said at one point that she thought Miss Kilman wore her mackintosh to flaunt her poorness and make Clarissa feel bad (at another point Miss Kilman defends it, saying, "First, it was cheap; second, she was over forty, and did not, after all, dress to please" (120)). That's pretty ridiculous, though; how can you assume something so simple as clothing is meant as an attack on you?
But, Clarissa is able to dispel her assumptions. We see as Miss Kilman is starting to leave that Clarissa can see through them: "Odd it was, as Miss Kilman stood there ..., how, second by second, the idea of her diminished, how hatred .. crumbled, how she lost her malignity, became second by second merely Miss Kilman, in a mackintosh, whom Heaven knows Clarissa would have liked to help" (123). In fact, the dichotomy between the idea of Miss Kilman and the woman herself was so great that Clarissa laughed. However, we have a problem here. Miss Kilman could not see what was happening in Clarissa's head, and assumed the worst. She thought Clarissa was insulting her: "Ugly, clumsy, Clarissa Dalloway had laughed at her for being that" (125). Now, why would she go and assume something like that? Why is it that whenever somebody does something, people assume it's intended to make a point to them? That just seems narcissistic to me.
What's worse is that several characters do it. Besides Clarissa and Miss Kilman, Septimus thinks everybody is watching him and closing in in the car scene. On the other hand, Lucrezia is afraid those people "closing in" will hear when he talks about killing himself or other dreadful things. Elizabeth does it too, and not even in a negative way. Waiting for the bus, she just assumes people would compare her to other things, saying, "And already, even as she stood there, in her very well cut clothes, it was beginning.... People were beginning to compare her to poplar trees, early dawn, hyacinths, fawns, running water, and garden lilies, and it made her life a burden to her" (131). Can't people be left to ignore her in peace? There's absolutely no reason that everybody must be thinking about her.
Don't get me wrong, I do this too. I have no idea why, but in public I'm always afraid of what people are thinking about me, or judging me for. I know that in all likelihood they're just thinking about the weather, or their day, or how everybody is thinking about them, but I can't get over myself and let it go. I wish I could though...
Elizabeth's acute self-consciousness in public has a lot to do with the fact that she's young, and just venturing out to walk through the city (and take buses) on her own for the first time. Her sense of herself as "performing" this quasi-adult role is reflected in the narration itself, in free-indirect-discuourse, when Woolf notes, first, that she boards the bus "most competently . . . in front of everyone" and then again, for the return trip, that she boarded the Westminster omnibus "calmly and competently." You're right that this self-consciousness is something we see in all the characters (and that poor nurse seems to have no idea that, for five minutes or so, she *is* the center of Peter Walsh's universe!). In Elizabeth, we see it take a particular form, with a young woman feeling proud of herself for navigating public transportation successfully. It's maybe the most Howie/Baker moment in the novel. She can list this as one of her own "personal advances."
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