COMPARISON BETWEEN THE NOVEL MRS DALLOWAY BY VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE FILM THE HOURS

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COMPARISON BETWEEN THE NOVEL MRS DALLOWAY BY VIRGINIA WOOLF 

AND THE FILM THE HOURS

With this work I want to analyse the novel in its main characteristics and to compare these elements to the way they are treated in the film which, although it is not a screen adaptation of the novel, can be seen as a great work on the book, and also one of the most particular ways to interpret it.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

 

Adeline Virginia Stephen was born in London in 1882, the third of four brothers. Leslie Stephen, her father, began his career as a clergyman, but soon became agnostic and he took up journalism, becoming an important Victorian literary critic; he and his wife provided their children with a home of wealth and comfort.

Virginia’s approach to her art was greatly influenced by the highly intellectual atmosphere she breathed at home.

During her lifetime she suffered through three major mental breakdowns; her compulsive drive to work, the fact of feeling herself overshadowed by her parents, combined with her fragile nature, contributed to these breakdowns.

The first crisis began after her mother’s death in 1895: Virginia may have felt guilty over choosing her father as the favourite parent. Two years later, the death of Stella, her stepsister, born from Leslie’s first marriage, made Virginia feel sick again.

The following years she began to write, until 1904,when her father died and she, overcome by the event, which caused her second mental breakdown and also an attempted suicide, moved to Bloomsbury.

Here she founded the Bloomsbury Group, a circle of intellectuals, including E.M.Forster, who shared values and emphasised the importance of subjectivity, aesthetic enjoyment, personal ties of affection and intellectual honesty. They were hostile to the dominant values of the period, and also challenged conventional literary and artistic tastes, becoming highly influential in the English intellectual life over forty years.

In 1910 she worked as a volunteer for Women’s Suffrage: she was always interested in the problems of woman’s emancipation.

In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, another member of the Bloomsbury Group, and he will be the stable presence she will need to control her moods during her whole life. Their marriage was a partnership, and some suggest they had no intercourse.

In 1913 she attempted suicide again, because of a third strong breakdown.

In 1917 she and her husband founded the Hogart Press, which published the best experimental works of the period and their own books; Leonard hoped that Virginia could bestow on the press the care she would have bestowed on children (after her third breakdown she had been advised she could not have become pregnant anymore).

In March 1941 Virginia left a suicide note behind for her husband before drowning herself in a nearby river: she feared her madness was returning and she would not be able to continue writing.

HER WORKS

Her first novel was The voyage out; then she wrote Night and DayThe Mark on the WallJacob’s Room, Monday or TuesdayMrs DallowayTo The LighthouseOrlando(the surrealistic story of a man who lives several lives, one of which also as a woman) A Room of One’s Own (one of the first and most passionate defences of women’s right to be writers) , The Waves (a novel-meditation on the passing of time), The years and Between the Acts.

In total, she accumulated a treasure chest of work, containing five volumes of collected essays (including The Common Reader, her first series of essays on literatureand reviews, two biographies, two libertarian books, a volume of selections from her diary, nine novels, and a volume of short stories.

MRS DALLOWAY(1925)

Introduction to the novel

This novel is the result of an expansion of the themes already developed in Jacob’s Room, adding to them that of insanity, and it is also a natural development of the short stories she wrote before deciding to make her character, Mrs Dalloway, into a full novel.

The Dalloways, Richard and Clarissa, had been introduced in The Voyage Out and some of the characters of the novel are taken from Virginia’s past: Clarissa was modeled after a friend of hers, named Kitty Maxse, whom Woolf thought to be a superficial socialite, Sally Saton was based on Madge Symons, towards whom she held an affectionate devotion, and Septimus Smith is often considered as the character who reveals, in the novel, Virginia’s manic depression.

Virginia originally planned to have Clarissa die or commit suicide at the end of the novel, but finally she decided to make Septimus die: this decision let her relatives see in it, after Virginia’s death, the omen of her suicide.

As the novel focused mainly on Clarissa, Woolf, before publishing it, changed the title of the novel to Mrs Dalloway from its more abstract working title, The Hours.

THE PLOT

The events narrated in Mrs Dalloway take place on a single day in June 1923, in London.

The novel starts with Clarissa Dalloway, the heroine, going out to buy flowers for the party she’s going to give on the evening; while she is in Bond Street, she meets Hugh Whitbread, a friend of her since her childhood, who has become a proper English gentleman and who feels he makes an important contribution to society by writing letters to the London Times. Hugh is going to see his wife Eveline, who is in hospital, admitted because of her continuous health problems, and when Clarissa meets him, she immediately invites him to the party.

After that Clarissa begins to think about Peter Walsh, her boyfriend before she married Richard, and about her daughter’s relationship with Miss Kilman, whom Richard has hired to tutor Elisabeth, their daughter, in history, and whom Clarissa hates because of the attention she takes from Elisabeth.

While she is at Mulburry’s florist, a sudden pistol-like noise comes from the street; it comes from a motorcar, likely carrying someone very important. At this moment, for the first time, Septimus and his wife Rezia appear in the story.

Septimus was once, before the war, a successful, intelligent, literary young man and, during the war, he also showed great courage and commitment, but then, after a good friend of his, Evans, is killed in action, he realized he could not longer feel. Marrying Rezia, an Italian girl, he attempted to move on, but he never regained an emotional attachment to the world; he also began to hear voices, namely of Evans, and he became extremely sensitive to color and natural beauty. The doctors who are now trying to help him, first Dr.Holmes and then Dr.Bradshaw, compound his problems by ignoring them, and they become the embodiment of evil in Septimus’s mind.

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At this point of the novel, Septimus and Rezia are both surprised to see an airplane flying and making incomprehensible letters out of smoke; at this point we also meet Maisie Johnson, a young woman from Scotland who is horrified by the look she noticed in Septimus’s eyes while she’s asking him for some street indication.

Through Clarissa’s train of thoughts, we understand she feels snubbed because of the invitation to lunch Lady Bruton had made to her husband only, excluding her. She also comes back with her memory to her old best friend, Sally Saton, with whom she had ...

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