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 shared her childhood and her adolescence in Bourton and who is now married with a wealthy man in Manchester.
Then Clarissa comes back home and, while she’s mending her dress, Peter Walsh suddenly enters, and they begin to speak about their youth, with a great nostalgia for both. Peter reveals to her that he is going to marry an Indian girl and that he has come back to London, after five years in India, only to take advice from his lawyers about the divorce Diana, this Indian girl, is arranging with her husband.
After a moment of deep mood, Elisabeth enters and Peter goes away.
The novel now concentrates on Peter’s thoughts, and through them we understand his pain, still suffocating, caused by Clarissa’s refusal to marry him in their youth: he never forgot this, because he still loves her.
The point of view shifts again, entering into Rezia’s mind: she wonders why she must suffer so much because of Septimus’s mental insanity, but, suddenly, a song rising from the subway station makes her abandon these troubles, she turns to see her husband, and she notices that he looks very well, strangely calm, as if he had never been ill.
At noon, Dr.Bradshaw goes to see Septimus at home and he says to him that he needs a long rest in the country to regain a sense of proportion.
The novel now concentrates again on Hugh Whitbread, who is going to Lady Bruton’s luncheon: here he also meets Richard, and Lady Bruton asks both to help her to write to the London Times on the topic of emigration to Canada. After that, Richard invites her to Clarissa’s party.
Coming back home, Richard decides to buy flowers for his wife, as he hadn’t shown her his love for a long time but, when he walks in with flowers, the only thing his wife shows to be interested in is her recent meeting with Peter, and Richard runs to work.
After having shown us Elisabeth and Miss Kilman shopping and then Elisabeth deciding to take a bus and enjoying the town alone, the point of view shifts another time in Rezia’s mind: she’s listening to Septimus, he looks very happy and, because of that, she makes a promise to herself: no one would separate her from him.
But, suddenly, Dr. Holmes arrives; she runs to stop him from seeing Septimus, she wants her husband to continue to feel calm and not to be disturbed by the doctors.
But it is too late: Septimus, having heard the doctor arrive, in a moment of total delirium, throws himself from the window onto the fence below.
After this very tragic moment Peter appears in the story: he never stops thinking about Clarissa and he decides to attend her party.
In the last section of the book, the author concentrates on the party: all the guests, Peter, Ellie Henderson, Lady Rosseter, Sally Saton, the Prime Minister, Lady Bruton, Elena (Clarissa’s old aunt) arrive and Clarissa greets each one with great joy. Elena begins to talk with Peter and, when Lady Bradshaw arrives, she immediately tells Clarissa about a young man, a patient of her husband, who had killed himself. Clarissa, even if with no reason, begins to think about that man, towards whom she feels symphatetic.
During the party, Peter keeps waiting for her, with an unbelievable desire to talk to her, but this moment never arrives and, during a little conversation with Sally, he admits his relationship with Clarissa had scarred his life.
THE THEMES
The Sea as symbol of Life:
in the novel, when the image of the sea is portrayed as being harmonized, it represents a great confidence and comfort; when its image is presented as disjointed or uncomfortable, it symbolizes loneliness and fear.
Doubling:
many critics describe Septimus as Clarissa’s "double", the darker, more internal personality compared to Clarissa’s very social outlook. The doubling portrays the polarity of the self and exposes the positive-negative relationship between the individual and the whole humanity.
The intersection between Time and the Timeless:
In Mrs Dalloway, Woolf creates a new narrative structure: in it there’s no distinction between dream and reality, between past and present. The narration flows simultaneously from the conscious to the unconscious, from the memory to the actual moment.
Social commentary:
Woolf also strived to illustrate the vain artificiality of Clarissa’s life: the detail given in one day of a woman organizing a party exposes the flimsy lifestyle of England’s upper classes at the time of the novel. Even though Clarissa is bombarded by profound thoughts, she’s also a woman for whom a party is her greatest offering to society.
The world of the sane and of the insane side by side:
Woolf portrays the sane grasping for significant and substantial connections to life, living among those who have been cut off from such connections and who suffer because of the improper treatment they receive.
Feminism:
Woolf greatly admired strong women, to whom she looked at in order to give personality to her characters. This admiration for some women she knew during her life, as for example the novelist Madge Symonds (Sally Saton), was coupled with a growing dislike for the male domination in society; this was caused by Virginia’s relationship with her stepbrother, who was fourteen when she was born.
NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE AND LANGUAGE
Virginia Woolf is of a great importance in the history of the novel because of her experiments with narration, characterisation and style. She deliberately rejected what for many readers was the main aim of the novel, namely the telling of a story. For her, events were not important in themselves, but in the impression they made on the characters who experienced them.
Also in Mrs Dalloway she valued the subjectivity more highly than the objectivity of events: because of that, she refused to use an omniscient narrator and she introduced a shifting point of view, revealing thoughts, sensations and impressions experienced by the characters.
The technique used, which aims at reproducing the flow of thoughts in an individual mind and to portray human consciousness, is called Stream of Consciousness.
Her novel involves constant shifting backwards and forwards in time according to the recollections aroused in her characters. Her fiction is characterised by two levels of narration, one of external events arranged in chronological order and one of the flux of thoughts arranged according to the association of ideas.
Her prose is built through few subordinate sentences, the plot focuses on the internal feelings and covers a very brief period of time, the language is figurative and evocative, rich in objects and events with a symbolical meaning.
…FROM THE NOVEL TO THE FILM…
THE HOURS
Director: Stephen Daldry
Writer: David Hare, based on the novel by Michael Cunningham
Cast: Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, Nicole Kidman, Ed Harris, Stephen Dillane, Toni Collette, John C Reilly, Allison Janney, Jeff Daniels, Miranda Richardson, Claire Danes
Year: 2002
Running time: 114 minutes
INTRODUCTION TO THE FILM
The film is the adaptation of a Michael Cunningham’s book, The Hours.
The project of the director was that of creating an intricate plot by combining the tales of three women in three different historical periods, all partially lesbian and all closely connected to the novel Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.
The first of these three women is Virginia Woolf, the author of the book, the second is Laura Brown, a housewife living with her family during the Fifties, the third is a modern Clarissa Dalloway, whose name is Clarissa Vaught and who lives in New York in the year 2001.
…A LOOK AT THE PLOT…
The film shows the relationship between Virginia and her husband Leonard, her terrifying breakdowns, and her great commitment in writing, which brings her to achieve a sort of identification with the heroine of the novel she’s dedicating to, Mrs Dalloway.
Virginia and her husband live in Richmond and they are the owners of the Hogart Press, they live isolated from the rest of the world, in a very quite place which Virginia hates, always hoping to come back to London; she has got a really moody temperament, and she’s often in contrast with her maids.
Virginia is under the constant and strict control of doctors who have forbidden her to go to London, and she hates them because of this.
By watching the film, we also understand her relationship with her sister Vanessa and with Vanessa’s children.
After having finished the book, about which she had though a lot, after having lived for a brief period in London, she finally commits suicide, by drowning herself in a river.
Laura is a housewife living with her son Richard and her husband Dan in Los Angeles. She is affected by a mental breakdown, because of which she will also think to commit suicide, but she will never find the courage to do that.
She’s connected to the novel because she’s reading it and she feels particularly close to the mental illness its heroine suffers from.
She is lesbian, she feels alone, obligated to her husband whom she doesn’t love and for whom she can’t feel any sexual desire; her son seems to understand his mother’s problems and he seems to be afraid of suddenly losing her. She is pregnant and, even if she thinks not to be able to tolerate her life, she finally chooses life instead of committing suicide; in any case, she will abandon her family and because of this she will always feel guilty.
Her story is linked with the first, that of Virginia, because of the book, but also with that of Clarissa Vaught, the third woman, because of Richard, Laura’s son, who will be Clarissa’s first love and with whom she will share her life.
Richard will be affected by AIDS and, at the end of the film, he will commit suicide by throwing himself from the window, just like Septimus, the visionary poet in Virginia’s novel.
The last scene of the film, after Richard’s death, is about the meeting between Clarissa and Laura, which is the revealer of the meaning of the whole film, hidden until the end and very close to the meaning of the novel Mrs Dalloway.
Clarissa can be seen as a modern Mrs Dalloway. The film concentrates on only one day in her life, from the morning, when she is in Bond Street buying flowers for her party, until the evening, when she meets Laura.
Clarissa lives with her companion, Sally, she works for a publishing house, she has a daughter, Giulia, and she keeps a very strong and intimate relationship with Richard, a love of her youth.
Richard is an artist, a writer, and his last book mainly focuses on Clarissa, showing, with this work, how much he still loves her.
In the film we also meet Louis, a friend of Clarissa's who lives in San Francisco and whom she had invited to the party: in his youth, Louis had an omosexual relationship with Richard and now he seems to be a bit jealous of the fact that Richard has only written about Clarissa in his book.
Another important thing to say about this book is that in it Richard makes his mother die: it is just for this reason that we understand he had tremendously suffered because of having been left alone by his mother.
Then, when evening is coming, Clarissa goes to Richard’s home and she meets him in a state of anxiety: he can’t tolerate his AIDS anymore and he doesn’t want to go to her party, being afraid to show himself in public. He begins to tell her about the day of their first meeting and, after having declared openly his love for her, he throws himself out of the window and he dies.
After that Clarissa meets Laura who reveals to her the affliction, the pain, the tremendous sense of guilt she had felt since she had left her family: she says that it is so terrible to survive to the death of your family. Her daughter and Richard’s father died and, now, also Richard.
She talks to Clarissa about the last years and she admits that, in the most difficult moment of her life, when she was so desperate and when she though of committing suicide, in that moment, she had a choice to make and, between life and death, she finally had chosen life.
So, just because of these words pronounced by Laura, we can infer a great meaning in the story told in the film:
"IT IS NECESSARY TO LOOK AT LIFE, TO LOOK AT IT IN THE EYES: ONLY FACING THE REALITY WE’LL BE ABLE TO LOVE IT"
THE THEMES
The three heroines of the film struggle with the same cycle, the same issues, and among these topics we find sexuality and the sense of the futility of life, social conventions and inner depression.
There are a lot of ties between these three women: the loss of identity, the meaning and the importance of certain choices in their life, mental breakdowns and suicide. This last is a recurrent theme, and in the film it is not treated as an absurd act: infact it is viewed as a valid, possible way to escape, even if the most tragic.
The message can be interpreted in this way: suicide is not a good act, not good at all, but in some cases, for persons affected by tremendous mental illnesses, it is the last exercise of free will.
It is important to remember that, as Mrs Dalloway was one of the earliest work created using the STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS, the movie as well can be seen as a "stream of consciousness" adaptation: this film is a voyage in time, created through the sensations and the feelings of the characters.
THE MUSIC
The music gives unity to this fragmented plot. The stories of the three characters are all connected by Philip Glass’music, which repeats its themes, its tones, in the same way as the texture of the film does.
COMMENTARY
The motif of the woman mentally instable is central to this film. The most important theme of the film could be said to be depression suffered by women unable to fully express themselves because of their social role.
It’s Woolf’s novel that forms the axis and connects the three women, even if the three stories are so distant in time. The shifting back in time can be quite difficult from a filmmaking standpoint, but the abilities of the director and of the screenwriter solve it with no confusion.
The issue of lesbianism in the film is dealt with tastefully, especially in Streep’s case: the words "gay" and "lesbian" aren’t even pronounced in the film, as gayness isn’t the true subject of the film.
There are, strangely, odd moments of joy in this sad and moving film: the behaviour of Clarissa’s daughter, Giulia, who seems untouched by all the depression and confusion around her, and that of Laura’s husband, who seems satisfied of his life.
Woolf’s modernist-era England is authentic and unromanticized, Laura’s angular Fifties are wonderfully evocated, as well as today New York, where Clarissa lives.
The performances are phenomenal, the movie captivating.
The Hours is not an easy film to watch, not easy at all. It is necessary to watch it with a critical attitude, admiring the particular way the images and the scenes are built, but also by paying attention to the unusual and extremely interesting themes that are developed.
For what concerns to the comparison between the film and the novel, the connections are hidden in those aspects that the narrative technique of the novel and the cinematic effects used in the film have in common. As well as the Stream of Consciousness represents the flow of thoughts in the mind of the characters, so the Flash-back and the Flash-forward employed in the film show dreams, memories, reveries and fantasy as if they were recollected in only one instant in the present.
The novel and the film have also some themes in common, as for example mental illnesses, human discomfort in society and in the individual role life imposes to everyone, and suicide.
In my opinion, the film renders very well the sensations the novel communicated to me: the modern Mrs Dalloway of the film, Clarissa Vaught, is a magnificent translation of the protagonist of the novel. Her thoughts, her feelings, her attitude towards the others, towards a reality she seems to face by imposing to herself an image which is not completely sincere, which she has to assume in order to continue to live. These are are exactly the same aspects I noticed in the real Mrs Dalloway when reading the novel .
Then Richard, the artist in the film, whose link with Septimus Smith, the character analysed by Virginia Woolf in the text, is so deep but also so unusual and not banal at all, is another figure who makes the spectator meditate.
Also the social commentary expressed by the film is the same the novel suggests to the reader: sometimes the life of a person, in this case that of Clarissa Vaught, as well as that of Clarissa Dalloway, can be, at least in certain aspects, so artificial, that its real meaning, the real significance of the relationships with the others seem to disappear.
Both the novel and the film give an image of the female sex which is not common, and not even simple, but which is the result of a great work on the psychology of a woman, of all her inner sensations and hidden thoughts.
MRS DALLOWAY: THE RESULT OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF FICTION IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE 20th CENTURY
In the first two decades of the 20th century there was a great reaction against the REALISTIC TRADITION OF VICTORIAN FICTION. This, which had aimed to portray reality trough plausible and credible stories, was contrasted by a new interest in fiction, that is the problem of representing individual consciousness.
Under the influence of the new psychological theories, put forward by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)and Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), fiction, in the first half of the 20th century, developed new techniques in order to make the unconscious reveal itself to the reader.
One of these techniques is that of leaving space to the train of thoughts in the characters’ minds, as exemplified by the style used in the novel Mrs Dalloway, built on the STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS technique.
The emphasis on the individual after the war became part of a general movement in literature and arts usually referred to as MODERNISM.
In a Modernist novel, the great realistic traditions of character, plot and authorial voice are abandoned, disregarded or changed.
Chronology and the linearity of time are substituted by the new idea of the Flux of Time: time is seen as it appears to the individual, past, present and future coexist and they are revealed in the text according to the importance they have in the individual consciousness, disregarding sequential progression.
As Virginia Woolf wrote in Modern Fiction in The Crowded Dance of Modern Life:
"The writer seems constrained, not by his own free will but by some unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and air of probability embalming the whole so impeccable that if all figures were to come to life they would find themselves dressed down to the last button of their coats in the fashion of the hour. The tyrant is obeyed; the novel is done to a turn. But sometimes, more and more often as time goes by, we suspect a momentary doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as the pages fill themselves in the customary way. Is life like this? Must novels be like this?
Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being "like this".
Examine for a moment an ordinary mind in an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from the old, the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. It is not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it".
Characters are analysed particularly in their thoughts, feelings and in how their experiences and memories come to the surface.
The authorial voice often disappears and the traditional author is removed or substituted by newer techniques of narration.
The Interior Monologue, through the use of Free Indirect Speech, permits the free expression of a character’s thoughts without any introductory word or verb and also not paying attention to structures like punctuaction, syntax and grammar.
Modernist writers considered and used language as non-referential and meaning as differently interpretable.
In that period, British intellectuals and writers were greatly influenced by ideas coming from other European countries. As we have already said, the two most involved psychologists in this phenomenon are the Austrian Sigmund Freud and the Swiss Carl Gustav Jung.
The first opened the way to the exploration of the subconscious and the unconscious with The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) which revolutionised the way people thought about sex, parent-child relationships and the motivations for human behaviour, describing consciousness as a multy-layered phenomenon, in which the past coexisted with the present. In Freud’s conception, each individual responds to reality according to his/her own personal history.
Particularly in The Ego And The Id (1923), Freud analyses the aspects connected with the social, religious and moral consciousness of a
person part of human collectivity. In this work, the psychologist describes human personality through the definition of the Ego, the Id and the Super-Ego and this new interpretation of the psyche is necessary just because of the role of identification in human growth.
Then, in Civilization and its Discontents (1930), Freud develops some important considerations on evolution in our civilization and its consequences on the happiness or unhappiness of man. Notwithstanding the great progress achieved, civilization creates a widespread malaise, because each society tends to repress the libidinal life of men by preventing the fulfilment, the satisfaction of a lot of needs and by making the population feel guilty. Freud reveals his pessimistic view on the possibility to control the troubles of collective life caused by some aggressive and self-destroying pulsions.
Jung continued Freud’s research and reached the conclusion that a series of mythic patterns are the basis of our conceptions of the world. He believed that modern man inherited a store of these mythic patterns, the Collective Unconscious, and that the artist was a person particularly gifted in bringing these unconscious images and archetypes to the surface.
In the arts the questioning of contemporary literary values and the search for new models to represent the new perception of reality found one expression in Pablo Picasso. In his works, with the dislocation of the female body into angular shapes, he challenged the artistic criteria of beauty and truth which had developed since the Renaissance.
A great example of this technique, developed in his Cubist period, is the famous painting Les Mademoiselles d’Avignon. It was just with this painting that Picasso introduced his Cubism.
Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907, oil on canvas, The Museum of Modern Arts, New York, USA.
So Mrs Dalloway and the innovations it introduces are not an isolated phenomenon, but they are part of a tendency, concerning all the aspects of life, to question cultural and scientific beliefs after the First World War.
Bibliography
DE LUCA, B. - GRILLO. U et alii, Literature and Beyond. Film, Music and Art, Torino, 1999.
FAMIZZA, MULLIGAN, Winds of Change, Torino, Paravia Editore, 1995
WOOLF, V., La Signora Dalloway, ("I Capolavori della Medusa"), Milano, 1980, trad. di Alessandra Scalero.
ID., Modern Fiction in The Crowded Dance of Modern Life, Penguin, London, 1993
Sitology
.channel4.com/film/reviews/film. jsp?id=104349
.gradesaver.com/ClassicNotes/ Authors/about_virginia_woolf. html
.co.uk/fm/h/hours_2002_r2.shtml
http://reelreviews.hotusa.org/thehours.html, commentodiRakashArunachalan