Module A Elective 1
Sample Response: Mrs Dalloway and The Hours
Response by: Catriona Arcamone
The question
(adapted from
2014 HSC)
The importance of living a full life is an idea which connects Virginia
Woolf’s novel, Mrs Dalloway and Stephen Daldry’s film, The Hours.
How is this idea shaped in these texts from different contexts?
Prescribed texts:
Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf, 1925 (prose fiction)
The Hours, Stephen Daldry, 2002 (film)
Begins with an
immediate
comparison that
leads to the
thesis and
responds to the
question
Despite the fact that the opening scene of Stephen Daldry’s film, The
Hours is a representation of Virginia Woolf’s suicide in the River Ouse,
and despite the fact that suicides feature in both the film and Virginia
Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway, both texts echo Woolf’s words from her
1922 diary: ‘I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as
usual.’ Both Woolf’s modernist 1925 novel and Daldry’s 2002
postmodernist film which has Mrs Dalloway as a pivotal point for its
three interwoven stories can be seen as life-affirming texts – with their
major focus on women whose rich inner lives are juxtaposed with their
outer lives constrained by the contexts in which they live. Both texts
place the characters in their respective context, to reflect on, or respond
Context is
introduced as
to, the horrors of the consequences of war and AIDS, the
well as the
disappointment of unfulfilled potential that is met at middle age, the
themes of
poignancy of lost love, the vagaries and difficulties of personal
women and
relationships, class, sexuality and mental illness. However, both novel
unfulfilled potential and film ultimately present an affirmation and celebration of life.
Structure of
both texts is
compared to
respond to idea
of lives in the
question
Time is
discussed as a
major theme in
the novel
Time discussion
is linked to film
and connected
with
experimental
modernist
techniques
Mrs Dalloway seeks to narrate the inner life of characters in a single day
– Wednesday, 13th June, 1923. This multivalent approach shapes a
number of perspectives which may oppose or contradict, while in The
Hours the action takes place within the span of a single day in three
different years, 1923, 1951 and 2001 – three parallel narratives with the
focus on three different women, alternating between them throughout
the film. In Mrs Dalloway, the chiming of both the grand Big Ben and
the gentler St Margaret’s, toll out the significance of time on life,
(Woolf’s original title for her novel was The Hours) albeit a
representation of time as mutable – Big Ben, ‘a warning… then the
hour, irrevocable’, reminding Clarissa of mortality, while St Margaret’s
chimes in a little late, gliding ‘into the recesses of the heart and buries
itself, to be, with a tremor of delight, at rest’. Woolf seems to say a full
life is one that accepts that the moment is valued, ‘What she loved was
this, here, now, in front of her’.
Daldry’s film, named for the Woolf novel, also breaks down temporal
barriers, reshaping the idea of time and the significance of an individual
moment. The concept of linear time is subverted in both texts. The
experimental modernist novel moves between present and past,
exterior and interior as characters reflect on life. Woolf employs what
has been termed a stream-of-consciousness technique to allow the
reader to be privy to characters’ associative leaps in thought, while the
film’s constant cutting between eras and characters explores the notion
of lost moments, the connection between individuals and the value of
life itself. The value of life – the act of being, of embracing life, is
shaped in Mrs Dalloway through modernist techniques and reshaped in
the postmodern approach of The Hours.
The idea of
context and
women is
introduced in
the book
Each text crosses different social, cultural and historical contexts, yet
there are shared values and attitudes towards a number of issues.
Woolf’s eponymous, middle-aged protagonist, placed firmly in the
upper-middle-class of a post-World War I England suffers from a sense
of malaise as she reflects on her role as ‘Mrs Richard Dalloway’ – her
individual identity at times denied to her. The focus on the party she
will give allows her to ruminate on one’s position as woman in the
social hierarchy – and indeed we see a range of women whose position
is compromised by the strictures of London in 1923. Clarissa and these
minor characters provide great insight into the lives of women of the
period, who despite their failings, still embrace those small things which
are life.
Women and
context
discussion
focuses on the
film showing
how filmic
techniques
enhance the
themes
The three female protagonists of The Hours represent changing
positions of women over time, this opposition represented by the
different palettes used for each character which also work
simultaneously to provide echoes from scene to scene. Philip Glass’s
music, an integral presence, is also used to provide a counterpoint.
Virginia Woolf is portrayed as privileged, but uncomfortable when
dealing with servants, and in some ways subordinate to her husband
Leonard. Laura Brown is unfulfilled and unhappy in her role as dutiful
1950s middle-class housebound mother and wife, caring for the
‘deserving’ returned service-man from World War II. While Clarissa
Vaughan appears as a successful publisher, with freedom to make
choices, she is seen to have an ambivalent position in upper-middleclass New York society, still in a sacrificial, sublimating role at the
beginning of the 21st century. All four of the main female characters are
frustrated by social expectations; although personal freedom and rights
increased over the decades, domestic responsibilities of women and
their resulting guilt remained for many a significant aspect of life.
There is a
movement
between the
two texts
constantly
contrasting the
ideas
The discussion
on women
moves to their
relationships
with others and
retruns to the
question on life
Both texts explore the suppression and sacrifices of the individual to
adhere to social requirements – women as carers, subservient to men,
forced into living lives comprised of minutiae, ‘silenced ... and
overshadowed by the heroics of men’. Laura Brown’s act reading of
Mrs Dalloway, stitched together with Virginia’s writing of the novel,
parallels her life with that of Woolf’s protagonist. While Laura spirals
into suicidal despair, the surrealistic dream sequence reminiscent of
Woolf’s 1941 drowning shocks her back to life and the birth of her
daughter. The depiction of the creative process of Woolf’s novel is an
affirmation of life, juxtaposed as it is with Virginia’s contemplation of
death and the dead bird. Subsequent scenes have her plunging into the
initial stages of writing the novel.
The party that is
central to each
text is discussed
Each text focuses on a party to be given by the Clarissa of Mrs
Dalloway and The Hours. The preparation of the parties consumes the
respective hostesses and both are aware of the superficiality of their
endeavours. While she knows her husband Richard has important work
in the government, Clarissa cannot differentiate between Armenians
and Albanians and is aware of her inadequacy. She knows that both
Peter and Richard ‘criticized her very unfairly, laughed at her very
unjustly, for her parties.’ However, Clarissa’s success is the gift she
offers others – bringing people together is an affirmation of life, a
communion of lives.
The word unlike
signals the
contrast
between the
two texts
Unlike Clarissa Dalloway’s successful party, Clarissa Vaughan’s party –
in honour of her former lover and AIDS sufferer Richard for his
prestigious poetry award – becomes futile because of his suicide, and
yet here too the composer offers an avowal of life. The dead poet’s
mother, Laura, comes to the apartment and is treated sensitively by
Clarissa’s daughter Julia, whose acceptance and non-judgemental
attitude of the choices she made – abandoning her own family so that
she might live – is an implicit affirmation. Julia’s dialogue earlier in the
film with her own mother gives an affirmation of filial relationships.
Like her namesake, Clarissa Vaughan, (Richard often refers to Clarissa
as ‘Mrs Dalloway’ because she is self-effacing and distracts herself from
her own life the way the Woolf character did 80 years earlier), creates
meaning in her own life through the happiness she can give to others in
her role as carer.
Relationship
between the
two texts is
further explored
through the
experience of
the kiss
The fluid nature of sexuality, unlived dreams, and repressed desires are
explored through Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness style of writing.
Clarissa’s sweetest kiss is the one she shares with the unconventional
Sally Seton. This is reshaped and echoed in the film where each of the
three central characters share a kiss, shown in a close-up shot, with
another woman – Vanessa and Virginia, Kitty and Laura, then Clarissa
and Sally, who are perhaps given the fulfilment their namesakes in the
original text were denied because of the contextual restrictions of lateVictorian England, with its espousal of sexual restraint and strict social
code of conduct. Sexual ambivalence and identity are significant and
explicit concerns of the film. Each text seems to confirm that these
repressed desires rob the protagonists of fulfilment and thus their lives
are emotionally poorer.
The discussion
of another
linking idea –
suffering – in
both texts is
contextualised
Both texts explore the idea of madness and both texts present this as an
issue of great concern for their own particular context – the shellshocked World War I veteran, who, like his creator heard the birds
speaking in Greek, and the AIDS sufferer whose final stages of the
disease have brought him to madness. The representation of both
characters is at once confronting and poignant, their ‘insanity’ shown as
a heightened awareness of life, of being. Septimus Warren Smith’s
interior monologues, his musings and scribblings, his anger towards his
doctors and institutions offer insight through his wit: ‘The world has
raised its whip; where will it descend?’ The madness caused by shellshock is dramatically and empathetically rendered in Woolf’s writing.
The focus on
AIDS is
contextulaised
Richard Brown’s emaciated physical appearance, demonstrating the
horror of AIDS, an almost ubiquitous disease in the late 20th century, is
exacerbated by the dim lighting effects in the shabby chic New York
warehouse apartment. His poetry books lined up on Clarissa’s shelves
likewise indicate a clever, sensitive and damaged man; we are aware at
the conclusion of the film that Richard is the abandoned son of Laura.
The final act of suicide links both characters – but the book and the
film affirm the living. Clarissa Dalloway in her empathy and
understanding of Septimus thinks she is very like him and interprets his
death as an act of embracing life: ‘She felt glad he had done it; thrown it
away.’ The representation of Clarissa Vaughan indicates that she too
understands Richard’s decision.
Conclusion
links all the
ideas
Both texts conclude with an unambiguous affirmation. The novel ends
with Peter Walsh’s excited, ‘It is Clarissa. For there she was’, the film
with Laura’s, ‘It [her domestic life] was death. I chose life.’, then
Virginia’s voiceover, ‘Always the years between us. Always the years.
Always the love. Always the hours.’ These declarations demonstrate
that in the midst of death, the importance of living and celebrating life
with all its minutiae and ordinariness, its complications and sacrifices is
an idea which connects both texts across the 80 years.