2 In One

Today we finished watching The Hours and reading Mrs. Dalloway. I thought that The Hours put up an interesting twist to Mrs. Dalloway and connected major themes. In The Hours, Meryl Streep is Clarissa Von who has characteristics of the Mrs. Dalloway character in Mrs. Dalloway. She is homosexual and has a partner, just like Mrs. Dalloway did. However, unlike the book, she remains close with her ex-husband. Richard. In the book although they remain close, their relationship did not seem as stable as it did in the movie. Clarissa Von has to deal with suicide, just like Mrs. Dalloway did. That is because she watched Richard commit suicide by falling out of a building.
I like the twist that Richard turned out to be the character of Laura’s son from the 50’s. Laura also dealt with suicide because she almost overdosed on pills, but we found out that the reason she didn’t go through with it was because she was pregnant with her second child. She says, “I can’t.” Just like how in the book says, “One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering…” (78). Laura ends up reasoning with herself that the reason why she cannot commit suicide is because she doesn’t want to harm a new born. I find this ironic because we find out that she left her family after her second child was born. Her husband dies of brain cancer and both her children end up committing suicide. So, just like in the book, she brings her children into suffering. When Laura comes to Richard’s funeral, she says to Clarissa Von,” Abandoning your children is the worst thing a mother can do.” Laura also said that nobody would ever understand or forgive her for it.
I think lack of choice is a big theme in not only the novel Mrs. Dalloway, but also in a lot of literature that women write. I have learned that women do a lot of things for other people rather than themselves. Nicole Kidman who plays Virginia Woolf in The Hours says, “I am the only one that can understand my suffering. I had my life taken away from me and I cannot live a life that I don’t want to live.” I think her message is important because even though it is sad to think that she would not want to live her life, and ended up drowning herself, she did what she wanted to do. She didn’t let Leonard, who I think is her husband control her any longer. When Leonard asked her why someone has to die in her book she responded with, “Someone has to die so that the others can appreciate life.” Leonard didn’t understand that. I find it interesting that she said that because maybe that means that she didn’t think Leonard appreciated life since she killed herself. I think that maybe it would have been better if the movie followed through on Leonard’s reaction after her death and if he changed his way of living.
Another aspect of the film and movie was regrets. Laura, Richard’s mother said, “It would be easy to have regrets, but what does it mean? How can you have regrets when you had no choice?” I still think that she had a choice. How awful it must have felt to go to her son’s funeral and know that he wrote about her in his book. He hated her for leaving him. The movie didn’t go into his sister and how she killed herself, which I think, is for the best because then it would have been confusing. Another example of having to deal with regrets happens when Richard was about to kill himself. He says to Clarissa Von that she and him couldn’t have been happier together and she should not blame herself for that. I felt like he had no regrets about how their relationship turned out. Laura mentions that she and Richard didn’t keep in touch often. So maybe he has regrets about the lack of relationship with his mother, but that isn’t clear.
The ending of the film shed a new light on suicide for me. In a weird way maybe Virginia Woolf was right when she said that someone has to die so that others can appreciate life. After I watched the film, it wasn’t that I immediately appreciated my life more, but I understood why someone could feel suicidal. Sometimes suicide isn’t always completely selfish like a lot of people think. When it comes to Laura though, I was surprised that she hadn’t killed herself before Richard did. It didn’t seem like she was doing a lot of things in her life at the moment, but she looked happy. I still think that leaving her husband and kids was selfish. Her home life in the 1950’s seemed perfect; she had a smiley husband and a cute son. Everyone was happy. Yet, it only seemed that way on the surface. The audience could tell that she had a lot of problems from stress and dark thoughts.
I’m glad that we watched the movie because it really put the plot of Mrs. Dalloway into perspective. Although The Hours was a combination of Virginia Woolf’s novels, but the single day plotline stayed the same. It helped me because it compressed the time span of the novel and made it more manageable for me to understand. I liked how there were parallels in the shots that captured each of the time periods. For example, when Virginia, Laura, and Clarissa would wake up in the morning, I could see a unifying quality in their actions. They would wash their face, cut the flowers, and put them down in a vase. Even though they had different lives, they shared similar experiences.