Jake's Injury

So, Jake's injury. At first, I thought for some reason that he was like, castrated (the funny Italian word would be castrati or whatever) by flying shrapnel. This gave me a whole different perspective on the book.  In fact, the damage appears to be to the actual penis rather than the testes, which really changes things an astonishing amount. When I realized, in class, that this made more sense, I actually said to myself, "Oh! No big deal then." Really, I could almost understand laughing at that injury for a minute there, so great was my relief for Jake.

When Freud talks about castration anxiety, I am confident that he's talking about more than losing the ability to make love- apparently the only thing that Jake lacks. Jake essentially has a bad case of E.D., which is tragic, sure, but nowhere near the worse-than-death sympathetic-thigh-clenching horrendousness of actual castration; it's not simply the loss of ability to grow facial hair, or any of the outward effects, but rather the loss of ability to even be considered a man. However much our attitudes may be culturally influenced, one feels that to lose the hormones we so rely on is to become a different person. Being unable to consummate desire is bad, but the presence of aggression, of a sex drive, is what in many ways defines our characters. I can't imagine my thought processes being the same sans primal urges. You'd be alive, yes, but would it really be you?

So what's the tl;dr? Jake is right to be tough and bluff about his injury. Every time night rolls around, he needs to remind himself that while he's greatly inconvenienced in the women department, some poor sap in the same hospital probably got it two inches lower and, for all intents and purposes, died.

The Hours

There was a lot to this movie, and trying to completely understand it after one relatively half-assed viewing wouldn't work out great. Mostly, I worried away at one aspect of it-- the connection between timelines.

You've got the obvious connections, of course-- Richard's the kid, his mom reads Mrs. Dalloway on the day in question, Clarissa is called Mrs. Dalloway by him, Woolf writes Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa's flowers and party-- but it goes a little deeper as well. First of all, the suicide. In the middle story, it's the housewife (it's almost comical how much animosity these artistic types have for the '50s; relative economic stability and public well-being is evidently so boring to write about that ennui-stricken and repressed housewives, artists, and troubled young people hardly ever stop hanging themselves and popping too many pills in various surreal and/or meta settings in modern works about the period). In the first, it's Virginia. In the third, it's Richard. The "visionaries" (Virginia and Richard) go through with it, while the Clarissa characters don't (modern Clarissa goes the "Mrs. Dalloway" route and never shows herself considering it, while Laura the housewife thinks about it and goes back- making Laura a metaphor, not for Clarissa Dalloway as she appears in Mrs. Dalloway, but for the character as it evolved along with the novel-- the character that Virginia is musing over throughout the course of the movie.

Richard is obviously the counterpart to Septimus. The question, then, is where Virginia falls. Is she Mrs. Dalloway or Septimus? In Mrs. Dalloway, I believe that she's Mrs. Dalloway-- after all, she doesn't end up killing herself; she gets through it for another decade or so. In The Hours, however, she's definitely Septimus the visionary/writer, because from a historical perspective we know that she's going to snuff the candle later in life.

Illness as a Result of Shock

So, in the clip/movie/whatever that we watched today, it said that Woolf got sick after she got married, and the English Professor that they were interviewing seemed very sure that her nearly life-threatening illness was the result of shock, which came from her "having to become a sexual person" or some such. Now, I'm no doctor, but the level of matter-of-fact assuredness with which this was said seems out of place to me. Why is it that only literary women from the eighteenth, nineteenth,  and early twentieth centuries are susceptible to these deadly maladies? You can hardly read an Austen novel without some girl taking a walk in the rain and then getting pneumonia, or hearing that her little sister ran off with a scoundrel and then falling deathly ill, and so forth. I'd always chalked it up to Austen's poor understanding of medical science, but apparently it carries over into real life as well. I've never heard of a modern (as in, 21st century) woman falling physically ill because of "shock" or what have you, but for some reason the only time when women from a certain era find themselves sick is when there's a very obvious and recent psychological cause for it. I'm certain that books could be written commenting on what this says about the traditional view of mind and body as more connected, or comparing it to certain Buddhist philosophies, or using it to critique the drug-fixated modern medical establishment, but for some reason, no one but me sees it as in the least odd.

The end of Mrs. Dalloway

In my mind, the ending of Mrs. Dalloway  was the better for its lack of suicide. All deep character-defining characteristics aside, a suicide there would just be too expected. "Ennui-filled housewife commits suicide" is so New Yorker; it's almost a cliché, honestly. You can't build a great novel around such a specific and tired premise. The ending as it stands actually makes us think. The conclusion we arrived at in class-- that is, that the ending is in many ways a celebration of life-- makes a lot of sense to me, and I'm more than a little enamored of Clarissa's Joie de vivre. In class, a couple of people intimated that perhaps Clarissa was supposed to be a superficial character, and that her "deep" thoughts were merely Woolf's way of showing that even the most shallow people think about death and so forth. Nonsense, in my opinion; we're given a number of flashbacks to her having almost tragically "modern" and "deep" conversations with Peter and so forth. She might appear superficial superficially, but she's a smart girl, and this makes the fact that she ends up with such a healthy and positive outlook really nice and quite unexpected.

Septimus's Jump

Septimus finds himself jumping to his death when approached by human nature in the form of Dr. Holmes. We know that he's already threatened to kill himself once, but Woolf never quite gives a reason- insane or otherwise- as to why he wants to end his life. In the end, it seems somehow connected to Holmes's appearance; perhaps he simply doesn't want to face Holmes's gregarious buck-upitude? Or perhaps he doesn't want to be rest-cured? That doesn't square, however, with the feel that we get in earlier references to the suicide he's threatening, because I, at least, got the impression that he was going to kill himself out of some kind of crazy theory- so that he'd arise jesus-style  because "there is no death"? At any rate, it certainly doesn't seem like Septimus is depressed earlier in the novel, because he marvels at such great length about the beauty around him and so forth. He's at a disconnect, certainly, and I could see him killing himself for either reason- so perhaps it's both? Had Holmes not shown up, would Septimus still have jumped at that moment? If he'd been in a more rational state of mind at the time (I, at least, got the impression that he'd already slipped out of the Old-Septimus groove he got into with Rezia for a bit) would he still have chosen to escape human nature?

So Many Words

Mr. Dalloway finds himself, at one point in the novel, incapable of telling Clarissa that he loves her in so many words. The flowers are well-received, and perhaps the message gets across (I don't know how Clarissa manages to miss the connection between flowers and old flames coming back to town, but what the hey). But what's interesting here is how well we can relate to Richard's plight, even today- it's hard to say things in so many words, whether it be "I love you" or "You owe me money" or what have you.

What I'm saying, I guess, is that Richard's cowardice is utterly relatable. He's afraid, not of rejection alone, but merely of voicing his feelings. He can't tell his own wife he loves her? Weak. But it's got to be the most common failing in the world to turn back and descend the stair with a bald spot in one's hair. What's really terrible about it is that it doesn't happen to everyone- the Admirable Hugh, for instance, probably never has to deal with it. He buys jewelry all the time. His is a relatively simple courage- but not entirely different from that which Septimus possesses during his "Manly" phase. It's just a smaller-scale lack of sensitivity, even if it expresses itself via "I love you"s and so forth. Modern novels love to tell you that true courage is feeling fear and then overcoming it, but in Woolf's day they didn't hold with such nonsense- true courage was when you bloody well did what you set out to do in a bluff, straightforward manner. Sure, Septimus goes a little mad, and Hugh Whitbread is an utterly inadmirable character when you get right down to it, but never is their manliness itself called into question- and given the other male characters present in Mrs. Dalloway (Who wants to be Peter? ... Anyone?), I'm not at all sure that they're the worst options.