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.
2 comments:
There are a number of parallels between Virginia (the chracter and the historical figure on which she's based) and Richard, the writer/visionary in the film, and this link is solidified when he quotes her suicide note to Leonard as he falls from the window: both are rather intimate and sincere communications of love and gratitude to the person who has cared for them in their illness. And Richard's novel sounds a bit like a Woolfian novel in many ways--it's "difficult," it concerns a character who kills herself "for no reason" (as Louis puts it), it's concerned with a detailed cataloging of routine, day-to-day experience (a 30-page section on whether or not to buy nail polish). In some ways, Richard has more in common with Virginia than with her character, Septimus. (Although I definitely think it's interesting to explore analogies between shell shock as a socially relevant public health issue in 1923 and AIDS in 2001.)
I like your effort to match up the characters in the book with those in the movie, but I doubt you'll be able to fit everyone up perfectly. The Hours is already a work of fiction that's based on another work of fiction; making a movie of it would fictionalize it even further. But when you mention Laura as a metaphor for the character Virginia muses on for her novel, an interesting thought popped up for a second - Had Mrs. Dalloway the novel been continued, would Clarissa have been fed up with her life and moved on (to say, France)?
For the last paragraph, when you say "Viriginia," did you actually mean Clarissa? Because Virginia does end up killing herself.
Great post! I enjoy the novelty of your thoughts.
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