Analyses of Connections/Contrasts Between The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway

- a response to the movie, The Hours -

As I was beginning to watch The Hours (the movie), the connections between the three main storylines were not at all clear to me. In fact, they seemed very distant, and even as I began to put several pieces together, I was still figuring out which characters I knew from the book and which ones weren't from the book. As the movie went on and built, however, the connections became much clearer and some were so shocking/cleverly planned that I had to force myself to pause the movie in order to allow myself to fully grasp the scene/character connection reveal. In this post, I would like to highlight some of the connections as well as contrasts that I was able to make between the book Mrs. Dalloway and the movie The Hours.

The Woman in the Mirror

As the camera switches between snippets of the three storylines in the beginning of the movie, the focus is on each woman waking up from her bed. As they get ready, each of the three main characters (Virginia, Clarissa, and Laura) have their own scene where they look into the mirror, mirroring (ha puns) the section of Mrs. Dalloway in which Clarissa examines and collects herself as she stares into the mirror. I noticed as I watched these scenes that it was very different from when I read the section in the book, mainly because with literature we had every single detail of what was going through her mind, with courtesy of Woolf’s free indirect discourse of Clarissa,

 as she attempted to collect all of her personal life’s puzzle pieces together. With the movie scenes, we are not able to step inside of each character’s mind to see what they think of themselves when they gaze into their mirrors, and this gives the movie a sense of conspicuousness, especially in the beginning of the movie when we have no in-depth introduction to any characters.

Character Reveals

I came to the personal conclusion that Richard Dalloway in this movie was a mixture between Septimus, Peter, and Richard from the novel. Here are a few notes on this:

(Movie scene: novel connection)

-               He is seen as a rather mentally unstable man with bad health who has to be nursed by Carissa: Septimus and Rezia’s relationship in the book

-               He always bashes Clarissa for her excitement and anxiety about her party that she is planning in celebration of Richard’s award: Peter and Clarissa’s criticizing relationship, as well as the idea that Clarissa is throwing a party for Richard like in the book

-               He is a poet, and he mentions that he wants to write about everything as he sees every intricacy of the world: Septimus and his poetry, seeing the beauty of the everyday

-               this part left me shook Richard has a movie scene where Clarissa finds him ripping down the curtains exclaiming that he wanted light, and I at first found this sort of promising, because I associate light with positivity. He and Clarissa started talking and having a conversation about her day, and they had flashbacks of when they were the happiest, but there was a sense of uneasiness in the room – then Richard took the fall through the window: my brain was screaming Septimus the whole time I was watching this scene; whoever created these connections is so smart and has my mind blown.

Death: The Way It Looms

I wanted to close with a few remarks on how death, specifically suicide, is addressed in this movie. With the novel Mrs. Dalloway, we know that Septimus did kill himself by jumping through his window, and we also took note of the idea of Clarissa being suicidal. However, I felt that suicide as a concept was incredibly prevalent in The Hours as each storyline weaved it into a character.

-               Laura Brown almost attempted suicide with drug overdose when she stayed in the hotel, but dreams led her not to do so. She goes back to little Richard (who I referred to as “Bug” until the movie revealed his identity) and tells him that “there was a moment where I thought I might be longer but I changed my mind”, implying that she was going to end her life but decided not to. I saw a similarity with Richard Dalloway in his apartment, as the camera zoomed into the multiple prescription drugs on his table and he mentions taking two drugs (Xanax and I can’t recall the other one) at once during the scene in which he takes his life.

-               Virginia, after Leonard found her awaiting the train to London, exclaims that if she had to choose between Richmond and death, she would choose death. This scene rang a bell when I was watching the end part when elderly Laura Brown explains where she went after she abandoned her children, and she says, “It was death. I chose life” when she contrasted her old life with her husband and kids with her solitary life in Toronto.