TIME AND THE RETELLING OF MRS. DALLOWAY IN THE FILM THE HOURS

            The film The Hours has a different treatment of time in its retelling of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.

            Using the horizontal dimension of time by following the events of a single day, the film adds a vertical dimension of time by following the events of a single day in the lives of three different women living in three different time periods. The lives of Virginia Woolf in 1923, Laura Brown in 1951, and Clarissa Vaughn in 2001, all run parallel to each other for the greater part of the film, beginning at seven in the morning.

            Virginia, Laura, and Clarissa all wake up at seven in the morning. The way this scene is show –as well as the succeeding scene where both Virginia and Clarissa are shown fixing their hair and washing their face simultaneously—gives the viewer a preview to the film’s structure and hints at future parallel actions and recurrent themes.

            Basically, the film’s horizontal dimension runs this way for all three women: they all wake up at seven in the morning, then the film shows how each woman spends her morning: Virginia begins to write her novel, Laura begins to bake a cake with her son, and Clarissa buys flowers and visits Richard. All three women are preparing for a party, and an unexpected visitor interrupts all these preparations. These visitors leave at about four in the afternoon. The rest of the film then shows how each woman spends the afternoon, with their actions echoing each other though not at exact points. For instance, Laura Brown leaves her son and checks in at a hotel at the same time that Virginia Woolf entertains guests. Later on, Virginia is shown leaving the house for a train station, at about the same time that Laura returns for her son. But the same image of leaving someone behind is still there. Many recurrent themes echo throughout the film, such as a shared kiss between two women, the suicide of Virginia Woolf and Richard, and the presence of flowers at the beginning of the film.

            Adding this vertical dimension and depicting three different live running parallel to one another has vast implications on the novel. This vertical dimension is a sign of the depth each character in Mrs. Dalloway has, such that many characters can be used in the film to give life to a single character of the novel. A certain diffusion of characteristics then occurs.

            In The Hours, the character of Peter Walsh is seen in two people: Richard and Lewis. Richard, as a man afflicted with AIDS, does not quite fit in with society. Like Peter, he is also a poet who feels he is a failure. In Mrs. Dalloway, we see how Peter keeps returning to his memories of Clarissa, somehow boxing her in to what he has always known her to be. Richard does the same thing to Clarissa Vaughn, as symbolized by the scene where Clarissa rides the elevator up to the apartment: the angle of the shot makes her look as though she is inside a box. The idea of boxing people in has two repercussions: one, Lewis feels free when he leaves Richard and goes to Europe. Here is where Lewis takes on the role of Peter as well: perhaps Clarissa Dalloway has also boxed in Peter somehow, as they both presume to know what the other is thinking. The second repercussion is Clarissa Vaughn is left with the impression that Richard thinks her life is trivial, the same feeling Clarissa Dalloway has about Peter.

            Richard Dalloway as an undemonstrative husband finds expression in the respective partners of the three women: Leonard Woolf, Dan Brown, and Sally. These people offer a sense of security for the women and give them some order in their lives. But despite this, the women do not experience any growth: Virginia feels as though she is dying in Richmond, Laura tries to be a perfect wife and mother every single day, and Clarissa is stuck in a ten-year rut, still an editor with the same publisher. Because of this, the women are still unhappy.

            The character of Septimus Warren Smith is evident in both Virginia Woolf and in Richard, as both suffer from insanity and both commit suicide. Richard, in particular, dies in the same way Septimus does: by falling out a window.

            The appearance of Laura Brown as an old woman in 2001 serves the same purpose as the old woman in Mrs. Dalloway. It allows us to realize that, in discovering that she is Richard’s mother, everything is connected and related. The three seemingly disparate lives all converge at this point: Virginia Woolf wrote Mrs. Dalloway, which Laura Brown reads in 1951, and Laura Brown is the mother of Richard, for whom Clarissa prepares a party in 2001. The connection between these three women then shows how they all represent one character: Clarissa Dalloway.

            All three women show how Clarissa Dalloway was a flawed and quite unhappy woman. But it is more important to focus on the end of the novel, where Clarissa sees herself in Septimus, and yet she is saved from death. The two women, Virginia and Laura, both experience a certain kind of death. Even before her physical death, Virginia already felt that her spirit was dying as she stayed on in Richmond. She thrived in London life, and yet she was forced into isolation because of her insanity. Thus, she lives a life she has no wish to live. Laura feels as though she is slowly dying the longer she stays with her family. It is ironic because the moment she gives life by giving birth to her second child, she feels as though she has plunged deeper into death. This is how she justifies her decision to abandon her family: “It was death. I chose life.”

            Hence we have two women who both represent Clarissa Dalloway and the seeming triviality of her life –if her life is so trivial, why is it worth living? It represents her realization that everything just happens over and over again, day after day. However, Virginia Woolf sees that Clarissa Dalloway’s destiny must be resolved. This is what makes Clarissa Vaughn’s character so important: she represents that side of Clarissa that is able to embrace life, to appreciate the present moment. This is what had saved Clarissa Dalloway from death, and this is what saves Clarissa Vaughn now. In response to her husband’s query “Why does someone have to die [in your novel]?” Virginia says, “Someone has to die in order for the rest of us to value life more.” Clarissa Vaughn experiences this as she listens to Laura Brown’s story. Laura had remarked, “You have a daughter,” and this implies that she expected Clarissa to understand her, to agree that having a family was like death. But Clarissa disagreed with her. By leaving the room, it was as good as saying, “I disagree. I’m not like you. I choose life.” And life, for her, is in the present. Not in the shadows of the past nor in the bleakness of the future.

            The present moment holds a certain depth, for it is the link between the memories of the past and the possibilities of the future. There is a striking difference between looking at time’s vertical dimension and its horizontal dimension, and a dialogue between Clarissa Vaughn and Richard best exemplifies this. She tells him, “You don’t have to come to the party.” He replies, “But I still have to face the hours, don’t I? The hours after the party and the hours after that.” Richard is following chronological time, just as Virginia and Laura do. This is why all three experience death: if one follows chronological time, there always comes a point when we will all die. Following time’s horizontal dimension inevitable results in death.

            Clarissa Vaughn was different, though. She cared about her party. She cared about the present moment and did not think of the hours after that. Instead, she thought of how rich the present moment could be, with different people coming together. We see that she saw a certain depth to the present moment, and she loved it. She personifies the feminine consciousness and the kind of time that Virginia Woolf used in the novel: the time of memory.

            In recognizing both the horizontal and the vertical dimensions of time, the film shows us just how everything is connected. No matter what the year, the existence of 7:00 in the morning, 2:30 in the afternoon, 9:00 in the evening will always hold true. Even if one’s life runs a linear course towards death, there is still that vertical course of memory that will live forever.

            This could be what the last line of the film means: Virginia writes her husband, “Always remember that between us are the years, the months, the hours.” Even if she had gone ahead of him and he would have to spend many years alone, she would not really die as long as she lived in his memory. He could remember her whenever the clock struck 5:20 in the afternoon, as this was the time they had argued at the train station. He could remember her getting out of bed at 7:00 in the morning, ready to write the first line of her novel. No matter how many years later he thinks of this, he will always remember her by the hour. And this is what keeps them together. These memories stored in a single moment, at a certain hour.

           The film The Hours succeeds in illustrating how time is both finite and infinite. One can measure how long life can last, but one cannot measure how deep memories can be stored. This reinforces the main idea of the novel Mrs. Dalloway: the ability to embrace and appreciate the present moment saves us from the despair of being confronted with our own mortality. For it is in the depth of the present moment, in the richness of our memories, that we are able to find immortality.