At their most primal form, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Stephen Daldry’s The Hours are love letters to life, showing every aspect of busy suburban life with both a macro and wide-angle lens and romanticising the minutia of the human experience but also not shying away from exploring its harsh realities. The most significant way it displays this dichotomy is through the constant presence of death throughout the two works of media and how it encourages us to live every day to the fullest and how we should appreciate both the big and small picture aspects of life. It urges us to re-examine our surroundings and our lives, and truly challenge if we are happy or content with the way we live or if it is time for a change. For are we truly living if we do not enjoy life?
Death In Mrs Dalloway and The Hours
Death as a concept is omnipresent through both Mrs Dalloway and The Hours and is one of the main themes of both works of media. Both death itself and the effects of death are the foundations on which both Mrs Dalloway and The Hours are built and their direct effects on the characters of the stories are explored. One of the earliest examples of this is our first introduction to Septimus Warren Smith, who we observe go into a panic after hearing a car backfire in the street. We then go on to learn that he suffers from ‘shell shock’ as a direct result of his participation in the Great War and the horrors he experienced there, including the death of his dear friend, Evans as we would later learn. Septimus’ mental illness also has effects on other people around him, as we see his wife Rezia having to endure her husband’s general apathy towards the world around him. This is already one powerful example of the effect death has on the characters of Mrs Dalloway. This post-WW1 world serves as a backdrop for the London of Mrs Dalloway and its effect is subtly displayed through interactions among the many different characters throughout the story.
Death is explored in several different ways through Mrs Dalloway and The Hours. One example of this is how it affects the behaviours and cognitions of each character and reveals a lot about them from a psychoanalytic perspective. For instance, the presence of death causes Peter Walsh to fear growing old and sick which leads him to live in a way that distracts him from this harsh reality. He does this by acting as if he is younger than he really is by living more frivolously in India and pursuing younger women. Another example is how Mrs Dalloway constantly ponders about the omnipresence of death and how the thought of it constantly enters her mind throughout a normal day, a topic that will be further explored later.
Life and death as metaphysical concepts are also explored in both The Hours and Mrs Dalloway and the two pieces of media encourage us to question what death is as a concept. In his essay, Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” and Death, Xi Chen suggests that Septimus’ suicide could be interpreted as an inevitable byproduct of having a mental illness and living in an extremely adverse and industrial environment. He continues to say his death, in this case, is not necessarily a choice but rather that Septimus was driven to suicide “by uncontrollably painful symptoms that were insufficiently addressed and managed by psychiatric medicine.” Interpreting his death in this way almost suggests his suicide as a sort of “death due to natural causes” due to his mental illness and external environment. This idea of inevitable and predetermined death is also explored in a scene from The Hours, where Vanessa Bell’s children find a dying bird and suggest saving it but their mother cautions them and says,
“There’s a time to die, and it may be the bird’s time.”
The bird was also found after it fell from its nest, which is a significant intertextual connection with the parallel death of Septimus in Mrs Dalloway. This suggests that it was also time for Septimus to die when he did. Instead of saving the bird, the children then prepare a grave for the bird to honour its life which is similar to the way Clarissa in Mrs Dalloway ponders and reflects privately on Septimus’ death. Chen also brings up Septimus’ suicide as an attempt to communicate to the people around him and also the greater world. He is drawing on a quote towards the end of Mrs Dalloway during the titular character’s penultimate internal monologue,
“Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.”
This quote is imperavtive in understanding suicide throughout Mrs Dalloway and The Hours and I implore you to keep this quote in mind while reading the rest of this essay. Death in this interpretation can be seen as a defiance to the society which has oppressed Septimus and to instead die a prideful death, remaining ‘pure’ and ‘untainted’. The contrast of Septimus’ character which is portrayed as being deeply intuned with nature and the discord of his external environment while also being internally troubled and disturbed can be seen as a metaphor for the horrors and death of war perverting a once innocent, pure, poetic soul. His death is an attempt to release his soul from his body untainted and truly be free. Death as a concept is explored in The Hours through an interaction between Angelica Bell and Virginia Woolf, where Bell ponders on what happens after a person dies,
- Angelica Bell: What happens when we die?
- Virginia Woolf: What happens? …We return to the place that we came from.
- Angelica Bell: I don’t remember where I came from.
- Virginia Woolf: Nor do I.
This raises an important existential question and makes us think about where we go after we die. Matter is neither created nor destroyed, so technically we may still exist albeit eventually as a mass scattering of atoms across the earth after we decay. Or, does our life go beyond the extent of our physical body, and instead persevere as long as there is someone to remember who we are?
Suicide In Mrs Dalloway and The Hours
As an extension of death, suicide is a primary focus throughout both Mrs Dalloway and all three time periods of The Hours. Although the suicides and suicidal ideations of Septimus, Laura Brown, Richard and Virginia Woolf are all for different reasons, they all ultimately stem from the inability to continue to march on through the tribulations of a cruel world. As Albert Camus writes in The Myth of Sisyphus,
“Killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it… It is merely confessing that it ‘is not worth the trouble.’ Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation and the uselessness of suffering.”
I believe that this quote is very vital in understanding suicide, especially in these two forms of media and gives context to the topic as a whole. In Mrs Dalloway and The Hours, suicide is seen as a way to escape or prevent further suffering. It is a final violent act to finally end all pain. But also, if there is no pain, there is also no life and all the pleasures that may come with it. It is a final arithmetic calculation where the ends no longer justify the means and the only answer that seems plausible is to cease suffering, and therefore cease living. In Mrs Dalloway, this concept can be seen where Septimus defenestrates himself to escape a cruel and dehumanising institutionalisation and decides that not living at all would be a better fate than to exist without his wife by his side. The prose preceding Septimus’ death delves into his mind before his suicide and is poetic in nature,
“So he was deserted. The whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes. But why should he kill himself for their sakes? Food was pleasant; the sun hot; and this killing oneself, how does one set about it, with a table knife, uglily, with floods of blood, — by sucking a gaspipe? He was too weak; he could scarcely raise his hand. Besides, now that he was quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know.”
The sublimity that those about to die experience is in reference to the acknowledgement that they will have to never suffer again and that it will all be over soon. This last section before his death describes a sort of isolation which can be best explained through a quote from famed director Orson Welles,
“We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.”
Ultimately as he throws himself out the window, Septimus is alone in the air and alone when he meets his demise. In The Hours, Laura Brown contemplates suicide to escape the suffering of a patriarchal suburban existence where she is a slave to the ideals and expectations of 1950s America. In the 1920s time period, Virginia Woolf is living in Richmond to soothe her mental illness which was caused by prior trauma throughout her life. This ultimately foreshadows her eventual suicide in 1941, depicted in the opening scenes of The Hours, which in itself is a significant indication of the importance of suicide in The Hours and its intertextual connection with Mrs Dalloway and that story’s theme of suicide. In the climax of The Hours, Richard takes his own life by leaping from the top story of his apartment whilst Clarrissa watches. The motivation for his suicide is poetically displayed through his final scene with Clarrissa, where he ponders about the “hours after the party…” and the “hours after them”. Despite momentary and seemingly superficial periods of enjoyment and happiness, it does not do much to change the underlying suffering he experiences constantly. His continuation of pushing the proverbial boulder up the mountain was for the sake of Clarrisa Vaughn but ultimately he decides that he cannot anymore and that Clarrisa also has to let him go.
There is another side to the coin that is suicide, where one side is the person who does not want to exist any longer, and the other side is the impact that one’s suicide may have on others. A reason people are sometimes given to not commit suicide is to think of how their suicide may affect their loved ones and how it is “selfish”. Although this wording may be extremely problematic, the core sentiment is still there. There is an intrinsic selfish nature to wanting to hold onto someone you love and to prevent someone you love die. For someone you know and love to commit suicide, it is to wake up the next day and know that you will never see, hear, touch or talk with them again, and that there was nothing you could’ve done to prevent their death. You may have listened to them at their darkest times, and given them all the help and support you could’ve provided, but in the end, there was nothing you could do to stop them from committing the act. For example, Rezia, despite all her best efforts and understanding, couldn’t stop Septimus from leaping out that window. This is mirrored by Clarissa Vaughn and Richard’s similar suicide. This juxtaposition can be illustrated through an interaction between Leonard and Virginia Woolf in The Hours, where after being told by her husband that he lives with the threat of her killing herself, Virginia replies,
“You live with the threat, you tell me you live with the threat of my extinction. Leonard, I live with it too.”
This interaction further illustrates the point of suicide, in any capacity, being a complex and multi-sided issue.
Absurdism in Mrs Dalloway
The idea of the absurd is touched upon briefly in Mrs Dalloway and is of value in exploring when it comes to discussing suicide and death in Mrs Dalloway and The Hours. Absurdism is the philosophy that all existence and life are absurd in the fact that the world does not have any intrinsic meaning or a higher purpose that can be intelligibly understood. It implies that searching for meaning in the world through means such as believing in a higher being, through religion, is ultimately futile. This reflects Woolf’s well-known aversion to Christianity. She is quoted in a letter to her sister, Vanessa Bell as saying, “I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.” After learning that T. S. Elliot had become an Anglo-Catholic, and “ believes in God and immortality, and goes to church.” This anti-religious and absurdist sentiment can also be seen in Clarissa’s thoughts in Mrs Dalloway,
“She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist’s religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.”
In response to the death of her sister at Bourton. Another instance of the absurd can be seen again, in the scene with the mysterious car and its unknown occupant towards the beginning of Mrs Dalloway. Despite its relative unimportance, the car does not fail to create an immense disturbance throughout the street, causing all the onlookers to speculate as to which important public figure is in the car. The car in conjunction with the plane also serves to further display the effects of the First World War on the inhabitants of London, with the sound of the backfiring car being akin to one of a pistol being fired and the plane, a reminder of the war, the first time planes were used to such an extent. The absurd is also further explored in quotes describing the thoughts of Mrs Dalloway herself, as she was being described as having a “Perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.” Mrs Dalloway is acknowledging the absurdity of the world and that at any instance she could be run over by one of the taxi cabs or die another gruesome death. Only in the next paragraph, we are again in the mind of Mrs Dalloway,
“Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely? All this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?”
Through these two quotes, we can see that Mrs Dalloway has accepted that “The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.”, a quote which has been attributed to Albert Camus, a French philosopher and author known for his novels exploring topics such as the absurd. Through Mrs Dalloway’s deep understanding of the absurd, she goes throughout the novel to ponder her existence and if she is truly happy with the decisions she had made in her life, such as choosing a safe marriage with Richard and where those decisions had left her.
How Dying Teaches Us How To Live
But, what good is an acknowledgement of the absurd if the suffering and destruction of the world continue to go on? What lessons do the deaths of our loved ones tell us about how we should live life? As Virginia Woolf puts it in The Hours,
“Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more. It’s contrast.”
But why is this?
The death of others reminds us of our own mortality and how someday, we too will cease to exist. While we can still see the light, we should strive to experience the world for those who are no longer able to and do the things they cannot. It is our obligation to give it our all in everything we do, every day. I interpret the opening sentence of Mrs Dalloway to be an invocation of this very sentiment, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” It is a statement that reinforces the will to live and step out into the bustling air of the city to do anything, even as simple as buying flowers. Choosing to live, as opposed to giving up, is choosing to try to see a brighter morning and a more peaceful afternoon. As Laura Brown says to Clarrissa Vaugn towards the end of The Hours,
“It would be wonderful to say you regretted it. It would be easy. But what does it mean? What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It’s what you can bear. There it is. No one’s going to forgive me. It was death. I chose life.”
This quote is particularly significant as it both gives us an insight into suicide and the motivation behind it as a means of escape from suffering but then making the decision to choose life instead. This idea of not having a choice is also reflected in another scene from The Hours where Laura Brown is on the hotel bed and we see the room filling up with water, akin to a flood. This could be interpreted as a metaphor for the feeling of drowning, and how Laura Brown feels that she is drowning with the pressures of her life and the society which seeks to oppress her. The framing of this scene puts us in a position directly over Laura Brown drowning, which evokes the feeling of us watching from an external position, akin to observing an animal in a zoo. We ultimately feel powerless to help Laura Brown and she in turn feels isolated and alone with no one to turn to.
In summary, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Stephen Daldry’s The Hours use both their respective forms and contexts to create a narrative with a message of how death and the absence of life can empower those still alive to continue to live and live their lives to their fullest potential. By the end of The Hours, each of the main female characters has decided to make a drastic change in their lives in hopes of changing their lives so that they can live them to their fullest. Virginia Woolf decides to move back to the London she so dearly misses, Laura Brown decides to abandon her family to live a life unencumbered by the strict societal expectations and norms of society and Clarrissa Vaughn chooses to live a life more worth living after the death of Richard. This idea can be distilled both in a quote from Mrs Dalloway which dives into the mind of Mrs Dalloway towards the end of the story where she reflects on the suicide of Septimus and the meaning that it brings to the interpretation of her own life,
“She felt somehow very like him — the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun. But she must go back. She must assemble.”
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