Death and re-birth in The Hours
Adapted from Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Director Stephen Daldry and playwright David Hare, The Hours was inspired by Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway. It is no coincidence that The Hours was the working title Woolf had given Mrs. Dalloway as she was writing it. The emotional trauma that this film guides its viewers through becomes evident in the opening prologue. The scene begins with Virginia Woolf composing what would be her suicide notes to her husband Leonard and her sister Vanessa, the two most important people in her life (Curtis, 57.) She begins: "I feel certain that I am going mad again: I feel we can't go through another of these terrible times... You have given me the greatest possible happiness.. ." The portrayal of this process quickly demonstrates the turmoil Woolf is feeling, both from her oncoming episode of "madness" and the difficulty she is having finding the correct words to say "farewell" (Lee, Hermoine). The prologue comes to its climax as Kidman portrays Woolf's suicide. It is a gut-wrenching display of one's "matter-of-fact" acceptance of one's own coming death. Very dramatically, Woolf fills the pockets of her coat with large stones and stoically walks into a swollen river. Her head slowly disappears beneath the muddy water as all hope of her reconsidering her suicide is swept away with the current.
The Hours then introduces us to three women from three different decades, and their relationships with others, tied together by a common thread--Mrs. Dalloway. Mrs. Dalloway is about one day in the life of its namesake, Clarissa Dalloway, as she prepares for a dinner party. "She is a woman who, on the outside, is a perfect...
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...m the responsibility for his death by saying a line similar to one in Woolf's letter to her husband--"I don't think two people could have been happier than we've been."
Though there are cinematic clues that they are the same person (similar pajamas, and Richard looking at a old photo of a woman with pills spilled on its surface)--It is only after Richard's suicide we learn that he is actually Laura Brown's grown up son Richie. Up until his suicide we are led to believe that Brown had committed suicide. In fact, in Richard's hard-to-read novel, he has his mother as committing suicide. The reality as we learn from her, is that she abandoned Richard and the rest of her family shortly after her second child was born. Much like the loss Woolf experienced when her mother died while Woolf was thirteen, the loss of his mother affected Richard deeply (Curtis).
Both Virginia Woolf and Annie Dillard are extremely gifted writers. Virginia Woolf in 1942 wrote an essay called The Death of the Moth. Annie Dillard later on in 1976 wrote an essay that was similar in the name called The Death of a Moth and even had similar context. The two authors wrote powerful texts expressing their perspectives on the topic of life and death. They both had similar techniques but used them to develop completely different views. Each of the two authors incorporate in their text a unique way of adding their personal experience in their essay as they describe a specific occasion, time, and memory of their lives. Woolf’s personal experience begins with “it was a pleasant morning, mid-September, mild, benignant, yet with a keener breath than that of the summer months” (Woolf, 1). Annie Dillard personal experience begins with “two summers ago, I was camping alone in the blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia” (Dillard, 1). Including personal experience allowed Virginia Woolf to give her own enjoyable, fulfilling and understandable perception of life and death. Likewise, Annie Dillard used the personal narrative to focus on life but specifically on the life of death. To explore the power of life and death Virginia Woolf uses literary tools such as metaphors and imagery, along with a specific style and structure of writing in a conversational way to create an emotional tone and connect with her reader the value of life, but ultimately accepting death through the relationship of a moth and a human. While Annie Dillard on the other hand uses the same exact literary tools along with a specific style and similar structure to create a completely different perspective on just death, expressing that death is how it comes. ...
According to Chronicles magazine, "Woolf was undeniably a brilliant writer." Woolf's work of Mrs. Dalloway was read by fifteen-year-old Michael Cunningham in order to impress an older girl in school. As he stated, "the book really knocked me out." Once older, Cunningham wanted to write about Mrs. Dalloway, but thought not too many people would want to read a book about reading a book. He then thought he might want to read a book about reading the right book. Hence, The Hours was written. Cunningham would incorporate Mrs. Dalloway into "a book about reading a book." The Hours weaves through three woman's lives. As the novel unfolds, it shows that these three women are related by parallel experiences.
After the death of William and Justine, Victor falls into a depression because he is disturbed with the guilt of the death of William and Justine.
A Comparison of Two Accounts of Life After Death Materialism is the view that the body and mind are inseparable, and for there to be life after death then the body must be resurrected. This is much like the Christian view of life after death. John Hick was a materialist and he argued that, in certain circumstances, it would be possible that the dead could exist as themselves after death, if an exact replica were to appear. Hick uses thought experiments to show the person who dies in this world is the same person who is resurrected in the next. He uses examples of using a character named John Smith.
Mrs. Dalloway covers a day in the life of the upper-class society involving Clarissa Dalloway and her friends, living in London post World War I. This passage is set at Regent’s Park as Septimus Smith, a World War I veteran suffering from shell shock, and his wife, Rezia, are waiting to see the psychiatrist William Bradshaw. Septimus’ daily life struggles are seen as he tries to emerge from a hallucination and back into the harsh London daylight. Despite being mentally ill and dealing with guilt over the loss of his best friend Evans, Septimus has great moments of clarity, as he is able to recognize the beauty that surrounds him. The use of repetition demonstrates Septimus constant battles with time as he keeps revisiting the battlefield and the only way to get away from those horrors is to be in the moment-by appreciating that “beauty is everywhere”. A continual sense of movement throughout the passage is evoked through the use of kinetic verbs, demonstrates that time cannot be held back and Septimus must continue to move forward despite his past.
For my final project I chose to compare two works of art from ancient Mesopotamia. A visual work of art and a literary one. The visual work of art I chose was the Statuettes of Worshipers which were created around 2900 to 2350 BCE at the Square Temple at Eshnunna, a city in ancient Mesopotamia. The literary artwork I have chosen is the Epic of Gilgamesh written roughly around 2800 BCE by author or authors unknown. It was set in Uruk, another city in ancient Mesopotamia. Both of these works of art share a common theme; the theme of immortality. It is my hopes that within this paper I can accurately show how each of these works of art express this theme, and how it relates to modern society.
The Hours begins with Virginia Woolf who is married to Leonard. They do not have any children of their own. Woolf lives in London in 1923 battling mental illness and struggling to write a book, Mrs. Dalloway. She struggled and finished the book according to Tony Peregrin "at the age of 43". Woolf is financially stable due to her husband was a publisher. She had a cook, Nelly, and a housekeeper Lottie. By 1941, The Second World War was going on and Virginia Woolf had committed suicide.
Life and death are dualities. These two immaterial forces culminate into a beautiful and tenuous composition creating an awareness of abject mortality that indirectly contributes to the breadth and depth of human existence. This existence or being is marked by an incessant love of life, influenced by the pervasive knowledge of eventual death. The characters in Mrs. Dalloway endeavor to grasp the meaning of both life and death through the act of resistance and/or acceptance of the impermanence of human existence as it relates to them personally and to those around them. Nietzsche’s interpretation of the themes of life
While reading Virginia Woolf's classic novel, Mrs. Dalloway, Michael Cunningham was inspired to write his revision The Hours. In The Hours, Michael Cunningham gives his interpretation of the characters in Mrs. Dalloway while giving it a modern twist. Like Virginia Woolf, Michael Cunningham includes many controversial topics like mental illness, and relationships among individuals of the same sex. While Woolf just mentions the idea of being with another woman in her novel, Cunningham takes this and makes it into something different, Even though Cunningham has made changes to the original text, you can still see the parallels between the two.
The suicides among Ernest’s parents and siblings family are numerous. Clarence Hemingway, Ernest's father, killed himself in 1928. Clarence was fervently religious, providing much of Ernest’s moral education in his younger years. However, Clarence battled depression and diabetes, and in the end shot himself in the head on December 6, 1928. Ernest’s closest younger sister, Ursula, suffered from cancer and bouts of depression, and killed herself in a drug overdose on October 30, 1966. Ernest’s brother Leicester was the youngest in the family, the only other male after Clarence’s sudden death. He was a writer like Ernest, but depression and diabetes gripped him and Leicester shot himself on September 15, 1982, after finding out he needed to amputate his legs.
Clarissa Dalloway, the central character in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, is a complex figure whose relations with other women reveal as much about her personality as do her own musings. By focusing at length on several characters, all of whom are in some way connected to Clarissa, Woolf expertly portrays the ways females interact: sometimes drawing upon one another for things which they cannot get from men; other times, turning on each other out of jealousy and insecurity.
The narrative of Mrs. Dalloway may be viewed by some as random congealing of various character experience. Although it appears to be a fragmented assortment of images and thought, there is a psychological coherence to the deeply layered novel. Part of this coherence can be found in Mrs. Dalloway's psychological tone which is tragic in nature. In her forward to Mrs. Dalloway, Maureen Howard informs us that Woolf was reading both Sophocles and Euripides for her essays in The Common Reader while writing Mrs. Dalloway (viii). According to Pamela Transue, "Woolf appears to have envisioned Mrs. Dalloway as a kind of modern tragedy based on the classic Greek model" (92). Mrs. Dalloway can be conceived of as a modern transformation of Aristotelian tragedy when one examines the following: 1) structural unity; 2) catharsis; 3) recognition, reversal, and catastrophe; 4) handling of time and overall sense of desperation.
A common feeling when a spouse loses his or her significant other is devastation like Mrs. Mallard initially felt when “she wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment,” but then she began to feel free (Chopin 236). She expresses her feelings for freedom by repeating the word “Free! Body and soul free!” (237). She was exalting with glee as she came to more of a realization that her husband’s death meant “she would live for herself;” however, right after her celebration, her husband walked in the front door (237). This shocked Mrs. Mallard to the point of death, ending her emotional breakdown.
The extensive descriptions of Mrs. Dalloway’s inner thoughts and observations reveals Woolf’s “stream of consciousness” writing style, which emphasizes the complexity of Clarissa’s existential crisis. She also alludes to Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, further revealing her preoccupation with death as she quotes lines from a funeral song. She reads these lines while shopping in the commotion and joy of the streets of London, which juxtaposes with her internal conflicts regarding death. Shakespeare, a motif in the book, represents hope and solace for Mrs. Dalloway, as his lines form Cymbeline talk about the comforts found in death. From the beginning of the book, Mrs. Dalloway has shown a fear for death and experiences multiple existential crises, so her connection with Shakespeare is her way of dealing with the horrors of death. The multiple layers to this passage, including the irony, juxtaposition, and allusion, reveal Woolf’s complex writing style, which demonstrates that death is constantly present in people’s minds, affecting their everyday
The main theme in “The Story of an Hour” is a woman’s freedom from oppression. Mrs. Mallard does not react accordingly to the news of her husband’s death; in the third paragraph it states, “she wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment.” After her initial wave of shock and sadness has passed, however, she becomes elated with the thought of finally being free of her husband. Originally, she is described as being “pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body” and having lines that “bespoke repression”; in an attempt to be a perfect wife to a man whom she did not even love, Mrs. Mallard has been masking her true self. Once she realizes that she has finally gained the freedom that she has been longing for, Mrs. Mallard begins to