Laura Brown's Ideal American Dream Life

Richard Brown is the grown up ‘Ritchie” of depressed housewife and mother, Laura Brown. Laura Brown, while not directly being diagnosed with any medical conditions, she shows symptoms of chronic depression. Out of the three women in the film, Laura’s condition is the most ambiguous. Regardless of living the ideal American Dream life, Laura is profoundly unhappy which leaves her melancholic and suicidal. She has everything needed to be content: a loving war hero husband, a doting son, the perfect family house, and another child on the way, but Laura was festering in her own environment. After the failure of her attempted suicide, Laura decided to leave her family once her second child was born: “It was death. I chose life.” (The Hours). Laura

evaded death, which would be to still be lingering in her old life and managed to live a satisfied life. In the end of the film, she came to attend her son’s burial, but Laura Brown revealed no signs of remorse for abandoning her family because she knew she would’ve eventually killed herself. Being abandoned by his mother at a young age did not steer Richard to suicide, instead it gave him a new perspective on the world he sees and the world others see. He kills off the mother in his novel in retaliation for being abandoned, but Richard dies happy and liberated like Septimus.
The death of Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway and the two deaths of Virginia and Richard in The Hours epitomize the need to avoid surrendering their souls to society and allow their loved ones live their lives, free of any constraints. David Hare’s The Hours, enhances the ideas depicted in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. “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.” (Woolf 184).