The Hours

For me, watching The Hours in class was an interesting experience. It gave a different perspective on Mrs. Dalloway, which was definitely nice to have, but I can't say that I enjoyed it as much as the book. I think that although splitting the movie into three distinct parts had its advantages, it also meant that the movie lost a lot of what made Mrs. Dalloway so great.

To start with the good, the scenes with Virginia Woolf were very well-done. I felt like they added a lot to how I thought about the novel. Having the context in which a book is written (or any work of art is made) can make you look back on what you've read and see much more clearly what the author was thinking and to some extent what they intended. That can help you get a much deeper understanding of a work, and help you understand a little better how the author was able to write the way they did. I do think it's important that that context comes after you read the book, because that allows you to go back and think about it again, instead of distracting you with all the things you know about the author while you're trying to read it, and maybe making you see connections that aren't there.

I'm a little less excited about the New York scenes. To me, they felt like a more-or-less straight retelling of a very good novel that cut out a lot of what made it so good - namely, the extremely detailed and observant style. That's not a knock against the filmmakers, since they did a very good job overall, but cutting down a novel like Mrs. Dalloway into a third of a 2 hour movie without dropping non-critical elements is pretty much impossible. Still, it's impossible to shake the feeling that the plot moves very quickly compared to the fairly slow pace of the book, and doesn't allow for the same subtlety and focus on different personalities as the book. Even though the modern setting is supposed to help us relate more to the characters, too little time devoted to too many people makes it hard to care for them much as characters.

The scenes where Laura Brown featured left me more conflicted. I liked the characters and got quickly attached to them, especially the lovable-yet-terrifying Dan. I think that even if the rest of that part of the movie had been boring, Dan's borderline psychopathic speech about why he married Laura would have been enough to make me appreciate it. Together with the excellent acting by Julianne Moore as a miserable housewife and the excellent way her near-suicide attempt was handled, I think the 50's section of the movie was very strong on its own right. The problem is, I don't necessarily know if it was important enough to the movie as a whole to justify its inclusion. Considering a lot of the problems with the New York scenes came from brevity and a very fast-moving plot, you have to wonder if all that set up to the plot twist of Laura being Richard's mother was really worth it.

The way I see it, there are two things that the 50's scenes are in the movie for: to give a back story for  Richard that serves to explain why he's been traumatized to the point of Septimosity, and to drive home some of the points Mrs. Dalloway makes about the role of the housewife in a setting that's more immediately familiar to most viewers - and to a character who seems to react more like most people probably expect they would in that role. To be honest, I think that the explanation of Richard's trauma is a little bit unnecessary. He gets enough piled on him between off-screen bitterness over losing Clarissa and being diagnosed with HIV at the height of his career that mommy issues aren't necessarily the only (or even the best) explanation for his suicide. As for the second role, I do think that's a valuable and interesting contribution. But it also makes me wonder - if we already have a character that brings some of the issues Clarissa has into a more modern context, do we really need the New York retelling? The way I see it, to really get as much of the full, detail-rich feel of Mrs. Dalloway into a 2 hour movie as possible, you might need to cut out one of the three storylines, or at least devote much less time to one of them. In that case, I'd have to go with Laura's story as the more interesting and thematically compelling choice than the straight retelling of the novel presented by the New York option, at least as someone who's already read Mrs. Dalloway.

Miss Kilman as the Dictator

When my group did our panel presentation on Mrs. Dalloway, the Dictator, and the Relativity Paradox by Christopher Herbert on Monday, I had a lot of fun and got to say a lot that I wanted to say, but there just wasn't enough time to get to everything that I wanted to talk about. One thing that I really wanted to bring up is the character of Miss Kilman, and what she represents in a relativist interpretation of the book.

Basically, in relativism, the main enemy is the absolutist dictator -- someone who has a flawed, absolutist way of thinking, meaning that they believe in a uniformity of moral, religious, or philosophical truths, and is therefore able to justify pushing their beliefs on others. In relativism, even if everything in a person's life leads them to believe that something must be true, they can't ever assume that they know enough to make a definitive decision. Even if they somehow do, they can't assume that what is fact for them is also fact for someone who perceives the world differently and has different experiences. Someone who does make these assumptions can easily make the mental leap to calcifying in their views. When their views are challenged, they react to the disruption in their mental peace by inflicting counter-pain to punish others. Most relativists view any form of nonessential counter-pain -- that is, punishment that is meant to seek revenge and reform behavior but does not solve any actual problems -- as oppression.

If we look at Miss Kilman, we see a woman who is very much calcified in her worldview. We see from her scene in the church that her Catholic faith genuinely brings her meaning and importance. That's important to a relativist - that she is able to be so faithful and that she is able to get so much joy out of her religion is a beautiful thing, and certainly not a problem in and of itself. The issue comes when she butts heads with Mrs. Dalloway. The short time she actually spends with Clarissa in the novel is enough to completely throw Miss Kilman off. She absolutely hates her, seemingly more than is at all reasonable. The obvious reason is that Mrs. Dalloway makes her feel inferior, but it's more complicated than that; it's about the specific way in which she makes her feel inferior.

After Kilman leaves Clarissa's house, she starts to worry about all kinds of things she normally doesn't worry about. Her money, her clothes, her house, her appearance. The same problems, she says, she worried about before she found Catholicism. But now, she's supposed to have rejected all of these worldly desires. She draws her self-confidence from the fact that she's above all of this. So for Mrs. Dalloway to bring her crashing back down to where she used to be is a serious ideological threat.

All of that fits with the classic absolutist. But for Kilman to be an actual "Dictator", she has to inflict counter-pain. But what does she actually do to punish Clarissa? After all, Clarissa doesn't care about Kilman's personal thoughts, and it's not like she physically hurts Clarissa, or even says anything particularly rude to her. What she does do, is put up enough of a veneer of cold, judgmental confidence that it makes Clarissa hate her almost as much as she hates Clarissa. But worse than just making her hate her personally, she makes her hate the person her daughter is spending all her time with. She makes Clarissa worry constantly (as we see in the book) about the company Elizabeth is keeping. In that way, Kilman is able to hit back (probably unintentionally or subconsciously) at the way Clarissa digs at her own self-hatred by digging at Clarissa's maternal fear for her daughter.

But the worst part is, hurting Clarissa the way she does doesn't even make Miss Kilman happy! She hates Clarissa just as much as she would anyways! She still worries about her appearance and her wealth, still compares herself to someone who's more socially accepted. She continues to be miserable, and all she accomplishes is to drag someone else part of the way down with her. That's the real problem relativists have with the character of the Dictator - by stepping on others, they don't actually make themselves much happier, if at all. All they do is make the world a worse place for the rest of us.

Bradshaw and Holmes

Mrs. Dalloway is generally a book that treats its characters evenly. We usually see both positive and negative portrayals of all of the characters, and when we see their point of view we are usually able to sympathize with them. The major exceptions, at least to me, were Septimus' two doctors, Dr. Holmes and Dr. Bradshaw. We see both of them as basically completely negative characters, who don't have a clue what they're doing. Even Clarissa dislikes Bradshaw when she sees him at the party, even though she can't explain it.

Since Woolf normally treats her characters so evenly, to treat two important characters so negatively is probably meant specifically to drive home her point. She wants to make completely sure that the readers understand what's wrong with the way war and soldiers have been treated, and that no one has any doubt that Septimus was really just a "coward." Those two characters are basically there less to serve a narrative purpose, like most of the others, and more to serve as a warning against a naive, idealistic view of war, based on ideas of toughness and masculinity without considering the suffering war causes, especially World War I.

In that way, the characters of Holmes and Bradshaw remind me a lot of Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut's first book. In Player Piano, the U.S. is run by an upper class of engineers who've invented machines to do almost all manual labor. The main antagonist, Dr. Kroner, is one of the top engineers, and the boss of the main character. He talks and acts almost exactly like the two doctors in Mrs. Dalloway, with a back-slapping enthusiasm for athletics and the masculine ideal. The parallels between Drs. Holmes and Bradshaw, who are meant to critique the simplistic masculine ideals of post-World War I Britain, and Dr. Kroner, who is meant to critique the simplistic masculine ideals of post-World War II America, are very interesting, and could probably be studied much more closely to talk about the more general similarities between cultures after major wars.

Is Septimus Really That Insane?

Today in class we talked about the character of Septimus Warren Smith, which really got me thinking. He's the most interesting character in the book to me, not so much because of his obvious delusions, but more because he seems like he's operating on a different level than everyone else in the book. When he sees something, he has a completely different reaction to it than Clarissa or Peter would. The obvious example is the car scene, where he doesn't even consider why the car is there, or even seem to register it at all until he gets caught up in the pattern of the blinds. When compared to the reactions of the people around him, who all get excited to see a fancy car and make up whole narratives about who could be in it and what they could be doing, Septimus seems like he's just a passive observer in the outside world. The problem is, he clearly isn't just some emotionless husk wandering around, feeling nothing. There are times when he gets intensely emotional, even to the point of tears when he sees the airplane early on. For all his talk about having no more feelings, it's pretty clear that he does, he just doesn't react to everything the same way a "normal" person would.

That's basically the crux of why he seems insane: he reacts differently than most people would to the same objects or events. But how can you expect anything else from someone who's been exposed to a world that's 180 degrees removed from anything Clarissa Dalloway has ever experienced? A lot of people talked about the way Septimus represents the effects of the war just a few years after it ended, which is probably a very accurate interpretation. Woolf comes from the time when PTSD was just starting to make itself popularly known, especially since the trench warfare of World War I was much more psychologically devastating than earlier methods of warfare. There's no doubt that Septimus is meant to be suffering from PTSD as it was understood at the time. But I also think that he represents something by himself, if you ignore his connections to the war.

I heard someone today bring up the point that Septimus seems self-centered, which in a sense he is. His whole worldview is completely removed from that of everyone around him, and he completely ignores the needs of his wife. He seems like he's so caught up in his own internal apocalypse that he can't be bothered with anyone else. Certainly on the outside, he seems simply cold and disinterested in other people. But having an insight into his thoughts, it's hard to say he's more self-absorbed than Clarissa Dalloway is. When he sees something that invokes a powerful reaction, he's reacting to it's natural beauty, or to what he thinks it means in the grand scheme of things (usually meaning its role in the ongoing destruction of the world). When Mrs. Dalloway has a strong reaction, it's always about what something means to her: how it reminds her of something in her life (usually Bourton), or how it means she has to act a certain way (chin held high for the queen's car). Outwardly, it seems like Clarissa is a less selfish person, because she holds parties and does people favors, but inwardly she seems to do these things more because they're what she enjoys; at some point she even says that her servants help her "to be like this, to be what she wanted, gentle, generous-hearted." In other words, she occasionally does menial tasks (like mending a dress) by herself to spare her servants the trouble, but only because it makes her feel like a gentle, generous-hearted mistress! It's hard to say that Mrs. Dalloway really sees the world through a less self-centered lens than Septimus when she seems to basically see things almost entirely through the lens of how they relate to her.

That's not to say that the way Mrs. Dalloway acts is wrong. She pretty clearly makes the people around her happier than Septimus does, and seems a good deal happier herself. But I do think there's some satire at the way Woolf compares her to someone who has a completely different perspective on things; by seeing someone who's worried about the end of the world and his own impending suicide, it makes Mrs. Dalloway's worries about how things could have gone otherwise at Bourton seem a lot more trivial, and helps to remind us a bit that, even though we've spent such a long time looking through Clarissa's eyes, and thinking the way she thinks, there are still other ways of looking at them that can be useful or interesting, and that really, the main conflicts in her life might not matter all that much.