The Hours' Virginia vs Clarissa

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 Watching “the hours,” I was interested in Steven Daldry’s depiction of Virginia Woolf, and her relationship with real-life Woold’s character of Clarissa Dalloway in Mrs. Dalloway. From the outside, it appears Clarrisa and this depiction of her creator have little in common. While Woolf struggles with depression and had tried to kill herself multiple times prior, Clarissa is a stable woman of deep thought and is not erratic in nature. While Clarissa has made peace with death and her mortality, Virginia Woolf is discontented, so much so that Daldry has her decide to vent her frustrations with life in this character of Clarissa she creates. And immediately, this intimate relationship begins to develop throughout The Hours between Woolf and Clarissa. 

Woolf and Clarissa certainly have some important parts of their worldview in common, and its clear Woolf begins to paint Clarissa seeing some connection. For example, both Woolf and Clarissa are fervent atheists, and both of them choose to battle death assuming the nonexistence of the afterlife. But for me, this connection did not become extremely strong and apparent, and we didn’t get Daldry’s thoughts on the significance of this connection per se, until the end of the film. When Woolf is asked by her husband, Leonard, why she feels the need to kill one of the characters in the "Mrs. Dalloway" novel that is taking shape, she answers “so that the other characters appreciate life more.” At the end of the novel, after Septimus kills himself, Clarissa Dalloway indeed begins to fully appreciate life, and all of the pieces come into place for her. She always has been in touch with her own mortality, but being in touch with one’s mortality doesn’t necessarily mean that she was content with life. And through Woolf’s novel, Clarissa is obviously not content—most notably when she dwells on Peter and worries that she picked a safe and monotonous life with Richard over…something better. In my opinion, Daldry is arguing a thesis that Clarissa is Woolf’s idealized version of herself, and Clarissa has epiphanic moments that Woolf herself was never able to achieve, something she greatly regrets.

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