Comparing The Film And Virginia Woolf 's Mrs. Dalloway

Contemporary novels have imposed upon the love tribulations of women, throughout the exploration of genre and the romantic quest. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their eyes were watching God (1978) and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (2000) interplay on the various tribulations of women, throughout the conventions of the romantic quest and the search for identity. The protagonists of both texts are women and experience tribulations of their own, however, unique from the conventional romantic novels of their predecessors. Such tribulations include the submission of women and the male desire for dominance when they explore the romantic quest and furthermore, the inner struggles of women. Both texts display graphic imagery of the women’s inner experiences through confronting and engaging literary techniques, which enhance the audiences’ reading experience. Hurston’s reconstructions of the genre are demonstrated through a Southern context, which is the exploration of womanhood and innocence. Whilst Woolf’s interpretation of the romantic quest is shown through modernity and an intimate connection with the persona Clarissa Dalloway, within a patriarchal society.

As most everyone knows, there are differences between a book and it’s movie adaptation. This is applicable to the book and it’s movie counterpart To Kill a Mockingbird, as well. But aside from the differences, there are also similarities between these two.

‘Mrs. Dalloway’, by Virginia Woolf is a derivative text of ‘The Hours’, written by Michael Cunningham. The novels both share an important theme of mental health. The circumstances of mental health are commonly sympathetic, and empathetic. The characters Septimus and Clarissa in ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ and Richard, Laura Brown, and Virginia Woolf in ‘The Hours’ show the strongest symbols for this theme. Most of the problems and treatments these characters face are in direct result of the age they live in. Both novels express a relationship between era, illnesses and treatments.

Throughout her life, novelist Virginia Woolf suffered with mental illness, and she ultimately ended her life at age 59. As art often imitates life, it is not surprising that characters in Woolf’s works also struggle with mental illness. One of her novels, Mrs. Dalloway, recounts a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a high society woman living in London, and those who run in her circle. As the novel progresses the reader sees one of the characters, Septimus, struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by serving in war. At the end of the story, he commits suicide. While there is no explicit articulation of any other character suffering from mental illness in the novel, Septimus is not alone. Through her thoughts and actions, we can deduce that Clarissa also endures mental and emotional suffering. Though Clarissa does not actually attempt to end her life in the novel, her mental and emotional suffering lead her to exhibit suicidal tendencies. To prove this, I will examine Clarissa’s thoughts and actions from a psychological perspective.

As we step into the street with Mrs. Dalloway, we are immediately surrounded by commotion, specifically in the form of motion, and a lack of it. We see a plane buzzing around spelling out an advertisement, one that no one seems to grasp the meaning of, and a car that has combusted, complete with tinted windows prompting a vocal commotion of assumptions as to who may be behind the glass. Woolf furthers this commotion with heavy and cloudy language, intensifying the surroundings and business of the street. Woolf personifies mystery, as she brushes the street “with her wing”, following the lead of the rumours as they pass “invisibly, inaudibly, like a cloud, swift, veil-like upon hills”. The language heightens the mood, and allows for an increased

The comparative study of texts and their appropriations reflect the context and values of their times, demonstrating how context plays a significant role. Virginia Woolf’s novel modernists Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Steven Daldry’s post modernists film The Hours (2002), an extrapolation, explore the rapid change of social and philosophical paradigms of the 20th century, focusing on women whose rich inner lives are juxtaposed with their outer lives. They place the characters in their respective context, to respond to, the horrors of the consequences of war and AIDS and the vagaries and difficulties of relationships, sexuality and mental illness. Through their differing intertextual perspectives the film and novel represent similar values, within different contextual concerns.

The ongoing relationship between the literary movements of modernism and post-modernism is encompassed by the intertextual relationships between Stephen Daldry’s “The Hours” and Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs Dalloway”. These relationships communicate the inadequacy of previous writings to convey trauma, cultural crisis and the deep fragmentation within their respective societies. The immediate context of these social dialogues creates a clear division between each text, however the intertextual similarities between minor and major characters create an effective parallel to traverse decades, years, months and days. This is in order to assess the lasting impacts of society on an individual’s desire to escape either physically or metaphorically.

Researching Edward Albee’s scandalous play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962), my case study will focus on the adaptation from stage to film, outlining the issues faced with both the original artists and my own group as artists. This specific piece of work from playwright Edward Albee is “arguably the best American play of the 1960s” (Leff 1981, p. 453), which encouraged Warner Brothers’ to gain the screen rights and recreate it as a film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. On Broadway, Albee’s play had been critized for its “lack of clarity” (Leff 1981, p. 456) however, when creating the film adaptation, Ernest Lehman, Jack Warner and Mike Nichols faced other issues regarding the release of the movie due to it’s profanity that would be subjected to the public, and

There are several possible stresses in Woolf’s life that may be contributing to her depression. One is the stress and isolation Woolf feels living in the suburb of Richmond. Although her husband states that they made to move in an attempt to relieve Woolf’s depression, Woolf herself states that if given the choice between Richmond and death, she would choose death. Another possible stressor in Woolf’s life is the task of writing a novel. Yet another stressor could be difficulties in Woolf’s interpersonal relationships. Woolf expresses that “even crazy people like to be asked [to parties].” Whether Woolf’s interpersonal difficulties contribute to her depression or are a result of it is unclear, however. An additional stressor may be the incestuous relationship Woolf has with her sister. We may not speculate upon a history of abuse in Woolf’s childhood but the nature of Woolf’s relationship with her sister goes against cultural norms of acceptable sexual behaviour at the time, being both incestuous and homosexual. In addition, although some people may not feel distressed at the existence of extramarital feelings for someone, many do. This abnormal relationship may be distressing to

Throughout Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf uses the characters Clarissa and Lucrezia not only to further the plot of the story but to make a profound statement about the role of wives in both society and their marriages. While these women are subjected to differing experiences in their marriages, there is one common thread that unites each of their marriages: oppression. These women drive the story of Mrs. Dalloway and provide meaning and reason in the lives of the men in the story; however, these women are slowly but surely forced to forsake their own ambitions in order to act in accordance with the social standards set in place by marriage for women. For women outside of many modern cultures, marriage has been a necessity for a woman’s safety and security, and it required her to give up her freedom and passions and subjected her to an oppressed lifestyle. Ultimately, through the wives in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf communicates that marriage is an institution where in women are forced to suppress their individual desires and passions in order to serve their husband and further his own ambitions as first priority.

  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.

Post World War I London society was characterized by a flow of new luxuries available to the wealthy and unemployment throughout the lower classes. Fascinated by the rapidly growing hierarchal social class system, Virginia Woolf, a young writer living in London at the time, sought to criticize it and reveal the corruption which lay beneath its surface. Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf’s fourth novel, was born in 1925 out of this desire precisely. A recurring focus in many of Woolf’s major novels is the individual and his or her conscious perceptions of daily life. Throughout Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf uses this technique, known as a “stream-of-consciousness,” to trace the thoughts of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith during one day in London five years after the Great War. It is exactly this narrative technique which allows Woolf to compare the lives of these two characters which belong to different social classes to argue that social placement has a negative effect on one’s life and psychological being.

In the book Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf wanted to cast the social system and bash it for how it worked. Her intricate focus is focusing not on the people, but on the morals of a certain class at a certain historical moment.

War is an important theme in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), a post World War I text. While on the one hand there is the focus on Mrs. Dalloway’s domestic life and her ‘party consciousness’, on the other there are ideas of masculinity and “patriotic zeal that stupefy marching boys into a stiff yet staring corpse and perniciously public-spirited doctors” , and the sense of war reverberates in the entire text. Woolf’s treatment of the Great War is different from the normative way in which the War is talked about in the post world war I texts. She includes in her text no first hand glimpse of battlefield, instead gives a detached description. This makes it more incisive because she delineates the after effects in personal ordinary lives. Judith

In her own writing on the novel Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf stated, "I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work at its most intense…“ In this essay, I shall use this quote as a means to examine the theme of love and solitude in one of her most famous novels which follows a set of characters that go about their day. Virginia Wolf was able to illustrate the isolation one experiences within its own mind and the importance of one’s soul and ways in which souls connect through different memories and events. Even though independency is highly valued, the inability for people to communicate and build meaningful relationships is the most important aspect in the novel.