Virginia Woolf 's The Hours

Throughout her essay, Woolf never once describes to us her immediate surroundings. By describing only what is outside, Woolf isolates herself from the rest of the world, instead of embracing it as Dillard did. She is chiefly concerned with describing where she isn't. Her focus is on the world outside of her window. She describes the field that is being plowed, the black, net-like flock of birds flying together. These images engender a rather unpleasant feeling of dreariness.

The central value connecting Mrs Dalloway and The Hours is an affirmation of life. Although suicides feature in both Stephen Daldry’s film and Virginia Woolf’s novel both texts echo Woolf’s words from her 1922 diary: ‘I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.’ Both Woolf’s modernist 1925 novel and Daldry’s 2002 postmodernist film focus on women whose rich inner lives are juxtaposed with their outer lives constrained by the contexts in which they live. The characters are placed in their respective context, to reflect on, or respond to, the consequences of war and AIDS, the difficulties of personal relationships, class, gender and sexuality.

In the quote, Woolf is discussing the confidence of women. Since the job of a woman is basically to be inferior to men, women are losing confidence. Women are constantly struggling to do what they want as they require, “gigantic courage and strength”. Wolf believes that men have purposefully made women inferior in order to reinforce their own confidence. Thus, this lack of confidence not only led to lack of quality life for women but also led to a lack of writing. However, even with this lack confidence women continue to persist and do everything they can to write. Woolf believes that if women did have more money and confidence, then they would not have to be so inferior and get married to men so early on. Woolf believes she could have done what she wanted as she would have been financially stable and not be reliant on others. Thus, Woolf could have been the boss of herself with freedom and time. With this freedom and time, Woolf and other women could have had the opportunities to produce the works they wanted to and get it published.

Angelyn Mitchell interprets Chopin’s work “The Story of an Hour” as a feminist piece of work. She believes that Chopin wants to prove the double conscience of females, which is when women connect their inner self with their outside and gain freedom. “In ‘The Story of an Hour,’ the quest for freedom is complicated by three important factors: biological determination, patriarchal social conditioning, and the patriarchal institution of marriage.” Mitchell uses Mrs. Mallard’s heart condition to show biological determination. “Richards, a friend of her husband, rushes to relate the sad news of his death before someone ‘less careful, less tender’ can do so.” Patriarchal social conditioning is shown by showing that Mrs. Mallard does not act as a woman

A shiny, crisp red fruit hangs enticingly off a lush verdant branch; a sly, seductive serpent and a woman in the nude converse under the sacred tree, and then Eve tentatively reaches up and plucks the juicy crimson fruit, a look of panic only reflected on her face once she realizes the gravity of her decision. She picks the forbidden fruit and her ignorance is ripped away from her like a newspaper on a windy day, and this single act started a trend of succumbing to temptations throughout human history. Even in the novels The Hours and The Awakening, the characters are tempted by someone else or a different idea; however, some of these characters exhibit strong self control and avoid their demise. The fine line between success and failure when it comes to avoiding temptation is most obviously demonstrated by Edna Pontellier and Laura Brown, and these two women showcase the destructive power of seduction and the strength of will it takes to deny the enticement. The allure of the unknown is not exclusive to the female sex either, many men in the novel also suffer from it, namely Robert Lebrun. The secret snare of temptation is interwoven throughout the stories, and the sliver of thread can be glimpsed between the inky words.

In Ellie Wiesel’s non-fiction novel, Night, he is telling his experiences of living in a concentration camp. The following passage is one that gives an example of how human lives were disregarded, “Faster, you filthy dogs! We were no longer marching, we were running like automatons. The SS were running as well, weapons in hand. We looked as though we were running from them.

‘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.

Virginia Woolf, a woman from a slightly different time than Charlotte Gilman and Weir Mitchell, had Manic-Depressive Psychosis, which according to The Royal Society of Medicine Health Encyclopedia, is a “mood disorder” and the patient could be bi or unipolar (10). Woolf contributes her condition to what happened to her during her childhood, her mother died when Woolf was young, and she said that she was abused by her father and her half-brothers (2). But, according to The Royal Society of Medicine Health Encyclopedia, this “condition” may have been from the characters Woolf created as her characters and stories were a mystery (11). Even though she wasn’t given “The Rest Cure,” she had issues, she kind of diagnosed herself through her writings

Before now women didn't have a say in much, they were basic housewives. Women stayed home, and the did the normal stuff women do, such as- cook, clean, take care of the house and kids. It was understood that women always need guidance from men, and we couldn't think for ourselves. Women were very rarely able to do what they pleased and think for themselves.Most of the time they lived up to their father or husbands standards. For Lousie Mallard this is the exact conflict that led to her death. Mallards husband was killed in a train accident, and she suffers from a heart condition. One day she sits and looks out the window seeing a life of freedom, as if her house is a place where she is trapped. She develops an unknown sensation and she tries

In Virginia Woolf’s “Night and Day”, we, as the reader, can examine various feminist themes throughout the novel. Even though, “Night and Day” is one of her more conventional novels, many of the issues fly in the face of traditional values and capitalizes on the female oppression that was present in that time era. Even though, this was one of her earlier works, I believe that her conventional structure was an intentional creation, as she was trying to make a point on literary tradition and feminism. In contrast to many of her later novels, like “To The Lighthouse”, which had much anti-structure and stream of consciousness, “Night and Day”, is full of carefully written

In the novel Mrs Dalloway, Woolf conveys her perspective, as she finely examines and critiques the traditional gender roles of women in a changing post-war society. Woolf characterisation of Clarissa Dalloway in a non linear structure, presents a critical portrayal of the existing class structure through modernist’s eyes. Titling her novel as Mrs Dalloway presents Clarissa’s marriage as a central focus of her life, drawing attention to how a women’s identity is defined by marriage. Despite the changing role of women throughout the 1920s, for married women life was the same post war. Clarissa experiences ‘the oddest sense of being herself invisible…that is being Mrs Dalloway…this being Richard Dalloway,”

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.

Virginia Woolf is a married woman who had public affairs with women and who shares a chaste kiss with her sister during her narrative. Woolf is also the author of Mrs. Dalloway, a novel that centers on Clarissa Dalloway, a woman who feels the same way "as men feel" (Woolf 36) about women, yet marries a man as society dictates.

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.