The Hours is a movie that follows the plot of Mrs. Dalloway, but also gives us a look into the life of this books author, Virginia Woolf. The Hours also has three different plots, one, the life of Virginia Woolf during the time period that she is writing Mrs. Dalloway.
The second plot is about a 50's housewife, Laura, who on the outside
fits the "50's housewife" stereotype, but has many mental issues.
Finally, the third plot is about Clarissa, a woman who is together with a
girl named Sally and who has a complicated relationship with a man
named Richard, who is Laura's son from the second plot. To top it all
off, Clarissa is planning to host a party in honor of Richard's work in
poetry.
At the very beginning of the movie, Woolf is seen writing a letter to her husband, Leonard, then walking peacefully toward a river, filling her pockets with heavy rocks, and drowning herself. Leonard is then shown coming home and reading the letter. After this, we are immediately introduced into the other plots. Eventually, the movie goes back to before Virginia's suicide, when she is writing Mrs. Dalloway, around 1924. Even at this point, some 17 years before she dies, Woolf seems mentally unstable, much like Laura in the movie's second plot. Reading about Virginia Woolf's life, we can see that she had a history of mental illness, which eventually led to her committing suicide, but when we watch her in the movie, you really get to understand the instability and tension in her life. Virginia is always dead serious and her facial expressions could kill. She often looks as if she might explode at any second. One of the worst scenes is after she kisses her sister, she starts crying and shaking. It intensifies the way one looks at Woolf's life.
After experiencing via The Hours the way Woolf may have acted and lived during the time when she was writing Mrs. Dalloway, we can understand some of her characters in this book better. When Woolf commits suicide, she looks very calm and almost at peace, especially after hearing the content of her letter to Leonard right before she dies. She does not want to die and wants Leonard to know how happy they were together. This relates to Septimus's suicide. He doesn't want to die but knows he must. In context to Woolf, Septimus is a very fragile character.
The other character that we can most relate to Woolf is her main character, Clarissa Dalloway. After watching the movie, we see Virginia have many breakdowns, like when she goes to the train station. These are similar to Clarissa's breakdowns. Both Clarissa and Virginia were upper class women who were supposed to act a certain way. Neither of them are supposed to have fits of mental instability. However, these breakdowns could be in part to the preset way that this class of women is supposed to behave. Finally, the eeriest example of correlation between Clarissa and Woolf is that Woolf was originally going to have Clarissa kill herself, which is what, 17 years later, Woolf did herself. Why did Woolf have Clarissa live in the end though? Could it have been because Woolf had hope for herself that she would eventually get passed her mental illness?
I really like your idea at the end there suggesting that Woolf could have kept Clarissa from killing herself because she had hope that she, too, would abstain from committing suicide. The comparisons between Woolf and Septimus and Woolf and Clarissa are interesting because Septimus and Clarissa have also been compared before. Perhaps Woolf uses both Septimus and Clarissa as a depiction of herself in the story, similarly to how Howie was considered part of Baker in "The Mezzanine". These two characters are a way for Woolf to show her feelings and to illustrate what she was like as a person, but it isn't until we watch the movie that it is clear that Woolf behaved in that way.
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