The textual conversation between Virginia Woolf’s modernist novel Mrs Dalloway and

Stephen Daldry’s postmodern filmic pastiche The Hours delivers immense insight into their

respective contextual values. Both composers skillfully manipulate their mediums to express

how female repression causes women to perceive death as an escape from their futile lives.

A comparison of their resonances and dissonances allows for a nuanced understanding of

how universal values transcend time and are uniquely interpreted by different contexts.

MD critiques traditional gender roles upon women in an evolving post-war world

whilst TH examines the persistence of female restriction in contemporary milieux, despite

social advancement. Clarissa Dalloway’s repression stemming from gender roles is

introduced in, “This being Mrs Dalloway; not even Clarissa anymore; this being Mrs Richard

Dalloway.” The author’s sardonic tone emphasises patriarchy control on a woman’s identity

and role in society, which explicitly labels Clarissa as a wife, not an individual. Although

Clarissa Vaughan is arguably the most empowered woman across the two texts, as a

woman living during third wave feminism, Daldry similarly proves that outdated gender

stereotypes persist in female repression. This conveyed in the scene where Clarissa,

costumed in a floral apron, sinks to the floor in a corner of the kitchen, and the high angle

shot with a slow zoom into her crying face physically represents her entrapment. Moreover,

through Clarissa’s recollection of Richard saying “Good morning, Mrs Dalloway,” and how

“from then [she has] been stuck with the name,” Daldry mirrors Clarissa’s stifled feelings in

MD, despite shift in context. Both texts portray how matrimony leads to repression of

women’s lives. TH notably displays this through Laura Brown seeing off her husband to

work. Daldry utilises framing in the mid-shot of Laura behind a window and curtains to

symbolise her confinement to a role of domesticity in the hollow world of the American

Dream. As Laura’s facial expression falls, Daldry highlights that the source of her depression

is the façade she must maintain and the false belief which requires women to find purpose

through their marriage and family. MD correspondingly exposes such values through, “The

sheets were clean, tight stretched in a broad white band from side to side. Narrower and
narrower would her bed be.” In Woolf’s metaphorical depiction of Clarissa’s fractured

marriage, frigidity and death unite in sheets and a bed. The bed is narrow as Clarissa sleeps

alone, but it will become “narrower and narrower” as she advances from her current isolation

to absolute isolation on her deathbed. The author perhaps references her own platonic

marriage to Leonard Woolf to challenge marriage as an unfulfilling expectation for women.

Evidently, MD and TH present inextricable connections due to common assumptions of

female repression and loss of identity from patriarchal constructs. Thus, Woolf and Daldry

suggest that death provides all four protagonists with an escape.

The underlying significance of this mortality in MD and TH is undeniable, as the

heroines unite in perceiving death as the ethereal escape from their unfulfilled lives. Both

texts immediately introduce the prevalence of death, as TH begins and ends with Virginia’s

drowning. Through the consuming diegetic sounds of the river and close-up shots of her

body floating underwater, Daldry illustrates death as a fluid, cleansing process, a part of the

cyclical nature of life. Big Ben is a prevalent symbol for death in MD and is first depicted

through, “There! Out it boomed. First a warning; musical; then the hour irrevocable.” Woolf’s

high modality in describing the hour as a “warning” and “irrevocable” connotes a negative

perception of time, as the peals are a reminder of mortality. Henceforth, death constantly

occupies the minds of the female leads. Woolf displays this through, "Did it matter then, she

asked herself, walking towards Bond Street... that she must inevitably cease completely; all

this must go on without her… or did it not become consoling that death ended absolutely?”

Woolf’s modernist techniques of free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness

capture Clarissa’s fragmented mind and emphasise her existentialism arising from quotidian

activities. Comparatively, in TH, this concept is displayed in the transition between Virginia’s

face next to the dead bird to the close-up of Laura in bed, crystallising her suicidal plan. The

hen’s death is an occurrence in Virginia’s day which triggers contemplation of her own

mortality, however, Daldry employs match-cut as a postmodernist film technique to achieve

temporal distortion of the tripartite narrative to connect characters’ thoughts at one time.
Eventually, the heroines begin to act upon their desires and exalt acts of suicide. In MD,

Clarissa’s reverence of death is demonstrated through, “Death was defiance. Death was an

attempt to communicate… There was an embrace in death,” referring to Septimus’ suicide.

The composer utilises anaphora by repeating “death” to empower readers to recognise that

it is the only certainty in life. Additionally, the definitive tone highlights that Clarissa upholds

death as the only way to preserve one’s individuality and reach enlightenment, through a

“defiance” of society’s standards. Thus, Woolf suggests that only men had the ability to

achieve the ultimate form of escape in the 1920s, hence why Clarissa apotheosises

Septimus and “[feels] glad that he had done it.” This aspect of the texts significantly collides,

as, in MD, only Septimus commits suicide, whilst in TH, Richard and Virginia take their lives.

Since suicide was so stigmatised and female agency was so limited in Georgian England,

Clarissa Dalloway yearns for death despite society’s absolute prohibition. However, due to

the increase of female rights and decrease in suicide stigma in following decades, Daldry

emphasises that Virginia, Laura and Clarissa Vaughan have greater autonomy and power,

explaining why Virginia chooses death, Laura symbolically dies to her family, and Clarissa

chooses life.

MD and TH resonate by establishing the realm of death as space through which,

even indirectly, feminist resistance is achieved as an escape from the confinement of living

death. Although dissonances arise from Woolf and Daldry’s contextual lenses and their

disparate forms, these composers create a lasting textual conversation by epitomising, “A

woman’s life in a single day.”