I, for one, am sorry to say this is the last post of the semester--and on time for the first time in weeks, I might add!
This has been a fantastic discussion and I thank you all for your thoughtful responses. I think the level of the discussion has been incredibly high and you have treated each other with the respect and consideration you all deserve. I hope you have found this as useful and intellectually stimulating--and as entertaining--as I have (and as I'd hoped I would!). Discussions like this make me want (and need) to return to teach another day.
So for the last issue for discussion: What about The Hours? Remember that this film is based on a novel of the same name, which is an excellent read, by the way. What did this vision of the novel, from three perspectives (a modern retelling, a woman reading the novel, and the life of Woolf), add to your understanding of the novel? Did the combination of themes and characters, especially in the New York retelling, reveal anything new to you about the story Woolf tells?
You only need to respond to this prompt for grading purposes, but feel free to respond to each other.
10 comments:
Well, i don't know...
i wil say, being a visual person, i enjoyed the movie and could put a face to the character. and nicole kidman looked just like virginia woolf. who by the way, did an excellent job in the role. i can say, that the movie was very sad, depressing and dark, just like much of virginia woolf's life!
it was very interesting how they had 3 separate times but all were woven together. that was genius. the movie was just so emotionally charged, that it stays with you for a period.
thank you, this has been enlightening and fun!
God Bless!
I really don't think that The Hours really explained much more of the story to me. To be honest, when I watched the movie I couldn't even relate to any of the characters. I was too busy being mad at their complete and obvious selfishness.
Though Woolf has always put an emphasis on the 'noble'ness of suicide... it really just makes me mad. I think the whole 'i just want to die' or 'i'm going to leave my family' mentality is just...selfish. It is just so amazingly.. ugh.
With Mrs. Dalloway, though I couldn't fully understand, I could empathize a little. The Hours is just an award winning pile of poop. (Yes, I just called it that.) I am sure the book is good, but seeing these women on screen just really hit me the wrong way.
So much for a last post. haha!
I’ll admit that watching The Hours helped me with reading Mrs. Dalloway because after the first installment, I was completely lost and confused (By the way, I watched it two weeks ago for history class and I now own a copy). The critical introduction, as well, gave me a better understanding of the form and technique that Woolf used when writing the novel.
Back to the movie—I absolutely like the overlapping effect. It is done in such a way that each character tells more about another without overshadowing. Virginia, (by the way—Nicole Kidman did an awesome job), in the movie reveals how Woolf probably felt when writing the famous novel and instead of killing her heroine (a representation of Woolf herself), she decides to kill one of the other characters. Clarissa Vaughn, to me, represents what Virginia's life would have been like if she had lived in a different part of the world and in a different era. Clarissa has choices, which Virginia—in essence—was trying to achieve back then.
Overall, I fairly enjoyed the movie and did not think it to be dark, sad, and depressing as some of my fellow classmates mentioned.
I really enjoyes the movie, not because it was depressing but because it gave me a better insight and understanding of Mrs. Dalloway. Using 3 different time periods was genius especially the way the director would overlap themduring the different stages of each woman's day and life.
Usually the book is better than the movie but this gave me a more visual take on emotions. Reading about a person contemplating suicide is a lot different than watching their actions. I'm a people watcher by nature, so for me, I enjoyed the movie better despite the darkness and sadness that Woolf experienced and brought to life through the characters.
Watching The Hours certainly made me appreciate Mrs. Dalloway all the more. I, being the history aficionado that I am, enjoyed seeing things in Woolf's time being tied to things in the present. It helped me relate more with the themes which, to me, included disillusionment. I found a way to relate to each of the perspectives, and they all helped intensify the plot of Dalloway. The British setting can easily be applied to our own American one (as seen in the movie), and that's what I ultimately feel The Hours was trying to get at: allowing us to interact with and respond to Woolf's ideas.
I liked The Hours, though I’m pretty into Virginia Woolf’s life and works. Committing suicide the way she did, to fill one’s pockets up and walk, WALK, into a river and let yourself go under is just… I’m not really sure what it is, intriguing is the only appropriate adjective I can come up with. Some may call it “selfish,” or “blasphemous,” or “cheating,” but I don’t know, there has to be more to it than that. There has to be something she really did see in death, suicide in particular, which made her do it in such a manner. Usually when a person commits suicide, they throw themselves off a bridge or building, shoot themselves, overdose, quick methods that do not allow time for contemplation and backing out. Virginia filled her pockets, walked into the water, and let herself go under. She could have taken the rocks out of her pockets, she could have held her breath and groped to shore, she could have stood on the edge of the river bank, watching the water rush by, and decided to empty her pockets and go for a swim. She killed herself in a manner that one could easily escape, had one only the will to do so. She apparently, did not. That is absolutely intriguing to me…wait, what were we talking about? The Hours? Oh yes, I liked it, but I don’t feel I gained any deeper understanding of the book. It thought the Mrs. Dalloway characters (Meryl Strep and Richard’s Mom) were too depressed to represent the novel’s Mrs. Dalloway. I imagined the novel’s Dalloway being of stronger reserve than either of those two, though I suppose Mrs. Strep gave a more accurate portrayal. In the New York scene, I like the meshing of the Richard/Septimus character, showing that the two were not so different, relating the Septimus character a little closer to Mrs. Dalloway, and replacing the shell shocked, PTSD, whatever you want to call it that Septimus had with another more contemporary issue, AIDS (this is not to say that PTSD is not a real disorder, or that is it any less relevant or important than aids, I don’t see how anyone can enter into an environment where you must kill others who are trying to kill you and return to their society unfazed, I’m only saying that the disease of AIDS is not something society had to deal with in Virginia’s time). While I don’t think it add much to my understanding of the story, I did enjoy it and think it tied themes from the novel and Virginia Woolf’s life into the movie’s own original story nicely.
Honestly, the movie confused me. It bounced back and forth too often. I had never seen nor heard of the movie before, so I didn't expect this. It made it extremely hard for me to keep up with who was who and what was going on. I personally thought it was frustrating and I don't plan on ever watching it again if I could help it. Now I see why people who had already seen the movie were so eager to leave!
I knew who the characters were and what they were trying to do, but there were times when I couldn't tell which time period we were currently watching. I thought the book was a little out there, but the movie tops it in the first few minutes.
I think I understood the novel better before I saw the movie. I knew about Woolf's background and this helped me to see where she was coming from, but when you throw all of that together and try to make sense of it visually, it's impossible.
In response to Chuck,
LOL. Yes I know that is so grammatically correct and it shows the ranges of my expansive vocabulary. (Ok so I tried to sound smart to make up for my text talk.)
I love how you analyze the way Woolf died, excuse me, committed suicide. Your emphasis on how she WALKED into the river made me LOL...seriously.
P.S. It's Streep (like street and creep squished together), not Strep (like strep throat).
You're awesome.
I was shocked by this version. I never would've assumed that Richard was gay and dying of Aids and Clarissa was a lesbian. It certainly brought another viewpoint to light. Richard's mother was even more intriguing because the novel doesn't actually say that much about Richard. The only thing we know is that he can't say he loves Clarissa and is somewhat detached from her by his own sense of individualism. I could believe though that Virginia lived the way she did. It would make sense that she would be filled with confusion about life and death in the movie because she was actually that way in real life. I felt sorry for her husband because he didn't really understand her. It has been said that there is a thin line between genius and insanity. I suppose she had one foot on the genius side and one foot on the insanity side because she was a brilliant writer, but her past was so damaging that nobody could really expect to live a healthy life after all that. She was scarred for life, but most people don't think about that when they read her work. If she had some kind of chain of support when she was younger, she wouldn't have been suicidal as an adult. No matter, I enjoyed the book and the movie.
I was pretty confused for a while in the beginning -- it took a while for the three plots to form their connection. Talk about time warping . . .
Like Chuck, I appreciated the modernized angle on Mrs. Dalloway. I'm not one who thinks British Lit is impossible to understand (gotta love the flowery old English!), but I must admit my insights and understanding of the novel deepened as various loose ends connected. Perhaps the visualization/auditory version contributed to that as well. Movies based off of books can be quite screwy -- sometimes you even wonder how the attribution can even be made -- but The Hours stayed relatively true to the novel despite the modernization of certain elements. Granted there were some significant differences, but overall they went hand in hand. The bonus of witnessing Woolfe's composition of the novel was a cool special feature, although she is such a downer. Bleh.
I found the movie to be extremely depressing indeed and the characters to sick people; like Claudia, never intend to watch it again.
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