Mrs Dalloway Movie Analysis

Mrs. Dalloway, written by Virginia Wolf, focuses on the lives of a group of people in the early 20th century, a post war era in which problems such as class divide, physical and mental illness after the war and the decision of choosing between love and marriage ran rampant. The characters in this novel are all deep and complex, and very few of them, if any, actually seem to be genuinely happy with the lives that they lead. Interestingly, the novel mirrors various different aspects of Virginia’s life itself, issues such as mental illness and sexuality to name but a few. Indeed, it is Wolf’s own personal experiences of such life issues that allowed her to create characters with such depth as their struggles and inner conflicts within themselves …show more content…
When looking at the film, Clarissa seems to be of main focus throughout. A large amount of the film is from her point of view and all the flashbacks featured are hers. She is the only character in the film whose thoughts are heard in the form of a kind of narration, we hear her insecurities as she is feeling them and we see her memories as she is thinking of them; however we do not get such privileges for any of the other characters in the film. This creates the illusion that she is the centre of the plot. Although this is true to some extent, Septimus is a major character of the book and we don’t get to know him as well in the movie as the novel. In the film, Septimus just seems to be the man that went to war, saw a man die and now is suffering mentally because of it. In the book we get a slower but deeper understanding of his character. The film also distorts the text as many characters are left out. Clarissa’s daughter Elizabeth plays a very minor role in the film and in the novel her role is quite significant. She represents many aspects of life back then for women such as the “struggle to choose between being a woman of the past like her mother or becoming a modern woman like Miss Killman hopes to see her become”(Klein) and she represents the “struggle to be free spiritually and physically within the restraints of society”(Klein). These vital characteristics of the book are barely touched upon in the film. Also, the film does …show more content…
The filmic version of the novel Mrs. Dalloway does make some significant changes and this does lead to some distortion to the original. The analysis above shows that even the slightest change in the adaptation can have a massive effect on the message and idea behind the story and of how it is then interpreted. It also shows that every single detail that Wolf put into her most famous novel had large