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”.
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This includes the AIDS epidemic of the 90’s and sexuality. Richard, like the other characters is confined and repressed by social conventions. However, his confinement is due to his sexuality and the severe stigma associated with the AIDs virus and subsequent hysteria experienced during the 90’s,. The irony within this is that Clarissa is liberated through her freedom of sexuality as communicated through her open and light filled apartment. In contrast Richard is found in a small environment, dark and decaying, exactly like his physical and mental state, also symbolized with dead flowers, which are replaced by Clarissa when she visits him. His suicide acts as a means to re-gain control over his life as he had been entirely dependant on the care of Clarissa and mimics that of the escape of Septimus Smith from the loving care of his wife Rezia. Hence, Daldry’s perceptions of suicide and sexuality can be a means of either confinement or liberation reliant on the social status of the individual …show more content…
The repetitive musical score by Philip Glass creates a sense of the cyclical nature of time and is evocative of the relentlessness of time. This too creates an illusion of both time and timelessness as the regular rhythm simulates that of a clock as chronology is further manipulated. The diagetic ticking of the clock throughout the film simulates the punctuation of “Mrs Dalloway” by Big Ben to remind the viewer of Daldry’s manipulation of time as he traverses between the triptychs. Daldry appropriates Woolf’s careful connections between the communal such as the visual elements of the skywriting or car backfiring through the repetition of roses. This salient connection between “Mrs Dalloway” and “The Hours” also unifies these vastly different women. The repetition of “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” cumulated with cut shots to the roses establishes a connection between the three women. Their social status is also alluded to through the domesticated nature of Laura’s roses in contrast to the more organic arrangement in Virginia Woolf’s house and Clarissa’s superfluous order of “buckets of roses”. By returning to techniques applied by Woolf, Daldry’s film version of The Hours establishes itself as a new retelling of Mrs
This includes the AIDS epidemic of the 90’s and sexuality. Richard, like the other characters is confined and repressed by social conventions. However, his confinement is due to his sexuality and the severe stigma associated with the AIDs virus and subsequent hysteria experienced during the 90’s,. The irony within this is that Clarissa is liberated through her freedom of sexuality as communicated through her open and light filled apartment. In contrast Richard is found in a small environment, dark and decaying, exactly like his physical and mental state, also symbolized with dead flowers, which are replaced by Clarissa when she visits him. His suicide acts as a means to re-gain control over his life as he had been entirely dependant on the care of Clarissa and mimics that of the escape of Septimus Smith from the loving care of his wife Rezia. Hence, Daldry’s perceptions of suicide and sexuality can be a means of either confinement or liberation reliant on the social status of the individual …show more content…
The repetitive musical score by Philip Glass creates a sense of the cyclical nature of time and is evocative of the relentlessness of time. This too creates an illusion of both time and timelessness as the regular rhythm simulates that of a clock as chronology is further manipulated. The diagetic ticking of the clock throughout the film simulates the punctuation of “Mrs Dalloway” by Big Ben to remind the viewer of Daldry’s manipulation of time as he traverses between the triptychs. Daldry appropriates Woolf’s careful connections between the communal such as the visual elements of the skywriting or car backfiring through the repetition of roses. This salient connection between “Mrs Dalloway” and “The Hours” also unifies these vastly different women. The repetition of “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” cumulated with cut shots to the roses establishes a connection between the three women. Their social status is also alluded to through the domesticated nature of Laura’s roses in contrast to the more organic arrangement in Virginia Woolf’s house and Clarissa’s superfluous order of “buckets of roses”. By returning to techniques applied by Woolf, Daldry’s film version of The Hours establishes itself as a new retelling of Mrs