The Hours: Virginia Wolf and T. S. Eliot Connection.

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"The Hours" is definetly one of my favourite movies of all times because I always discover new things when I see it. It is based on the book "The Hours" by Michael Cunningham ("The Hours" was the original working title of Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway"). The story follows three women living in three different   periods of time, whose lives are connected through time by Woolf's novel, "Mrs. Dalloway."

The scene I selected is when Laura Brown, a model housewife who struggles with the idea that her life has no use other than taking care of her young son and doting her husband, because of this, she feels desperate and invaded with suicidal thoughts. As she reads the novel written by Virginia Wolf, “Mrs. Dolloway,” she somehow connects with its main character, the more she reads, the more she is prompted to a devastating decision. After leaving her son at a neighbor’s house, she goes into a hotel room with the intention of committing suicide. She felt trapped in her role of a suburban housewife and sees suicide as a possible solution or escape from wearing this mask. The scene in the picture depicts when she was dreaming that the water starts coming into the room, but she does not wake up to the water and just drowns. Then she wakes up from this nightmare, with a plan. It was time to take off the mask.  

This made me think of the poem by T.S Eliot called “The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock” when he says: “We have lingered in the chambers of the sea by sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown till human voices wake us, and we drown." (Eliot, 1920)

The character, Laura Brown had been sleeping under the chambers of the sea, hypnotized by the singing of the mermaids like Eliot would say, but when she realized that her mask had taken over her; she drowned and felt the need to put an end to her life. The twist here is that she did not commit suicide, like I said before; she woke up with a plan which was to abandon her family and live the life she was supposed to. 

There are two interesting coincidences between Wolf and Eliot here, both of them were modernist’s writers so there are some similar elements among their motives, for example, both Mrs. Dalloway and Prufrock hide behind masks. Another weird and maybe bizarre connection here is the fact that Virginia Wolf killed herself by drowning in the river. As she could not deal with the mask, she drowned, but literally.