The Hours ": la letteratura come nevrosi e liberazione

"The Hours" è un film che racconta tre storie di donne che vivono in tre periodi diversi, ma che hanno come comune denominatore il romanzo " Mrs. Dalloway" di Virginia Woolf.

Un'unica giornata per ciascuna, dal trillo della sveglia all'ora di coricarsi.

Clarissa Vaughan, proprietaria di una casa editrice della New York dei giorni nostri, trascorre l'intera giornata preparando una festa per il suo migliore amico Richard, che affettuosamente la chiama "signora Dalloway"; è uno scrittore che soffre di disturbi mentali e che è malato di AIDS e ha vinto un importante premio letterario.

Nonostante la donna, adesso, viva con Sally, la sua compagna di vita, in passato ha avuto una storia con Richard, il quale si rifiuta di partecipare alla festa e si lascia cadere giù dalla finestra davanti agli occhi della donna.

Qualche annetto prima, intorno agli anni '50, Laura Brown, una californiana incinta, comincia a leggere "Mrs. Dalloway" nel giorno del compleanno di suo marito e decide di preparargli una torta.

Ma è proprio questo il problema, si sente disperata e isolata e nessuna si rende conto della sua fragilità e depressione. Laura s'identifica sempre più in Septimus, l'antieroe del romanzo che soffre di disturbi mentali e alla fine si suicida. Laura, però, non si ammazza pensando ai suoi figli e cerca di combattere i suoi disagi interiori.

Nei primi anni del 1920 V. Woolf, in uno dei suoi momenti di poca lucidità, comincia a scrivere il romanzo: come Laura vive il disagio dell'abitare nei sobborghi, nel suo caso, quelli di Londra, in una casa enorme e vuota invece di migliore la sua malattia peggiora. Inevitabile è l'arrivo di sua sorella Vanessa verso la quale prova profonda invidia per la bellezza, per la stabilità mentale e per l'intensa vita sociale. Differentemente dalle altre due donne, la scrittrice, com'è noto, si lascia annegare nel fiume per facilitare la vita a suo marito.

Il significato del film è quello della scelta della vita contro la morte nonostante il carattere effimero della felicità, la ricerca di quel mistico stato di euforia, di quell'ebbrezza e la ricerca di una soluzione per eliminare la silente rabbia e la solitudine che è in ognuno di noi. E' lo stesso Richard, infatti, rivolgendosi a Clarissa, che dice "Signora Dalloway dai sempre feste per coprire la solitudine". Se Clarissa, alla fine, arriva alla conclusione che la morte degli altri dà la possibilità di apprezzare la propria vita, Virginia dice, lasciandosi morire dice "Bisogna guardare la vita in faccia, conoscerla ed amarla per quella che è, e poi metterla da parte".

Sia la Woolf, sia Laura e sia Clarissa sono vittime della sofferenza insita nella vita stessa, hanno difficoltà ad accettare la realtà e il vuoto dell'esistenza; vivono l'angoscia per la mancata libertà ed hanno voglia di scappare dal loro mondo e, alla fine, solo Clarissa ci riesce liberandosi dall'accudire Richard, Laura tenta la fuga ma poi ritorna sui suoi passi, mentre la Woolf si toglie la vita.

La scrittrice e Richard scelgono di morire per non sopportare più la pesantezza della vita "Non ho la forza di affrontare le ore successive"( Richard); "E' il poeta che deve morire, il visionario" perché solo eliminandolo, o meglio, eliminando quella parte che è in ognuno di noi si può riuscire a sopportare la realtà.    

In Virginia Woolf's novel Septimus, the poet, dies ,too.

The film doesn't reproduces the whole plot of Woolf's novel so ,first of all ,we have to say that the events of this novel take place in the corse of one day.On a bright June morning in London, 1923, Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway, who is preparing to give a party that evening, goes to buy flowers. As she walks through the city, she thinks about many things. She had loved a young man named Peter Walsh, but marrying him would have been a mistake. He had always criticized her for giving parties ,but she took them seriously: They were her "offering" to life.

In the crowd there is a War veteran named Septimus and his Italian wife, Lucrezia.In the same moment arrives a skywriting airplane and everyone looks up. They try to read the writing, but the wind keeps breaking it up. Septimus also sees the skywriting, but he thinks it was a message to him from the dead.

When Clarissa returnes home from the shop, she reflects on her marriage. She had always loved Richard , but she seems to lack passion. She remembers she had even been in love once with her wild friend Sally Seton. Suddenly, Peter Walsh bursts in. He had been in India; they had not seen each other for many years. Their reunion is bittersweet. Each feels chaotic emotions; eachthinks, privately, that Clarissa had rejected Peter thirty years before. Then Peter announces that he is in love with a married woman in India .When Peter leaves, Clarissa calles after him to remember her party.

Peter walkes the streets, reflecting and reminiscing as Clarissa has done that morning. He sits on a bench and dreams about an incident at Bourton when he and Clarissa had fought.

Lucrezia and Septimus are also in the park. Septimus, having visions, talks to himself, to the trees, and to his dead comrade Evans, who has been killed in battle. Septimus had fought bravely and well in the War, but when peace came he discovered that "he could not feel." He had then descended into what ordinary people would call madness. But to him it is enlightenment, a state of heightened knowledge about the true meaning of the world, which he findes at once exquisitely beautiful and intolerably evil.

Today, Lucrezia is taking Septimus to a new doctor, Sir William Bradshaw, who has a fine reputation. Sir William diagnoses Septimus as shell-shocked and insane. Sir William seemes cruel to both Lucrezia and Septimus and they leave hating him. It is now 1:30. Richard Dalloway is lunching with Lady Bruton, who mentiones that Peter Walsh was in town. Meanwhile, Septimus is beginning to get better. Gradually, he begins to recognize the ordinary reality of objects in his home. He also feels awed by his wife's goodheartedness and her brave renunciation of the doctors. Lucrezia rejoices as Septimus slowly becomes himself again. Then they hear Dr. Holmes coming. Lucrezia runs out to stop him ,Septimus waits until the last moment, then hurles himself out of the window.

Clarissa's party is beginning. Important guests arrive in droves, but Clarissa feels the party is failing. Sir William is there and when Clarissa learns that one of his patients has committed suicide, she feels depressed. Then she intuited :

That the young man had killed himself to protect his soul and to communicate         something;

That Sir William, who seemed evil to her, must have driven him to it;

That the young man was somehow like her.

Meanwhile, Peter and Sally Seton sit together, reminiscing and speaking intimately about Clarissa and the past. Peter admitts that Clarissa had been his one true love. When Clarissa reappeares, Peter looks up at her with a mixture of terror and ecstasy.

The form of Mrs. Dalloway is, of course, something to ponder. It was deemed "experimental" in its day, and Woolf believed that with it she had made a major contribution to the modern reinvention of the novel. Woolf wanted the novel's form to reflect and also recreate what she considered to be a uniquely modern experience of the world. It is clear from the plot that the meaning of the novel does not lie in the sequence of events, but in the way a specific use of time and place holds them together. Through the characters in the novel, Virginia Woolf shows life as changing endlessli from moment to moment. Not only are they emotionally aware of the moment as it passes, but they also respond physically to the world around them. The main charachters are: Clarissa and Septimus.

Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway

She is 52 years old ,very thin, upright. Not particularly beautiful or clever, but her vivacity makes her a "presence" nonetheless. In a crowded room, she is the one whom people notice and remember. Clarissa is the central character in the book. All of the other characters are connected to her in some way. Even when they are away from her, they still feel connected to her, and she to them, by "invisible strings." They often find themselves trying to explain her, or else trying to explain themselves by comparing themselves to her. Not everyone likes her, but in one way or another, all must come to terms with her. Though many criticize her for being frivolous. Clarissa is the creative energy that makes things happen, the "life force" animating their small corner of the world. And she believes that because she has made herself so much a part of other people, she will continue to live through them after she dies.

Septimus Smith

He is mid-twenties. Was an ambitious but mediocre young poet before the War. Fought bravely during the War, but began to have problems afterwards, when he discovered that he could not feel. He began having nightmares, visions, out-of-body experiences. Two doctors examined him; the second, Sir William Bradshaw, decided to institutionalize him. When Septimus's wife, Lucrezia, vowed to protect him from the doctors, he finally began to heal. But when he realized that the doctors and "their kind" could not be stopped, he committed suicide. From a clinical perspective and that of ordinary people, Septimus is delusional, shell-shocked, self-absorbed, utterly insane. He talks to dead people and trees. From another perspective, he is one of the sad "casualties" of a necessary war, a once-promising young man ruined by his unfortunate contact with death and destruction. From yet another perspective, however that of many artists, thinkers, and veterans during the 1920s and 30s Septimus is not insane in the least. He is, rather, the sanest person in England, and his response to the War is entirely appropriate. As had many young men, Septimus had fought from a poetic and patriotic sense of duty, but the England and the cause for which he thought he was fighting turned out not to exist. Instead, the War became an arbitrary and pointless death machine, a pure expression of the evil in human nature. Seen from this perspective, Septimus's condition is not "madness" but an expression of the unspeakable terror and agony of these truths, which cannot be communicated in ordinary language. Without knowing any of the details of his case, Clarissa takes, instinctively, this latter perspective, when she intuits that Septimus's suicide was an attempt to protect his soul, to communicate something, and to defy men like Sir William, who struck her, too, as "obscurely evil."

Clarissa's insight that Septimus "was somehow like her" both is and is not startling. Though they never meet, and though they move in entirely different social spheres and have had radically different life experiences, Clarissa is the only person who "hears" the message Septimus sends with his suicide. Why is this? How are the two characters related? Some readers find a spiritual likeness between them. Some emphasize instead their functional roles in the novel, arguing, for instance, that Septimus symbolizes and embodies England's war trauma while Clarissa represents the very ideal of "Englishness" that the War put into question.

The plot doesn't connect Clarissa and Septimus ,but they are similar in many aspects :

Their emotional intensity;

Her dipendence upon Richard ,his dependence upon Lucrezia for protection;

Her fragidity, his impotence;

Their marriages are founded on need rather than on love;

The main difference between the two is that Septimus is not always able to distinguish his personal response and the nature of external reality;his psychic paralisys leads him to suicide ,instead Clarissa from his death acquires the ability to go on.

Peter Walsh

He is 53 years old. Tall, intelligent-looking, charming. Refined enough to impress strangers as a well-bred gentleman, but not over-refined, not affected, not a snob. Loves books and solitude, but loves society equally well loves people, gossip, politics, sports, cigars, and especially "the society of women." Has both an analytical mind and a passionate heart. Clarissa was his first and only true love; when she refused to marry him, he fled to India (then part of the British Empire), married a woman on the boat, and started a new life. Living in India, he has done dangerous, exciting work but has also gotten divorced, had many love-affairs, and failed at several jobs. He blames his failures on two things:

what he calls his "susceptibility" to impressions and strong feelings, which causes him never to quite fit into society ;

his long-ago rejection by Clarissa, which he calls the most important event of his life. He has returned to London on and off since he fled; the last time he returned was five years ago. This time, when he meets Clarissa, he notices that she and he have both aged and death-thoughts haunt his mind throughout the rest of the day. Peter has always admired, even been astonished by, Clarissa's vivacity and her social grace. He has also always criticized her "frivolity," her worldliness, and her snobbery. He has always detected, too, a cold streak in her, something hard and unyielding. He realizes that, if they had married, they probably would have destroyed each other. Even in this late stage of his life, contact with her is excruciatingly painful for him, a mixture of frustration, terror, and ecstasy; but he relishes their meetings after the fact, becomes absorbed in remembering and analyzing what they said and felt and why, and he is still surprised by the way revelations about her continue to "unfold" and fill his inner life, long after they have met.

Woolf once described her technique,the socalled 'stream of consciousness' and 'interiore monologue', as a "tunnelling process ;in other words, Woolf's characters reveal their depths gradually and piecemeal; fragments of thought and memory emerge as they respond to and interact with their surroundings and other characters, and from these fragments we piece together each character's past and a tentative idea of his or her "whole being'.Very important are the socalled 'moments of being' .

Life

Three were the main aspects in her life:

Madness

Feminism

Art

Infact, Virginia Woolf was born in 1882. Her father Leslie Stephen was already an eminent Victorian man of letters so she grew up in an intellectual atmosphere and received a private education.

The death of her mother in 1895 affected her deeply and brought about her first breakdown .Together with her sister Vanessa and her brother Thoby,she decided to move to Bloomsbury. Here together with Leonard Woolf, J. M. Keyness, Clive Bell founded the socalled "Bloomsbury Group ",which gave a great contribute to the spreading of modernism.

Her breakdowns were severe ,required many weeks of medical treatment and bed rest. She had her second attack at the age of 22 , then at the age of 28 and at last at 30. As she said she was not only depressed, but she was going mad again and beginning to hear voices. She could not concentrate and belived she could not read and write; she was hopless and selfcritical and to the end maintained that her suicide was justified and that she would not recover.

The periods following her breakdowns were very prolific.In fact in1925 she wrote 'Mrs. Dalloway', 1927 "To the lighthouse" 'The waves' ,in 1928 'Orlando',In 1941 she chose the only possible death for her, ''death by water'', and drowned herself in the river Ouse.

In 1929 she wrote "A rom of one's own". In it she made her famous statement:"a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." The book originated from two expanded and revised lectures the author presented at Cambridge University's Newnham. It deals with the obstacles and pregiudices that have hindered women writers, and analyzes the differences between women as objects of representation and women as authors of represantation. Woolf argued that a change in the forms of literature was necessary because most literature had been "made by men out of their own needs for their own uses".In the last chapter it explores the possibility of an androgynous mind. Woolf refers to Coleridge who said that a great mind is androgynous and states that when this fusion takes space the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties. "Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create any more than a mind that is purely feminine.".

Art was very important in her life, she always tried to write in an impersonal way giving us a vision of reality from different points of view, but she realized she failed her attempt for this reason she laved art. She belived that painting was the only way to be impersonal ,for this reason was a little envios of her sister Vanessa ,who was able to paint.Vanessa was relieved when Leslie Stephen died, relieved finally to take a trip to Europe and be on her own. Her family, as for Virginia, never would understand her love for colour and her need for travel and nature. Meanwhile Virginia was sinking into despair. She felt as if she was the only sibling mourning their father.

Virginia loved most dearly to her heart her big sister Vanessa. Vanessa adored her younger sister and needed her approval, valued her opinion, and even envied her a bit for her outspoken intelligence. Their sisterhood was perfect ,Virginia 'owned' the intellectual,Vanessa 'owned' the physical.

Virginia, gifted at intellectual discourse, shined brilliantly. Vanessa's glow was more subtle and sensual. As an artist looking to escape the dark rooms of her childhood, Vanessa turned their new home into her first showpiece of nonconformity, color and light.After the sudden death of Thoby, Vanessa accepted art critic Clive Bell's third marriage proposal.Vanessa flourished as a figure of great fecundity: bearing children, painting pictures, decorating her homes; all were done with the commitment of an artist.Virginia was traumatized by Vanessa's marriage. She'd envisioned them never marrying and always living together. She felt betrayed.

Bloomsbury Group

It was a group of writers that was established in Bloomsbury, Englang. They were very popular and well known for producing many great pieces of literature and art that was ever published throughout the many years that literature has been present. Members of this group were Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa and Clive Bell, J. M. Keyness and Duncan Grant ,they all "belived art to be the most important thing in the world, the highest expression that man has attained".

All of the "Bloomsberries" loved poetry,art, paintings, as well as reading other people's works to see how others viewed things as opposed to themselves.

This group of people was one of the most prolific intellectual circles of writers, artists and painters ever Known .Part of the B. ethic was the desire to challange social norms and rebel against what they saw as Victorian hypocrisy. They didn't like the way the Victorian culture viewed people and their fashination with beauty. The B. had a style of making assertions ,just by raising their eyebrows.

Modernism

It's a way of thiking that addresses the question of how to live acceptablyin the modern world's tempest of adversity. The term usually refers to the early of the twentieth century ane to the radical shift in aesthetic and cultural sensibilities evident in the art and literature of the post-World War One period. Modernism marks a distinctive break with Victorian bourgeois morality; rejecting nineteenth-century optimism,they presented a profoundly pessimistic picture of a culture in disarray. In literature, the movement is associated with the works of Eliot, J.Joyce , V. Woolf, Ezdra Pound. In their attempt to throw off the aesthetic burden ofthe realist novel, these writers introduced a variety of literary tactics and devices:

The breaking down of limitations in space and time;

The awareness that our percepition of reality is necessarily uncertain, temporary and subject to change;

The importance of unconscious as well as conscious life;

The impossibility of giving a final or absolute interpretation of reality.

'stream of consciousness', 'interior monologue'

Besrgson's conception of time had a great influence on Modernism and on the use of the stream of consciousness Technique. The greatest blow to traditional ways of ordering reality was the breakdown of time division .Instead of the accepted ideas of past ,present and future ,philosophers began to conceive of time as a continuos flow in which only individual consciousness identified significant moment.

For this reason V. Woolf said that human perception depends not on measurable time but on the way that the mind is affected by it;consequently in her novels the space of few hours can contain a whole life .'A minute can be more importante and last more than a year if the significant action happens inside, not outside the mind'.

So the technical solution adopted by modernists to express this revolutionary concept was the 'stream of consciousness', so called because it reproduces the continuous flow of human thought.It describes the modernists peculiar and difficult style which puts togheter apparently distant ideas and images ,presenting them with no rational order but rather as they would pass through the uncounscious mind.

We have to distinguish it from the 'interior monologue'.While the latter is the verbal expression of a psychic phenomenon ,the stream of consciousness is the psychic phenomenon itself.We can distinguish four kinds of interior monologue:

Indirect interior monologue,where the narrator never lets the character's thoughts flow without control and mantains a logical and grammatic organization;

Interior monologue ,characterised by two levels of narration:one internal, one external to the character's mind;

Interior monologue where the character's thoughts flow freely;

Extreme interior monologue ,where words fuse into others to create new expressions;

'Moments of being'

In her memoir 'Moments of being', V. Woolf tells of a frightening dream she had as a young girl in which ,as she looked at herself in the mirror ,she saw something moving in the background.She writes about special moments that a writer must be ready for,moments when what she calls 'cotton wool of daily existence' falls away and for a moment we are presented with an astonishing truth about something,anything.It doesn't have to be an earth-shattering event,it could be a time when for some reason you were aware of the sound of the wind or of the voice of birds.Through the moments of being she explaines the impossibility to settle  the present ,the present that has a double meaning: on one hand it is something elusive, on the other hand is something to reject. She compares a moment of being to a fire ,which must be stopped in literature,because the literature concerns with the 'essences',which are incommunicable : literature is silence.