It's Not About Space Travel

If anything it's about time travel, life travel; a journey.

The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway seem to be just about living as they are about dying. The character's only contemplate the inevitable concrete concept of death because they are living a life, and usually not the life they want to be living. Some even think about suicide because they feel the life they have lead has been much more horrid than what death can bring them. Yet, all this while they have been living one way or another. Anyone who has contemplated death as a "way out" must have the thoughts of giving up on continuing on to their "next chapter" in life; be it that they have just stopped trying or they know it's going to suck worse than the last one. If anything it is up to us to make our life novel worth experiencing, worth reading. It can either be carefully crafted or spontaneous like Mrs. Dalloway pulls at. Clarissa from both books seems to be yearning for much more, even though her later carefully created chapters of her life so far haven't seemed as bad. She had tried that route of being spontaneous and free (at 18) and had found nothing but sorrows. Yet, when she tried to plan everything out, get into a more orderly and adult world, she still feels something is lacking. Finding that perfect balance is nothing short of a miracle, since life is spontaneous and controlled in many different aspects.

It's about the hours, whether you want them or not. It's about the living, it's always been about the living and always will be far after you have died, been buried and rotted away into the soil. It's a cycle and it's a journey.

Virginia, a bird-sized Virginia, lets herself metamorphose into an ornament on a hat

It was shocking to see how death seemed to always be on the minds of all these different characters. But it shows how apparent and unchanging this order is. You live, and then you die. What is in between is what you choose, but you cannot choose to go on living forever. Even though I myself am still at a young age I too have these thoughts cross my mind, perhaps not everyday, but in moderation but still there. Although both novels were brilliant, it made me start thinking about being mortal and having this final destination. I was honestly scared and disturbed, especially when reading Cunningham's novel because he seemed to right about it in more of a grim way, whereas with Woolf it was on the characters' mind, but was so cryptic in nature that it didn't shock me as much. Also, in general it seemed to be more of a blissful thing to die after living a full life, whereas Cunningham had many terminally sick and depressing characters that openingly talked about death in such a crude and raw way. He only seemed to parallel Woolf's characters' views on death in the not so terrible way through his portrayal of Woolf just wanting to lay in that bird's tomb. It was quick and simple and only hinted at the absurdity that one would only have after realizing that death/suicide was being talked about.

Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death...

“Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death..."-part of a quote from Voltaire.

Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours both share in this concept of time. It is marked in Woolf's novel by Big Ben, and by the characters in Cunningham's piece discussing or thinking about the hours passing by. Time within the novels then is somewhat of a physical manifestation of death upon the characters. They see time is ticking by, and that it will continue to do so with or without them. Pages 4, 95, 127, and 150 are a few examples of when Big Ben is brought up or time in general within Mrs. Dalloway. In The Hours the one example that stuck most in my mind was on page 197-198, the scene with Richard up on his windowsill and Clarissa. "But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another. I'm so sick." This getting through the hours is then revisited in the ending chapter with Clarissa realizing that Richard's mother was just waiting for the end of the hour to go to sleep alone.

At first when I had read The Hours I didn't understand the title. Yet now that I look back on it and this connection with time in Mrs. Dalloway that inspired his novel seemed to add up. It was about the passing hours, the time that goes by when one lives and goes about their business, and realizing that it goes by indefinitely.

A Woolf in Sheep's Clothing

Throughout our more current readings for class there has been an idea of personal issues hidden within the texts. In The Yellow Wallpaper the author's own personal affairs were brought upfront to the reader through the use of another character. I would like to suggest that the same thing is happening within Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Wolf.
There seems to be many issues that paralleled Wolf's personal life throughout this novel. For instance, the friendship Clarissa Dalloway had with a young woman named Sally is described as a bit more than that of good friends. Clarissa even goes on to say that that moment when Sally had kissed her was the happiest one of her life (pg. 36). This relationship seems to parallel the friendship Virginia Wolf had with her Vita Sackville-West, a married woman, who Wolf had given a love letter to before. This relationship started in 1922, three years before Mrs. Dalloway was published.
Virginia Wolf was also supposedly said to have suffered from depression throughout her lifetime, which parallels her character Septimus Smith's personality within her novel. With how much I have read so far in the novel, Septimus is currently playing with the idea of suicide. Wolf also had similar thoughts running through her head since she tried to commit suicide a few times, before ultimately "succeeding" by drowning herself on March 28, 1941).

(BTW: Such facts as these about the book and Wolf can be found on good ol' Wikipedia.com)