Julia Schwartz

January 9, 2004

Yellow Roses

Michael Cunningham’s The Hours is striking in its close parallelism to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. The Hours is solely based on Woolf’s work, but intertwines depth to the novel that goes beyond Woolf’s own beauty with the advent of additional characters. Each of the main characters in Mrs. Dalloway has a counterpart in The Hours, a counterpart who is often nearly identical to the character of Woolf’s imagination. Additionally, the parallels between different characters who have no connection on the surface serve to highlight the main ideas of Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours, ideas that virtually remain the same.

            Mrs. Dalloway, written by Virginia Woolf in 1925, is a book that centers around its title protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway. The novel is critically known as Woolf’s most autobiographical novel, with much of Woolf’s ideas about life and death woven among the characters of Mrs. Dalloway. The story takes place over a mere one day – a day which ultimately serves infinite importance in the lives of the characters depicted. In Mrs. Dalloway, the lives changed forever are those related to Septimus Warren Smith, the “poet who must die” (Daldry). Yet for the characters of The Hours, in both the book and movie versions, the one day depicted serves as marked moment on the cycles of all the lives chronicled: Virginia speaks with Leonard and is granted a return to London; Laura avoids suicide and hatches her plan to escape; and Clarissa loses her dear friend Richard to a second suicide.

            The suicide of both men on the one day depicted in the stories surrounding Mrs. Dalloway – those of Septimus and Richard Brown – draw the first of many partnerships between characters in Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours. Septimus and Richard Brown are parallel characters because they are the poets that commit suicide, both letting themselves slip out of a lofty window to oblivion. Both seek death as a respite from the insanity of their lives, Septimus tortured by his memories of World War One, and Richard suffering from the trials of AIDS.

            Richard Brown, perhaps the most important person in Clarissa Vaughan’s life in The Hours, is the one who calls her “Mrs. Dalloway,” bringing the first threads of the two stories together. Ultimately, The Hours is about characters who all are affected by Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf in writing it, Laura Brown in reading it, and Clarissa Vaughan in living it. However, Clarissa is not the only one living the life of Mrs. Dalloway: Laura is too, repressed by her perfect 1950s life and struggling with depression. And even though Virginia is the one writing the story, determining which characters do what, as mentioned, this is a partially autobiographical novel, so the struggles of Mrs. Dalloway to stay within the confines of a Victorian housewife are those which she experiences; the insanity that Septimus possesses, with his inherent fear of not living life right and desiring suicide, is hers as well. As we know, Virginia met the same fate as her character Septimus, committing suicide by drowning herself in a river in 1941, on the brink of World War Two.

            Because the characters in Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours are so similar, yet not identical, the names and the parts that those people play in The Hours presents a powerful opinion about the true nature of the relationships within Woolf’s novel. In Mrs. Dalloway¸ Clarissa Dalloway, Clarissa Vaughan’s counterpart, is married to Richard Dalloway. Richard Brown of The Hours is the one who coined the name “Mrs. Dalloway” for Clarissa, and ostensibly her true love. By making Clarissa’s best friend, and not her marital partner, Richard, Cunningham insinuates that Richard should have been Clarissa’s husband, as Richard tells Clarissa years before when he first calls her Mrs. Dalloway on the porch at Wellfleet.

            In an opposite fashion, Clarissa Vaughan’s partner is named Sally, a homosexual relationship that has lasted for ten years. In Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa dreams often of her old friend Sally Seton, a boisterous woman who smoked cigars and ran in alleys naked. To Clarissa, Sally represented freedom and rebellion, and Clarissa seemed to be a bit in love with Sally, as well, sharing an almost lesbian bond. By placing Clarissa Vaughan with a woman named Sally, Cunningham raises the possibility of Mrs. Dalloway’s homosexuality and desires to be with Sally Seton.

            Yet because Cunningham’s character set up works in two directions – Clarissa Dalloway should have been with Sally, or should have been with Richard – she is right in one scenario. There is no telling which, which is addressed by the stories: Clarissa (Vaughan or Dalloway) is not entirely happy in the life she is living, yet she realizes that the life she dreams of with the full idealism of unhappiness would not have worked out either. Clarissa Vaughan knows she could not have lived a life with Richard Brown, yet she seems to love him with more than friendship, she is “used to” yet not thrilled by Sally, and she is constantly dreaming of that morning in Wellfleet as utopia, mourning its passage.

            The fuzzy relationships between the Richards, the Clarissas, and the Sallys are only further complicated by the advent of two former lovers into the stories: into Mrs. Dalloway enters Peter Walsh, Clarissa’s old flame who was forsaken for Richard Dalloway, and into The Hours returns Louis Waters, the man whom Richard chose over Clarissa those many years before. These two men bring the past with them on the day of the party, causing Clarissa to finally face the past and come to terms with her actions. Clarissa knows that she has a certain life, and on the day of the party, calls it into question, criticizing her life as “trivial” (Cunningham 161). When Peter and Louis come back, she recalls the past, questioning the path that she took to get to the point where she is now.

Mrs. Dalloway, in Woolf’s book, is well-aware of the fact that she is naught but a society wife, but in her era, this is largely the only option available to her, as a woman of high social standing. She is occasionally ashamed of this position, but she comes to accept it. Clarissa Vaughan, however, is a woman of the nineties, a New York editor, who still spends her life planning parties. “Richard’s private conviction that [she] has, at heart, become a society wife” (Cunningham 20) distresses her, throwing her into the pinnacle of the downward spiral she has been on for so many years.

The other pair of characters who are incredibly similar and do nothing for either Clarissa but make her feel ashamed of herself and unhappy with her life are the older companions of the Mrs. Dalloways’ daughters: Clarissa Dalloway’s daughter Elizabeth’s teacher Doris Kilman, and Clarissa Vaughan’s daughter Julia’s professor Mary Krall. Mary and Doris are both atypical for their ages, with Mary, for the most part, being a modern Doris . Both women are scorned by society, and do not have the social comforts that others do. They are unhappy, lonely, and worship their younger companions, Elizabeth and Julia. On the day of the party, each comes by the “Dalloway” house with the daughter, causing their mothers to be thrown into pits of despair, wondering how their daughters became so distant from them, causing them to be jealous of the women who have been able to be their companions.

Doris and Mary are not only the object of jealousy, however. They are also both entirely resentful of Clarissa, and her comfortable, easy life. Moreover, they both possess an inordinate value of disdain for Mrs. Dalloway, shouting silently, “Fool! Simpleton! You who have known neither sorrow nor pleasure; who have trifled your life away!” (Woolf 125). Both are presented as narrow-minded, but they are not, really. They are simply two women who have not had as pleasant a life as those they cherish, and hold Clarissa responsible for their unhappiness, though she in truth had nothing to do with it. Ultimately, Doris and Mary determine that it is Clarissa’s own loss, not being able to experience any emotion but party-planning, but they fail to see the depth of either Clarissa; they fail to learn the inner workings of two minds that are, in truth, as contemplative of their existences as Doris and Mary assume themselves to be.       

Though Leonard Woolf is closer to his wife Virginia than is Lucrezia to Septimus, both Rezia and Leonard are burdened with the draining task of taking care of a mentally ill spouse. The treatments which they chooses for their spouses are different, with Leonard selecting respite in the country, and Rezia taking Septimus to a parade of doctors and accepting a plan to commit him to an institution. Both Rezia and Septimus, and Leonard and Virginia, had wonderful months of wedded bliss, when they would be nothing but young lovers and their disagreements were “lovers’ quarrels.”

Yet with the resurgences of mental illness in Septimus and Virginia, Rezia and Leonard are forced into the position of caretaker, only occasionally receiving droplets of love from their spouses occasionally. While Virginia shows affection for Leonard when she is not in a state of confusion or imagination, Septimus only returns to his original self while Rezia is making a hat for her neighbor, right before his suicide. While we know that Septimus only married Rezia out of conciliation, truly desiring to marry her older sister, the intimacy of Leonard and Virginia ’s relationship is shown through her suicide letter in The Hours, as well as by historical documentation of the true nature of their relationship.

Virginia Woolf, as an author, is known for her imagery, and Mrs. Dalloway does not disappoint, with The Hours again reinforcing the ideas set forth by Mrs. Dalloway. Flower imagery in the stories of the many women reveals a hidden dimension to them, presenting a summation of their characters that might not otherwise be achieved.

In the cinematic rendering of The Hours, the parallels between each of the three women are quickly drawn upon the outset of the film. One of the parallel sequences portrayed is the flowers that each woman is in possession of: Virginia has a vase of “bachelor buttons,” or cornflowers; Laura is presented with a vase of yellow roses by her husband Dan; and Clarissa has a vase of deep red roses. The importance of flowers is set up right from the start of Mrs. Dalloway, with its famous first line reading, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” (Woolf 1). (Another of the parallel sequences shows Virginia writing the line, Laura reading it, and Clarissa saying it to Sally.)

Virginia ’s deep blue cornflowers fit her personality. Cornflowers are representative of delicacy, and hope and devotion. Delicacy implies Virginia ’s delicate mental condition, and the hope and devotion emphasize Leonard’s hope for and devotion to Virginia ’s health. Dark blue, the color of her flowers, represents impulsiveness and depression, two qualities that could not be more descriptive of Woolf. She is clearly entrenched in the throes of depression, ruled by her impulsiveness: she impulsively kisses her sister Vanessa, she impulsively writes her novels, she impulsively takes a trip to the train station, and she impulsively drowns herself in a river.

Laura receives a gift of yellow roses from her husband, Dan, on the morning of the day described. Roses are historically the flower of love, and yellow roses are indicative of joy or gladness. Laura’s is, on the surface, a happy life: her husband is living his dreams, with a wife, a young son, a house, and two cars, returned from the war to his high school fantasy. Yellow is a color to describe joy, but also can describe envy, treason, or intellect. Those three qualities are all in some way descriptive of Laura Brown: she is envious of the perfect lives that other women have, like Kitty’s ability to maintain composure and make pristine cakes; she in some senses commits an act of treason when she deserts her husband and children; and she is intellectual, with her singular descriptive quality being that she likes to read.

Also, in the movie version of The Hours, one constantly sees flowers in the window of Laura’s home: birds of paradise. Birds of paradise, though beautiful tropical flowers which denote perfection and happiness through their name alone, are actually somewhat poisonous. This queer combination of utopia and poison directly parallels Laura’s own life as Dan Brown’s wife – she has all the elements necessary to be perfectly happy, yet she is being poisoned in her environment. “It was death or life” (Daldry) in her situation, and death was remaining where she was. By escaping “paradise,” Laura managed to find enough happiness that she was able to live her life to her eighties, surviving her husband and children, even though we knew her on a day which she almost became the first to enter the ranks of the dead.

Clarissa, though surrounded by the flowers she is buying for the party, is introduced by deep red roses. Again, roses are the color of love, but red roses are symbolic of passion. This passion is the passion that Clarissa possesses for her parties, and for her care of Richard. Red is also a color of strength, love, protection, warning, suffering, and sacrifice, themes through Clarissa’s life – mainly through her relationship with Richard. She is his strength, and is strong for him; she loves him, as a friend, as a patient, and as a lover; she tries to protect him from what is ostensibly himself; and suffering and sacrifice are the perfect words to describe what Clarissa goes through in order to take care of Richard, because although she loves him, it is a struggle for her to maintain her strength and patience with him. Finally, they are a signal of warning: Richard’s death is to be on that day, and those red roses are the first signal of impending doom.

Laura’s flowers are a part of the biggest theme of the story of Mrs. Dalloway: yellow roses. Roses are everywhere: Laura’s roses, the roses Mr. Dalloway gives to Mrs. Dalloway, the roses Clarissa Vaughan gives to Richard Brown, the roses that Virginia places on the dead bird’s grave (Daldry), the rose that Rezia stitches on the hat she makes for her neighbor, the rose Sally Seton gives to Clarissa in their youth, the roses on Laura’s cake for Dan, the walls of Richard’s apartment, and the “roses blooming under glass” (Woolf 71) that every woman had in the Victorian age. Each incidence of roses has a unique implication, but roses are the flowers of love, and the roses pervading the novels ultimately convey the importance of the various relationships that take place.

Laura’s roses are yellow, symbolizing her fantasy world and her desire to escape it. The roses Mr. Dalloway gives to Mrs. Dalloway are a combination of red and white roses, which represent unity. Those roses that Mr. Dalloway gives to Clarissa are symbolic of his love for her. He buys them to remind her of his love, and though he is unable to bring the words, he believes that she understands his intent with the flowers. This is similar to Richie’s question to his mother, Laura, while baking the cake:

            Laura: We’re baking this cake for Dad, so he knows we love him.

            Richie: Otherwise he won’t know?

            Laura: That’s right.

The importance of one deed to an entire relationship says a lot about the nature of the marriages being discussed. There is a “gulf” between two married people “that one must respect” (Woolf 120), thinks Septimus, perhaps touching upon the secrets that the spouses keep from each other: namely, their unhappiness and random romantic encounters.

            In a novel where color is another key symbolic indicator, the color yellow, a highly versatile color, is omnipresent. The yellow roses that Dan gives Laura are the first time we see yellow roses, but they appear again in a mixture that Clarissa Vaughan gives Richard (the mixture of roses is pink, orange, yellow, and white, symbolizing friendship and love, encouragement, attraction, protection, and peace). The yellow roses also appear on the cake that Laura bakes for Dan (twice), and when a little bird dies – the first encounter with death in The Hours – Virginia places yellow roses on the bird as it goes to its death.

            The color yellow is important for its versatility. Yellow can be for mourning, for cowardice, for courage, for jealousy, and as a warning. Mourning is the meaning most befitted to the dead bird; cowardice is perhaps Laura’s failure to face her life – or it could be courage in leaving it; jealousy is Laura wishing she could make a perfect cake or Virginia wishing she had more control over her servants; and again, the roses serve as a warning, this time of Laura’s departure and more immediately, her suicide attempt.

            Independent of roses, yellow occurs in Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours quite frequently. At Mrs. Dalloway’s party, the curtains in the room where all her guests are are yellow, so she and all of her guests are framed in yellow, the color of envy, treason, and unhappiness. In the climax of another storyline, when Virginia enters the river to drown herself, we are told of the “yellow surface of the river” (Cunningham 5). Depending on the interpretation of Woolf’s suicide – be it a defeat or an act of strength – the yellow can foreshadow either; regardless, yellow is a warning color, warning that something is about to happen.

            There are, however, other colors that convey additional information about a particular happenstance in The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway. The suicide note that Virginia leaves for Leonard is in a light blue envelope (Cunningham 6), with the light blue color standing for tranquility. With the sense of tranquility, one can surmise that Virginia is finally going to be able to reach peace in her death, a state which she strove for but was unable to achieve her entire life. The retreat in Richmond that Leonard brings Virginia to to recover from her psychological illness is “green beyond green” (Cunningham 29). Green is a color of hope, growth, and future, three words which describe perfectly the hopes that Leonard had for his wife: he hopes that she will be able to grow psychologically so that she will have a more positive and happy future.

            Elizabeth, Clarissa and Richard Dalloway’s daughter, wears a pink dress to the party, and is so beautiful and grown up that many guests do not recognize her, including her own father. Elizabeth and Julia Vaughan represent the latest generation of women: Elizabeth with the age-old hope of youth, and Julia as the next woman to take up life after Virginia, Laura, and Clarissa in The Hours. Elizabeth ’s dress is altogether fitting, then, as pink: symbolic of light breaking through. In her pink dress, Elizabeth is that light.

            Finally, when Clarissa Vaughan is chatting with Mary and Julia on their way out to buy boots for Mary, Clarissa cannot move beyond the “synthetic orange brilliance” (Cunningham 161) of her daughter’s backpack. Orange is a bright color, symbolic of the energy that Julia possesses in her youth. Orange can also be eroticism, which comes out when it is revealed that Mary sees Julia in a sexual manner, although Julia does not feel in kind.

            As much as the stories around the various Mrs. Dalloways are about relationships between lovers and friends, the main agenda of Woolf when she was writing the novel, and Cunningham in elaborating upon it, was an examination of the way we live our lives and a study in what death is. There are no characters that are actually completely happy, but they all have an appreciation for life, observing the simple beauty of little things, “absorbing, mysterious, of infinite richness, this life” (Woolf 163).

            Still, there is one suicide in Mrs. Dalloway and two in The Hours. Why death amidst those who realize the beauty and power of life? Often times, the realization of the beauty of life is too much for some people – they cannot live among it, because they do not see their own lives in fitting in with life’s beauty, so they choose to exterminate it.

            The death in Mrs. Dalloway and two in The Hours is not a result of inadequacy, however. The three characters who commit suicide – Septimus, Richard, and Virginia – do so out of desperation. They are driven insane, either by mental or physical illness. Moreover, Septimus and Richard have lost the way to find the meaning of life, and have lost feelings of regret. In the case of Septimus, “nothing whatever [was] the matter, except the sin for which human nature had condemned him to death; that he did not feel” (Woolf 91). He did not care when his Army friend Evans was killed, “his wife was crying, and he felt nothing” (Woolf 90). The realization that he could not feel, even when his best friend or wife was suffering, was enough to make Septimus feel he did not deserve to live. Beyond that, he didn’t even care about life anymore, and was rather insane as a result of shell shock from the war.

            Laura does not feel regretful for leaving her family behind (Daldry), for she knows staying would have meant death for her, a slow, poisonous death. However, she has spent her entire life paying for that choice – “the worst thing a mother can do” (Daldry). She knew it was wrong, but she knew it was her only way out.

            Richard also regrets: he regrets not writing about Clarissa and him. “I don’t have any regrets, really, except that one. Do you know what I mean? I wanted to write about everything, the life we’re having and the lives we might have had. I wanted to write about all the ways we might die’” (Cunningham 67). In essence, Richard regrets not loving Clarissa more boldly, because if he had, he would have been able to love her as a wife, instead of merely as a friend and a former lover.

            These characters do not feel regret, but moreover, they feel nothing at all. Virginia kills herself because she does not feel better: she chooses death over her present life in Richmond . And the title is born of a statement by Richard, who is simply waiting for death to take him over. “…I still have to face the hours, don’t I? I mean, the hours after the party, and the hours after that…” (Daldry). He is only entertained, stimulated, loved, and cared for by Clarissa, but she is not always there for him, because as much as she is a constant in his life, she has a life of her own that needs tending to as well. Richard is only staying alive for that care from Clarissa: “I think I’m staying alive to satisfy you,” (Daldry) he says to her.

            Thus, death becomes a way out for Virginia, Richard, and Septimus. “Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate… there was an embrace in death” (Woolf 184). All three of them see no other option. Septimus kills himself so he won’t be taken away by Sir Bradshaw’s men to the asylum. Virginia kills herself so she will not have to “go on spoiling [Leonard’s] life” (Cunningham 7). Richard kills himself so that Clarissa will finally be forced to live her own life, instead of living only to salvage his.

            Ultimately, the characters of Cunningham’s The Hours serve to enhance the relationships among the fewer characters of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. The Hours shows Woolf herself and her role in the story she creates, as well as the effects of the lives that the characters in Mrs. Dalloway’s life have, both on her and on others. The colors and symbolism, vibrantly placed in Mrs. Dalloway, used again in The Hours, and then shown prolifically in the movie version of the latter, highlight the characters and their opinions toward life, both in general and in the context of their lives.

            The parallels are infinite, the imagery vivid, and the philosophy rampant in the story of one day in the world – “a woman’s whole life, in a single day, just one day – and in that day, her whole life” (Daldry). There isn’t really much needed to tell a story: just a few hours and a few friends. Then all will come out, and truth will finally be allowed to live free, as hopelessness dies among a bed of yellow roses.