nature of insanity is not objective in my opinion, insanity, in another sense, might in fact be a heightened sanity, or at least a heightened sense of awareness.
Richard in The Hours and Virginia Wolf in The Hours are both concerned with creativity and the nature of the creative act, the object is their writing. Artists always are easily perplexed by inspirations crashed in their heads, and they may present as “insanity”. Besides of these, artists are much better as being aware of the society, and when they see the dark sides only but shriveling to changes them, the feelings of guilty and weakness afflict them badly. They have no other way to discharge there gloominess but being insane.
Laura is another insane woman. In this society, women who occupied half of the popularity are considered as useless, and therefore, bending over the social standard, the only creative activity for women is being insane. Trapped in roles of mother and wife, Laura sinks into a total numbness and desperation—a quieter insane way “but at that moment it had seemed clear that there was another way, far quieter, a way that was numb and hopeless, flat, so much so that an emotion as strong as sorrow would have been a relief.”[9] P142
But in fact, Septimus and Laura are not idiots or insanities at all. On the contrary, they are sages in this absurd world. They appear dreadfully and dowdily, but don’t degenerate; they keep clear comprehensions
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towards the absurdness, but usually act as indifference to everything. They reason of these people’s insanities is the absurdness of the world, which alienates and contorts the pure personalities. Then normal people loss their passion of life and become loveless and speechless. Hence they turn into insane (like Septimus) or silently fight against the absurd world with indifferences and numb (like Laura).
2.3.2 Homosexuality
Homosexuality conception as lesbian desire is an obvious trace in Mrs. Dalloway, and The Hours shows even an open attitude towards it in the postmodern period, Cunningham enlargers the extent of homosexuality from lesbian love to gayness and even bisexuality, which is the advancement of sexual culture and human being civilization. It is an intertextual motif and a positive parody to the pre-text.
“Mrs. Dalloway has special feelings for the same sex. In spite of her lack of something central which permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together” [9] P24 “ she could not resist sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman, not a girl, of a woman confessing, as to her they often did, some scrape, some folly.”[9] P24The reason why this feeling come out is duet by Clarissa Dalloway, to pity, appreciation for beauty, her admiration of youths since she is getting old, some outside influence such as a scent, a catchy tune next door, etc. But her lesbian inclination exists
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in her girlhood in which time she meets and admires Sally Seton. The kissing moment between she and Sally becomes an eternal unforgettable memory of Clarissa Dalloway’s whole life and a powerful evidence of her lesbian desire.
Lesbian desire also finds its expressions in the case of Clarissa Dalloway’s daughter, Elizabeth Dalloway, and in the case of Clarissa Vaughan’s daughter, Julia.
Virginia Wolf has a kiss with her elder sister Vanessa Wolf, and this kiss has its conceal allusion of Virginia’s lesbian inclinations; in the same case, Mrs. Brown kisses her neighbor Kitty in her kitchen. Those depressive desire burst into a form of being insanity. As time goes by and development of society, the bisexual Clarissa Vaughan who loved the gay boy Richard when she was a girl, has been living with Sally, a producer of public television, for more than 15 years, and she has a daughter born in a way of artificial fertilization. Clarissa Vaughan apparently enjoys every liberty: freedom to be a lesbian, to come and go as she likes. Yet she has ended up, in spite of her unusual way of life, as a fairly conversational wife and mother as Richard predicts thirty years ago: “under her private-girl veneer lay all the making of a good suburban wife.”[9] P16
2.3.4 Suicide and Death
The main characters in The Hours search for meaning in their lives
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and evaluate suicide as a way of escaping the problems they face. Virginia Wolf and Laura are incredibly sensitive and perceptive to the world of them.
With Clarissa Dalloway’s words, Virginia Wolf, boasting two lives, one in realistic and the other in academic book of literary history, expresses her view about death in Mrs. Dalloway: “Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate, people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded; one was alone. There was an embrace in death”[9] P151. Septimus accepts the death for which Clarissa has been destined. Virginia Wolf sinks herself into the river; Mrs. Brown drives to her Room Nineteen with her hypnotic pills; Richard jumps out of the window in the same fashion of Septimus’; Easy-going Clarissa Vaughan thinks about the sense of insignificance which caused by the an invitation to lunch with Oliver St. Ives, seems like death and she even find herself as “a woman admiring death” trough reading Richards works.
In the scene of Richard’s suicide, there is a quotation of Virginia Wolf’s posthumous letter “He (Richard) sys, ‘I don’t think two people could have been happier than we’ve been’”. [10] P200
In The Hours, how Virginia Wolf decides on the death of one of major characters in her masterpiece Mrs. Dalloway is imagined, which makes readers who read Mrs. Dalloway later than The Hours finds it
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easier to accept and understand the death and suicide in Mrs. Dalloway. Readers who have read Mrs. Dalloway but haven’t read The Hours may feel enlightened on some obscure points of death and suicide in Mrs. Dalloway when they read The Hours. Such a case of being inter-referential is very intertextual.
2.4 Other Intertextual Reinterpretations in The Hours
The use of Stream of Consciousness Technique in The Hours is typical pastiche intertextuality. Remarks that Cunningham has managed to reproduce “gorgeous, Woolfian, shimmering, perfectly-observed prose”[13] P5, or that the author is “eerily fluent in Woolf’s exquisitely orchestrated elucidation of the torrent of thoughts, memories, longings,
[13] P5
and regrets that surges ceaselessly through the mind” rarely give any
detailed analysis of the two writers’ styles. If we are to consider the term pastiche as being in any way appropriate, then it seems essential that we should analysis how Cunningham has adopted or adopted Wolf’s style. The episode of “Mrs. Brown” in The Hours is a parody of the short story To Room Nineteen, which was wrote by British female writer Doris Lessing in 1963, and that story is a critical fiction to the western society male oriented.
The descriptions and plot conceptions of Virginia Wolf are also echoes of The Yellow Wallpaper by American Feminism writer Charlotte P. Gilman, and this fiction is a semi- autobiographic work of Charlotte.
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