Suppression and Insight: Comparative Analysis of Mrs Dalloway and The Hours Anonymous 12th Grade

Through examining the intertextual connections between two texts, the effects of context, purpose and audience on the shaping of meaning is made evident. Virginia Woolf’s modernist novel ‘Mrs Dalloway’ (Penguin, 1925) and Stephen Daldry’s postmodern film adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s novel ‘The Hours’ (Miramax, 2002) are examples of this, as ‘The Hours’ offers new insights about repression through the lives of its three heroines as well as affirming those offered in ‘Mrs Dalloway’. This is manifested through the exploration of the struggle and failure to conform to societal expectations and its psychological impacts and the sense of unfulfillment due to oppressive societal roles and norms.

The exploration of how the inability to embody societal roles can have repressive repercussions on one’s mental health and interior self is evident in Woolf’s ‘Mrs Dalloway’. Although modernism was in response to scientific developments, Woolf represents the ignorance of psychology when it manifests in the authoritarian form of mechanically minded Dr Holmes’ and Bradshaw’s resistance to Freudian developments as they mistreat shell-shock suffering Septimus due to their denial of male weakness. Through the use of Septimus’ indirect...