Annelle Dupuy's With Steel Magnolias

To begin, Anne was a selfless, outgoing, and positive young girl that had to live in hiding. Anne was always positive during the time of the war,

The plan of the “Steel Magnolias” is an autobiography or a bond narrative. While a lot of the action occurs offstage, the on stage (Salon) is the culmination of the emotions generated by the action that takes place off stage. Shelby numerous challenges such her aspiration to become a pregnant besides her illness, breakdown of her health due to diabetes, and her conflicts with her mother takes place offstage. Annelle’s troubles with her husband, who is a villain, and pregnancy and remarriage follow the offstage action. Emotive complexity drives the film (Grandin, 2013).

Laura Brown is also a married woman, like both Woolf and Dalloway, but rather than having affairs with women, she, like Clarissa Dalloway, feels bound by her role in society and is greatly unhappy with her situation. For a brief moment, she breaks away from her heteronormative life and seems to truly desire to break free from the gender roles forced upon her while sharing a kiss with her neighbor’s wife, Kitty.

Mrs Dalloway seeks to narrate the inner life of characters in a single day, Wednesday, 13th June, 1923, while in The Hours, the action takes place within the span of a single day in three different years, 1923, 1951 and 2001. It communicates 3 parallel narratives with the focus on three different women, alternating between them throughout the film. In Mrs Dalloway, the chiming of both the grand Big Ben and the gentler St Margaret’s symbolise the significance of time in life, despite a representation of time as mutable – Big Ben, ‘a warning…then the hour, irrevocable’, reminding Clarissa of mortality, while St Margaret’s chimes in a little late, gliding ‘into the recesses of the heart and buries itself, to be, with a tremor of delight, at rest.’ Woolf seems to say a full life is one that accepts the moment is

Anne struggles with her identity and developing herself as a person. Anne believes that she is a good person but because of her confinement she is not able to reach her full potential. Anne never get the chance to reach her full potential and never gets the chance of becoming the good person she has in mind.

  Clarissa Dalloway, the central character in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, is a complex figure whose relations with other women reveal as much about her personality as do her own musings. By focusing at length on several characters, all of whom are in some way connected to Clarissa, Woolf expertly portrays the ways females interact: sometimes drawing upon one another for things which they cannot get from men; other times, turning on each other out of jealousy and insecurity.

In the book Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf wanted to cast the social system and bash it for how it worked. Her intricate focus is focusing not on the people, but on the morals of a certain class at a certain historical moment.

She feels she has done an inadequate job as a wife and as an author: she wishes fruitlessly that she might live up to society's expectations of being a mother who is not afflicted with illness and a much-celebrated novelist. However, in the day of her life that Cunningham recounts over the course of the novel, she does not fully accept death as the way to end her suffering, because she still bears a sense of optimism about her own capabilities. Initially, she convinces herself that the ordinary housewife, Clarissa, in her novel Mrs. Dalloway will commit suicide to flee her sorrows over being unable to accomplish some extraordinary or applauded feat. Yet, a glimpse at death in nature acts to change her view: ". . . the bird is laid on the grass compactly, its wings folded up against its body. She knows it has died already, in Quentin's palms. It seems to have wanted to make the smallest possibly package of itself" (120). In death, the bird bears less significance, and life perdures all around it in the form of Vanessa's children. Virginia relates herself to the bird, and realizes that she is not yet ready to be so insignificant. She has great hope in the potential for her novel, eagerly anticipating that in its writing, she can integrate herself to a degree back into the life of the thriving society of London. Thus, she chooses to use Clarissa Dalloway to represent the life she aspires to have, and chooses that

Throughout her life, novelist Virginia Woolf suffered with mental illness, and she ultimately ended her life at age 59. As art often imitates life, it is not surprising that characters in Woolf’s works also struggle with mental illness. One of her novels, Mrs. Dalloway, recounts a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a high society woman living in London, and those who run in her circle. As the novel progresses the reader sees one of the characters, Septimus, struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by serving in war. At the end of the story, he commits suicide. While there is no explicit articulation of any other character suffering from mental illness in the novel, Septimus is not alone. Through her thoughts and actions, we can deduce that Clarissa also endures mental and emotional suffering. Though Clarissa does not actually attempt to end her life in the novel, her mental and emotional suffering lead her to exhibit suicidal tendencies. To prove this, I will examine Clarissa’s thoughts and actions from a psychological perspective.

"Mrs. Dalloway" written by Virginia Woolf is about the fictional life of a character by the name of Clarrisa Dalloway, who is seen to be this high class woman living in an era after the war, who is preparing for a party that she is to be hosting later on. Virginia Woolf seemed to use time as a main part of the setting of her story too by setting it in the morning and ending the next day at three in the morning. Using time like this is significant because then now the reader must really pay attention since every detail seems important. For example when characters reflect on past incidents that happened in their lives and then the story suddenly turns back into the present and in reality of the story a few minutes have only gone by. An example of that is when Clarrisa reflects her youth, "What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges,

Much Cunningham's portrayal of Virginia, who is working on her famous novel "Mrs. Dalloway" as the story opens, deals with her feelings about life in the suburbs, a life in which her husband dictates such small details of her everyday life as bedtime, how long she will be allowed to work, and even whether or not going

In the novel Mrs Dalloway, Woolf conveys her perspective, as she finely examines and critiques the traditional gender roles of women in a changing post-war society. Woolf characterisation of Clarissa Dalloway in a non linear structure, presents a critical portrayal of the existing class structure through modernist’s eyes. Titling her novel as Mrs Dalloway presents Clarissa’s marriage as a central focus of her life, drawing attention to how a women’s identity is defined by marriage. Despite the changing role of women throughout the 1920s, for married women life was the same post war. Clarissa experiences ‘the oddest sense of being herself invisible…that is being Mrs Dalloway…this being Richard Dalloway,”

‘Mrs. Dalloway’, by Virginia Woolf is a derivative text of ‘The Hours’, written by Michael Cunningham. The novels both share an important theme of mental health. The circumstances of mental health are commonly sympathetic, and empathetic. The characters Septimus and Clarissa in ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ and Richard, Laura Brown, and Virginia Woolf in ‘The Hours’ show the strongest symbols for this theme. Most of the problems and treatments these characters face are in direct result of the age they live in. Both novels express a relationship between era, illnesses and treatments.

In her own writing on the novel Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf stated, "I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work at its most intense…“ In this essay, I shall use this quote as a means to examine the theme of love and solitude in one of her most famous novels which follows a set of characters that go about their day. Virginia Wolf was able to illustrate the isolation one experiences within its own mind and the importance of one’s soul and ways in which souls connect through different memories and events. Even though independency is highly valued, the inability for people to communicate and build meaningful relationships is the most important aspect in the novel.

Throughout Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf uses the characters Clarissa and Lucrezia not only to further the plot of the story but to make a profound statement about the role of wives in both society and their marriages. While these women are subjected to differing experiences in their marriages, there is one common thread that unites each of their marriages: oppression. These women drive the story of Mrs. Dalloway and provide meaning and reason in the lives of the men in the story; however, these women are slowly but surely forced to forsake their own ambitions in order to act in accordance with the social standards set in place by marriage for women. For women outside of many modern cultures, marriage has been a necessity for a woman’s safety and security, and it required her to give up her freedom and passions and subjected her to an oppressed lifestyle. Ultimately, through the wives in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf communicates that marriage is an institution where in women are forced to suppress their individual desires and passions in order to serve their husband and further his own ambitions as first priority.