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Virginia Woolf And Laura Brown In Michael Cunningham's The Hours

Decent Essays

Virginia Woolf and Laura Brown in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours aren’t satisfied with the current situation they are in and wish that things could go back to the way they were before Virginia moved and Laura got married. Laura Brown wants to flee her family because she feels that she always has to put up an act when she is around them. Although she has her happy moments, it doesn’t last long when she starts fantasizing death and thinks about how easy it would be to end her life. She misses who she was before she got married and started a family, ”Laura Zielski, the solitary girl, the incessant reader, is gone, and here in her place is Laura Brown” (40). Virginia Woolf also relishes on her past back when she lived in London and the city life, …show more content…

She married young, has a boy named Richie and is expecting another baby. We see that this is not the case when she has to remind herself to put down the book she seeks comfort in, get up and join her family downstairs for Dan’s birthday. “Laura closes the book and lays it on the nightstand. She does not dislike her child, does not dislike her husband. She will rise and be cheerful” (41). This leads us to believe that she might is in pain and dissatisfied because she has to remind herself that she does like her family. Her life and her responsibilities don’t seem natural to her but are rehearsed when she says, “She is again possessed (it seems to be getting worse) by a dream-like feeling, as if she is standing in the wings, about to go onstage and perform in a play for which she has not adequately rehearsed. What, she wonders, is wrong with her; this is her little boy. All the man and boy require of her is her presence and, of course, her love” (43). She also wishes her responsibilities would disappear, “For the moment she wants to leave—not to harm him, she’d never do that—but to be free, blameless, unaccountable. These persistent thoughts of feeling trapped as a mom and wife drive her to the thoughts of suicide. She thinks about finding a way out of her situation when she is at the hotel as well as when she’s getting ready for bed that same night. “It would be as simple as checking into a …show more content…

The book started with her committing suicide and drowning in a river. Throughout the novel she dreams of getting out of the suburbs and into the city, “She despises Richmond. She is starved for London; she dreams sometimes about the hearts of cities. Here, where she has been taken to live for the last eight years because it is neither strange nor marvellous , she is largely free of of the headaches and voices, the fits of rage. Here all she desires is a return to the dangers of city life” (83). Virginia also has chronic headaches that she tries to keep at bay but they take over sometimes. She uses writing as a way to diminish the voices. She takes her inner pain and uses it to write stories. She writes the story of Clarissa Vaughn and debates whether or not Clarissa should take her own life. She plays off the voices in her head and thinks that if she acts healthy then Leonard will let them move back to London, “She knows how suddenly the headache can return but she diminishes it in Leonard’s presence, acts more firmly healthy than she sometimes feels. She will return to London. Better to die raving mad in London than evaporate in Richmond” (71). Virginia decides to go for a walk later on when she feels like she’s about to relapse. She walks through Richmond thinking, “I am alone, Virginia thinks, as the man and woman continue

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