The Hours

With Virginia’s story pre-concluded in the Prologue, the final chapters focus on Laura and Clarissa.

In Laura’s final standalone chapter, she becomes so alienated from her life that she’s no longer able to force herself to do the things expected of her, as she has been for so long. Her brief vision of a shadow self behind her in the mirror while she delays entering the bedroom—where Dan will call on her to play the role of wife she can no longer play—recalls the shadow self Virginia avoided in mirrors. This apparition is ominous, conjuring images of the horror jump-scare trope in which the haunting spirit suddenly appears behind someone in a mirror. The spirit haunting these two women is the true self that they’ve suppressed or repressed to accommodate the false self that’s expected of them. Laura’s true self includes her repressed sexuality and her suppressed desire to pursue literature. Because she continues to ignore her true self and is stymied in her attempts to accommodate it (such as her trip to the hotel), it “possesses” her not unlike a spirit possesses—against its victim’s best interests. Laura now does more than idly fantasize about suicide; she picks up her full bottle of sleeping pills. In the bedroom, she becomes paralyzed and dissociates again—feeling as if she’s reading her life as a book. Laura’s pronounced detachment and the horror overtones are foreboding: Her options have narrowed to one; her fate is clear.

The plot twist in Clarissa’s final chapter—that Laura is Richard’s mother—upends the predominating fatalistic tone. A sense of fatalism grew as the storylines became increasingly intertwined and, apparently, inter-causal; it appeared many of the characters were destined for Woolfian fates, and for Richard (and, of course, Virginia) these fates were realized. The twist of Laura’s relation to Richard disrupts this sense of fatalism in the storylines of both Clarissa and Laura—who both felt their lives were on tracks they couldn’t change—and in the reader, for whom plot is a kind of fatalism. Trying to die by suicide showed Laura that she had other options, and she fled to Canada to become a librarian, in line with her desire to live a life in books. This path, like any other, was not without its suffering: She felt guilty over abandoning Richard. However, it was an assertion of her free will; she went from reader to author of her life story.

Richard’s suicide and his confession to Clarissa of his sense of failure are cathartic. They finally allow her to shed her insecurity about her conventionality and her feeling of pronounced sehnsucht—that her ordinary life lacked some necessary excitement, the excitement of the literary world. Richard personified these feelings because he pursued poetry and disdained Clarissa’s domesticity, a quality he attached to her by calling her Mrs. Dalloway. By doing so until his death, he tied Clarissa to that fictional character to the extent that Mrs. Dalloway’s psyche became Clarissa’s.

Richard’s death allows Clarissa to shed her false self of Mrs. Dalloway and to embrace her true self. The ordinariness of her life doesn’t distress Clarissa anymore because she’s realized that people’s lives only appear extraordinary from a distance: Richard’s confession of failure showed her that even the person in her life whom she considered the most extraordinary suffered feelings of inadequacy. Furthermore, meeting Laura—the outsize shadow figure that drove Richard’s poetry, “the victim and torturer who haunted Richard’s work” (242)—shows Clarissa that Laura, too, is just another ordinary person, a retired librarian. Clarissa accepts what Virginia realized but couldn’t accept: that life is simply a succession of largely unremarkable hours. However, sometimes amidst these hours something unexpected and transcendent happens: “an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined” (244). We are no more likely to find these special hours in London than Richmond, New York than Wellfleet, downtown Los Angeles than the suburbs. At the end of the novel, Clarissa realizes the impossibility of reliving or reenacting the happiest moment of her life—the kiss by the pond at dusk with Richard. Richard’s lifelong, unfulfilled quest in poetry to regain his mother’s unconditional love suggests that he did not know how to heal and that he was unwittingly trying to change the past. Clarissa knows that only by accepting her life and mourning her losses can she move fully into the rest of her life.