One of the monthly projects I have is to reread a literary classic and follow this up by watching one or two film adaptations of the novel. Great works of literature carry a story that deserve to be read over and over again. Most of them only get better with multiple readings. These works present to us stories that carry insights in life that go deep and keep their value. 

The one I have been working on this month is Virginia Woolf‘s Mrs Dalloway. The book was published in 1925. The story takes place on one day in June 1923. The memories of WWI are still very vivid. The novel opens with Clarissa Dalloway walking in central London to the flower shop to buy flowers for the party that she puts on that evening for the elite of London. Her path crosses with the war trauma struck Septimus Smith, who is in the book an alter ego of Clarissa. That day will bring her ample opportunity to think through the choices she’s made in life and their consequences.

The novel stays mostly within the mind of Clarissa. It is written in the streams-of-consciousness technique, the modernist literary form writers like her, James Joyce and William Faulkner became known for. In the book no one whom she meets during that day will know what she really is thinking. All they meet is a charming, reserved woman while within her the deepest reflections on the choices she’s made in life, bubble up. It is a piece of compelling, powerful writing!

In 1998 the Dutch film maker Marleen Gorris, who previously in 1995 had become Oscar-winner with her acclaimed film Antonia’s World, brought Mrs Dalloway to the screen. Films cannot, like the book does, stay in the mind of a person. Gorris tries to solve that through a voice-over, letting Clarissa speak the thoughts that go on inside her. She also uses flash-backs to her youth when she got quite deeply involved with Peter and with Sally, who both courted her. In those parts the movie becomes a period-piece, lacking the emotional and melancholic tension of the book. It makes it into an instructive example of how a director has to struggle with form when faced with an almost unfilmable book. 

The theme that stays with me both through the book and the film is how one looks back at the choices one makes in life. How do you find and maintain peace with the choices you’ve made? choices that initiate one sort of life for you while closing the door on others – perhaps more risky options? Mrs. Dalloway has got one way of life, but she will always wonder what might have been. For the outside world it is respectable, safe and successful. At the inside we find a woman heavy with emotion, with private thoughts fed by the depth of her loneliness.  

Rinus, Aug 2019

*image used under fair use of copyright material in recommendation of the film

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