Virginia Woolf, in the novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925), introduces the character of Clarissa Dalloway, wife of Richard Dalloway (member of Parliament). For only about 15 hours, from nine o’ clock in the morning when she goes to buy some flowers for her party, until the early hours of the next day, when her guests depart the readers spend their time with her, are very close to the experience of her real life and to all the daily stimuli which remind her of others in the past.
To The Lighthouse instead consists of three parts divided into many sections. The first part, the longest, is The Window, where it is presented a family, the Ramsays, and three guests for only a few hours and nothing really happens. The main character is Mrs. Ramsay. The following part Time Passes, is very short and it is like a poetic elegy on the uninhabited house ten years after, Mrs. Ramsey being now dead. The third part The Lighthouse sees Lily Briscoe, an artist, unable to finish a long meditated picture, who finally achieves success when she feels the presence of Mrs. Ramsay so strongly upon her that she seems actually to see her. James, Mrs. Ramsay’s son, who as a child had been unable to visit the lighthouse, now visits it with his father and sister. The lighthouse has certainly got a symbolic meaning; its light seems to symbolize the final peace in which personality and the fret of life are lost. Virginia Woolf uses two times, the chronological and the interior time to better show the difference between what characters think and their daily life.
This concept of time is well described in the 2002 film The Hours by Stephen Daldry in which the author follows the life of three women, three different generations, three diffrenet times – V. Woolf (1920s), an unhappy pregnant mother (1950s)and Clarissa Dalloway (2000s) .
This concept of time is well described in the 2002 film The Hours by Stephen Daldry in which the author follows the life of three women, three different generations, three diffrenet times – V. Woolf (1920s), an unhappy pregnant mother (1950s)and Clarissa Dalloway (2000s) .