The Death of a Poet

The film The Hours tackles the question that many readers may have after reading Mrs. Dalloway, namely “Why was Septimus included in the novel?” In the film, Virginia Woolf spends much of the movie contemplating the death of the protagonist in her newest novel. In one of the final scenes, her husband asks her “Why must someone die?,” to which she answers “Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.” When her husband asks, “Who will die?,” she responds “the poet.” This is clearly meant to reflect Woolf’s depressed and suicidal nature when she was writing Mrs. Dalloway. Through her writing, Woolf was expressing her own will to die “so that the rest of us will value life more.”

            In the film, our modern Clarissa Dalloway is planning a party at her apartment later that night. During the day she gets emotional when she begins to consider that the best days of her life are past her. However, at the climax of the film she visits her terminally ill friend Richard to take him to the party in his honor, and during her visit he commits suicide by jumping out of the window.

            Initially, Clarissa is in shock over Richard's death. But after a conversation with Richard’s mother, Clarissa finds new love for her partner and her daughter. While obviously she is still shaken from her friend’s death, in her final scene she seems to be already looking at life with a newfound appreciation. This expands upon Woolf’s reasoning concerning the death of a character. In the novel, Clarissa does not actually know Septimus (unlike the relation between her movie persona and Richard), but she hears of his death at her party and it affects her deeply. In this sense, Mrs. Dalloway is also changed by the death of “the poet” and perhaps the she, too, would go on to appreciate life more fully.