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Chapter 10: Mrs. Woolf
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Hours, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Passage of Time
Suicide and Mental Health
Marriage, Relationships, and Personal Fulfillment
Reading and Writing
Summary
Analysis
Clarissa fills a flower vase with yellow roses. She is surprised when Louis buzzes the intercom at her apartment. She feels he’s the only New Yorker she knows who would show up without calling first. It’s been about five years since Clarissa last saw Louis, and she’s a little nervous. He looks the same as he has ever since he lost his bulk and strength about two decades ago. They greet each other happily, and Louis tears up.
Yellow roses traditionally symbolize friendship, and in this case, they stand as a reminder that Richard is just Clarissa’s friend and not her romantic partner (who might receive red roses instead). Once again, a chapter echoes the previous one, with Louis’s unexpected arrival mirroring how Vanessa arrived early at Virginia’s place.
Themes
Louis hasn’t heard about Richard’s prize, but Clarissa said he should come and that Richard will be happy to see him. Even though Richard lived with Louis for much of his life, he spent his last years of health writing about a woman in a townhouse in Manhattan, with only a brief appearance from a character who resembles Louis.
This passage reveals that for all Richard’s success, he is just like Clarissa in the way that he longs for the past and all the possibilities it promises. Like many characters in the novel, he was in a relationship that seemed ideal on paper, but he couldn’t let go of his longing for something more.
Themes
Louis walks into the apartment and sees that most of the decorating seems to be influenced by Sally’s taste. He thinks that even though Clarissa definitely looks older, she still has some glamor to her. Clarissa says she can’t believe that Louis hasn’t been back to New York in five years. In reality, Louis has been back—he just never looked her up.
The narration in the novel not only jumps through time but also from character to character, on rare occasions following the thoughts of minor characters like Louis. This type of shifting perspective also appeared in several of Woolf’s works, and it helps show the limitations of the protagonists’ subjective views of the world by providing a different viewpoint.
Themes
Clarissa warns Louis that Richard isn’t the same as he used to be due to his AIDS. They talk about Richard’s one novel. Louis feels Richard barely even tried to hide that he was writing about Clarissa, but Clarissa feels that the character is just Richard’s fantasy of a woman who resembles her. The novel is over 900 pages of almost nothing happening, until suddenly the character kills herself.
Although Richard received acclaim for his writing, this passage questions how talented he truly was. Most of Woolf’s novels (including Mrs. Dalloway) are fairly short, like The Hours itself, standing in stark contrast to Richard’s 900-page epic. This portion of the narrative seems to suggest that even with nearly a 1,000 pages, Richard couldn’t understand Clarissa’s life as well as Virginia Woolf understood her own Clarissa, even though Woolf wrote only a couple hundred pages.
Themes
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Clarissa tells Louis that as much as Richard has changed, he still holds on to some part of his old self. They each regret how they treated each other in the past. For a moment, Clarissa almost thinks it seems like she and Louis are about to have sex, but then Louis mentions that he has fallen in love with a former student named Hunter Craydon (who is at least the fourth of his students that he’s fallen in love with). But in fact, secretly Louis knows that his relationship with Hunter is just an affair.
Like Richard and Clarissa, Louis also holds on to nostalgia for the past, and for him, this takes the form of relationships with much younger students. Louis calls these relationships love even when he knows they’re not, since—like Clarissa—he is always searching for that invigorating feeling that comes in the beginning of a relationship.
Themes
Thinking about love and the past, Louis gets emotional and starts to cry. Just then, Clarissa’s daughter Julia arrives at the apartment. Louis hasn’t seen Julia in five years and almost gets emotional again over how grown up she looks. At last, Louis says he has to go—he’s only in the city for a couple more days, but eventually, he’s moving back permanently. He promises to make it to Richard’s party.
In contrast to the students who help Louis maintain the illusion that he’s still young, Julia has the opposite effect by providing clear evidence of how much things can change in five years. Perhaps because the students are not enough to stop Louis’s fear of aging, he wants to go back to New York City (where he went to college) to try to recapture his youth in a different way.
Themes
As Louis leaves, he thinks back on his past and how, when he was 28 and on a trip with Richard to Rome, he got upset with Richard after a letter from Clarissa to Richard made Louis feel like Richard was more interested in her than in him. He remembers how freeing it felt to take a train to Madrid and leave Richard behind, at least temporarily.
Richard’s obsession with the past prevented him from having a full relationship with Louis. And yet, in spite of all Louis’s frustrations with Richard, it was Richard who decided to leave for good. In Madrid, Louis wanted to be rid of Richard, but when he finally gets his wish years later, he realizes he still feels unsatisfied.
Themes
