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Chapter 19: Mrs. Brown
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
Virginia is having difficulty concentrating on the books she’s reading, so she tries to reassure herself by thinking of how at dinner, she managed to convince Leonard to move back to London. She makes promises to finish writing her current book and write many more.
Like Laura in the last chapter, Virginia also experiences a moment of triumph, made bittersweet by the knowledge that, as the prologue reveals, she’ll eventually die by suicide. Still, Virginia succeeds in her goal of finishing her book and writing many more. This passage shows how, in fact, dread and anticipation related to the passage of time are not always opposites and can exist alongside each other.
Themes
Suddenly, Virginia thinks of kissing Vanessa. She thinks the kiss was innocent in some ways but also mysterious and not innocent in other ways, which is why they hid it from Nelly. Leonard gets up from his own chair and asks if Virginia is going to bed. She says she’s not tired yet, but Leonard says he’d like to see her in bed within a half hour. Virginia agrees. She thinks about how in her book, she will make it so that Clarissa Dalloway has loved a woman and even kissed a woman, but just once. Clarissa will get to go on living her life and enjoying London while some “deranged poet” will die in the novel instead.
Even now, in her moment of contentment, Virginia can’t help wanting more and thinking of something that disturbs her happiness. Leonard’s seemingly innocuous command for Virginia to come to bed in half an hour reveals a lot about why Virginia feels trapped in her current relationship—and why she thinks a relationship with a woman might be better. Virginia’s story ends with her deciding that her character Mrs. Dalloway should exist in a state of stasis, always enjoying her life in London. And so, fiction offers a way to achieve what isn’t possible in real life.
Themes
