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Chapter 2: 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
In Los Angeles in 1949, Laura Brown reads Mrs. Dalloway. She knows that instead of reading in bed, she should be getting up to make breakfast for her husband, Dan, and her three-year-old son, Richie. But she decides to stay in bed, figuring that she is allowed to get away with some “lapses” because she’s pregnant. She plans to make Dan a birthday cake later and set a big bouquet of flowers on a table surrounded by all his presents.
In the first chapter, Clarissa remembers Richard accusing her of being a suburban housewife, and this chapter goes back to the period in time when the stereotype of the suburban housewife first began to take shape. Like Virginia and Clarissa, Laura wants to be a caring partner, but she also wants the independence to do things on her own, like read Mrs. Dalloway by herself if she chooses.
Themes
Laura reads more of Mrs. Dalloway and finds it very beautiful. She thinks about how just five years ago, she heard Dan was dead, only to learn two days later that he was still alive (and someone else with the same name had died). Dan could have married anyone after he came back a hero, but he’d already decided on Laura.
Laura reads another page, wondering how anyone who wrote as vividly as Virginia could ever kill herself. Laura is reading through all of Virginia’s books and likes to imagine sometimes that she has some of the same brilliance in her that Virginia had. At last, she gets ready and goes down to breakfast with Dan and Richie. Laura thinks of the cake she’ll make later in the day and the flowers she’ll buy. Dan has already poured cereal for himself and Richie.
Reading provides Laura with an escape from her daily life, letting her imagine new possibilities. Interestingly, although Laura sees Virginia as a brilliant and free woman, in fact, Virginia dealt with many of the same problems and responsibilities in her daily life as Laura. In this sense, Laura is correct to believe that she might share some of the brilliance of Virginia.
Themes
Laura says Dan shouldn’t have let her sleep in on his birthday, but Dan says she needed the rest. Laura insists, so Dan says he’ll wake her up with him the next morning. She has always been embarrassed about being three years older than him.
Moment-to-moment, Dan acts in ways that seem to show he understands Laura, suggesting that the real causes of her stress are larger social expectations that go beyond Dan (although Dan still buys into these social expectations).
Themes
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Dan leaves for work. Alone with Richie, Laura often feels uncertain of what to do. She tells him to finish his breakfast, then she lights a cigarette while she finishes her coffee. She thinks about how she was up until 2 a.m. the previous night reading and wonders if it’s bad for the new baby. Laura tells Richie about the cake they’re going to make together for Dan, but Richie seems unconvinced that this will actually happen.
This section of the novel shows how, particularly in this time period, a woman’s main role in marriage was often to take care of children. Another detail that helps establish the time period is Laura’s cigarette—at the time, scientists had yet to establish a concrete link between smoking and lung cancer or dangers to pregnancy. This passage helps capture how times change, showing how for all Laura’s anxieties about being a mother, she never considers how smoking is perhaps the biggest risk to her future baby.
Themes
