The first London I was intimately acquainted with: Bloomsbury.
This is where I lived and studied, so it’s only prudent to reminisce through the academic lens of Bloomsbury’s most influential group.
The Bloomsbury Group was elusive, chaotic, and thoroughly critiqued in its heyday. The members all operated independently, yet with a distinct togetherness that unified them through the chaos of modernity. It is nearly impossible to place a singular definition on the group, its motives, or criterion for membership. However, in class we discussed some qualities that characterize the group, and they were also dramatised in The Hours. Rather directly, the legacy of the Bloomsbury Group influenced characters in the film through the writing of Virginia Woolf. Woolf’s book, Mrs. Dalloway, was woven into the plot of The Hours. One of the characters, Laura, lives in sunny L.A. with her husband and sun. Her life is textbook-perfect, yet she is desperately unhappy, and as she progresses through Woolf’s book in the film, she becomes increasingly distressed, to the same suicidal extent as a character in the book. The contrasting dynamic of her nicely curated life with the deeply unhappy individuals is an example of the direct legacy of the dialectics of modernism. Besides the lasting legacy of the literature of the Bloomsbury Group, their chaotic sexual relations – notably homosexuality and their numerous affairs – also impact the plot of the film. The Hours stars a gay character, a lesbian character, and a man having an affair with a student, in addition to complicated sexual relations between heterosexual couples. More than anything, Woolf’s modernism was inspiration and at times detrimental to traditional relationships in the film, and the personalities of the Bloomsbury Group are channeled or mirrored in the personalities of contemporary characters in the film. The Hours explores the complex meaning of belonging, and uses Woolf’s suicide in particular to explore the constant human battle of mortality.
*original here
