Mr./Ms. Good Enough
Clarissa Vaughan. What a character. When I think about Clarissa Vaughan, I think about strength, hope, innocence, and sadness. These “virtues” manifest themselves in her thoughts and actions and I see them stemming mainly from the inside due to her past experiences. She is strong because she is an independent woman who can keep it all together, but is comfortable/confident enough to deal with her problems. Her innocence is tied to hope because she genuinely gives the impression of a child, wide eyed, and full of wonder with the world and that it seems that no matter what happens, she genuinely is optimistic about things. The sadness does not necessarily come from her, but through observing how she leads her life, and the nostalgia she experiences.
When I was reading through The Hours, I could not help but think that I was reading, more or less, an unresolved love story. A love story that had a “good enough” ending instead of a happily ever after, and we have caught her on the upswing of feelings of nostalgia of “what could have been.”
To me, the nostalgia with which she is struggling, with regards to this love story, is her desire to re-experience/recreate her relationship with Richard, her first love, an unconditional love with no constraints, the typical “puppy love” “high school romance.” Her relationship with Sally on the other hand, is the adult relationship, the domesticated, healthy and rational relationship. At times, what is lacking in that relationship is the spark, or the butterflies in the stomach feeling. On the flip side, the dangers of her love affair with Richard are immaturity, superficiality, and more often than not, those intense feelings are fleeting.
On a broader scope, I think that everybody “suffers” from feelings of nostalgia and wonders what if? These little longings are usually triggered by an association to something material that allows these memories to resurface. I think that we go through a lot of those what ifs on any given day but because there is so much going on, and our short term memory is flooded with so much stimuli in such short amounts of time, that we quickly “forget” what we were reminiscing. Only the significant life altering choices that we have made where we spent hours agonizing over the right decision (e.g. buying a house versus renting, new car versus used, college, this person as a significant other versus the other), maintain a longer half life in our conscious. Obviously there are exceptions to ever rule, but I do not think it would be too outrageous to say that the importance/significance of a decision can be measured by the amount of time spent deciding.
On the other hand, I do not think the product of the times in which she lives had as much of a significant effect when compared to the lives of Virginia Woolf and Laura Brown. We must remember that the “modern,” and therefore much more progressive, world that she inhabits in the novel is definitely not as strict as the 1950 San Francisco, or around 1900 England. This is why she could live openly as a lesbian with her partner for 10 years and not be considered a deviant. I believe that the roles that the outside stimuli play are just to trigger past memories through the use of associations.
I enjoy your post I agree with you that in most novels we do not explore the inner workings of our character. This novel’s objective is usually to illustrate how the protagonist and antagonist interact with each other on an external level. “We can’t sit around and learn how the main character takes his coffee when the villain of the story is raging terror.” That is exactly what happens in many novels, we spend so much time watching our characters interact with the fictional universe that even as readers we at times over look seeing our protagonist as anything but entertainment. We keep on reading along and pushing forward to see what the next pivotal moment in the story will be however sometimes we do not stop to get a deeper look at our characters. What makes them tick and why? What else is below the surface that we are not seeing? With Jane Eyre we were in her head for around five hundred pages, learning about her psyche and understanding her on a deeper level than simply a woman in the 19th century England. In order for us to look below the surface of our characters authors would have to give us access into a character’s inner thoughts. As you said, what we see on the outside may not be what is going on the inside.
i don't know about all ya'll but I think following a main character's thoughts hour by hour has the potential to be entertaining-- it makes me think of Pulp Fiction when Travolta Samuel Jackson's characters are discussing a royale with cheese.
The entire conversation serves little purpose in the plot. In fact the plot has very little to do with the enjoyment of the film--its those moments when Vincent absent mindedly blows off someones head or the famous "foot massage" dialogue that I return to again and again in my mind.
Why was it necessary for them to discuss the topic so thoroughly? I mean-- it's a lot like The Hours. Instead of a straight to the chase narrative we follow the two gangsters thorough their daily life, much like we follow Clarissa and Woolf's lives, that are, for the most part, uneventful and then punctuated by incredibly potent scenes.
The construction of a narrative through separate moments, like a montage is so unnatural- we forget that we are more attuned to small talk, thoughts quickly forgotten, a mess of ideas, rhetoric, distractions, chosen observation.
This is how most of our lives are constructed-- unless you have an author nit picking your experiences for you?
Perhaps our daily lives are not so unworthy of writing down-- through all of the information fed to us through the senses we naturally transform it into some coherent thought. There is some internal editing going on in there wouldn’t you say?