Septimus vs. Richard

After watching The Hours in class, I found myself comparing it to Mrs. Dalloway. I was surprised at a few things, like the fact that Richard’s suicide in the movie affected me emotionally a lot more than Septimus’s suicide in the novel. I don’t think it was necessarily from actually seeing it happen, but more because I felt that in the movie, I got to know Richard more and actually understand what he was feeling. In the novel, there is a good deal more of Septimus (than of Richard in the movie), however almost anything about him was coming from inside his head, things he was thinking and these are things that weren’t very emotional. They were strange thoughts, almost hallucinations. The only time we got a glimpse of what Septimus was like before the war was when he and Lucrezia were making the hat and laughing and having a good time; she recollects that that was how she remembered him. In all of Richard’s scenes in the movie, I felt a deep sympathy for what he was feeling simply because we weren’t hearing what he was thinking, we were hearing what he was saying. I think that if Virginia Woolf had given the reader more of an idea of how people saw Septimus from the outside, I would have been able to have a deeper connection with Septimus.