Dressing to Please

"Yes, Miss Kilman stood on the landing, and wore a mackintosh; but she had her reasons. First, it was cheap; second, she was over forty; and did not, after all, dress to please."

I was reading these lines from Mrs. Dalloway the other night and this sort of chill went up my spine. I had difficulty with it for a few reasons; are we to dress cheap and dowdy after the age of forty? And, while I don't follow the latest trends slavishly, and I'm not interested in 'dressing to please' in the way Virginia Woolf implies, I do try to dress to please myself. But above all, I should like to avoid becoming Miss Kilman.

I'll admit, I've been a little lazy lately, putting on whatever comes to hand, being a little too 'matchy', with the result of spending the entire day vaguely dissatisfied and uninspired. But those words haunted me, so I turned a blind eye to my spending hiatus, scanned the pages of the latest j. crew catalog, grabbed my bag and went to the store. Armed with fancy ideas about colors, and layers, and textures, I found a few things that give me a fresher outlook on the day. Luckily for me, the current fashions aren't particularly 'matchy' these days. And now, to go back to the closet to send away those things that bore me to distraction ...

The Hours

As a big fan of Virginia Woolf, I’m a little chagrined that it took me so long to see ‘The Hours.’ The film weaves together the lives of three women living in three eras; the famous writer Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) battling depression; Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), a wife and mother in 1950’s suburbia, suffering with her inability to embrace her traditional life; and Clarissa Vaughn (Meryl Streep), a New York editor coming to terms with the inevitable death of an ex-lover and dear friend from AIDS. The thread that connects these three women is Woolf’s book ‘Mrs. Dalloway,’ a story about a London society woman who throws parties to avoid thinking deeply about her inner life and choices she has made. You will find that the story’s plot is subtly woven into the plot of ‘The Hours.’

If you put aside the gender and sexuality politics, the film becomes about defining what constitutes happiness, and how it can be so different from one person to another. Woolf is suffocating in their Richmond, Surrey cottage (though I could certainly find happiness there!) and yearns to get back to their London life. Laura’s husband defines their married life in the suburbs as paradise even as his wife suffers in silence. Even Clarissa, who has thrown off the apparent confines of sexuality of the two previous women, battles anxieties about leading a “trivial” life. As her daughter comments, “it only matters if you think it’s true.”

What saves the film from becoming sentimental is its ability to look at life straight in the eye, unflinchingly.