The Hours: Between Safety and Servitude

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 64, No. 3, September 2004 (Ó 2004) THE HOURS: BETWEEN SAFETY AND SERVITUDE Marilyn Charles This paper explores the issue of how character is created and re-created in the context of relationships. This theme, salient in the recent film The Hours, has been particularly problematic for creative women, who are often caught in tensions between self-development and relationship. Two case examples are given, in counterpoint to the film and to illustrations from Woolf’s life and work. Through these various lenses, we can consider the complex interplays between our conjectures as to the expected price of relationship, and the actual price exacted as our various dramas unfold. KEY WORDS: film; Virginia Woolf; recognition; creativity; relationship. The cinema provides an opportunity to encounter our myths regarding love and relationships. Within the privacy of the darkened space, we are invited into the narrative being portrayed, to experience and then consider the meanings of that portrayal. One recent film that offers up many riches for our consideration is Stephen Daldry’s The Hours (2002), which interweaves the stories of three women in three different eras. Through the intricate interplay of story upon story, The Hours provides a richly textured hall of mirrors within which we are invited to consider how each character reflects and refracts images of the others. Providing the unifying theme that brings together these three women is Virginia Woolf’s (1925) novel, Mrs. Dalloway. The character of Clarissa Dalloway may be seen as an attempt by Woolf to puzzle through the paradigmatic social persona that called to and yet ineluctably eluded her (Bell, 1972a,b): The tensions between the social and the creative self (Woolf, 1978). Born into an era and class in which the social graces had reached the form of an art; Virginia Woolf seems to have been haunted by memories of her mother’s consummate mastery of that art, in harsh juxtaposition to her own relative ineptitude. This was a theme that Woolf Marilyn Charles, Ph.D., is Adjunct Professor of Clinical Psychology, Michigan State University, and a Training and Supervising Analyst, Michigan Psychoanalytic Council. She is in private practice in East Lansing, Michigan. Address correspondence to Marilyn Charles, Ph.D., 325 Wildwood Drive, East Lansing, MI 48823-3154; e-mail: [email protected]. 305 0002-9548/04/0900-0305/1 Ó 2004 Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis 306 CHARLES was to return to repeatedly, evoking the beauty of her images of mother, while noting the costs of pursuing that particular path (1927). Interwoven skillfully and hauntingly in The Hours are vignettes from three lives: That of the author, Virginia Woolf, as she parses through the phrases and ideas that are to become Mrs. Dalloway; Mrs. Brown, a woman in the fifties who is reading the finished work; and Clarissa, a contemporary woman who is, in some ways, Mrs. Dalloway come to life. The juxtaposition of these three women’s lives provides us with an opportunity to think beyond the context or the given characterization, and to consider each character (and her relationships) from various angles. Cunningham (1998), the author of the novel upon which the film is based, had infused the pages of The Hours with the spirit of Virginia Woolf, and speckled the landscape with various of the dilemmas that concerned her in her life and in her writing. A common thread that unifies the three women in The Hours is the dilemma of how to define the self in relation to the other: How can one love and be loved and survive intact? This is a theme that preoccupied Woolf for most of her adult life, having watched various important women in her life sacrificing their lives and interests to the men they loved (Bell, 1972a,b). This theme is brought forward perhaps most forcefully in the scene in The Hours in which Virginia1 and Leonard sit at the train station, caught by the tension between the importance of being loved and cared for, and the price of that protection. In that moment we are pulled beyond the ostensible roles of the characters, and invited to consider more deeply who is keeping whom alive, and to what ends. True to the style of Virginia Woolf, in whose novels a question, character, or scene may be considered from various angles, settings, times, and vantage points, these questions are also considered in the dilemma of Mrs. Brown, as she struggles to survive the love of her husband and child; and of Clarissa, as she threads her way through her various allegiances and regrets. In Clarissa, as in the character of Mrs. Dalloway, we see the price of opting for the feminine role of hostess, keeper of the flame. And yet, even here, we are invited into the layers, as Sally (Clarissa’s longtime partner) becomes the protective force that enables Clarissa to sustain Richard (the poet; her former lover, who is dying of AIDS), who, in turn, sustains Clarissa’s fantasies of self. For all three women, there is a difficult interplay between the relationships that sustain life and the fantasies that sustain the self. Each would seem to undermine existence in important ways. 1 I will use ‘‘Virginia’’ to refer to the character of Virginia Woolf in the novel and film, The Hours. THE HOURS: BETWEEN SAFETY AND SERVITUDE 307 Another common thread that weaves these women together is the narrative as a form; as a mode of expression and a means for understanding self. As we watch Virginia considering her words—rolling them carefully off her tongue—we are invited into the act of creation, to more carefully consider the character being created by the character. The character of Clarissa affords us an opportunity to consider the character as character, culled from the pages of history and pulled forth into the present. We see her being written, not only by Virginia, but also by Richard (who has made Clarissa a central character in his novel) and by herself. For Richard, Clarissa is Mrs. Dalloway come to life. He captures a piece of her essence in this characterization, but also loses her. For this latter-day Clarissa, much like her prototype in Woolf’s novel, Richard is the person she might have loved had she not opted for security. In contrast, as we look from the vantage point of Mrs. Brown, we are being invited more explicitly to consider not only the character who has been created, but also the character for whom she has been created. Mrs. Brown, too, is being created from multiple directions, inviting us into the book within a book within a book that pulls us out of any individual characterization into the issue of character itself, and the often conflicting acts of creating character as text, versus creating character in terms of being and becoming. By jarring our attempts to neatly categorize, layer, and contextualize these various characterizations, The Hours attempts to both bridge and define the space between the original inspiration and its ultimate end(s): The inevitable encounter between inspiration and the clumsiness of creation. Virginia is ostensibly writing the drama, but is also being written by the drama she is attempting to convey. Mrs. Brown is reading the drama, but is also being written by the drama in which she longs to both lose and find herself. They are co-conspirators, and we who watch conspire along with them in these acts of identification, disidentification, and co-creation. Behind them both is the shadow of the creator of this particular novel brought to the screen, Michael Cunningham, who creates for us his own interpretations of the struggles of these women to create self in a world in which they feel so greatly constrained by the male characters who are co-writing the text. It is a beautiful irony that the dilemma of these women is finally interpreted to us through the visioning of the very male voice that Virginia Woolf tried so hard to both speak to and leave behind. As we search for ways of understanding the character of ‘‘Mrs. Brown,’’ we encounter Woolf’s essay ‘‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,’’ in which ‘‘Mrs. Brown’’ becomes a euphemism for human nature itself: ‘‘Character imposing itself upon another person’’ (1984, p. 199). By way of illustrating this position, Woolf (1984) describes an experience of seeing a woman on 308 CHARLES a train. She calls her ‘‘Mrs. Brown,’’ after a comment by Mark Gertler, in which he ‘‘denounced the vulgarity, the inferiority of what he called ‘‘literature’’ . . . ‘‘For it always deals with Mr. and Mrs. Brown,’’—he said—with the personal, the trivial, that is’’ (p. 85). Woolf, in contrast, does not define the personal as trivial, but rather sees the very purpose of the novel as the expression of character, positing ‘‘Mrs. Brown’’ as the inevitable mystery that calls to be elucidated through the narrative form. For Woolf, far from being trivial, to actually bring to life the character of another is a monumental task: ‘‘If one could give a sense of my mother’s personality one would have to be an artist. It would be as difficult to do that, as it should be done, as to paint a Cézanne’’ (1976, p. 85). To actually bring a person to life is the challenge, a challenge that was always at the heart of Woolf’s writings, as she created characters from those that threatened to become lost to the mists of history. It was Woolf’s genius that enabled her to consummate this impossible task; to be able to create portraits with such incredible artistry that her sister Vanessa described the portrait of their mother in To the Lighthouse as ‘‘more like her to me than anything I could ever have conceived of as possible. It is almost painful to have her so raised from the dead’’ (in Bell, 1972b, p. 128). In The Hours, we watch Virginia attempting to create Mrs. Dalloway from her own experiences and conjectures. In Mrs. Dalloway, she creates the consummate social being, a far cry from Virginia herself, for whom there was always a tension between the social self and the creative self (Bell, 1972a,b). Virginia Woolf’s social experiences fed her creativity, but also exhausted her and made it difficult for her to write or, at times, to even maintain her equilibrium. In the film The Hours, we see this same tension expressed from another side, in the character of Mrs. Brown, who is also attempting to find some equilibrium between the strains of the social self and the private self that is needing nurturing. From one vantage, she would seem to be the woman who is trying to lose herself and also find herself within the pages of the novel Virginia is creating. ‘‘It’s about a woman who seems to be happy,’’ she says to her friend Kitty, in reference to the novel Mrs. Dalloway, ‘‘but she’s not.’’ Much as Mrs. Brown warns us not to passively accept the surface layerings of the character with whom we are presented, so, too, in the essay ‘‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,’’ Woolf admonishes the reader not to accept passively the writer’s depiction of Mrs. Brown: ‘‘For she is just as visible to you who remain silent as to us who tell stories about her’’ (1984, p. 211). In this way, Woolf invites Mrs. Brown into a dialogue in which she seems reluctant to engage. ‘‘Nevertheless,’’ Woolf continues, ‘‘you allow the writers to palm off upon you a version of all this, an image of Mrs. Brown, which has no likeness to that surprising apparition THE HOURS: BETWEEN SAFETY AND SERVITUDE 309 whatsoever. In your modesty you seem to consider that the writers are different blood and bone from yourselves; that they know more of Mrs. Brown than you do’’ (p. 212). Woolf laments this passive acceptance of the writer’s truth that corrupts the search for a greater Truth. ‘‘Your part is to insist that writers shall come down off their plinths and pedestals, and describe beautifully if possible, truthfully at any rate, our Mrs. Brown. You should insist that she is an old lady of unlimited capacity and infinite variety . . . for she is, of course, the spirit we live by, life itself’’ (p. 212). In the film, true to Woolf’s (1976) portrayal, Mrs. Brown underestimates herself. It is only her spirit that survives—that insists on survival, no matter what the price. Juxtaposed are the young Mrs. Brown, overwhelmed by the constraints of marriage and motherhood, and the echoes of Mrs. Brown, brought into the narrative through her adult son, Richard (the poet, once again). Richard has been writing and re-writing Mrs. Brown. He (re-)creates her from his memories, needs, wishes, and disappointments. In his novel, he kills her by her own hand, which speaks to the emotional truth of the situation from his perspective, if not the ‘‘truth’’ from an outer view (she had actually abandoned him when he was quite small). We find ourselves invited into other views of relationship as prison. We see Mrs. Brown struggling to be what she is expected to be, and to also survive the encounter and, in counterpoint, we see her son caught within the vestiges of her failures. In his own way, Richard, too, struggles to be what he is expected to be, but also begs to be set free from this life become prison. Richard is dying; Clarissa cares for him, virtually keeping him alive. And yet, he finds himself with fewer and fewer bearings in this world, more and more lost to the voices that haunt him in this new reality being created as his disease destroys his mind. Cunningham’s poet brings this latter-day Mrs. Dalloway into direct contact with the poet who had haunted the pages of Mrs. Dalloway from afar. The poet, in both novels, would seem to carry the portion of Virginia Woolf that was haunted in waking life and dreamed of release. Thoughts of death and respite from her struggles were never too far away. Much as Virginia, at times, stayed alive for Leonard, Richard is staying alive for Clarissa (he tells her), but it’s too much for him. For Richard, it is Clarissa who is writing the story of his life, a story he has attempted to collaborate in, but can no longer keep up the pretense. ‘‘I don’t think I can make it to the party,’’ he says. ‘‘I’m sorry.’’ He laments the loss of the Mrs. Dalloway of the past: the character they have co-created, whom Clarissa keeps present through her relationship with Richard. Ultimately, Richard finds himself imprisoned by Clarissa’s need to keep him/her present. He departs from this life paraphrasing the same words with which 310 CHARLES Virginia takes her departure from her own life: ‘‘You’ve been so good to me, Mrs. Dalloway,’’ he says. ‘‘I don’t think two people could have been happier than we’ve been.’’ This juncture marks the pivotal dilemma that I wish to explore: That of the price of being in relation; the price of being kept alive. In the novel, The Hours, Cunningham describes Virginia coming up against the irresolvable dilemma, in which Leonard has become equated with the side of caution. For Leonard, London represents Virginia’s madness and his fears of losing her. Richmond represents the fantasy that he can keep her safe from herself and keep her with him. For Virginia, London represents life; Richmond represents a living death. And here, of course, is the dilemma: he’s entirely right and horribly wrong at the same time. She is better, she is safer, if she rests in Richmond; if she does not speak too much, write too much, feel too much; . . . and yet she is dying this way, she is gently dying on a bed of roses. Better, really, to face the fin in the water than to live in hiding (Cunningham, 1998, p. 169). The film version is more explicit. In the scene at the train station, Virginia says to Leonard, ‘‘I’ve endured this custody. I’ve endured the imprisonment. My life has been stolen from me. I’m living a life I have no wish to live. How did this happen?’’ ‘‘This is not you speaking,’’ replies Leonard, ‘‘This is not your voice.’’ ‘‘It’s my voice,’’ replies Virginia. ‘‘It’s mine and it’s mine alone. If I were thinking clearly, I would tell you: You cannot find peace by avoiding life, Leonard.’’ In this scene, we as onlookers sense that both participants are clearly aware of what is at stake: Leonard stands on the side of the prolongation of life, even at the price of its quality, whereas, for Virginia, as the quality attenuates, there is no life. On one side is Leonard and the closed up life she has been leading. On the other side is London, and all London implies about freedom, about kisses, about the possibilities of art and the sly dark glitter of madness. Mrs. Dalloway, she thinks, is a house on a hill where a party is about to begin; death is the city below, which Mrs. Dalloway loves and fears and which she wants, in some way, to walk into so deeply she will never find her way back again (Cunningham, 1998, p. 172). In this depiction, Virginia herself has been split between the surface social self and the mad poet self, dying in the city below. The idea that marriage in some ways represents death, particularly for the woman, is omnipresent in Woolf’s writings. We find this idea played THE HOURS: BETWEEN SAFETY AND SERVITUDE 311 out in her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), as Rachel’s betrothal comes to signal her death. Maze (1983) suggests that, for Woolf, this fate ‘‘represents the death of the soul that is to be feared in matrimony’’ (p. 96), a theme that comes up again in To the Lighthouse (1927). In the latter novel, we are invited into the conflict between the solitary life and the life of union, which is also one of servitude. These two sides are played out in the roles of Lily and Mrs. Ramsay. At some level, what is being played out, in the opposition between solitude and union, would seem to be the urge for re-union with the mother (Wolf and Wolf, 1979). In this regard, it is important to remember that for both Virginia and Vanessa Woolf, the Ramsays clearly represented their parents, Julia and Leslie Stephen (Bell, 1972b). The direness of the dilemma of the tension between solitude and union is depicted very early in the novel To the Lighthouse, as Mrs. Ramsay listens to the waves breaking on the shore, and experiences them as both supportive guardians and destructive engulfment. There is the sense that the desire for immersion in the mother/unconscious is safeguarded by devotion to one’s role in the family drama. However, the supportive protection of the father/husband also represents the death of the more autonomous creative self of the woman. Thus, we see Mrs. Ramsay caught between her compulsion to push the young women she encounters into marriage (in affirmation of the positive side of the split), and the rising dissatisfaction she experiences and pushes away throughout the first portion of the novel (affirmation of her resentment at splitting off her own needs in favour of those of her husband). It is only through her early death that Mrs. Ramsay ultimately finds resolution to her dilemma, but then we see that those she left behind are still caught by the illusion she has promulgated, much as Virginia Woolf found herself caught in the webs of illusion left behind in the wake of her mother’s passing. Mrs. Ramsay is depicted as caught within the web of deceit that arose between the inevitable ‘‘inadequacy of human relationships . . . [and] her instinct for truth’’ (Woolf, 1927, p. 62). In promoting the illusions her husband required for his own vanity, and those that she required for hers, ‘‘it was painful to feel herself convicted of unworthiness, and impeded in her proper function by these lies, these exaggerations’’ (p. 63). Mrs. Ramsay finds herself giving up her solitude and her self for her husband ‘‘for he wished, she knew, to protect her’’ (p. 100). Although the theme of the price of marriage for the woman is a salient one in Virginia Woolf’s novels, it is not just the woman who suffers from the urge for union. The human attachment to obligations interferes with creativity for both men and women, alike. Woolf (1927) is quite clear as 312 CHARLES to the dangers of the seduction: ‘‘For what could be more serious than the love of man for woman, what more commanding, more impressive, bearing in its bosom the seeds of death; at the same time these lovers, these people entering into illusion glittering eyed, must be danced round with mockery, decorated with garlands’’ (p. 151). Mrs. Ramsay envies her husband his work, but only briefly: ‘‘She was driven on, too quickly she knew, almost as if it were an escape for her too, to say that people must marry; people must have children’’ (pp. 92–93). And yet, it is only when she is alone, in her silence, that she feels most herself. ‘‘When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless . . . There was freedom, there was peace’’ (p. 96). By way of contrast, we are given the portrait of Lily, who seems to portray the part of Virginia Woolf that longs for union with her mother but does not accept the solution of the mother (marriage) as a resolution to this dilemma. Lily is a young artist, who is among the various guests visiting the family at their summer home. She seems to have few prospects for matrimony, and yet her relief at maintaining her autonomy and her art outweigh her regret. Lily seems to be quite clear that the price of marriage is a sacrifice of the self: There is a code of behaviour, she knew, whose seventh article (it that on occasions of this sort it behoves the woman, whatever her tion may be, to go to the help of the young man opposite so expose and relieve the thigh bones, the ribs, of his vanity, of his to assert himself (p. 137). may be) says own occupathat he may urgent desire Lily seems not to be tempted by what she describes as the ‘‘rapture’’ (pp. 73–74) of love. And yet, she describes being pulled by the excitement of it, even while she sees quite clearly the treachery of it, particularly for a woman. Lily’s resolution seems to be to allow herself to think about her love for Mrs. Ramsay, while throwing her energies into her painting. Not accepting an illusory resolution (marriage) leaves open the possibility of actually working through her dilemma. Through Lily, we are invited into the urgency of the creative process. We see the forces at work within her: beneath the colour there was the shape. She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment’s flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child (p. 32). THE HOURS: BETWEEN SAFETY AND SERVITUDE 313 It was in her despair at her own inadequacy that Lily longed to turn to Mrs. Ramsay, to declare her love, not for Mrs. Ramsay herself, but for the vision that was created by her of life. This idyllic vision, attributed to Mrs. Ramsay, but actually left in the wake of Julia Stephen’s death, seemed to call to Virginia Woolf, but also threatened to drown her (Bell, 1972a, b). In the portrayal of the transformation of Lily’s desire for Mrs. Ramsay, herself, into the realization that it is the image of Mrs. Ramsay that she longs to capture, we see the tension between the urge to create (that arises from the conception of ‘‘Mrs. Brown’’/Ramsay) and the various inhibitions that are encountered. For Woolf, who struggled throughout her life with the conflicting desires to stimulate her creativity and to titrate her ‘‘madness,’’ this tension was a crucial one. She plays with it in To the Lighthouse, showing us how Mrs. Ramsay’s creative energies are channeled into sustaining the lives of her children and husband. This assignment of roles was in keeping with the dictates of the society of the time. In striking contrast, for Virginia Woolf, it is Leonard who keeps her alive. Because of the mores of the time, Virginia Woolf is not as free as Mr. Ramsay to be sustained with impunity. She finds herself caught between the very disparate roles of ‘‘woman’’ and ‘‘artist.’’ Although in some ways Virginia Woolf experienced Leonard as a threat to her creative process, he also ensured it. It was Leonard who was responsible for her not being institutionalized at various points in time (Bell, 1972b). Given the treatments available at the time, we can surmise that this saved her life: Certainly her creative life. Leonard seems to have been given the somewhat thankless task of trying to keep her alive and in reasonable equilibrium, in spite of herself. We see this depicted most dramatically in the scene at the train station in the film The Hours. The dilemma of self versus other has been particularly problematic for the woman, whose role has traditionally been one of protected protector. For many women, the price of love would seem to be servitude. However, this is often a price paid because of our conjectures regarding the need to sacrifice self for the other that have never been tested in actuality. As we consider the ways in which we come to kill ourselves and one another in these encounters, we come back to the issue of the reflection: How we come to be reflected in the various mirrors we devise as ways of seeing/understanding/misunderstanding self and other. As I try to puzzle through these issues, I think of two patients, in particular, who become caught in the issue of dependence on the other, as the reflected view becomes an annihilating projection. When there is too little faith in the value of the self, we too easily find ourselves selling ourselves for the desired recognition/misrecognition. This condensation or ‘‘symmetrization’’ (Matte-Blanco, 1975) between recognition and misrecognition is 314 CHARLES a crucial issue. We have ideas about recognition and reflection that are based on an idea of a mirror as veridical reflector rather then idiosyncratic refractor of images (Charles, 2003a). However, recognition is a process that is based upon the relative agreement between the two parties as to the veracity of whatever it is that is being seen. Even when there is some agreement that something important is being recognized by the other, we also have beliefs about the price of that recognition, patterned on our past experiences. Insufficient self-regard leaves us liable to becoming caught by our own lack of faith in self. We have the idea that the recognition is an illusion, rather than a real reflection. In this way, we would seem to come into the area of the split-off persecutor that Klein (1975a,b) has described. Ironically, however, in this case we are persecuted, not by the bad, split-off aspects of self, but by the fear that the good aspects of self that have been deposited into the hands of the other for safekeeping are not really ours at all. This comes, perhaps, from the sense that our foundation is so shaky that it cannot be sustained. When we do not believe in the foundation of whatever is being recognized, the recognition itself comes to seem to be a possession of the other rather than a real reflection of the self. We then come to act out a battle for psychic survival that is built on fictions so densely warded off that we cannot even encounter them. They seem, rather, to loom or to intrude upon us in ways that evoke anger, fear, panic, or other ways of not-seeing. Even as the pattern begins to emerge, it can have so many layers that whatever we do see tends to obscure more than it reveals. At those times, it is important to be able to hold both the sense and the non-sense, so that we might weigh on the side of clarity rather than further obscuring the depths. Let me give you an example. I find myself sitting with a woman who, in spite of her many talents and capacities, feels herself to be so wounded and vulnerable that most of her energies are spent in hiding and in other protective and self-destructive measures. Her patterns for relationship are dangerous: her household of origin was chaotic, angry and violent. To be ignored—to be not-seen—was often the safest position. This left her, however, terribly alone, with little sense of herself as a subject in any positive sense. ‘‘Lisa’’ survived by ‘‘performing’’ in school. Now, even though she has been able to be quite successful in the world of work, the arena of relationship remains quite dangerous. Lisa’s relationships with other women tend to be patterned by her mother, an angry and godly woman, who reviles Lisa without ever really ‘‘seeing’’ her. Lisa finds psychic survival difficult to achieve in her mother’s presence. It has been relatively easy for Lisa to see that part of her problem in past relationships has been that she tends to seek out THE HOURS: BETWEEN SAFETY AND SERVITUDE 315 ostensibly strong, narcissistic women, like her mother, in an attempt to finally find one who will ‘‘recognize’’ her in a positive sense. It has been more difficult for her to understand her attachment to a relationship in which she had felt profoundly ‘‘seen,’’ but then discarded. As we were attempting to understand what keeps Lisa so stuck in the remnants of that relationship, I had the sense that we were in the arena of both mother and not-mother. Likening ‘‘Kerry’’ to her mother damned Lisa’s own sense of something different, something positive, in this relationship. We needed to be able to move a little deeper in order, perhaps, to see a bit clearer. As I tried to understand the ‘‘rightness’’ and the ‘‘wrongness’’ of this particular relationship, various images came to mind. The metaphor is often a place where Lisa and I can meet, without the way becoming too imperiled by the intimacy of the encounter. I said that some people are like heat-seeking missiles. They find themselves drawn without any real appreciation of whatever it is that they are being drawn to. Lisa smiled and nodded, resonating to the image of the missile, which, she said, was in line with her sense of having been blasted. Another image came to the fore: I said that many people seemed to be drawn to her good qualities. They had sufficient sense to value her, but then really had nothing to give in return. I likened this to a divining rod that finds water, but cannot get to it; cannot make use of it in any way other than marking the spot. Lisa has taken the dissolution of past relationships to mean that she has nothing of value with which to sustain them. However, the fact that these individuals can’t do anything constructive with what they have found does not mean that there is nothing there. Kerry’s rejection had been experienced by Lisa as an affirmation that Lisa did not have whatever qualities had been seen and valued. However, it is likely that Kerry was responding more to her own needs to heal and be healed than to any need of Lisa’s. When the healing didn’t happen, Kerry had moved off towards the next likely landing place. Lisa was left feeling as though whatever had been recognized either was not real or had no value. She was no longer able to experience the validation once Kerry had ended the relationship. I suggested to Lisa that she might need to learn to look in her own looking glass and find this recognition/validation. This would require the ability to see the recognition in Kerry’s eyes as a reflection of very real parts of Lisa, rather than as a quality of the mirror/person in whose eyes she was being reflected. My thoughts were drawn to a poem that Lisa had given me relatively early in our work together. The poem was very raw and illuminated her creative gifts and acuity of vision, along with her tremendous pain and vulnerability. ‘‘I wonder if what Kerry saw was the part you showed me 316 CHARLES when you showed me your poem: The tremendous pain along with the tremendous capacity,’’ I said. This statement seemed to provide recognition of the parts of Lisa that she needs to have recognized, but is afraid cannot be both recognized and valued. Sitting together with the words between us provides recognition that Lisa can exist, at least within this context. More precarious is the issue of whether she can sustain herself in the presence of others. This vignette brings us, quite pointedly, up against the issue of servitude to the beloved. As we privilege the other out of fear and desire, can this servitude be benign? If we cannot value what we have from within, we wind up trying to buy validation from without, which only serves to the extent that we can keep it present. For Lisa, this has meant a servitude to Kerry, in which she cannot risk bringing her own needs to the fore out of fear of losing the reflection/recognition upon which she depends. However, this dependence on the other also validates the fear that the recognition is a gift bestowed by the other, rather than a reflection of one’s own internal resources. This is the same type of dilemma in which ‘‘Jeanne’’ finds herself caught, as she tries to make a home for herself in the interpersonal world, but loses herself in the process. The other is inevitably an imperfect mirror, most particularly for the creative individual (Charles, 2003b). By definition, the other will not be able to envision the creative act until it is realized, but rather can only have a sense of the potential of the other. For Jeanne, the unrealized potential is equated with lack only. In actuality, however, the potential is the person, whether or not that potential becomes manifest in any particular form or fashion. The enjoyment comes from recognition of the potential and being able to play with it, rather than becoming burdened by the need to express it in some form worthy of its potential. If the value resides in the recognition, it is always ephemeral. It must, therefore, reside in the act of creation. We can see that tension in the life and work of Virginia Woolf, in which there was always a great tension between the act of creation and the depletion that ensued upon the completion of any work (Bell, 1972b). Part of this depletion had to do with the fear that the work would not be valued. As Woolf moved from her immersion in the work itself, to its completion, whereby her energies were not actively revitalizing it, there came a lull during which she did not yet know whether the work would be recognized: Whether its value might be carried by the collective other. For Jeanne, this collective other became the source of her incapacitation. In relational terms, her expectation of not being understood/recognized/valued by the other became a hole through which she lost her self and her creativity. THE HOURS: BETWEEN SAFETY AND SERVITUDE 317 When Jeanne first came in for treatment, she would talk extensively about her frustrations with her partner. Although he made it possible for her to pursue her creative endeavours by supporting her financially and emotionally, he also diminished her through his lack of understanding. Their ways of processing information were so different that their conversations seemed to become increasingly doomed as they became more important. It was difficult for Jeanne to imagine that he might actually be trying to understand through his questions, rather than trying to actively sabotage her attempts at communication. As we explored the patterns upon which her conjectures regarding relationship were based, it became clear that Jeanne’s expectations of her current partner were highly colored by the critical and deprecating quality of her interactions in her family of origin. As her affect intensified in these engagements, it became virtually impossible for her to distinguish present from past. It was only her great intellect and willingness to try to see these interactions from a different perspective that eventually began to provide some relief. The relief from the intensity of the negative affect also afforded the possibility of greater engagement, through which she might actually be able to receive the recognition and positive valuation of the other. For both of these women, there was a tension between the allure of relationship and the fear of the price of actual engagement. Jeanne was fortunate in having found a partner who was sufficiently committed to their relationship that he was able to tolerate the vicissitudes of her ambivalence. Lisa, in contrast, seems to have selected partners who were not able to tolerate her ambivalence. For each of these women, it was their relative inability to make a home for themselves sufficiently within the relationship that put them at risk. This is not so different from the dilemma of each of the women (and also of Richard, the poet) in the film The Hours, in which there was a deadly tension between the self that the character was yearning to create, and the self being evoked by those most near and dear. Virginia seemed to be searching for the enlivening that filled her sails and made her able to be and to work. Leonard, in contrast, was fearful of the price of expending her vitality; fearful of losing her. Clarissa seems to have resolved the tension by finding a relationship that sustained her more pragmatic being, while also maintaining the alliance with Richard that sustained her phantasies of self. We can see, however, in the tensions between these two selves, that this was not entirely a successful resolution of her dilemma, rippling difficulties in all directions. The price of this lack of resolution may be seen perhaps most pointedly in the scene in which Clarissa laments to her daughter the loss of her ‘‘most perfect moment,’’ that had occurred long before the child was ever 318 CHARLES born. Clarissa’s idealization of the past seems to make her unable to realize the price that her lack of resolution exacts upon her daughter. We see these same threads in our encounters with Mrs. Brown. Although the husband seems to be relatively oblivious to his wife’s distress, the child clearly is not. We are shown the child’s resonance to the distress of the mother, which is consuming his energies and torturing his waking dreams. We then see how massively his mother’s distress and ultimate abandonment have marked themselves upon this child-become-man, shaping his work, his relationships, and his being. In this way, we see the price Richard pays for his mother’s inability to resolve her own tension between self and relationship without foreclosing on one or the other. Although we might hope for some more perfect resolution of these dilemmas, in this case truth prevails over fiction, and we are left with our tensions unresolved. No one in this drama survives unscathed in their encounters. Leonard is enriched, but left bereft, as is Clarissa, as is Richard. In the end, we are left with the tension we experienced watching Leonard and Virginia at the train station; left to consider, perhaps more deeply, what is to be the price of attachment—to work; to love; and to life. REFERENCES Bell, Q. (1972a). Virginia Woolf: A biography. Volume I: Virginia Stephen 1882– 1912. London: Hogarth Press. Bell, Q. (1972b). Virginia Woolf: A biography. Volume II: Mrs. Woolf 1912–1941. London: Hogarth Press. Charles, M. (2003a). Mirroring from the perspective of the theories of MatteBlanco. Psychoanalytic Review, 90, 791–809. Charles, M. (2003b). A beautiful mind. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 63, 19–35. Cunningham, M. (1998). The hours. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Klein, M. (1975a). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. In Envy and gratitude and other works, 1946–1963 (pp. 1–24). London: Hogarth Press (original work published 1946). Klein, M. (1975b). Some theoretical conclusions regarding the emotional life of the infant. In Envy and gratitude and other works, 1946–1963 (pp. 61–93). London: Hogarth Press (original work published 1952). Matte-Blanco, I. (1975). The unconscious as infinite sets: An essay in bi-logic. London: Duckworth. Maze, J. R. (1983). Virginia Woolf: Ideas of marriage and death in The Voyage Out. International Review of Psychoanalysis, 10, 95–104. Wolf, E. S., & Wolf, I. (1979). We perished, each alone. A psychoanalytic commentary on Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. International Review of Psychoanalysis 6, 37–47. THE HOURS: BETWEEN SAFETY AND SERVITUDE 319 Woolf, V. (1915). The voyage out. London: Hogarth Press. Woolf, V. (1925). Mrs. Dalloway. London: Hogarth Press. Woolf, V. (1927). To the lighthouse. London: Hogarth Press. Woolf, (1976). In J. Schulkind. (Ed.) Moments of being Sussex: The University Press. Woolf, V. (1978). A. O. Bell (Ed.). The diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume two 1920–1924. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Javanovich. Woolf, V. (1984). Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. In M. A. Leaska (Ed.), The Virginia Woolf reader (pp. 192–212). San Diego: Harcourt Brace Javanovich (original work published in 1924).