While my position may appear strange to many, it is one that resonates profoundly for me. The one character who I found to be most sympathetic with was Laura Brown, the mother who abandoned her children without regret and ended her life without death. To me, her actions and background do not appear fictional; she is, in many ways, very much like Clarissa Dalloway. In the novel The Hours, the author explains the reasons why Laura married Dan: "Why did she marry him? She married him out of love. She married him out of guilt; out of fear of being alone; out of patriotism." Was the love she had truly love? Or was it a self-induced kind of affection that arose out of the fear of loneliness - that eternal gripping fear - and patriotism? In the movie, Laura explains to Peggy that she feels as if Dan had deserved her for his actions in the war. But this sentiment, even coming from herself, is unspeakably degrading. For it sets her up as an object, a prize, to be won; Dan deserved her, not because she loved him, but because he needed a reward for putting his life on the front line for their nation.
There is also the matter of her fear of being alone to consider, and it too is not her fault. Everyone is a bit afraid of the chasm of isolation. Perhaps Laura married Dan to escape from it, but she must have found that feeling even more overbearing after marriage. There was undeniably comfort and happiness, if only one-sided, in their lives as husband and wife, but Laura came into this marriage with that feeling of unworthiness, which crept on and strangled her heart. How could she be happy when she didn't feel worthy of it? Like Clarissa in the novel, Laura was agonized by her own thoughts and by the world that demanded her to be happy. In some way I think she parallels Septimus, who too was tortured by his inability to feel what others expected him to experience.
I do not advocate abandoning your family, but desperate times do call for drastic and sometimes unforgivable actions. Laura did so with open eyes and she did not expect forgiveness. It takes courage to leave such a wonderful life behind, yet her act was one to preserve herself, much like Septimus's defiant suicide. It was selfish of her to leave behind Dan, Richie and her daughter, and perhaps some can argue it was too selfish, but it's her desperation to find a life of her own, her enforced sense of unworthiness, and her courage to do so that wrenches my heart and draws my sympathy like no other.
1 comment:
An astute analysis, and a courageous one, in a strange way: our reaction against a person of either gender who abandons his or her children is so instinctively strong, it's especially difficult to engage symphathetically with a character in light of such an act (and a pregnant mother of one killing herself, of course, would also constitute such an abandonment, so this judgment doesn't just emerge at the ending revelation of her flight to Canada). And, let's face it, Laura as portrayed by Moore (one of my favorite actors) is not easy to like--she is so alienated by ordinary social behavior, she doesn't endear herself to the audience. As she says herself at the end, "I don't expect to be forgiven." But she sees her flight as the only possible choice; the alternative is death.
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