Universidad Nacional del Litoral

Licenciatura en Inglés

Literatura en Lengua Inglesa II

Docente: Cristina Rivas

Alumna: Romina Paola Piñeyro

Comisión: SF4

The purpose of the present paper is to give a critical review and examine closely those

differences and similarities between Stephen Daldry’s 2002 film version of The Hours

and Michael Cunningham’s novel of the same name.

Stephen Daldry’s award-winning film version shows a wonderful screenplay production

in the hands of David Hare, in this way proving the permeability between the borders of

high culture (reading populations) and popular ones (cinema goers), paraphrasing the

words of Seymour Chatman in her essay “Mrs Dalloway progeny : The Hours as a

second degree narrative” . Both the movie and the book make use of Virginia Woolf’s

intermingles with her own novel’s main character Mrs Dalloway as the focus of

attention and starting point for a multiple point of view in the narrative, a vast use of

the stream of consciousness technique (so much used by Woolf herself), an intricate,

anti chronological time structure ,flashbacks and low-concept, low-key themes. All this,

added to the transporting scenes of the three different main female characters. On one

side, Virginia Woolf’s depression cast by Nicole Kidman's with an “imperious

prosthetic nose” and highlighted central role as the tormented, suffering writer. Also, a

common woman of the ‘50s who lives in Los Angeles shortly after World War II

portraying a young and pregnant housewife named Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) .
She is making a strong effort to hug her boring, loving husband and film-perfect style

of suburban life. Cultural and retracted, she finds a brief escape and open breathing in

reading Woolf's novel and, leaving her small son all alone, she decides to rent a hotel

room - a room of her own where no one will bother her- and imagines the end of

everything. Later she will also appear in the third story. This third story, is set in New

York in contemporary times, in these times, Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) is

preparing to give a party for her best friend and previous love Richard (who is always

calling her Mrs Dalloway humorously) to celebrate his major poetry prize. Richard, on

the other hand, is in the terminal stages of Aids and does not wish to be part of the

celebration and the crowd , also suffering from a depression.

All the main characters share that anguish provoked by time that chokes them and that

is displayed in the movie by means of gestures and looks on the actresses.

As a reader of Virginia Woolf myself, I find it hard to see the real person that Virginia

Woolf was made into a fictional character on the screen and in the novel with certain

characteristics that do not show or live up to determined expectations from a reader.

Given the scenes one imagines when reading a novel, the encounter with a cinema

version is sometimes shocking. Some examples may be pointed out and will help to

expand this idea:

 Hare's script leaves open interpretation and ommits words for the same purpose,

but not taking the element of three different voices regarded as too confusing

and an omniscient off-screen type of narrator as over-literary and even naive, he

had to make his characters speak out loud things, that is, let them speak those

thoughts that are so richly and vividly described by means of the stream of

consciousness technique, that were merely implicit in Cunningham's text. In the

book, we take it for granted but we do not hear it. when we listen to them,
 however, we feel embarrassed. This is most striking in two late scenes involving

Laura Brown, the least articulate of the women.

 Husband—and successful socialist and owner of a publishing house—Leonard

Woolf is utterly over protective. He and his wife have moved to the London

suburbs to relieve and free Virginia from the social , psychological , stressing

pressures, assuming that this will be good for her health, but after eight years of

peaceful sorroundings, she is agonising in that style of sedate life and would

like to return to the city, the lights, the splendour, the noise. When she goes away

from her home without saying a word and and strides straight to the nearest

train station, Leonard runs after her. A sharp argument occurs between them. He

reminds her of her clinical conditions and history and their motives for

originally leaving London. But, between the the country life and death, she

whispers almost without breath, “ I choose death!” This funny little scene and

its effect in both book and movie, which proves to be the decisive, climactic

episode of the Woolf segment, is revealing, foreboding, especially seeing how

Leonard agrees without words to go with her into the train. While not a literal

word is seriously devoted to the writer’s fiction or her and her husband’s

conviction and ideas (socialism, feminism, pacifism, etc.), much less to the

character of the epoch, this “lifestyle” choice, this spontaneous going into the

train is made into a life-and-death issue. Leonard prefers not to contradict her.

But then— considering the results, by and large, of their artistic or scholarly

labors, of their belonging to intellectual groups —one assumes that

contemporary intellectuals have to be putting most of their creative energy into

such earthshaking situations.

  What mostly calls one’s attention about the contemporary sequences and order

in particular in both the novel and the film is the blinding, sedating absorption

in oneself and complacency the characters show. This is an advantegeous point

against analysing inquiring and being inquired. The life led by Clarissa Vaughan

and her lover, Sally, is put into words in Cunningham’s book in the following

way: “Two floors and a garden in the West Village! They are rich, of course;

obscenely rich by the world’s standards; but not rich rich, not New York City

rich.” The “of course” is a nice way of putting it.

* As regards details, then, there is the scene in the book which would have helped the

movie to set a more thorough idea of the political and social context and setting but

unfortunately was not included in the movie. And that is when Sally is having lunch

with a film star: “There is no more powerful force in the world, she thinks, than fame.”

Both movie and novel stimulate the reader or audience to sort out an impression on

Virginia Woolf’s life from her suicide backwards and christalyse a dramatic picture of

the artist as a middle aged woman who was losing her senses. The movie tries to avoid

the gladness or those moments of revelation there were in Virginia Woolf’s life putting

her not in a position of a clever, self sufficient woman but an ill and neurotic, even

histerical victim, hinting that she committed suicide immediately after having finished

writing her novel “Mrs Dalloway”.

Cunningham’s novel focuses on the mind of the possessed author and goes after her

towards the riverside, recreating, with pity and sympathy the sorrow of her depression

and anguish looking for relief in a calm death in the water. The author of the novel even

includes the letter that Woolf had written to her husband the very same day of her
suicide. In this aspect, novel and movie manage to depict the conflict and clash of

emotions that must have taken place in the mind of Virginia Woolf, enough reasons to

take the drastic decision of filling her pockets with rocks and then drown.

When it comes to scenery details, I think Daldry has achieved in living up to the

standard expectations of the reader’s mind. The river bank to which Virginia goes,

though, may not be like that river one would imagine, more similar to the sea, more

embracing. The house, the country life Virginia is leading, and the solitude provoked by

this are satisfactorily portrayed in the book and displayed in the movie.

The use of costumes, Virginia Woolf loose clothes and her simple and disarranged hair

style agree with that idea of a artist who cares only for creating and for the essential

moments of revelations which Virginia Woolf mentiones so many times in her novels,

short stories and essays, those moments of illumination in the middle of chaos, such as

the scene with the dead bird in the movie when she lies on the floor and, all of a sudden,

she utters: “she will die”. This words serve as epiphanies for the rest of the novel and

movie, stating a sort of prophesy for the end of the novel that she herself was writing as

well as her own end. We could call it “the novel within the novel” as Shakespeare made

use of “the play within the play”, with dramatic irony. All this is very well achieved in

just seconds of the movie.

The other two characters laura Brown and Clarissa (coincidently, the same name as Mrs

Dalloway), are also very well depicted, and the asphyxia Laura Brown feels (Julianne

Moore) is so well played in the moments she is at the hotel, in the way she looks at the

pills she never takes and the avoidance of engaging in deep feelings with her own child.

The passion with which she cries and the moment in which she tries to kiss her

neighbour as a means of escaping show clearly the oppression of the woman, the dread

towards continue living. The audience feels identified with her emotions and her
impotence but at the same time cannot understand how she could abandon her child so

easily. The way in which Clarissa Vaughan goes out every day buying things shows

there is a sort of emptiness going round to which she never submits, she can be said to

be the strongest of the characters, quite well represented by the actress Meryl Streep.

The soundtrack (Philip Glass), the colours, the setting have all helped to situate the

reader’s mind attention in the theme of the novel, that is, what matters, appreciating a

simmetry in the life of these three women and an interconnection of the three stories

sudessfully.

Although suicide eventually tempts three of the film's characters, The Hours is not a

dark or morbid film. I think Daldry's cinema version (2002) enriches and enhances the

book in a way that identifies and makes real those areas in the novel that leave a lot to

be desired by the reader. Above all, it points to the book's fault (or is it purposely?) to

create characters that are not unreal or ridicule in certain ways of life, but human beings

who demand our sympathy and comprehension, and who - if one may appeal to those

categories of a more morally-minded literary criticism - deal with their guilt, self

punishing and responsibility in a believable way out of melodrama and false humility.

It is true, through an apparently complex structure, The Hours enables the author to

raise in the audience those untouchable existential and potentially disturbing questions.

Yet as I see it, the novel suffers from weaknesses resulting from style , which the

comparison with the film might illuminate and nurture. In choosing the actresses,

regardless the claims of the book's critics, the film may act as a trigger for the

exploration of the emptiness lying underneath the text lines , under its apparent

structural ingenuity - a gap that can be seen below any surface "hinting " that the novel's

astounding, clever setup so openly suggests. In this way, the film encourages the type

of thorough search that literary criticism supports.

This is not a film about depression - it's about people standing to find the opportunity of

happiness and deciding on how to achieve it. That's not an easy option, but they do

manage to move towards the light, towards transfiguration and illumination.

Perhaps The Hours' most extraordinary feature is that it aims to be a set of shared ideas

in a movie which has been based on a postmodern novel by Cunningham at the same

time inspired by an earlier book by Woolf,being itself experimental and revealing.

Bibliography:

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Readings, Fifth Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
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 Cunningham Michael ,“The Hours”. Picador. 2002.

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