The Hours

When Clarissa returns to her building with the flowers, she meets her partner, Sally, on the way out. Sally has a severe face, gray hair, and a restless disposition. Clarissa feels tender toward her but also disapproves of her yellow jacket. Sally is having lunch with Oliver St. Ives, a B-movie action star who was fired for coming out as gay in Vanity Fair before going on to become a celebrity gay rights activist.

Sally leaves. Clarissa notices the pleasure she felt that morning is gone. The dusty, brown-lighted hallway of her building feels like the entrance to a place of infernal boredom. She feels better once she enters their apartment. She appreciates their luck in finding a two-floor apartment with a garden in the West Village.

Upon reading Sally’s note about lunch, Clarissa suddenly feels that her apartment is not hers, that it doesn’t conform to her taste. She feels her true self lives not in the apartment but in her memory of the tree tapping against the glass and the music it begot; she lives not in the material world of her possessions but in the immateriality of her raw experience, moment to moment. She realizes living with Sally in their apartment is the source of her suffering; she fantasizes about leaving and feeling like herself again, with the future ahead of her. This feeling soon passes.

Clarissa feels snubbed by Oliver St. Ives, who didn’t invite her to lunch. This feeling prompts an extended contemplation of her life and other lives she could live. She vacillates between trying to feel content with what she has and pining for the lost possibility of a life with Richard. Oliver’s apparent interest in Sally over Clarissa makes Clarissa feel she has become trivial on her road to death, when the world will get on just as well without her. She fantasizes about embracing the immortal celebrity from the trailer and crying together over their common suffering.

Clarissa recalls her summer spent with Richard and his lover, Louis (in a house Louis’s parents lent them), when the world overflowed with possibility. She’d rationalized that the romance she developed with Richard was in the spirit of free love and didn’t hurt Louis, despite the fact he was always (seemingly accidentally) cutting himself that summer. Clarissa imagines the life she and Richard could’ve created together, probably in Europe, if she’d returned his kiss of the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal that she passed that morning: “[A life] full of infidelities and great battles [...] a vast and enduring romance laid over friendship so searing and profound it would accompany them to the grave [...] a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself” (111).

Clarissa knows that having multiple romances also could’ve created a life without the secure love Sally provides. What Clarissa cherishes most is a night from before she and Richard started sleeping together, when they shared their first kiss by a pond at dusk and had dinner afterward. In that moment, she was happy like in no other because of the future life it foreshadowed so vividly; now she knows there will be no other moment like it.

The cake doesn’t turn out as the picture of bounty and health Laura envisioned—it looks amateurish and small. She invents a task for Richie as she ices it, not wanting him to ruin it, but she doesn’t plan the lettering and it ends up cramped.

Laura foresees how Dan will receive her presents: grateful for the sentiment but not the things themselves. He seems satisfied with what he has. This lack of desire and his work satisfaction confuse Laura. She reminds herself to be grateful that he loves her for who she is and doesn’t care about things. She wants to be the competent mother, the loving wife; she doesn’t want to be the reclusive Laura Zielski she was: “the strange woman, the pathetic creature, full of quirks and rages, solitary, sulking, tolerated but not loved” (116). Laura remembers that Virginia Woolf drowned herself.

Laura’s neighbor Kitty knocks. Laura panics because she’s not properly dressed and considers ignoring the knock until she sees Richie has noticed it. She lets Kitty in, who is the embodiment of domesticity. Kitty was a popular, confident girl who graduated in the same class as Dan. Laura knows that in a life where she’d been in that same class, Kitty would’ve bullied her; however, in this life, where Laura is married to a decorated war hero, they’re friends. Laura relishes the proximity to Kitty’s celebrity aura their friendship affords but simultaneously feels guilty about liking her.

Kitty comments that the cake is cute; to Laura, this comment reveals how pathetic the cake really is: “The cake is cute [in] the way a child’s painting might be cute. It is sweet and touching in its heartfelt, agonizingly sincere discrepancy between ambition and facility” (119). Laura asks about Kitty’s husband, Ray, a vital boy grown into an unremarkable man incapable of impregnating his wife.

Kitty has come to ask Laura to feed their dog while she’s in the hospital for three days for a growth in her uterus. This news changes Laura’s view of Kitty from a dutiful wife standing by her war-damaged, possibly infertile husband to a tragic figure. Laura consoles Kitty and they share a prolonged, intimate embrace. Laura notices Kitty’s pleasant smell and breasts as she rests her head in Laura’s breasts. Laura kisses Kitty on the forehead, and then their lips touch. Kitty pulls away first, and Laura feels ashamed of herself, fearing she’s been a “predator.”

After Kitty leaves—having deflected the intensity of the interaction by simply saying to Laura, “you’re sweet”—the world becomes strangely flat to Laura. The suburban shopping street outside seems squished. She longs to return to bed and Mrs. Dalloway. She again recalls the line, “life, London, this moment of June” (128). She goes into the kitchen and trashes the cake; she feels relieved. She plans a new cake, free of its predecessor’s flaws.