The Hours

It’s the end of the 20th century in New York City. As her partner, Sally, cleans their home, Fifty-two-year-old Clarissa Vaughan leaves to buy flowers for her party for her friend Richard, a distinguished poet. She and Richard met in Wellfleet when she was 18; he gave her the name “Mrs. Dalloway” because, he claimed, “Vaughan” didn’t suit her. He’d insisted she should instead be named after a great literary figure, but when Clarissa had suggested Isabel Archer or Anna Karenina, Richard objected to these, reasoning that the name would carry the power of “fate” and that Clarissa was “not destined” for such calamity as a poor marriage or fatal train collision (as befall the fictional Isabel and Anna). Rather, he proclaimed, she would be called Mrs. Dalloway: Not only did she and Mrs. Dalloway share the same first same, but, like the Woolf character, Clarissa was destined for “charm” and “prosperity.”

Clarissa stops to admire the beautiful June morning, feeling as if she’s about to jump into a pool. In the city, she sees the persistent emergence of new life amidst the garbage of the city. She relishes the privilege of being able to bask in the morning with nothing but an errand to do.

Clarissa loves everything she sees as she walks; she sees everything as it is in itself, beyond its name: “[E]verything in the world is part of a vast, inscrutable intention and everything in the world has its own secret name, a name that cannot be conveyed in language but is simply the sight and feel of the thing itself” (19-20). She thinks of this attunement to the world as her soul. She knows from their first meeting as teenagers that Richard disdains this view of the world as sentimental and romantic. She feels guilty that she doesn’t feel sadder about Richard’s AIDS diagnosis; she realizes she may love the world a little more than she loves him.

A stranger, Willie Bass, sees Clarissa across the street; he views her as a hippie aged past her time. He takes a complacent pride in his perceptiveness, believing that he recognizes in her face the beauty she once was and the tragic figure she strikes in contradiction to her confident bearing. He imagines he knows her both her inner life and her fate:

[T]his morning she makes a tragic sight, standing so straight in her big shirt and exotic shoes, resisting the pull of gravity, a female mammoth already up to its knees in the tar, taking a rest between efforts, standing bulky and proud, almost nonchalant, pretending to contemplate the tender grasses waiting on the far bank when it is beginning to know for certain that it will remain here, trapped and alone, after dark, when the jackals come out. She waits patiently for the light. She must have been spectacular twenty-five years ago; men must have died happy in her arms (20-21).

As she continues her reverent walk through the city, Clarissa thinks that the buzz of life around her keeps even the most destitute from suicide. In a plaza, she encounters an acquaintance, Walter Hardy: an athletic man in his forties who writes popular gay romance novels. In her bumbling avoidance of his greeting kiss, she despairs in seeing the conventionality that both her daughter and Richard disdain.

Clarissa concludes Walter recognizes her bygone social importance. She invites him and his partner, Evan, who has AIDS, to her party for Richard winning the Carruthers Prize. She asks whether he knows the importance of the prize. Richard despises Walter’s unapologetic hedonism, seeing it as a form of arrested development; Clarissa admires Walter’s devotion to Evan and his uncultured enjoyment of life.

After they part, Clarissa pines for the person Richard was before his sickness, the best friend who would argue with her about Walter. At the same time, Clarissa remembers Richard’s long-running, secret disapproval of both her partner, Sally (whom he found boring), and their ordinary life together full of hard work and good works.

Clarissa thinks of buying her daughter, Julia, a dress before remembering that because Julia is enthralled with a hard-edged queer theorist Mary Krull, she only dresses butch. Clarissa hates Mary, knowing she secretly mocks Clarissa’s unsubversively feminine presentation and her conventional dress—Clarissa’s “quaint” concept of being a lesbian—ignoring the human suffering common to them both. Clarissa thinks, then, of buying a gift for Evan but realizes that objects, including pieces of art, might not provide consolation to someone who is dying. She wishes she could convey, through the gift, a memory of what feels like her emergence into the world: a vivid early childhood scene of a branch tapping on her window at the same time that jazz started on the phonograph; this made it seem like the branch prompted the music. In her reflection in the storefront glass, Clarissa sees incipient old age.

At the cool, lush flower shop, Clarissa greets the florist Barbara with a kiss—in this moment, everything feels perfect again. Clarissa is guilty about not being a better friend to Barbara—a failed opera singer with cancer who lives in poverty—even though they only see each other in the store. As Clarissa chooses flowers, there’s a crash outside on a movie set. Clarissa watches as a woman with the aura of celebrity emerges from her trailer to ask about the noise, like an angel descended to reprimand humanity for its misbehavior (30).

In 1923 in Richmond, a suburb of London, Virginia awakes with an idea for an alternate first line for her new novel about a character named Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia falls back asleep and enters a park so perfect it seems like the eternal idea of itself. Beneath this park she sees another park, the park of Hades, which is at once more awesome and more ideal than the simple beauty of the earthly park. Virginia sees that the park of the underworld nourishes the earthly one.

Virginia awakes again in Richmond. She is in Hogarth House, the place she and her husband have lived for years, which, even in daytime, always seems to be repelling an intruding darkness. Virginia thinks of how she’ll protect her fragile inspiration from the likely disruptions in her morning routine. In the bathroom, she avoids the mirror, knowing it will show her shadow self. She knows her shadow self will poison her feeling of anticipation, the feeling that she’s about to descend to a beautiful party full of good conversation and more: “something finer than wit or beauty; something mysterious and golden; a spark of profound celebration, of life itself, as silks rustle across polished floors and secrets are whispered under the music” (38). She moves quietly downstairs, afraid of alerting her moody housekeeper, Nelly, to her presence.

Virginia’s husband, Leonard—an author and publisher—greets her with the fierce look he gives to page proofs, a look that hopes for the best of people but expects less. Once he switches focus from the pages, his expression becomes that of the husband who has nurtured her through a years-long sickness. He insists Virginia eat breakfast; she compromises on eating lunch, not wanting to disturb the tenuous thread of her excitement. Leonard thinks it’s bad for her to not eat, noticing that while still regal, Virginia has been sapped of her vitality. Virginia hopes to maintain a minimum healthy weight so she can convince Leonard to move back to London after their years spent in Richmond for her health.

In her study, Virginia relishes the lucidity that comes from an empty stomach and the feeling of preparing to write on a good day. This is one of her favorite experiences because it sometimes allows her to connect to a deeper, truer self, something that empowers her to write through the muses:

[This self] is more than the sum of her intellect and her emotions, more than the sum of her experiences, though it runs like veins of brilliant metal through all three. It is an inner faculty that recognizes the animating mysteries of the world because it is made of the same substance (43).

In writing in this way, Virginia transcends herself, becoming sure of her words. Without that connection to her truer self, she feels small and uncertain. She pens a line: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” (44).

On a June morning in Los Angeles in 1949, Laura Brown lays in bed reading Mrs. Dalloway. She reproaches herself for staying in bed on her husband, Dan’s, birthday rather than being in the kitchen, where she can hear Dan and her three-year-old, Richie. Reading distracts Laura from her waking feeling that it’s going to be a bad day—that she’ll feel unmoored in her house. Reading makes her feel like a beached sea creature returned to sea: “returned from a realm of crushing gravity to her true medium, the suck and swell of saltwater, that weightless brilliance” (50).

A beautiful passage in the book makes Laura wonder how someone as brilliant as Virginia Woolf could die by suicide. If Dan hadn’t miraculously survived World War II and married her—Laura Zielski, the odd looking, bookwormish older sister of his best friend—she could’ve spent her world in books. Instead, she is Laura Brown, a woman who secretly hopes she’s possessed of literary genius but who feels obligated to a calling she deems higher than art: the creation of a happy, nurturing home amidst the postwar prosperity. She reassures herself that she likes her life, her husband, and her child.

Before entering the kitchen, Laura is arrested by the feeling that she isn’t ready to play the role of herself. She suppresses her irritation at Dan’s voice and her desire to go upstairs, and she enters the kitchen. As she steps out, she sees Dan has already bought the roses she intended to buy. Dan is happy to see her; she’s angry he’s preempted her task.

Looking at her son eating breakfast, Laura reaches for a cigarette before restraining herself. In this moment, Laura feels almost happy: “It is almost perfect, it is almost enough, to be a young mother in a yellow kitchen touching her thick, dark hair, pregnant with another child. There are leaf shadows on the curtains; there is fresh coffee” (53). A bee taps repeatedly against a windowpane.

Laura watches as Dan turns his attention from her to his day in the outside world. As he departs for work, Laura and Richie watch from behind the screen door, “stand[ing] like spectators at a parade as the man pilots his ice-blue Chevrolet down the short driveway” (56). With Dan gone, Laura no longer feels sure of what she should do. Richie’s incessant attention overwhelms her and makes her feel scrutinized; without Dan, she loses her natural capacity for mothering.

Back in the kitchen, Laura lights a cigarette and recalls a line from Mrs. Dalloway: “[T]he triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June” (57). She feels exhausted from staying up late reading. She wonders if inadequate sleep is bad for her fetus but worries that if she asked the doctor, he’d order her to stop reading. Now committed to staying downstairs, Laura tells Richie that they’re going to make a magnificent cake for his father’s birthday.