The Hours: A Review

The Hours had three strong characters: Laura Brown, Clarissa Vaughn, and Virginia Woolf. I most related with Laura Brown. She was a bookworm who loved to stay in bed. I also do those things. I do not, however, think about how easy suicide would be in a hotel room or obsess over the icing on a cake. Virginia Woolf is borderline anorexic, has headaches and eventually commits suicide. Clarissa Vaughn is a lesbian who loses a friend/ex-lover to cancer. Laura Brown turns out to be Clarissa's friend/ex-lover's mother.

The relationship of the female and male characters in the movie is distant. Laura loves her husband but it feels fake. She also loves her son but wants to leave him. Virginia loves her husband, Leonard, but can't tell him her deepest thoughts on dying. Clarissa is distant with her ex-husband. She doesn't like talking to Richard's exlover. She sees Richard everyday but it's not a safe kind of love, she is waiting for him to set her free.

The role of homosexuality plays a big part in this novel filled with women. Laura is sexually excited when Kitty comes to confess her illness in Laura's kitchen one morning. Laura consoles her and then starts to kiss her. She fantasizes about that kiss for the rest of the novel. It is probably one of the main reasons she thinks so deeply about leaving her family and/or committing suicide. Clarissa is a lesbian and has a partner, Sally. She and Sally fight but throughout the novel, Clarissa is constantly thinking of how she can tell Sally anything and Sally will console her. Virginia gets an odd excitement from kissing her sister, Vanessa, while her maid has turned her back. She said it felt sexually exciting and she never thought about it as a bad thing. Maybe the role of homosexuality is a way of demonstrating how these three women feel distant from society.

Clarissa's relationship with Julia is a distant one as well. She loves her daughter but everything is pretty much handled as a business transaction. When Julia comes to see her, bringing an older gay woman along, Clarissa is mad and wonders why her straight daughter is hanging out with this woman. After Richard commits suicide, Clarissa comes home to see Julia sleeping on the couch and acknowledges how beautiful she is. Julia helps Clarissa in making Richard's mother, Laura Brown, comfortable in their apartment.

The three main characters' jobs may be important to mention in this novel. Virginia is a writer. She writes whenever her headaches allow her. She blocks out all visitors, even the maid with meals, and writes until she expends herself. Maybe this is the reason she is so open-minded about kissing her sister and about dying/suicide. Clarissa is an editor. She makes enough money to live comfortably. Her job also maybe the reason she can live so freely with her partner, Sally. Laura is an unemployed housewife, which was not uncommon in the 1940s. However this may explain more than all the others why she felt distant from her husband, her son and from society. All she had to live for everyday was doing menial tasks like cleaning the kitchen, baking a cake, playing with Richie. She felt trapped, so she left and thought about killing herself in a hotel room.

The time period the characters lived in is also important. Virginia lived in 1920s London, a very free time for women. Clarissa lived in 1990s New York, an unrestricted time zone. Laura however lived in 1940s L.A. She was expected to stay at home.