The Hours : Film Analysis

With Film Analysis comes the analyzation of films and movies that depict narrative structure, cultural context, the evaluation of discourse, and many other approaches. The film, “Friday” (1995), is a comedy and drama that displays the relationship between two childhood friends growing up in an impoverished neighborhood. These two friends became affiliated with a neighborhoods drug dealer, and were startled and clueless as to how they were going to come up with the money they owed him by the end of the night! The characterization, setting, and conflicts are the three main elements, in which are portrayed can indicate the analyzation of contributing a larger meaning of this particular film.

According to Chronicles magazine, "Woolf was undeniably a brilliant writer." Woolf's work of Mrs. Dalloway was read by fifteen-year-old Michael Cunningham in order to impress an older girl in school. As he stated, "the book really knocked me out." Once older, Cunningham wanted to write about Mrs. Dalloway, but thought not too many people would want to read a book about reading a book. He then thought he might want to read a book about reading the right book. Hence, The Hours was written. Cunningham would incorporate Mrs. Dalloway into "a book about reading a book." The Hours weaves through three woman's lives. As the novel unfolds, it shows that these three women

‘Mrs. Dalloway’, by Virginia Woolf is a derivative text of ‘The Hours’, written by Michael Cunningham. The novels both share an important theme of mental health. The circumstances of mental health are commonly sympathetic, and empathetic. The characters Septimus and Clarissa in ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ and Richard, Laura Brown, and Virginia Woolf in ‘The Hours’ show the strongest symbols for this theme. Most of the problems and treatments these characters face are in direct result of the age they live in. Both novels express a relationship between era, illnesses and treatments.

Throughout her life, novelist Virginia Woolf suffered with mental illness, and she ultimately ended her life at age 59. As art often imitates life, it is not surprising that characters in Woolf’s works also struggle with mental illness. One of her novels, Mrs. Dalloway, recounts a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a high society woman living in London, and those who run in her circle. As the novel progresses the reader sees one of the characters, Septimus, struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by serving in war. At the end of the story, he commits suicide. While there is no explicit articulation of any other character suffering from mental illness in the novel, Septimus is not alone. Through her thoughts and actions, we can deduce that Clarissa also endures mental and emotional suffering. Though Clarissa does not actually attempt to end her life in the novel, her mental and emotional suffering lead her to exhibit suicidal tendencies. To prove this, I will examine Clarissa’s thoughts and actions from a psychological perspective.

Unlike Annie Dillard, Virginia Woolf was an essayist during the turbulence of the early twentieth century, where she witnessed the atrocities of both world wars and the lack of women in the intellectual realm. Ultimately, Woolf decided to end her own life by drowning herself. Therefore, her views of life

The comparative study of texts and their appropriations reflect the context and values of their times, demonstrating how context plays a significant role. Virginia Woolf’s novel modernists Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Steven Daldry’s post modernists film The Hours (2002), an extrapolation, explore the rapid change of social and philosophical paradigms of the 20th century, focusing on women whose rich inner lives are juxtaposed with their outer lives. They place the characters in their respective context, to respond to, the horrors of the consequences of war and AIDS and the vagaries and difficulties of relationships, sexuality and mental illness. Through their differing intertextual perspectives the film and novel represent similar values, within different contextual concerns.

The Hours is a movie that won the most awards in 2002.The movie is mainly about relationships, love, and death. This movie follows a single day in the lives of three women in different time periods between 1941 to 2001.The clothes that all three of these women wore were from different time periods. It is apparent from this movie that throughout history women were faced with trials and tribulations. Through each of their lives they battled with their own identity and the roles that they should play in society. In fact, this movie is mostly based on three women and their reflection on the novel Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia Woolf is the author of the novel Mrs. Dalloway, accordingly Laura Brown, reads

Virginia Woolf is a married woman who had public affairs with women and who shares a chaste kiss with her sister during her narrative. Woolf is also the author of Mrs. Dalloway, a novel that centers on Clarissa Dalloway, a woman who feels the same way "as men feel" (Woolf 36) about women, yet marries a man as society dictates.

Many live attempting to decipher the riddle of life. What is life? What is the purpose? What makes? Even though we only seek happiness why can’t we ever seem to achieve it? When we do reach happiness why can’t we seem to grasp it and hold it for more than the few short hours that pass like seconds? The question we must answer first is “What makes happiness, true?”

Part 1 - In American author's 2009 book, The Help, the primary thesis is the relationship between Black maids and white households in Jackson, Mississippi during the early 1960s. The story is really told from three perspectives, Aibileen and Minny are Black women, both maids, and Skeeter is the nickname of Eugenia Phelan, daughter of a prominent White family. Skeeter has just finished school and hopes to become a writer. In general, the relationship between the Black maids and the White employers is six sided: On one side we have the White employers who have three views: 1) Their personal and private beliefs that can range from extreme scorn and bias to kindness regarding race; 2) Their public persona that must have the "proper" attitude about Blacks and "the help," and 3) Their employer attitude, which is condescending and parental. The Black view also has three segments: 1) Their personal and private beliefs that usually range from understanding not all Whites are the same and an extreme love and empathy for the White children for whom they care; 2) The public persona that is deferential, polite, and stoic to their White bosses; and 3) Their attitude and view among the Black community, which usually separates the "poor and ignorant but rich" White souls from the Black view of family and common sense. All in all, the relationship is contentious, phony, and based on economic advantage.

Post World War I London society was characterized by a flow of new luxuries available to the wealthy and unemployment throughout the lower classes. Fascinated by the rapidly growing hierarchal social class system, Virginia Woolf, a young writer living in London at the time, sought to criticize it and reveal the corruption which lay beneath its surface. Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf’s fourth novel, was born in 1925 out of this desire precisely. A recurring focus in many of Woolf’s major novels is the individual and his or her conscious perceptions of daily life. Throughout Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf uses this technique, known as a “stream-of-consciousness,” to trace the thoughts of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith during one day in London five years after the Great War. It is exactly this narrative technique which allows Woolf to compare the lives of these two characters which belong to different social classes to argue that social placement has a negative effect on one’s life and psychological being.

“The Story of an Hour” tells the story about Mrs. Mallard, who learns that her husband is dead and right after that faces a great variety of emotions and feelings. Mrs. Mallard has a heart problem. One day she gets news that her husband has died in a railroad disaster. She starts crying at once, goes upstairs and locks herself in her room. She feels very lonely at first but then she starts feeling happy and free from her marriage. After some time she opens the door and descends the stairs. She surprisingly sees Mr. Mallard at the door. When she looks at Mr. Mallard, she dies suddenly. The doctor says that she dies of her heart disease, from the "joy that kills." This story illustrates the dependent condition and status of married women in the 19th century and reveals the fact that there is no way of escaping from marriage except one’s death.

This was soon followed by the death of her mother and the inevitable estrangement and death of her father. Due to these events, Woolf became close to her sister, Vanessa; whom both shared to goal of escaping the “constraints of Victorian womanhood” (Hussey 377). This mainly stemmed from the sisters not being able to go to traditional school like their brothers. Not being mainstreamed into the school system provided Woolf with few friends and lead to many of her mental disabilities. After the death of her father, Woolf attempted suicide for the first time by jumping out a window. Soon after this event, her doctor and family members deemed Woolf mentally unstable. This led to Woolf’s passion of writing, it allowed her to explore her mania-depression on a deeper level. Her mental issues also led to her feminist tendencies, in which she eventually turned against men completely, even her husband Leonard.

In the book Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf wanted to cast the social system and bash it for how it worked. Her intricate focus is focusing not on the people, but on the morals of a certain class at a certain historical moment.

In her own writing on the novel Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf stated, "I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work at its most intense…“ In this essay, I shall use this quote as a means to examine the theme of love and solitude in one of her most famous novels which follows a set of characters that go about their day. Virginia Wolf was able to illustrate the isolation one experiences within its own mind and the importance of one’s soul and ways in which souls connect through different memories and events. Even though independency is highly valued, the inability for people to communicate and build meaningful relationships is the most important aspect in the novel.