The Hours

Clarissa wants to give Richard the best party she can. Unexpectedly, someone rings the doorbell: it’s Louis, who has been living in San Francisco for five years. He has left his job teaching drama and come to New York to pursue other work. Louis’s surprise appearance evokes a complex feeling in Clarissa: “traces of devotion and guilt, attraction, a distinct element of stage fright, and a pure untarnished hope” (139). Time has stripped him of his intimidating beauty, revealing him as the ordinary person he always was.

Noticing Clarissa’s impeccable manners and the facsimile of an upper-class apartment in which she lives, Louis imagines the quiet years she’s spent with Sally and thinks of how little love there is in the world (142). Seeing that Clarissa has aged past a youthful appearance, Louis is surprised he doesn’t feel the schadenfreude he thought he would. He’d imagined her loss of beauty as karmic payback for her character stealing the spotlight in Richard’s recent book, in which Richard rendered Louis—his loyal partner for 12 years—as a minor, pathetic character who complains about the lack of love in the world. Instead, Louis sympathizes with Clarissa, feeling they have both aged out of their place in the world. He admits to himself that Clarissa still has a refined sexiness.

Louis comments on a book Richard wrote, saying it was strange for Richard to make no effort to conceal Clarissa as the protagonist. She responds the character isn’t her but rather Richard’s idealized picture of her. The book, which didn’t do well, is long and has no build-up to the protagonist’s eventual suicide. As Clarissa adjusts the roses—laughing she’s just like her mother—Louis notices the way she appears to preempt his internal criticisms (that she’s become her mother) with self-aware remarks. In doing so, she seems to admit she wants to be better but can’t change.

Clarissa says she wants her ashes spread on a dune in Wellfleet from their youth, atop which she and Richard embraced in front of the ocean, steps away from Louis. Louis shares how angry he was with her then, despite his attempts to be open minded. Suddenly, Clarissa wants to share her entire life with Louis: “She wants to tumble [her life] out onto the floor at Louis’s feet, all the vivid, pointless moments that can’t be told as stories” (148).

Louis is in love with a student of his (the fourth). Clarissa envies that he has passion to look forward to, and she longs for an ill-fated love. Louis starts crying after admitting to himself that neither he nor his boyfriend love each other; he thinks of how little love there is in the world (150). The arrival of Clarissa’s daughter, Julia, prompts Louis’s departure. Julia is grave, hale, and handsome.

As he walks, Louis remembers how he both liked and hated being Richard’s object of beauty. Louis recalls the freedom he felt boarding a train to Madrid after fighting with Richard and sees how the separation, which felt temporary, became permanent.

Feeling stifled by birthday preparations and overwhelmed by her and Kitty’s kiss, Laura leaves Richie with a neighbor and drives towards downtown Los Angeles. In the car, she feels as if she’s dreaming. Despite her efforts at improvement, Laura is disappointed by her second cake: It doesn’t radiate the happiness she hoped it would. Laura wants Kitty, wants a reckless affair with her. Her feelings for Kitty are bright and sensual, whereas her predominant feeling for Dan is duty tainted by shame. Laura doesn’t see why her two loves should be incompatible.

As she nears downtown, Laura realizes nowhere in the cityscape offers the private seclusion she wants: Anywhere she goes, she’ll have to perform, to interact with people. She sees a hotel and realizes a room will provide what she wants. In the cool, liminal lobby, Laura feels both at home and guilty about her reason for being there. She’s thrilled by how easy it is to lie to the clerk, telling him that her husband will be joining her soon. At the elevators, she notices she’s gained distance from her chronic feelings of anger, disappointment, and anxiety.

In her room, Laura again feels as if she’s dreaming; as she lies on the bed, she feels she’s entered the world of Mrs. Dalloway. She reads a passage of the book in which Mrs. Dalloway revels in the present of her life while also wondering whether death saps the present of meaning. Mrs. Dalloway also feels she’s trying to recover some lost memory that continuously eludes her. Laura recognizes the possibility of her own suicide; the anonymous hotel room makes the idea seem more plausible. She fantasizes about how people would then finally realize the depths of her suffering.

Laura acknowledges the fantasy is just that. Despite her bad moments, she loves life. She also sees it would devastate her family: “It would be, simply, evil. It would punch a hole in the atmosphere, through which everything she’s created—the orderly days, the lighted windows, the table laid for supper—would be sucked away” (169). Still, the possibility of suicide comforts Laura. She pictures the defeated Woolf stepping into a river, an act as easy as checking into a hotel.

In the midst of Vanessa and her children, their emotions and the everyday of their lives, Virginia remembers the preciousness of life. She decides that Mrs. Dalloway won’t kill herself; Virginia will reserve that fate for a character who, due to their genius and suffering, turns away from the world.

Nelly returns, indignant, from London with the tea supplies and presents them to Virginia and Vanessa. Beside her sister in the kitchen, Virginia feels happy and alive. When Nelly turns away, Virginia kisses her sister’s mouth and Vanessa returns the kiss. Though the kiss is innocent, it rings of something more: “[I]n this kitchen, behind Nelly’s back, it feels like the most delicious and forbidden of pleasures” (171).