What the novel The Hours, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and the film The Hours share in significant part is the presentation of behavior that is completely consistent with a milieu of civilized and civilizing experience but that is so determinedly self-absorbed that it conceals a whole range of unacknowledged and unexpressed emotions and that connotes what Dr. King in another context called "the bleakness of nagging despair" (King 91). To be sure, Cunningham's text refers to the "stern brown decrepitude" (9) of New York City, which suggests a theme that surfaces in the action of the plot. The text contrasts that firm condition with a suggestion that, even there, hope and life can spring eternal; in the film The Hours Clarissa's flowers and the abundant groceries visually express the sense of life amid decline. One senses in both film and novel, however, that decline is on the rise and has a good chance of triumphing.
In both film and novel, Clarissa Vaughan's determination to remain upbeat and energetic positions her as a partisan of life, even though that partisanship, figured as her ministrations to Richard, is perhaps more well meaning and doubtless more superficial than intimately and deeply experienced. The introduction of the character of Richard and the manner in which he relates to Clarissa in the film conveys visually and in an instant their entire history and current status of their relationship in a way that text can reveal only with every next word that indicates the challenge that his artistic temperament and personality present to her and her friendly (but not quite engaged) accommodation of them. That is in the background of the fact that she has "endured teasing . . . for more than thirty years" (Cunningham 12). Yet for all of that, Clarissa is somehow not quite in the moment of direct experience of the fullness of life, especially the difficult and declining life of AIDS-ravaged Richard; it is as if she thinks that bringin...