Chiming the Hours: A Philip Glass Soundtrack

Abstract

The 2002 film The Hours, directed by Stephen Daldry, with a screenplay by David Hare, closely follows Michael Cunningham's 1998 novel of the same name. Cunningham's novel in turn bears a close affinity to Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925), so that a brief account of all three works is called for to clarify what the film embeds. Mrs. Dalloway recounts a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway as she prepares for a fashionable evening party. Her thoughts and actions are counterpointed against those of Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked and delusional war veteran, whose day ends in his suicide. Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Hours takes the original working title of Mrs. Dalloway and uses Woolf herself as one of the characters. Both the novel The Hours and the screenplay based on it depict the intertwined lives of three women of different times and places. Woolf's life (England, 1923) is paralleled with the suburban domesticity of Laura Brown (California, 1951) and with publisher Clarissa Vaughan (New York, 2001). All three are dealing with depression and thoughts of suicide. 1 At the end of both novel and film, two of the lives coalesce in the meeting of Laura Brown and Clarissa Vaughan. Laura's estranged son Richard, who proves to be Clarissa's dying friend (see note 1), further links the California and New York narratives, though that connection is not immediately made.