Expectations in the Movie The Hours

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Expectations in the Movie The Hours

We expect those endowed with a gift - be it artistic, intellectual or circumstantial - to cultivate that gift and use it as a vehicle for excellence in life. In the movie The Hours Virginia Woolf, the 20th Century British author; Laura Brown, a doted-upon 1951 Los Angeles housewife; and Clarissa Vaughan, a 2001 New York editor; struggle with their gifts and the expectations they, and others, have for themselves. All three women are obsessed with finding the right balance between living, freedom, happiness and love.

The Hours attempts to use one day to reflect Woolf s life and the impact her work has had on others. In the movie, Woolf is writing Mrs.Dalloway which Brown is reading and Vaughan sort of lives out. Woolf s novel connects the three women and affects their actions. It should be noted that Vaughan gets a lot less attention than Woolf and

Brown and seems to be more of a manifestation of Mrs. Dalloway. Vaughan, like Mrs. Dalloway, is a great party planner and is in the process of planning a party for a friend. Vaughan also projects Mrs. Dalloway's outward confidence and inward confusion.

THE GIFTS AND THEIR PRESSURES

A main theme throughout the movie is freedom. All three women actively seek it and at the movie's end each woman chooses what she thinks is best: Woolf drowns herself, Brown leaves her family and Vaughan finally lets go of her longtime friend and past lover, Richard. Each woman's decision, fueled by the circumstances which surround her, is reached after much thought and deliberation. Woolf s concern is Leonard's sanity and happiness. She realizes the great pressure she puts on him and sees her suicide as a way of freeing him from being responsible for ...

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... Biography, Volume 6: Modem Writers, 1914-1945. Gale Research,1991. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group. 2004http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRCć

*"(Adeline) Virginia Woolf." Feminist Writers. St. James Press, 1996.Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group. 2004. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRCć

*"Virginia Woolf." Gay & Lesbian Biography. St. James Press, 1997. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group. 2004. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRCć

*Gay, Peter. "On not psychoanalyzing Virginia Woolf."American Scholar. Spring 2002

*Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf: A Biography Chatto and Windus, 1996.

*Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography Harcourt (New York, NY), 1972

*The Hours (The movie) DVD Extras

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