Cinematic Representation of Multiple Narratives: Juxtaposing, Crossing, and Uniting Three Women’s Stories in the Film The Hours

Abstract

Stephen Daldry’s film The Hours is based on Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same title, which describes three women’s stories that revolve around Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Despite the postmodern literary techniques such as multiple narratives and daunting leaps in time and space that Cunningham’s novel employs, Stephen Daldry successfully makes the novel into a 114 minutes film. Backed by the performances of such popular actresses as Nicole Kidman, Julian Moore, and Meryl Streep, the film smoothly handles the multiple narrative lines and clarifies the ideological implications surrounding the main characters. In his cinematic representation of multiple narratives, Daldry uses the swift camera swing technique with which he effectively juxtaposes a whole single day of three ordinary women who are respectively living in early 20th century England, suburban LA in the 1950s, and contemporary New York. Weaving together the apparently fragmented scenes leaping across different time and space, the film makes the three narrative strands structurally parallel, contextually crossed, and thematically united. Though, some critics have accused the film of distorting or misrepresenting the characters of the novel. However, those critics more or less ignore hypertextuality that is inevitable in the film adaptation of the novel. This essay sees the film The Hours not as a simply visual text of Cunningham's novel but as a hypertext to the novel. Thus, instead of discussing how the film misrepresents the characters of the novel, this essay more focuses on the cinematic representation of multiple narratives in Cunningham’s novel The Hours. More specifically, this essay explores how Daldry juxtaposes the multiple narrative lines on the screen and how he endows his film with a thematic unity.