INSTITUTO DE ENSEÑANZA SUPERIOR EN LENGUAS VIVAS

“JUAN RAMÓN FERNÁNDEZ”

Introducción a los estudios culturales

Alejandra Vasallo

Paola Longo

2008

A woman’s life in a single day, and in that day, her whole life:
Stephen Daldry’s The Hours in light of
Joan Wallach Scott’s dynamic concept of gender

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Index

Introduction……………………………………… Page 3

Historical background…………………………… Page 5

Theoretical framework…………………………… Page 9

Analysis of The Hours…………………………… Page 11

Conclusion……………………………………….. Page 16

Use of this material in an ESL classroom……….. Page 18

Bibliography……………………………………... Page 20

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 Introduction

“It was certainly an odd monster that one made up by reading the historians
first and the poets afterwards – (woman as) a worm winged like an eagle; the
spirit of life and beauty in a kitchen chipping up suet.”
Virginia Woolf (1929)

Three women face their day and, in that day, their whole lives. Laura knows that

greasing the pan is essential to make a cake and so, she does it. Little Richard reminds

her that it is important to grease the pan and she feels that her inadequacy for the task is

such that even his little boy can see it. Clarissa decides to buy the flowers herself and so,

she goes to the flower shop. Everything is under control for the party even though she

knows her world in unravelling around her. She does not want any morbid flowers: she

wants gay flowers, happy flowers. Virginia does not talk to the servants for she has

nothing to tell them. Maybe they will feel her uneasiness near the raw meat, the lamb

blood and the dirty vegetables. She prefers going about her world which is nobody

else’s.

Making a cake, throwing a party and preparing lunch are activities which do not

seem to have much in common apart from being activities strongly associated with

women. But one must wonder: what is there in a task that makes it a woman’s task? Why

should doing the dishes be a female activity and chopping wood a male one? When

addressing these questions, we need inevitably to resort to a gendered perspective to

unveil the concepts and struggles behind social notions that might seem “natural”. We

could safely risk that there is nothing natural about culture and whatever we see as such

has been purposefully constructed in that way.

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 It might be thought that women are individuals who can easily handle different

chords in their homes as part of their everyday routine and be content with it. However,

the leading characters in Stephen Daldry’s The Hours will depict three situations in

which women cannot fill the slot and cannot be content with the role society imposes on

them. In order to approach this subject from a gendered perspective, I will use Joan

Wallach Scott’s conception of Gender as an historical category and I will try to apply it

on the female characters portrayed in Stephen Daldry’s The Hours and see how these

characters live in a dynamic struggle of power between the sexes. This struggle will vary

both diachronically and synchronically and it will be necessary to take into account the

historical and geographical scenario in order to understand the restrictions and limitations

that these women experienced.

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 Historical Background

“The female is as it were a deformed male”

Aristotle

The characters in the film live in three different periods of time and in two

different countries (Great Britain and Unites States) and in order to approach the

understanding of gender, these factors need to be taken into account.

England during the twenties

Virginia Woolf was a writer who lived in the Interwar England of the twenties

and who experienced strong restrictions imposed by a strict Victorian society. However,

women’s position in Great Britain was already changing by the turn of the twentieth

century. In 1918, after the war ended, women over 30 were

given the vote if they were housewives. By 1928 all women

over 21 were given the vote when the Equal Franchise Act

was passed. Still, a patronizing attitude towards women

remained and they were regarded as mere things that

accompanied men with no further purpose but to bear

children.

Picture 1: Advertisement depicting women role in a popular magazine

By 1939 married women, unless poverty obliged them, did not go out to work.

They could not hold a job unless it was that of a teacher or a domestic servant. However,

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they had to give them up on marriage. Society accepted the working spinster, but not the

working wife. The role of women was to have children and tend to the house.

The Art community reacted and set itself to challenge these social norms and

rebel against what they saw as Victorian hypocrisy. One of these communities was The

Bloomsbury Group which was an English collective of loving friends and relatives who

lived in or near London during the first half of the twentieth century. Their work deeply

influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics as well as modern attitudes

towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality. Its best known members were Virginia

Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, and Lytton Strachey. They would assemble

on few nights a week for some drinks and conversation. It was in the heart of this group

that Virginia Woolf found her identity as a creative and reactionary writer.

America during the fifties

Mrs. Brown reflects the typical American house maker who lives with her family

in the Californian suburbs. During the fifties, and even when the number of women at

work did rise after the war, female workers were viewed with suspicion by many.

Picture 2: Advertisement portraying the perfect

American family

The traditional idea that women’s

role was at home remain very strong

during the fifties and sixties in America.

Women we married by their twenties and

they were encouraged to stay at home and rise their family. Also, the home appliances

industry pushed women further into their homes: kitchen and cleaning appliances like

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washing machines, fridges and Hoovers were advertised as being ‘every woman’s

dream’. Also, higher standards were expected of women since the aid of these machines

made their tasks ‘easier’.

The suburbs also played an important role in women’s position in the household.

They were developed in the 1950s for middle-class families who left the cities to live in

new houses in large suburban estates. The husband would drive to work in his car and the

wife would wait for him and welcome him with his supper ready in the evening. In this

environment, women’s only possibilities to socialize were the get-togethers they could

organize among their female neighbours such as the Tupperware parties held once a

week.

The frustration felt by women during this period of time and the limitations that

restrained them were great but it was not until the sixties that feminist movements started

facing this situation. In 1963, Betty Friedan wrote ‘The Feminist Mystique’ in which she

called upon women to become partners of their husbands rather than servants. It was also

Friedan who described the American suburban life as "a comfortable concentration

camp".

America – New York during the nineties

Today, American women experience a degree of

freedom and liberation unseen in the Western world. Different

organizations have supported feminist movements which

stood up for their rights to choose, to vote, and to receive

Picture 3: Female sexuality identity has achieved new spaces in the 90’s

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equal wages, and opportunities. More women achieve higher education in American

universities: they are more empowered and independent than ever before.

However, sexism and female oppression have been, by no means, eliminated:

women continue to receive worse-paid jobs, more childcare responsibility, more

economic dependence from their husbands, and they have virtually no voice in politics.

There are still many restrains for women in the American society. First of all, domestic

labour is still very much present even in the employment sphere: women are usually

associated with routine and light jobs and men are usually seen in positions of power and

decision-making. In Britain, for example, women are heavily concentrated in ten given

occupations while men are spread much more evenly. Furthermore, women tend to

occupy the lower reaches of the occupational hierarchy. These occupational

disadvantages are also related to their potential role in the family: the employer’s and

even employee’s belief rely on the fact that women’s place is at home and will act

accordingly. This belief is reinforced through having women believe also that they are

natural women and housewives.

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 Theoretical Framework

“Wouldn’t the worst be, isn’t the worst, in truth, that women aren’t castrated,
that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the sirens were men)
for history to change its meaning? You only have to look at the Medusa
straight on to see her. And she is not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s
laughing”.
Hélène Cixous (1976)

Even though the term gender had already been used by sociologists during the

1950’s and more strongly by the Feminist movement during the 1970’s, it was Joan

Wallach Scott who in 1988 in her book entitled Gender and the Politics of History that

she challenged the historical conventions and stated the need of a re-categorization of the

terminology used to really discuss gender and found a new history.

According to the author, we cannot construct a new history in which women are

equal to men unless we deconstruct it and use new categories which in our modern male

history are non existent. For historians, she noted, women were nothing but decorative

and anecdotal appendixes to men and those women who did stood above others in their

time, were seen as mere exceptions. Unless history is conceived as a road where both

men and women can walk equally, History will remain the history of men.

Scott considers that it is not enough to include women as part of history since they

will always be seen as something secondary. To produce the big change, it is necessary

to find new categories and to found History on those bases. Achieving this means re-

defining the very concept of gender, concept which had, until that moment, been used by

Feminists to refer to the state of oppression suffered by women and, thus, was most likely

than not associated with women only. For Scott, there is a need to work on the human

social relationships level and, for that; a new analytic category had to be coined.

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 Thus, Scott conceives gender not merely associated to one of the sexes but as a

dynamic notion which implies the constant struggle to regain power within social

institutions which are always organized hierarchically in terms of power. In addition to

that, this struggle is dynamic because it takes different shapes according to its historical

and geographical context. Scott also names four different elements which might be

present in this struggle:

1. Culturally available symbols that evoke multiple representations (all symbols that

could be present in a given society);

2. Normative concepts which constrain the possibility of interpretations (the number

of possible symbols are narrowed down to match the vision of those in power);

3. Construction through kingship, economic and political means (gender is created

through different means);

4. Subjective identity (a person’s identity could be constructed within a given

community and culture).

Gender is, then, not only a matter of the sexes but also a place where power is

being negotiated constantly. By incorporating this concept, the analysis of history will

lead us to challenge notions related to men and women such as:

• Women are assigned certain feminine personalities through socialisation and

institutions;

• Women are secluded from the public sphere and are meant to be in the privacy of

their homes;

• When working, women remain in lower hierarchical activities;

• Women are defined as dependant of men.

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 Finally, it is important for the author to analyze the individual processes but also

the social relationships because it is in the social sphere that power is exerted. It is there

that all humans try to create their own identity by relating themselves to others and being

part of a struggle for power which also takes place in a gendered arena. Therefore, we

cannot understand fully how power works unless we take into account gender.

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 Analysis of The Hours

Stephen Daldry’s The Hours was shown for the fist time in 2002 in the United

States and it is based on the acclaimed book "The Hours" by Michael Cunningham. The

story follows three women living in three different periods of time whose lives are

connected through time by Woolf's novel, "Mrs. Dalloway”. Nicole Kidman’s character,

Virginia Woolf, struggles with her sanity in a Victorian society which excludes women of

any public decisive role and confines them to the household chords. Julianne Moore’s

character, Laura Brown, represents the middle class American wife who lives in the

1950’s suburbs of a big city, such as Los Angeles, and who should be content with

raising a healthy and happy family. Finally, Meryl Streep’s character, Clarissa Vaughan,

is a successful lesbian editor who lives in New York City during the 1990’s. Surprisingly

enough, it is Clarissa Vaughn who will prove to share more characteristics with Virginia

Woolf’s character, Mrs. Dalloway, and in doing so, reinforces the idea that the struggle of

power between the sexes is constant and ever-lasting.

What makes this film interesting for the analysis of Scott’s concept of gender is

that these three characters depict, in many ways, the circumstances in which women live

and how they face the normative and symbolic use of gender as a means of oppression.

In addition to that, none of these three women felt they belonged to their society and they

felt they could not cope with the precepts that were being imposed on them, letting us see

a crack in a constructed image of women and how some roles they had to fulfil were not

natural but imposed by their societies (such as motherhood, housewives, etc.,). Power

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was exerted on these women not only through public social institutions but also through

the institution of the family where their roles were limited to their sexes. Women’s

identity is also constructed by the institutions they belong to and it is only by

understanding gender that we can clearly analyze the way in which power works and

restrict these women to more domestic and passive roles.

Virginia Woolf

Nicole Kidman’s character is, out of the three characters, who suffers the most

social constrain and ends up killing herself. This character, as the real Virginia Woolf

did, does not represent the typical British woman of Interwar England during the

twenties. In a historical moment when women were not considered as equal to men and

did not have the same rights (they could not work or be independent), the normative

image of women was constructed as fragile beings devoted to the home and the family.

The development of the cosmetic and textile industries restrained women to leave their

homes just for shopping and to dedicate themselves to frivolous matters.

Picture 4: Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf in "The Hours."

In this context, women were denied the

possibility of fulfilling a professional life or a

career. For Scott, gender would be here the place

where some symbolic images are chosen over many others: the fragile, motherly and

frivolous woman over a strong, determined and independent one. In the film, we see how

Virginia is utterly incapable of giving instructions to the servants regarding the chords of

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the house. Also, her sister, Vanessa, who is a better adjusted woman, laughs at her

impossibility to handle the easier tasks for women.

Even when the twentieth century was already welcoming some changes in terms

of women’s rights, everyday life for most women had to be carried out by strict social

and moral norms specially in the interwar Britain which could not afford to open up to

liberation movements if the Empire was to be kept together. Themes as homosexuality

and women’s rights were excluded of the public sphere whereas concepts such as family

and motherhood were reinforced as the basis of modern England. It was those same

topics, which were normatively banned, that Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group

addressed and which made them outcasts of the same society the belonged to. In the film

The Hours, Virginia claims “her own voice” and her right to have some say in her own

life, right which was mostly prohibited to women in England during the time.

Laura Brown

Laura Brown is a character which most clearly reflects the struggle between sexes

and the restrain women felt in this articulation of power over gendered individuals. Just

like Virginia Woolf during the 1920’s, Laura Brown has a role to fulfil in the 1950’s

Post-war America: women were supposed to be grateful to their men for having won the

war and, thus, their main role was to make them

happy. One of the ways to achieve this was to take

care of the house, bear their children and be a perfect

social role for them.

Picture 5: Jack Rovello as Ritchie and Julianne Moore as Laura Brown in "The Hours."

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 According to Scott, we might say that women had an economic role to fulfil since

they were restrained to their homes and work for them was not seen as proper. Women

had to dedicate their lives to the chords of the house and the raising of the children

whereas men had to go to work and were seen as the breadwinners. It is through gender

and the role of the sexes that the American economy built the concept of the perfect

American family.

Women constructed their identity in relationship with the social models of women

promoted by the American society of the time. Therefore, the predominant symbolic

image of women was seen as always beautiful, attentive to her husband and children and

home and content with it: no hints of an inner life or any artistic or professional interests

were associated with women. Laura Brown shows how women had to identify with these

role models to be part of a community and if they did not, as was the case of Laura, they

had no alternative but to abandon everything for their society did not offer any other

options.

A clear example of women’s role in the fifties is shown when Laura tries to make

a cake for her husband Dan and fails. Her neighbour, Kitty, a well adjusted middle-class

woman, keeps telling her that the task is ridiculously easy as if domestic affairs were

something that women did naturally. Yet, Laura proves her that it is not so and her very

womanhood is being questioned over a simple task. Since society forced women to

construct their identity over certain activities (such as cooking, cleaning, etc.,), women

which were not able to carry them out were left outside their own gender. It is with

Scott’s redefinition of gender that we can understand how these tasks were imposed on

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women by a male-driven society by promoting certain symbolic images that helped

construct a very specific female gender identity.

Clarissa Vaughn

Clarissa Vaughn might seem like the character that represents that all struggles for

liberty have been achieved for women: she is a lesbian upper-class editor who lives with

her female lover in New York; she has a very successful professional life and she has

conceived a child through artificial insemination. All the barriers that women had set

themselves to break seem to have been conquered in Clarissa Vaughn. However,

appearances may be deceiving: as Scott states, the struggle for power through gender will

never disappear because power is something that individuals are always trying to acquire

and it is in that struggle that the very concept of gender becomes dynamic.

Picture 6: Meryl Streep as Clarissa and Ed Harris as Richard in

"The Hours."

Even this liberal character that, at the turn of

the century, seems to lead the life she chose, has to

cope with different roles that society imposes on her

due to her gender: She still has to be the perfect wife, though not in a traditional couple,

and a perfect mother and, finally, the perfect hostess. Women in the twenty-first century

have become highly trained and successful professionals as long as their roles as mothers

and wives are not risked or abandoned. Motherhood still remains the quintessential

characteristic of womanhood and technology and science have accompanied this role by

introducing great advancements in the fields of assisted insemination.

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 It is ironic how this character, Clarissa Vaughn, is more similar to Virginia

Woof’s character, Mrs. Dalloway, though we might think she is ages ahead of that

Victorian woman. This similitude tells us that even though many things have been

achieved for women, society and culture still remain places where the symbolic and the

normative are produced so that women’s identity is constructed within some social

institutions such as family, school and work.

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 Conclusion

I started this paper by describing a single day in three different women’s lives as

they were depicted in the film The Hours. These women had more things in common

than we could imagine even when they lived in utterly different periods of time, different

countries and even when they belong to different social classes. None of these distinctive

elements could erase the struggle in which they were immersed: as women, they were

part of a struggle for power as gendered individuals.

It is thanks to Jean Wallach Scott’s re definition of the concept of gender that we

can clearly understand that it is through gender that power is also exerted, regardless of

the culture and historical moment in which this struggle takes place. Once we understand

that men and women identities are gendered cultural and political constructions, it is

easier to make out the elements that limit and restrain women to certain roles in society.

The Hours proved to be a good example of how women questioned the standards of their

society and claimed their own roles as empowered individuals.

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 Use of this material in an ESL classroom in Argentina

The subject of gender is a subject that, as teacher, should be constantly in our

minds since our classroom is not only a place where we teach language but it is also the

place where social notions of gender are reinforced. Of course, the school cannot fight

alone the battle of gender awareness but it can, little by little, raise awareness and interest

in students.

When working with Scott’s text and Daldry’s film, I kept on thinking how many

of my students would feel related to the subject either because they feel what the

characters feel or because they have someone in the family going through the same

struggle. Therefore, I thought of an activity which would help them express their ideas

on the matter in the context of a language classroom.

Age of the students: Teenagers, secondary school

Level of English: Intermediate

Classroom: Any English class (preferably an English literature class) in any classroom in

Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Materials used: Daldry’s film The Hours (scene where Laura Brawn attempts to make a

cake and fails)

Aims: Have students deconstruct one of the characters of the film in terms of the struggle

between the sexes and her role in society.

Outline:

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Pre-activity: Students discuss in groups the role of women and men in our society and

how it is different from their grandparents’. Then, the class discusses what they’ve talked

about and share their experiences.

Activity: Students watch the scene from The Hours when Laura Brown tries to make a

cake having in mind the following questions: what is expected of women during the

fifties in America? Was that what women wanted? What happens to the character? Why?

After watching the scene, students discuss the questions and share their points of view

with the class.

After the discussion, students attempt to complete the following poster:

The family: men and women roles

Past Today Future

How were families How are families in What do you think
in the past? the present? needs still to change?
Women role

Men role

Post-activity: Students write their own reflections after the discussion using their own

family experiences.

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 Bibliography

• Scott, J.W., Gender and the Politics of History, New York, Columbia University
Press, 1988.

• The Hours. Dir. Stephen Daldry. Perfs. Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, Meryl
Streep and Ed Harris. Paramount Pictures. 2002.

• Abercrombie, N.; Hill, S. and Turner, B., Dictionary of Sociology. London,

Penguin, 1994.

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