The Hours

“New York in its racket and stern brown decrepitude, its bottomless decline, always produces a few summer mornings like this; mornings invaded everywhere by an assertion of new life so determined it is almost comic, like a cartoon character that endures endless, hideous punishments and always emerges unburnt, unscarred, ready for more. This June, again, the trees along West Tenth Street have produced perfect little leaves from the squares of dog dirt and discarded wrappers in which they stand. Again the window box of the old woman next door, filled as it always is with faded red plastic geraniums pushed into the dirt, has sprouted a rogue dandelion.”

Clarissa’s experience of New York City on her walk to the florist’s shows her optimistic, life-affirming worldview. The perfect leaves formed from dirty squares and the dandelion in the window box symbolize not only that life prevails but that it retains its beauty under adverse circumstances.

“What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously privileged, with a simple errand to run.”

This is one of the many lines in The Hours that mimics in syntax and content a line from Mrs. Dalloway, drawing one of the first parallels between that titular character and Clarissa. The joy of being alive on this morning, with only an errand to run, indicates that Clarissa is content with the pleasures of an ordinary life. As the beautiful morning shows, the extraordinary sometimes springs up within an ordinary life.

“She still has a certain sexiness; a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm; and yet this morning she makes a tragic sight, standing so straight in her big shirt and exotic shoes, resisting the pull of gravity, a female mammoth already up to its knees in the tar, taking a rest between efforts, standing bulky and proud, almost nonchalant, pretending to contemplate the tender grasses waiting on the far bank when it is beginning to know for certain that it will remain here, trapped and alone, after dark, when the jackals come out.” 

Willie Bass’s description of Clarissa, as he sees her across the street, recalls a similar moment from Mrs. Dalloway. The metaphor of the doomed mammoth evokes not only obliviousness in the face of death and fading significance, but also extinction: Within this metaphor, there is no longer a place for Clarissa in the world. The description, however, creates an irony. While Clarissa herself harbors such fears of aging and irrelevance—she cannot help but internalize these judgements from a society bent on reducing women’s value to their outward youth and sexual appeal—Willie’s evaluation occurs pointedly after Clarissa’s character has been vividly introduced as the opposite of that evaluation.