The Hours, Feminisms and Women’s Art

Abstract

In the previous chapters I explored how the films Sylvia (Christine Jeffs, 2003) and Frida (Julie Taymor, 2002) exemplify two innovations in the postfeminist biopic: the re-inflection of historical and feminist constructions of the woman in history, and the use of the conventions of the artist biopic subgenre to represent the life of a creative historical woman. While both films are marked by the contradictions of postfeminist texts, my analysis suggests that feminism is not overtly rejected or a ‘structuring absence’ in these films as suggested by alternative scholarly perspectives on postfeminist culture (Kathleen Karlyn cited in Tasker and Negra, 2007: 4). Rather, a pluralistic version of feminism informs the practice of the filmmakers who produced them. This chapter extends the discussion of the postfeminist biopic to The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002), a film about a day in the life of three protagonists: the historical figure Virginia Woolf, and the fictional characters Laura Brown, a 1950s Los Angeles housewife, and Clarissa Vaughan, an editor living in Manhattan in 2001.¹