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Abstract
Stephen Daldry’s award-winning 2002 film version of The Hours makes use of a brilliant screenplay by David Hare to adapt Michael Cunningham’s novel of the same name for a cinematic audience, thus proving the “permeability of the borders between high and popular culture” (Chatman 269). Both film and novel use Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway as the substratum for a multifaceted narrative and celluloid framing of 20 th -century malaise—from Woolf’s own manic-depressive battle with headaches and haunting voices, through a housewife’s suburban entrapment in postwar America at mid-century, to the millennial angst of a homosexual artist battling the ravages of AIDS. The Hours has many aspects of postmodernism considering its intertextuality and interpersonation of literary styles. However, the historical figure of Virginia Woolf as its primary character and the three part narrative being a narrative of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway(1925) signals the text as a ‘modernist continuum’(Martin Halliwell).