'It Was Death, I Chose Life': Feminist Resistance in The Hours, Book and Film

In writing about melodrama, Thomas Elsaesser (1987) argues that the transfer of written texts into film leads to an inevitable compression of plot, character, and emotional processes. Bearing on Elsaesser’s assertion regarding cinematic adaptation, this paper examines the cinematic The Hours (directed by Stephen Daldry in 2002) against its literary predecessor (written by Michael Cunningham in 1999), and demonstrates the density of the cinematic text not only in matters of plot and character, but also in matters of social and gender politics, and their concentrated representability in the film. Through analyzing The Hours between textual and visual reading and its intertextual heritage, this paper suggests that upon adaptation, cinematic tools enhance not only plot and character, but also feminist resistance.