Study on Three Types of Women’s Struggles with the Reality: Based on the Roles in “The Hours”

Abstract

Feminism Movement plays a big role in the improvement of women’s status. It gains many rights for women and changed the malicious patriarchy to some degree. At the same time it betters the social morality and spurred its advancement. Accordingly, feminism literature is very significant in the literary world. Many studies have focused on these works. A movie named “The Hours” is just this sort of work. It describes three women’s different life and displays their troubles, struggles through the method of montage.

As to the film “the hours”, people have done a lot of research on it from the diachronic and synchronic perspective. These studies do reveal us a clear process of the development of women’s self-awareness. But they mainly concentrate on studying women in the 20th century, resulting in an incomplete research. And they often address the progress of this movement in a chronological order, but hardly describe it through analyzing the varied destinies of women resulted by their different identity and social status. This paper will analyze the varied fates of different women (professional writer, housewife and maid) in “The Hours” and other feminism works with the foundation of studies done by former researchers.

According to the differences of these women, the writer classified them into three types: professional writer, housewife and maid. Here writer mainly refers to Virginia Woolf in “The Hours”; housewife refers to Laura Brown in “The Hours” and Celie in “the Color Purple”; maid refers to the maid of Virginia’s family. This paper will analyze the varied destinies of different women and the development of feminism movements through the observation on the difficulties these women meet and their reactions towards those troubles.

Key words: feminism, The Hours, different identities, difficulties, struggles