Ginger, chocolate cake, and the crab thing

Every day of your life is a battle. Life is the enemy. If you keep this simple fact in your mind at all times, you should find that your choices are few.

The three women who's lives are portrayed in The Hours choose to face their common enemy in three different ways.

Clarissa Vaughan ( Meryl Streep) accepts her challenge and tries to cope with life's difficulties. Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) decides that her responsibilities and burdens are too great and runs away from them. Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman), cognizant of the fates of the former two, accepts defeat and kills herself in a desperate bid for control.

Have you ever wondered how your life would be different if you lived in a different time? Or if the people in your life were right for you, but your timing was off?

The Hours explores these questions. The answer is that even if you lived in another era, a distant country, or in a different social circle, your life would be exactly the same as it is right now. If your world is a funneling disaster and you feel out of step, you feel that way not because your timing is off, but because that is what it feels like to be alive.

Although the events of the movie occur to different people in different time periods, under different sets of rules, the threads that compose their lives are tied together in the same kinds of interpersonal relationships. While the roles and genders of each of the participants are tussled, their thematic interdependencies are ultimately the same.

Perhaps the stories of these three different women are so alike because their lives represent the lives of all women, or at least the life of the life of the woman to whom the narrative matters most, its author.

After thinking about The Hours, I realized that it is less about three different women than it is about three different aspects of one person's life (Virginia's), scattered across time which serves as a tool for the author to keep them separate and each distant from one another.

The common element in each of the three lives is the reliance on food for its symbolic power. It serves as a binding marker for the mental state of each of the women. For Laura, the cake is symbol of failure. To Clarissa, crab dip is the is a symbol of lost potential and her resignation to waste and decay. To Virginia, ginger is a symbol of happiness and the exotic side of romance.

The way that these characters treat their food is an analogy to the way they see their lives at that particular moment. Their attitudes toward a common element differ in the same way that a person's attitude may change about their life and their outlook during the normal course of their life.

As an audience, we see the lives of the women play out before us separately. We all know that a person must play many roles and live many lives during her lifetime. All the depths of a person's soul can not be likened to any solitary pattern, or simple course of events. The states of the mind swing from one far metric to another and back again.

When Clarissa finds that her attempts to control her life are foiled by the unpredictable and whimsical wills of others, she realizes how little reign she really has over her own fate, in spite of all of her attempts at accepting life's challenges.

In the end, Virginia finds that the only way to have absolute control over her future is to put an end to all of her social dependencies by taking her own life. Suicide for her is the only true way to master her destiny.