Virginia Woolf used interior monologue and has precisely coordinated the stream of Clarissa’s thoughts, her memories of the kiss and of her youth, her longings for Peter, and her regrets about not choosing a different way of life and Cunningham also uses stream of consciousness in his novel and wrote ‘The Hours’ as an interior monologue, without which the novel would fall apart. If there were no interior monologues in ‘The Hours’, there would be nothing for the characters in the novel to fall back on because it would read as meaningless words.
The Virginia Woolf story that serves as the novel’s discourse reveals her conclusion at the end of ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ – that eventually you have to look life in the face, to know what it is, and at last to love it for what it is, and then to put it away. Cunningham’s novel also ends on a similar note, where perhaps with the death of Richard, his close ones come to realise and appreciate the gift of life much more. As Woolf said of her characters in the midst of creating ‘Mrs. Dalloway’: “Someone has to die so the rest of us can value life more.” Through this paradox, Woolf teaches us of beauty through pain.
Cunningham has woven together the three stories adding auxiliary components of ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ in order to illuminate some of the concerns within Woolf’s novel. Cunningham exploits the possibility of retrospect by linking flashbacks from Virginia Woolf’s life – her relationship with Leonard, her fear of Nelly, with scenes from the lives of Laura Brown and Clarissa Vaughan. He therefore blends together the three stories into a deep, meaningful, and mystical novel, which gives a new angle to Woolf’s original novel ‘Mrs. Dalloway’. In this sense, he uses his novel to highlight autobiographical aspects of the text as well as to explore the life and thought processes of Virginia Woolf.
Michael Cunningham uses certain methods in writing ‘The Hours,’ making expert use of the contemporary post-modernist approach. His writing style rejects boundaries and rigid genre distinctions, which brings his novel authenticity, making it so distinctive. He emphasises a sense of partition in his novel by having the novel in the three-story layout, however the readers are called to look upon the novel from a broad perspective in order for it to make sense – as a fusion, because if the novel is looked upon in fragments – it is meaningless. As New York critic Alex Grant puts it: - “The parts are meant to be blended in together like a collage that makes up a complex and meaningful image.” This blending is an important factor for the readers of ‘The Hours’ and it must also be considered that its predecessor, ‘Mrs. Dalloway’, is also a part of this ‘collage’ that needs to be deconstructed in order to extract meaning.
Alex Grant goes on to state: - “It is, rather, an attempt at osmosis with the spirit of Virginia Woolf.” ‘The Hours’ can definitely be seen as an extension of the ideas in ‘Mrs. Dalloway’, which are subtle and almost unintentional. However, underpinning Cunningham’s whole intention in writing ‘The Hours’ lays ‘Mrs Dalloway’, which comes to serve as a “template” for his “collage.” In some ways, Cunningham explicates what had been implicit in ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ – illuminating it at the same time.
In some ways, ‘The Hours’ can be seen as a variation on a theme, where Cunningham explores the ways in which the three women in ‘The Hours’: Virginia Woolf, Laura Brown, and Clarissa Vaughn engage in self-narration through streams of consciousness. Cunningham exploits the stream of consciousness in order to clarify the internalised worlds of his characters. Through this they tell their stories, explore themselves, and illuminate certain characters in the novel of ‘Mrs. Dalloway’: “Clarissa will be bereaved, deeply lonely, but she will not die. She will be too much in love with life, with London.” Here we see Cunningham adding dimensions to his own characters as well as working on his “template” in order to clarify and level some of the imbalances within ‘Mrs Dalloway’.
‘Mrs. Dalloway’ can certainly be seen as a template for Cunningham’s novel. One of the driving forces behind Cunningham’s novel is the improvisational use of every aspect of ‘Mrs. Dalloway’- its themes and ideas as well as Virginia Woolf’s life story: - “The voices are here, the headache is coming, and if she restores herself to the care of Leonard and Vanessa they won’t let her go again, will they?” Cunningham uses ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ as a model – he takes certain characters from the novel and extends them by developing their inner selves, something that Woolf was perhaps unable to do: He uses Clarissa Dalloway and turns her into a freer, more independent, happier Clarissa Vaughn. Cunningham is enabled to do this through the cultural context in which he writes that context of a more liberated and modern society.
The central themes of Cunningham’s novel, such as Homosexuality, solutions to suicide, regrets, the love and the hate of life that were present in 1923 with Virginia and Clarissa were exposed in the Laura story in 1949 as well as in the contemporary Clarissa story in 1999. It can be argued that as a modern day writer, Cunningham exploits aspects of the novel ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ such as its homosexuality sub-plot, as a means of liberation both for himself as a homosexual writer and for Virginia Woolf who was forced to live as a heterosexual woman. Indeed one reason why Cunningham has chosen to ‘pick up’ from where Virginia Woolf has left off was in sympathy of her plight as a repressed homosexual as well as to satisfy the readers of ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ by showing them how it could have turned out for Clarissa if she were to take a different path in her life. It is quite evident that Woolf herself would not have felt free to openly write a novel about homosexuality and regrets, so perhaps Cunningham decided to put it right and use her central themes to exhibit the fact that even if people take alternative paths to their lives, some things never change.
His novel shows that the issues and preoccupations that he highlights exist now as they did back then in the 1920s and that in many ways society remains as isolating now as it was then. Cunningham’s intentions therefore are to reveal that even though times change - human nature stays fundamentally the same: -
“I love you – has become almost ordinary…what Sally wants to say has to do with all the people who’ve died; it has to do with her own feelings of enormous good fortune and imminent, devastating loss.”
This sense of loss is very important in the novel because it is also a metaphor for regret – something that both novels ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ and ‘The Hours’ explore in great detail. Clarissa Dalloway spends her whole life regretting not marrying Peter and not taking a path in her life with Sally. Laura Brown in ‘The Hours’ also explores the idea of regret when she talks of the opportunities that have been lost due to her marriage and family life. This sense of regret – and more specifically the regret experienced by women repressed by marriage and family is apocalyptic and quite disastrous in many ways because even the title ‘The Hours’ reminds us that life is brief and short-lived and opportunities must not be missed.
In his novel, Cunningham mimics and illuminates Virginia Woolf seventy years after ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ and innovates his own characters by using her structure. Woolf introduced two separate stories – the Septimus and the Clarissa stories which did not actually come together in the end but served to illuminate each other as they cannot be looked at and made sense of separately. They were written as two separate stories but their stories blend together at the end of the novel and make up a significant point about the temperament of human nature. Cunningham employs this structure and writes his novel in three different stories, exploiting a sense of fragmentation too. ‘The Hours’ offer us layers of meaning depending on how hard we work to piece together the characters and the stories.
Cunningham pushes his novel taking it to the next level from ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ by first of all using retrospective reading of ‘Mrs Dalloway’ to make the wrongs of the novel – right. An example of this is having Clarissa live with Sally in order to restore the repressed sexuality themes. Layers of meaning are then created by proving the complexities and extensiveness of the human nature – showing that some things never change: - “Here she is, then; the woman of wrath and sorrow, of pathos, of dazzling charm; the woman in love with death.” In this way, the characters and plot are given depth and complexity.
Another way in which Cunningham illuminates ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ is through setting. Cunningham changes the character’s settings: Clarissa lives in New York, Laura in California, however he does not change Virginia’s setting as he writes about her life in the suburbs. Cunningham wanted to show a paradox, which occurred with all three women in his novel: they all wanted to escape from their surroundings and become more liberated individuals, however every single one of them craved to be in a huge city. Virginia hated being in the suburbs and loved London, which for her represented and symbolised this escape and liberation – it was her reality: Virginia's poignant belief was that “you do not find peace by avoiding life.” This urban context is important – particularly in a Woolfian perspective, because for Virginia Woolf, the city came to represent a certain anonymity that enabled her to be freer than she would otherwise have been allowed to be. It also gives us some important historical context about the novel’s Woolfian elements; Virginia Woolf felt empowered by London’s Bloomsbury and it became her psychological and intellectual haven and represented freedom for her as a woman that in other areas of her life, felt quite oppressed. Thus, the equation between city and liberation is one that Cunningham maintains in ‘The Hours’.
This is ironic because big cities are assumed to be anything but liberating whereas open countryside and the suburbs are. The same relates to Laura who also longed to escape into a crowded place of some sort because it would enable her to lose her identity and make her feel more anonymous and free. This need for displacement is adverse; nonetheless, it represents a driving force in the novels. A significant paradox is thrown up in ‘Mrs Dalloway”. In The Observer critic Vanessa Thorpe states that: - “This paradox is shown through the contrast between the ignorant society that does not care about Septimus and the watchful society with its ever-present scrutiny from which the characters and the authors are trying to escape as they had a great desire to be anonymous.”
The flicking between the past and the present in the two novels can also be seen as a metaphor for the human state of regret. In literature, the notion of time’s passing is a tragic concept: what one has or has not done and indeed, what one could have done differently had there been more time which could have changed things forever. The dilemma of time is at the core of these two novels. ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ is preoccupied with the impressions of the ‘moment’ and in the novel, the characters undertake repeated excursions into the past: “Yet everyone remembered” – Clarissa thinks as she walks toward Bond Street. The continual movement of the characters’ thoughts between remembering the past and perceiving the present forms a dominant rhythm in the novel. Cunningham is equally successful in exploring and revealing the reasons for the importance of the idea of the moments, the hours of time and regret in his novel.
While ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ is about the love of life and the hate of death where Clarissa is the life force in the novel and Septimus is the death force, ‘The Hours’ is about choosing life over death. It is also, about why the characters such as Laura Brown continue to hold on to their existence despite the pain that has been caused – her regrets about what she lost in life by getting married and the pain our life is sure to cause us. ‘The Hours’ is also about particular things we need to say but we do not say because they do not fit into words: for example, what Richard feels when he is about to commit suicide. In ‘Mrs. Dalloway’, Woolf does play around the idea of those short-lived and unforgettable small moments – her kiss with Sally, which she remembered and dwelled upon for the rest of her life. Cunningham too employs this idea of the love for the precious unforgettable moments and hating the dragging of the time. He illuminates this idea of time showing how short-lived any kind of pleasure can be, nonetheless, this is paradoxical – the shortness of pleasure is tragic, yet its intensity, even in one, quick, unexpected moment is uplifting.
A central idea animating ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ and embodied in its stream of consciousness language is that experiencing the same external events connects people, who never meet, like Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith. Cunningham’s idea resounds – “we are creatures who repeat ourselves” no matter how displaced we may be, we all form part of a community and a common struggle. The centrality of this idea to the two novels illuminates itself. Vanessa Thorpe, in The Observer on Sunday explained that: - ‘The Hours’ extends this idea through the decades to celebrate the timelessness of great literature by placing the author, her fictional alter ego, and two of her latter-day readers in the same sphere of consciousness.” Cunningham has reaffirmed that Woolf is of lasting significance, that the questions she asked about life remain urgent, and that, in spite of sorrow, pain, and the promise of death, the simplest things like walking out the door on a lovely morning, setting a vase of roses on a table - can be, for one shining moment, enough.
