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Transcending Time: Michael Cunningham’s The Hours

© Janet Kay Blaylock

In The Hours (1998), Michael Cunningham pays tribute to Virginia Woolf in a beautifully crafted re-imagining of Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Woolf's novel follows Clarissa Dalloway on a June day in London, as she prepares for a party she is giving that evening. With its emphasis on plumbing the depths of characters' inner lives, Mrs. Dalloway is characteristic of Woolf's oeuvre. Her experimental prose, a combination of stream of consciousness, interior monologue, and lyrical language, strives to capture what she referred to as moments of being, fleeting moments of joy, where even the smallest of gestures effect the most enduring impressions. As Clarissa recalls such past moments, considering her relationships with men and with women, the novel unfolds larger themes, exploring the nature of creativity, of identity and sanity, of loss, of time, and of the choices we make. As these themes overlap, so do people's lives. Woolf suggests we are tethered like a web, with delicacy, transparency, and resilience.

Cunningham spins similar webs among his characters; not only do their lives overlap within the novel's framework, but outside of it, as well, intersecting with the lives of their literary predecessors. It's a marvelous feat, really, and one Cunningham achieves by borrowing and transforming Woolf's characters, by mimicking Woolf's linguistic techniques (such as uniting scenes and themes through recurring images and language), and by similarly applying a poet's attention to language, to how sounds affect and effect meaning. Even his title, The Hours, borrows from Woolf, as it was her working title for Mrs. Dalloway.

The opening of The Hours makes clear Cunningham's intentions. After an epilogue visualizing Woolf's suicide, The Hours begins with Clarissa Vaughn (dubbed Mrs. Dalloway by her friend and former lover), an editor in modern day New York City, thinking, "There are still the flowers to buy." From here, Cunningham proceeds in the next two chapters to do what he does throughout the novel, to move seamlessly back and forth in time among the stories of three women, Clarissa Vaughn, Woolf herself, and Laura Brown, a disaffected 1950's mother and wife, escaping from everyday demands in the pages of Woolf's novel. All three women are introduced with the flower imagery, a central motif associated with the theme of creativity. Chapter two presents Virginia Woolf in the process of refining the first line of her novel: "Mrs. Dalloway said something (what?), and got the flowers herself." Correspondingly, chapter three introduces Laura Brown reading the first line of Mrs. Dalloway. The second paragraphs of each of these three introductory chapters stylistically and thematically reinforce the parallel structure. Chapter one:"It is New York City. It is the end of the twentieth century." Chapter two: It is a suburb of London. It is 1923." Chapter three: "It is Los Angeles. It is 1949." Not surprisingly, the setting for these three chapters is a day in June.

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