Michael Cunningham Virginia Woolf

¶ … Hours

In her novel "Mrs. Dalloway," Virginia Woolf demonstrated a distinctly modern style as she revealed the dynamics of perception rather than simply writing another "conventional" story, like many other writers of her time. Michael Cunningham, in a tribute to Wolff, took her story and modified her modern style with his own unique writing in "The Hours."

Cunningham played with Woolf's writing styles in his novel, intensifying her clever style. For example, Woolf had an unusual method of making her characters experience backward launches of memories, which were usually sparked by some type of image. In addition, she would jumble time and place to show her readers the reality of human consciousness and experience. Cunningham mimicked her style in "The Hours" yet added to the excitement with his postmodern styles. Therefore, while Woolf's plot was simple, Cunningham's was decidedly complex.

In his introductory statement, Cunningham discusses Woolf, hinting that she killed herself because she believed she had failed as an artist, as she felt she could not create a work that was real and alive. He brings out this suggestion in his novel, through Richard, a gifted poet who is dying of AIDS. Richard, too, was haunted by the belief that he was a failure. In one scene, Richard tells Clarissa, "I thought I was a genius. I actually used that word, privately, to myself" (Cunningham, 1998, p. 65). In addition, Woolf, as she walks to her death, is burdened with thoughts of failure, "She herself has failed. She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric" (p. 4). In this light, it seems that Cunningham doubted Woolf's ability to effectively use modernism to show her readers reality. Perhaps this is why he brought it upon himself to update the novel.

Each of the three main female characters in "the Hours" shows a visible conscious of her inner self, slightly separate from the "self" seen by the world. Clarissa's "determined, abiding fascination is what she thinks of as her soul" (p. 12); Virginia "can feel it inside her, an all but indescribable second self, or rather a parallel, purer self. If she were religious, she would call it the soul... It is an inner faculty that recognizes the animating mysteries of the world because it is made of the same substance" (pp. 34-35). Similarly, Woolf's "Clarissa felt that pieces of herself existed wherever she had ever been (Woolf, 1996, p. 3)." However, while Woolf only hinted to this inner self, Cunningham made it the essence of each of his characters.

In Woolf's novel, she uses a sense of psychological time rather than historical time to clue her readers in on the relationship between Clarissa and Peter. "For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter: she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, if he were with me now what would he say (p. 5)?" Cunningham mimics this style, as well as the relationship, with his jumbled sense of time when Clarissa and Richard.

Woolf's novel asks the question, "Who is Mrs. Dalloway?" However, Woolf makes it a point to never answer the question, as she concludes that no single or collective perception can ever really understand the complexities of another. Cunningham takes this idea a step further in his postmodern attempts, stating that words will never be able to truly demonstrate the complexities of human nature.

In his novel, Cunningham looks at Woolf herself on the day that she began to write "Mrs. Dalloway (Guthmann, 1998)." He also examines the life of Mrs. Brown, a pretty housewife is contemplating suicide while reading Mrs. Dalloway. Finally, he reveals the life of Clarissa, a middle-aged lesbian who is caring for her dying friend. Of all these characters, Cunningham makes the biggest statement with Clarissa, who is a modern version of Mrs. Dalloway, a generous woman who is afraid that she's become "conventional, a meager spirit."

Before writing The Hours, Cunningham read all of Woolf's novels, letters, and diaries, as well as several Woolf biographies, in an effort to discover who she really was. "I wanted the book to be colored by her voice, to feel steeped in her style without trying to mimic it," he says in an interview with The Advocate, "which would be a doomed enterprise and would just make me look like a fool (Guthman, 1998)."