Hours - By Michael Cunningham

¶ … Hours - by Michael Cunningham

The three women in Michael Cunningham's novel The Hours are of course created, as the other characters are, the drivers in Cunningham's award-winning literary tribute to Virginia Woolf's novel, Mrs. Dalloway. The first woman in Cunningham's novel is troubled but brilliant writer Virginia Woolf; the second is Clarissa, AKA "Mrs. Dalloway," a lesbian who lives in New York; and the third is Mrs. Laura Brown, pregnant with her second child, fascinated (even obsessed) with Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway, and living in Los Angeles.

The three woman are dramatically different in several ways. Clarissa has been with another woman in a love relationship for 18 years. Clarissa's daughter is lesbian and being romanced by an older woman that her mom despises. Laura has battled with her sanity, with her jealous obsessions, and motherhood itself has not been an easy fit for her. Woolf is plagued by the obsession that she will topple over into madness during the writing of Mrs. Dalloway.

All three women are presented by Cunningham in a day's time. The day is both tragic and transcendent for all three. There is fun, life, hope, and yet there is also death, the threat of death, AIDS, insanity, the specter of suicide, the ugly aging of bodies; and the human, emotional, and plot threads from Cunningham are both plucked from and re-woven into Woolf's themes.

It's a good start to the day for Clarissa, who "stands guiltily, holding her flowers... [she] can't help being drawn to the aura of fame - and more than fame, actual immortality..." She sees old friends, she reflects on important moments in her past. Willie Bass thinks she is an "old beauty, the old hippie, hair still long and defiantly gray..." Clarissa is in "unnaturally good health," Cunningham writes. "She still has a certain sexiness, a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm..."

And Cunningham portrays Clarissa as fighting her age and her body, and when she stands looking at books and at "her reflection superimposed on the glass (she still looks all right, handsome now instead of pretty - when will the crepe and gauntness, the shriveled lips, of her old woman's face begin to emerge?)."

And while Clarissa is not repulsed at all by her reflection in the window, Mrs. Woolf is another story, as far as how she sees herself. "She does not look directly into the oval mirror that hangs above the basin...she does not permit herself to look." The mirror, to Mrs. Woolf, "is dangerous; it sometimes shows her the dark manifestation of air that matches her body, takes her form but stands behind... [and] she washes her face and does not look..."

Virginia Woolf, in her husband's eye, is "pale and tall, startling as a Rembrandt...she has aged dramatically, just this year, as if a layer of air has leaked out from under her skin. She's grown craggy and worn...suddenly no longer beautiful." Not only has Virginia lost her loveliness, she is joined by the devil.

There is evil living within a brilliant mind, the ultimate juxtaposition that defines a character as having a struggle to be positive at all, let alone sustain happiness for any lengthy period of time. About Woolf: "The devil is a voice inside a wall...the devil sucks all the beauty from the world, all the hope, and what remains when the devil has finished is a realm of the living dead - joyless, suffocating."