The Hours by Michael Cunningham: Three Women, One Day

Introduction: Three Women in a Single Day

The three women in Michael Cunningham's novel The Hours are the central drivers of his award-winning literary tribute to Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. The first woman is the troubled but brilliant writer Virginia Woolf herself; the second is Clarissa, nicknamed "Mrs. Dalloway," a lesbian living in New York; and the third is Mrs. Laura Brown, pregnant with her second child, deeply fascinated—even obsessed—with Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway, and living in Los Angeles.

The three women are dramatically different in several ways. Clarissa has been in a love relationship with another woman for eighteen years. Her daughter is also a lesbian, currently being romanced by an older woman whom Clarissa despises. Laura has battled with her sanity and her jealous obsessions, and motherhood has not been an easy fit for her. Woolf, meanwhile, is plagued by the fear that she will topple into madness during the writing of Mrs. Dalloway.

Cunningham presents all three women within the span of a single day. That day is both tragic and transcendent for each of them. There is fun, life, and hope, yet there is also death, the threat of death, AIDS, insanity, the specter of suicide, and the ugly aging of bodies. The emotional and plot threads that Cunningham weaves are at once plucked from and rewoven into Woolf's original themes.

Clarissa: Flowers, Aging, and Bohemian Grace

It is 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 encounters old friends and reflects on important moments from her past. Willie Bass thinks of her as an "old beauty, the old hippie, hair still long and defiantly gray." Clarissa is described as being in "unnaturally good health," Cunningham writes. "She still has a certain sexiness, a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm."

Cunningham also portrays Clarissa as someone who quietly wrestles with her age and her body. Standing before a shop window, she studies "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?)." Yet despite this internal questioning, Clarissa is not repulsed by what she sees. Her relationship with her own reflection stands in notable contrast to that of Virginia Woolf.

Virginia Woolf: The Mirror and the Devil Within

Where Clarissa regards her reflection with cautious acceptance, Woolf actively avoids hers. "She does not look directly into the oval mirror that hangs above the basin… she does not permit herself to look." The mirror, for 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."

In her husband's eyes, Virginia Woolf is "pale and tall, startling as a Rembrandt," yet "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 former loveliness—she is joined, in Cunningham's rendering, by something darker.

There is evil living within a brilliant mind, the ultimate juxtaposition that defines a character as someone who struggles to remain positive at all, let alone to sustain happiness for any length of time. Of Woolf, Cunningham writes: "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." This image of inner torment, drawn from the historical Woolf's well-documented mental illness, gives Cunningham's fictional portrait both psychological depth and tragic weight.

Conclusion: Life, Death, and Intertextual Threads

Cunningham's The Hours ultimately presents a single day that is simultaneously tragic and transcendent for each of its three protagonists. The novel's emotional and narrative threads are drawn directly from Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and rewoven into new contexts, allowing themes of aging, madness, desire, and survival to resonate across different eras and circumstances. Whether through Clarissa's bittersweet self-appraisal, Woolf's tormented avoidance of her own reflection, or Laura's quiet transformation through reading, Cunningham demonstrates that a single day—and a single novel—can contain the full spectrum of human experience.

Cunningham, Michael. The Hours. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.