Cultivating Moments in Post-modernity: Michael Cunningham’s The Hours

It is a testament to the power of memory that a single moment in time can remain

with us throughout our lives. The passing hours, days and years whittle away much of

the chaff, yet what remains are occurrences, seemingly ordinary to those that pass in and

out of our lives, but for better or worse make us who we are. It is less a cliché than a

human truth that some moments freeze us in time, have the power to change us or to

haunt us with threats of what might have been. More accurately, for many the “present

. . . is a perpetual repetition of the past” (Miller 59). “In another sense,” J. Hillis Miller

explains, “the weight of all the past moments presses just beneath the surface of the

present, ready in an instant to flow into consciousness, overwhelming it with the

immediate presence of the past” (Miller 59). It is this weight, the considerable hold of

the past in the form of nostalgia that directs many of the personal choices we are inclined

to make presently.

Nostalgia has been recognized throughout all cultures since at least 1688 when the

term was coined by a Swiss medical student pressed to diagnose severe homesickness in

those who had been away from home for long periods of time. But nostalgia is much

more complex than homesickness. Svetlana Boym writes:

At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually it is a

yearning for a different time-the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms

of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is a rebellion against the

modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic

desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective

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 mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the

irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition. (Boym XV)

Time is thought to be reversed through repetition of the past, and that which seemed

irrecoverable becomes a shadow. For the fast paced postmodern culture, it is a “longing

for continuity in a fragmented world. Nostalgia inevitably appears as a defense

mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals”

(Boym XIV). The evolution of the conception of time is important to note, as well.

Linda Hutcheon writes of this evolution as “a shift in site from the spatial to the temporal.

Nostalgia was no longer simply a yearning to return home . . . people who did return

home were usually disappointed because, in fact, they did not want to return to a place,

but to a time of youth. Time, unlike space, cannot be returned to-ever; time is

irreversible. And nostalgia becomes the reaction to that sad fact” (Hutcheon).

As is often the case with a culture’s obsession, these concerns are reflected in art.

Painting, architecture, music and electronic media have all honored the past, sometimes

as obvious homage, and at other times as completely new forms and movements.

Although the written word has evolved in much the same way, it enjoys a more unique

relationship with its admirer, the reader. For modernist writer Virginia Woolf, the novel

was the truest representation of life and all its complexities. “Writing,” observes J. Hillis

Miller, “is the only action which exists simultaneously on both sides of the mirror, within

death and within life at once” (Miller 72). No one saw this more clearly than Woolf. At a

time when writers were expected to write about more serious subjects, such as social

issues or World War I, these subjects are only experiences which happen to inhabit the

same place and time as those ordinary moments which are Woolf’s real concern. As

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Michael Cunningham notes, “Woolf was then and remains today unparalleled in her

ability to convey the sensations and complexities of the experience known as being alive.

Any number of writers manage the big moments beautifully; few do as much with what it

feels like to live through an ordinary hour on a usual day” (Cunningham, Salon.com).

Cunningham describes Woolf’s fervent conviction that what is most remembered in life

“is less likely to be its supposed climaxes than its unexpected moments of awareness,

often arising out of unremarkable experience, so deeply personal they can rarely be

explained” (Cunningham, Salon.com). No wonder Cunningham chooses to honor Woolf

with his own version of her novel Mrs. Dalloway, which follows a single day in the life

of a woman in 1920’s London. The Hours, Cunningham’s postmodern homage to

Woolf’s novel, follows a single day in the life three women in three separate time periods.

Both novels revolve around the lasting memory of a most ordinary, but deeply affecting

moment-a kiss. In Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa describes the kiss as “the most exquisite

moment of her whole life . . . The whole world might have turned upside down! The

others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally”(Woolf 35). Cunningham’s Clarissa

Vaughan has a similar experience: “What lives undimmed in Clarissa’s mind more than

three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as

mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it’s

perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more” (Cunningham

98). The pasts of a host of human characters pervades both novels. “Caves” Woolf called

them. “The idea,” she believed, “is that the caves shall connect, and each comes to

daylight at the present moment” (Lee 43). What, then, to do with the present moment?

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4
 Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

Perhaps the first past to bear upon the present in artistic representation is that of

the artist or writer. If a work of art or a novel is best understood when viewed in the

context of its time, then it is a reasonable assumption that the artist or writer’s past

contributes to this context. Susan Stewart suggests a person’s past has great influence on

the present self: “Here we might remember the meaning of appurtenance as appendage,

the part that is a whole, the addition to the body which forms an attachment, transforming

the very boundary, or outline, of the self” (Stewart xi). Virginia Woolf’s life, the societal

means into which she was born and the people she knew contribute to the artistic

expression that is Mrs. Dalloway. Something of a novel of manners, Clarissa Dalloway

knows enough about social graces to throw the kind of party everyone wants to attend.

As biographer Hermione Lee notes, Clarissa Dalloway “is nothing like Virginia Woolf,

though she shares her intense memories of childhood, her sexual ambivalence and

withdrawal . . . her need for both solitude and society, and her preoccupation with illness

and mortality combined with a passionate love of the life of the city” (Lee 44-45). What

Woolf does not share with Clarissa is her mastery of social skill and high class manners.

Marilyn Charles notes: “Born into an era and class in which the social graces had reached

the form of an art; Virginia Woolf seems to have been haunted by memories of her

mother’s consummate mastery of that art, in harsh juxtaposition to her own relative

ineptitude” (Charles 305). Often accused of being a snob, many of Woolf’s attempts to

be sociable proved to be disastrously marred by tardiness (not as fashionable then as it

seems today) and a misunderstanding of manners and polite conversation. According to

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Charles, “The character of Clarissa Dalloway may be seen as an attempt to puzzle

through the paradigmatic social persona that called to and yet ineluctably eluded her”

(Charles 305).

If Woolf’s social circles serve as a model for the setting of Mrs. Dalloway, then

the people she knew serve as models for the characters. Another inspiration for the

character of Clarissa Dalloway may have been Woolf’s cousin, Madge Vaughan.

Described as having a childlike wonder and fresh outlook on life, Madge seemed to

inspire Virginia. Woolf’s nephew, Quentin Bell, recalls: “Virginia was in fact in love

with her. She was the-and in those early years Virginia fled altogether from anything

male-the first to capture her heart, to make it beat faster, indeed to make it almost stand

still . . . Virginia once declared that she had never felt a more poignant emotion for

anyone than she did at that moment for Madge” (Bell 60 -61). If these words sound

familiar, it’s because Woolf will use language very close to this to describe Clarissa

Dalloway’s feelings for Sally Seton. In addition to the same-sex emotions she knew so

well, Woolf also endows Clarissa with her own philosophy of life. Having rejected

conventional religious faith throughout most of her life, she instills in Clarissa “a

mystical belief that her self is somehow interfused among familiar places and people.

The idea sustains her . . .” (Marder 57). The same belief that Woolf had grown to accept

through the years inhabits Clarissa’s thoughts:

on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived,

lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home;

of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of

the people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the

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 people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the

trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself. (Woolf 9)

Spread ever so far, her life. These words are an acknowledgement that one’s past is a part

of their whole self; and the idea is conveyed by Clarissa Dalloway, a product of Woolf’s

collective memory and imagination. Finally, there is Septimus Warren-Smith inspired in

part by Woolf family friend Kitty Maxse. Virginia had always believed her death by

falling down a flight of stairs to be a suicide rather than an accident. Quentin Bell writes

that Kitty’s death “almost certainly helped to transform the stories [Woolf’s Dalloway

short stories] into a book and to give that book its final character” (Bell 87).

When Virginia Woolf began writing Mrs. Dalloway in 1922, she had also begun

writing a work of literary criticism called The Common Reader. The work primarily

drew upon articles or essays which had already been published, but of particular interest

is the essay entitled “On Not Knowing Greek”. Tongue slightly in cheek, her study of

more ancient texts could not help but inform her writing. According to Steven Monte,

Mrs. Dalloway “contains an unusual number of similes that draw on epic language and

imagery” (Monte 589). One example is the way in which Woolf chooses to describe the

awkwardness between Clarissa and Peter after years of estrangement: “So before a battle

begins, the horses paw the ground; toss their heads; the light shines on their flanks; their

necks curve. So Peter Walsh and Clarissa, sitting side by side on the blue sofa,

challenged each other” (Woolf 44). Just as in the Greek epics Woolf had been reading,

her adept use of “extended similes . . . are lyric interruptions of the narrative. They hold

our attention on the moment and briefly stop the flow of time even as they help the

storyteller, if not the story, to continue” (Monte 590). In a way, using the language of the

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Greek epic affirms what Woolf had always believed about the lasting impression of small,

awkward moments like the meeting between two friends turned strangers. By doing so

she raises “everyday activities to the level of the heroic” (Monte 591). She further

references these ancient writers as she attempts to employ in her novel a form of a

distinctively Greek literary device-the chorus. Woolf had written in The Common

Reader: “The intolerable restrictions of the drama could be loosened . . . if a means could

be found by which what was general and poetic, comment, not action, could be freed

without interrupting the movement of the whole” (Woolf 28-29). Steven Monte explains,

“Her novelistic chorus is an attempt at indirect commentary, a way of pushing the ego

aside” (Monte 597). It was Woolf’s idea to push aside any author’s commentary

regarding the forward momentum of the story, to “record the atoms as they fall on the

mind in the order in which they fall” (Woolf 33-34). Woolf would utilize moments that

link the minds of her characters together, enabling her to switch from one interior

monologue to the next without interrupting the flow of the narrative with the author’s

voice. “From this perspective,” writes Monte, “moments such as the old woman singing

outside the Regent’s Park tube station have to count as choruses whether or not Woolf’s

idea originates as a more direct ‘Greek’ chorus” (Monte 597). Events seen or heard by all

in the flow of the narrative, such as the backfiring of the car, the ringing of Big Ben’s

bells or the skywriting airplane would seem to serve the same purpose. Although Woolf

reaches back as far as the ancient Greeks to inform her ideas regarding writing, she would

also respond to more modern writers, viewing the whole of literary history as an

evolutionary continuum. Virginia Woolf would come to acknowledge that “one’s own

language is prepared to some extent by that of earlier writers . . . that literary works do

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not really stem from a single mind” (Monte 601). In the essay entitled “Modern Fiction”,

she writes, “In making any survey, even the freest and loosest, of modern fiction, it is

difficult not to take it for granted that the modern practice of the art is somehow an

improvement upon the old” (Woolf 146). More than a simple affirmation of the

modernist propensity to make old things new again, she would engage in “a necessary

revisionary fantasy: the engendering of one’s own predecessors” (Monte 602). Woolf

often would write in response to the most admired works of her time, respectfully

reworking themes and style in the way she imagined they ought to be. Chief among

those to whom Woolf’s fiction pays homage are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Marcel

Proust, Henry James and James Joyce.

Nancy Walker writes, “women writers have . . . been conscious of a prior tradition

of women writers that could nurture and potentially include them . . . [they] view

themselves as part of a community and a continuum” (Walker 20-21). Virginia Woolf

would find herself in the good company of prominent women writers like Jane Austen

and George Eliot. Jane Austen’s ability to describe characters without an overbearing

authorial ego would inspire Woolf’s own style a great deal. Acknowledging that Austen

died before her work really had a chance to blossom, Woolf wonders how she may have

developed as a writer had she lived: “She would have devised a method, clear and

composed as ever, but deeper and more suggestive, for conveying not only what people

say, but what they leave unsaid; not only what they are, but what life is. She would have

stood further away from her characters, and seen them more as a group, less as

individuals” (Woolf 145). In short, suggests Steven Monte, “She would have become

Woolf” (Monte 602). Woolf would also find stylistic inspiration within the pages of

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Middlemarch, in which author George Eliot “draws attention away from her heroine by

focusing on other characters for long stretches” (Monte 600). However, Woolf believed

Eliot’s own personality infiltrated her work to the point of distraction. Woolf’s attempts

to resolve the problem of the author’s ego would evolve into the aforementioned idea of a

novelistic chorus inspired by the Greeks.

Proust, James and Joyce would influence more directly the narrative of Mrs.

Dalloway. The way in which Woolf creates distinctive pasts for her characters “can be

likened to Proustian uses of memory” (Monte 592), and also the many flashback scenes

involving Clarissa and Peter “have a modern, Jamesian feel to them” (Monte 593). More

specifically, James is likely to have inspired the idea of the immanent present moment as

described in Woolf’s famous last words in the novel: “For there she was” (Woolf 194).

Observing James among a host of other party guests, Woolf would note his concentration

on those in a ballroom. Finding inspiration for Clarissa Dalloway’s party, James

“reinforces the idea of hostess or observant partygoer as novelist . . . a ‘pointing toward’

rather than a description of reality, is subjective in that it signals a point of view, yet it

also suggests transparency and immanence” (Monte 593). Finally, it is generally

considered by most literary critics that Mrs. Dalloway is in many ways a response to

James Joyce’s Ulysses. There are in fact many similarities between the two works. Both

take place over the course of a single day with hour to hour progression, and both works

employ the stream of consciousness technique. However, Woolf did not particularly care

for Joyce’s writing, perhaps attempting to improve upon both his style and themes in

Mrs. Dalloway. She would write of him, “if you could weigh the meaning of Joyces [sic]

page it would be about 10 times as light as Henry James” (Woolf 548). While finding

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Joyce’s work insubstantial in terms of deeply felt emotions that ring true, his use of

shifting perspectives and interior monologue would find their way into Mrs. Dalloway as

literary devices that Woolf believed she could employ more effectively.

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway “emerged gradually from Woolf’s struggles with

writers old and new” (Monte 604). She pays homage to a rich literary history dating back

as far as the Greek epics, while at the same time engaging her contemporaries. She in

fact understood the reality of memory’s role in a stream of consciousness narrative, a

style popular amongst the writers of her time. She would write of memories built upon

one another, shifting in and out of the present, while still part of a linear time flow. By

acknowledging her role in a greater historical and memorial narrative dealing with the

same themes, “Once again, Woolf is dispersing the ego, only this time via literary

history” (Monte 601).

Since Woolf knew of the past’s propensity to bear upon the present through both

her own past and that of the community of writers of which she was now a part, it could

not help but to infiltrate her work and ideas. She did not consider it at all false or

manipulative that human experience and emotion be conveyed through story. It is in fact,

one representative among many in which human culture has recorded its past. Susan

Stewart writes, “conventions of description are intimately bound up with the conception

of time as it is both portrayed in the work and partaken of by the work. By means of its

conventions of depiction, temporality, and ultimately, closure, narrative here seeks to

‘realize’ a certain formulation of the world . . . In this sense, every narrative is a miniature

and every book a microcosm” (Stewart xi-xii). Woolf sees the developing novel form as

the perfect way to convey the lasting impact of a singular moment and the nostalgic

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longing for what might have been. In Mrs. Dalloway, this moment involves a kiss

between Clarissa and Sally. James Schiff explains the importance of this moment:

In a novel in which the self is often depicted as being alone and detached,

a kiss serves most crucially as the initial point of physical contact, the

moment at which the gap between people is bridged. Though often

desired, this moment of intimacy is also frightening because characters

remain uncertain, particularly if the kiss threatens or violates social order,

of how it will be interpreted and whether it will be returned. (Schiff 371)

And while Peter Walsh does not see what transpires, his interruption of this moment will

remain with both he and Clarissa a lifetime.

In modernist fashion, Virginia Woolf charts Clarissa’s day linearly. Her path will

literally follow the minutes and hours in her day. Beginning with Clarissa’s “plunge” into

the streets of London on one June morning, the image of the ocean implies the movement

of time. “The flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave,” as Woolf describes the way in which

ripples move in water, is clearly meant to “suggest the vast concentric circles of

interconnection that unite the disparate characters of the novel, as well as the

unfathomable depths beneath the surface of their thoughts and actions” (Hughes 351).

But to limit the story to a wave that extends outward from a single day in June is to

overlook the ripples from a past that still holds sway on the present. This ripple is

acknowledged almost immediately as Clarissa, reminded by “the squeak of the hinges”,

recalls a day when she is eighteen years old, “the time when she had loved Sally, and

Richard Dalloway and Peter Walsh had courted her” (Hughes 352). So, while the present

is marked by the passing hours, her memory of a day in the past has a particular

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immediacy on this day; a day on which “the most important figures in Clarissa’s past

actually return during the day, Peter Walsh journeying from India and appearing suddenly

at her door, then later coming to her party; Sally Seton, now married and the mother of

five sons, also coming to her party” (Miller 62).

As Clarissa sets out to buy flowers for her party, we are reminded of the passage

of time as it is marked by the chiming of Big Ben’s bells: “First a warning, musical; then

the hour, irrevocable” (Woolf 4). Birgit Spengler notes “the chiming of Big Ben does not

only help to anchor the characters’ experiences in time and space, and to provide a

transition from one consciousness to another. External time (clock time) and ‘reality’ are

continuously juxtaposed to the characters’ inner time (duration) and experiences”

(Spengler 66). For example, Clarissa hears in their ringing, along with what most would

consider background noise, the rhythm of life: “In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and

trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans,

sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the

jingle and the strange high singing of some aero-plane overhead was what she loved; life;

London; this moment of June” (Woolf 4). This rhythm can be seen and felt within the

pages of the novel as well. David Dowling suggests that time is so well marked within

the pages of the novel, that characters can be recognized to be in particular places at

particular times. Consider the following:

10:00-11:00 am Clarissa shopping/Septimus in park 60 minutes

11:00-11:30 am Peter visits Clarissa 30 minutes

11:30-11:45 am Peter walks to park 15 minutes

(Dowling 52)

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It is to Woolf’s credit that she achieves this movement effortlessly through a stream of

consciousness style that allows the narrative to flow in real time, while also

demonstrating what she knew would ring true for the reader: “Repeatedly during the day

of the novel’s action the reader finds himself within the mind of a character who has been

invaded and engulfed by a memory so vivid that it displaces the present of the novel and

becomes the virtual present of the readers experience” (Miller 59).

Woolf also understands the sentimental, often nostalgic value of objects that can

initiate our memories from years that have long passed and interjects them throughout the

narrative for her characters. The squeaking of hinges, Peter’s pocketknife, a backfiring

automobile all serve to dredge up memories from the past. Susan Stewart explains,

“Because of its connection to biography and its place in constituting the notion of the

individual life, the memento becomes emblematic of the worth of that life and of the

self’s capacity to generate worthiness” (Stewart 139). This explains why the distant past

can be so vivid to us when we see objects or hear sounds we associate with a person, or a

place, or an “exquisite moment”. In a way, suggests J. Hillis Miller, Woolf resurrects the

dead: “As the characters make their ways through London the most important events of

their pasts rise up within them, so that the day of Mrs. Dalloway may be described as a

general day of recollection. The revivification of the past performed by the characters

becomes in its turn another past revivified, brought back from the dead, by the narrator”

(Miller 62). Melba Cuddy-Keane notes that “the characters seem not to be recollecting

the past so much as living the present through the past” (Cuddy-Keane 174). The danger,

Susan Stewart warns, is that we become paralyzed by the past, dwelling on mementos we

use “to authenticate a past or otherwise remote experience and, at the same time, to

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discredit the present” (Stewart 139). She further explains why: “The present is either too

impersonal, too looming, or too alienating compared to the intimate and direct experience

of contact which the souvenir has as its referent” (Stewart 139). The immediate present

frightens us, so we repeat what we know of the past. Even if it is not real, there is some

part of it that seems real to us. Clarissa Dalloway and Peter Walsh are characterized by

these conflicting feelings, and will take two different paths.

Clarissa’s past will inexorably intertwine with her present, already begun by the

squeaking of those hinges. She will describe herself as being “very young; at the same

unspeakably aged” (Woolf 8), and will later compare life to an attic room: “There was an

emptiness about the heart of life” (Woolf 31). Clarissa is a middle-aged woman with real

middle-aged concerns, and “she feared time itself . . . the dwindling of life; how year by

year her share was sliced” (Woolf 30). As she contemplates her mortality, she thinks

back on her past with bitter-sweetness. Melba Cuddy-Keane notes:

For Clarissa . . . memory is more than a source of pain-though her trauma

is very much the painful trauma of aging, of growing old. For her, the

point of trauma crystallizes her loss of youth-so strongly connected with

Sally but also with Peter-a loss that ultimately demands an acceptance of

death, not just personally, but in a metaphysical sense.

(Cuddy-Keane 174)

As aforementioned, Woolf had described the power of ordinary “moments of being”. But

she also acknowledged extraordinary moments in which “something happened so

violently that I have remembered it all my life” (Woolf 70). Paradoxically, Woolf

conveys both through events that occur on a single day in Clarissa Dalloway’s past.

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 Taken as she was with Sally Seton, eighteen year old Clarissa saw in her a

vibrancy of life that made her realize “how sheltered the life at Bourton was” (Woolf 33).

Knowing little about life outside of the country, she learned about sex and social

problems from Sally. As young girls often do, they dreamed big dreams: “There they sat

hour after hour, talking in her bedroom at the top of the stairs, talking about life, how

they were to reform the world” (Woolf 33). And although she does not feel for her as she

would for a man, she knows it to be love. Then comes “the most exquisite moment of her

whole life” (Woolf 35). Clarissa’s entire world seems to come undone by a kiss from

Sally. Unknowingly, Peter Walsh interrupts the reverie of this moment:

“Star-gazing?” said Peter.

So unexpected and unwanted is Peter’s innocent intrusion that Clarissa forever

remembers it this way: “It was like running one’s face against a granite wall in the

darkness! It was shocking; it was horrible! . . . ‘Oh this horror!’ she said to herself, as if

she had known all along that something would interrupt, would embitter her moment of

happiness” (Woolf 36). Jonathan Quick writes of Peter’s intrusion as “the embryonic

moment . . . aborted” (Quick 131). Peter will never have any knowledge of his error, and

Clarissa will keep Sally’s kiss “a present, wrapped up . . . a diamond infinitely precious”

(Woolf 35). Clarissa, unable to pursue her feelings for Sally due to societal constraints,

will marry Richard Dalloway and settle into a life of safe domesticity which promises the

cherished ordinary life she holds so dear. However, Peter’s memories of this time will be

marked by regrets and his unrequited love for Clarissa.

Peculiar, how history can repeat itself. While lost in her memories of Sally, her

front doorbell rings. Interrupting again, after many years, is Peter. An awkward meeting,

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they reminisce about their time at Bourton. Peter becomes lost in grief, his heart

breaking all over again as he remembers how he once wanted to marry Clarissa: “Of

course I did, thought Peter; it almost broke my heart too, he thought; and was overcome

with his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful

with light from the sunken day. I was more unhappy than I’ve ever been since, he

thought” (Woolf 42). Although the reunion is uneasy, it affords an opportunity for some

sense of reconciliation: “Gradually, through common memories and a welling-up of

emotion generated by their recognition of each other’s unhappiness, Peter and Clarissa

draw together” (Quick 130). Ironically, Clarissa’s daughter shatters the moment in much

the same way Peter had years prior. Elizabeth’s interruption sends Peter bolting from the

house with Clarissa reminding him of the party that evening, her voice trailing behind. In

much the same way Clarissa feels about being middle aged, Peter feels “hollowed out,

utterly empty within” (Woolf 49). And as the party approaches, Clarissa herself feels

“Some grief for the past . . . some concern for the present” (Woolf 49). The difference

between the deeply felt nostalgia afflicting both Clarissa and Peter is how they confront

the present. Because Peter’s life seems to him to be “a history of thwarted or betrayed

emotions dating from Clarissa’s early rejection of his love, he will not allow the

consciousness of [the present] moment to possess him. He retreats from it in nervous

distrust, settling into his secure but sterile attitude of ironic detachment” (Quick 132).

Christine Froula elaborates:

The main thing that distinguishes Clarissa from Peter is the chosen

strategy of self-identification. Communication and intimacy with people

and the surrounding world seem quite true and correct to Mrs. Dalloway.

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 She is the only one among all the characters in the novel who can sense

herself, though for a moment, as part of an internal and continuous life

stream. Peter, on the contrary, chooses the way of confrontation with the

whole world. (Froula 271)

Perhaps the reader should not be too hard on Peter, though. After all, his past, “his love

of Clarissa-has colored his whole life” (Cuddy-Keane 174). And who hasn’t been there.

Peter may be perpetually repeating his past, ensnared in self-indulgent grief, but as Peter

Knox-Shaw notes, “It is repetition that keeps open the arteries of feeling”

(Knox-Shaw 107). There is some evidence that Peter seems to be coming around as the

time for Clarissa’s party nears. After their uncomfortable reunion, he spends the

afternoon walking the streets of London, “And just because nobody yet knew he was in

London . . . the earth . . . still seemed an island to him, the strangeness of standing alone,

alive unknown . . . overcame him . . . He had not felt so young in years” (Woolf 52).

Finally, an island unto himself, he can at this moment at least, relate to Clarissa: “at the

age of fifty-three one scarcely needed people any more. Life itself, every moment of it,

every drop of it, here, this instant, now, in the sun, in Regent’s Park was enough”

(Woolf 79). Yet he fails to understand the meaning of Clarissa’s parties: “Peter . . .

thought, that she enjoyed imposing herself; liked to have famous people about her; great

names; was simply a snob in short . . . Richard merely thought it foolish of her to like

excitement when she knew it was bad for her heart. It was childish, he thought. And

both were quite wrong. What she liked was simply life” (Woolf 121). Having not totally

escaped from the past herself, she will live with the memory of Sally’s kiss forever. But

she sees in her parties an “offering” to life, and as “some effort, some call on her to be

18
herself, . . . she alone knew how different, how incompatible, and composed so for the

world only into one centre, one diamond, one woman who sat in her drawing-room and

made a meeting-point, a radiancy no doubt in some dull lives, a refuge for the lonely to

come” (Woolf 37). While this explanation seems far too abstract for him, “who was Peter

to make out that life was all plain sailing?” (Woolf 121). As he knows all too well, life is

not steady. But from the first time the reader encounters Clarissa Dalloway, we see her as

a woman who endeavors to create “every moment afresh” (Woolf 4). To her credit she

realizes the danger in attempting to exercise too much control over events and emotions.

So she has these “offerings” in which “Far from some majestic desire to oversee the

party, she is affected by the demand to let things be. She has created the festivity; now

her task is to allow the party to develop a life of its own” (Ruotolo 116). Further,

Lucio Ruotolo explains, “Since the given [moment] remains perpetually inconclusive,

existential encounters call for ever-renewed acts of recreation” (Ruotolo 100). Clarissa

Dalloway, existential heroine and foil to Peter Walsh’s existential questions, is described

at the party as a mermaid “Lolloping on the waves . . . having that gift still; to be; to

exist; to sum it all up in the moment as she passed . . . all with the most perfect ease and

air of a creature floating in its element” (Woolf 174). Edward Bishop sees this image as

evidence that Clarissa “has at last become a participant in, as well as architect of, her

creation” (Bishop 64). So while Clarissa balances her nostalgic feelings for the past with

the understanding that the present is a gift to be renewed and re-created, “Peter repeats

that moment of Clarissa coming towards him, not to understand it-which he knows he’s

unable to do-but to know it as an informing and enduring moment in his life” (Cuddy-

Keane 175). Perhaps, this awareness is some indication that Peter is beginning to see the

19
light, the present moment that Clarissa inhabits and represents as she walks towards him:

“What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there

she was” (Woolf 194).

20
 Michael Cunningham’s The Hours

Michael Cunningham, after writing three moderately successful novels, including

Flesh and Blood and A Home at the End of the World, looks to his past to find inspiration

for his 1999 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Hours. Cunningham recounts in an

interview, “My introduction to Woolf’s work . . . was in high school, where a very rough,

difficult, slightly crazed girl with teased hair and long fingernails, who used to hang

around behind the gym and smoke cigarettes, proclaimed her to be a genius . . . not an

especially bookish kid . . . [I] picked up Mrs. Dalloway at the local book store, and the

book just nailed me; I’ve thought about it almost constantly ever since” (Coffey 53).

Cunningham abandoned his typical habit of dissecting the lyrics of Bob Dylan, and at the

age of fifteen believed he could impress this rebel girl with at least a cursory knowledge

of her literary heroes. Describing in Woolfian terms the effectiveness of a single

moment, Cunningham remembers, “it went right through me. It was the first great novel

I read. It’s stayed with me in a way that no other book quite has . . . That book feels

almost as much a part of my life, my experiences, as my childhood does, or the time I lost

my virginity, or the first time I fell in love . . . Mrs. Dalloway got mixed up in there,

along with falling in love and losing my virginity” (Spring 77). Not coincidentally,

Cunningham will write of this experience after the publication of The Hours, comparing

it to the intimacy of one’s first kiss: “Everybody who reads has a first book-maybe not the

21
first book you read, but the first book that shows you what literature can be. Like a first

kiss. And you read other books, you kiss other people, but especially for those who are

romantically inclined, that first book stays with you” (Cunningham 34). Cunningham

had fallen in love with Woolf “because she knew that everyone, every single person, is

the hero of his or her own epic story” (Peregrin 30).

Cunningham further acknowledges that his past invades The Hours in another

way. In early versions of the novel, his mother was the model for character Laura Brown.

While Laura Brown refers to Woolf’s name for the “ordinary woman who sets a

challenge to all novelists” (Lee 51), she is also Cunningham’s representation of a

housewife and mother estranged from life:

. . . in early drafts, the Laura Brown sections were specifically

autobiographical. It was about my mother. And I used her name.

Initially, the book was going to involve a section that was entirely fiction,

though based on previous fictions; an imaginative section based on a

deceased person, Virginia Woolf; and a section that was as close to fact as

I could possibly make it, about my mother, Dorothy Cunningham, a

housewife in Los Angeles . . . I had tried to lift a day out of my own

childhood with my mother, who then metamorphosed into Laura Brown.

(Spring 80)

Much to Cunningham’s relief the character grows away from this and into a figure more

symbolic of the smothering limitations placed on women circa 1949. But in the final

version, Laura Brown is perhaps closer to Woolf’s vision of the ordinary woman because

of how Cunningham’s mother had inspired the character.

22
 Cunningham has said of his writing of The Hours, “What I wanted to do was

more akin to music, to jazz, where a musician will play improvisations on an existing

piece of music from the past-not to reinvent it, not to lay any kind of direct claim to it,

but to both honor it and try to make other art out of an existing work of art” (Schiff 113).

“Such re-telling or re-presentation of an earlier work of art,” writes Mary Joe Hughes, “is

rife in postmodernity” (Hughes 349). Consciously referencing Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

throughout (the title of Cunningham’s novel is itself a reference to Woolf’s original title

for Mrs. Dalloway), Hermione Lee suggests that The Hours is difficult to place as a

literary genre:

The Hours is not an imitation, or a pastiche, or exactly a rewriting; in fact

this genre of book is hard to define. Michael Wood says that “The Hours

is haunted by Mrs. Dalloway . . . . The relationship between the two

novels goes beyond allusion, and even beyond the modernist habit

of

borrowing previous literary structures which T.S. Eliot called ‘the

mythical method.’” The critic Seymour Chatman, in a piece called

“Mrs. Dalloway’s Progeny: The Hours as Second-Degree Narrative,”

refers to Gerard Genette’s Palimpests in an attempt to define this brand

of intertextuality. Is it a sequel, a variation on a theme, a pastiche, a

parallel, an imitation, a rewriting, a plagiarism, a caricature, an homage, or

a transposition? Chatman argues that The Hours is “an alternative version

of Mrs. Dalloway” in which the main project is to present the

“ordinariness” of gay life, to “demonstrate that the gay world is not exotic,

23
 but populated by ordinary people. (Lee 52-53)

Whatever Cunningham’s motives, it is obvious his novel is a labor of love as he takes

great care in producing “a postmodernist fabric woven out of intertextual references”

(Wild).

In addition to the intertextual references to Woolf’s novel, Cunningham splits The

Hours into “different strands divided up into sections instead of chapters . . . where three

separate strands, each centered on a single day in the life of a different person, run

parallel and form individual units, though they also intersect as they all relate in one way

or the other to Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway” (Wild). The three part structure reflects the

fragmentary nature of postmodern artistic representations: “postmodern works of

literature . . . defy a linear or chronological structure with a beginning, middle, and end.

Instead they spin off stories like ripples in all directions, points of contact and connection

as the circle widens . . . postmodern art carries the tradition beyond itself, adding more

circles in the water” (Hughes 357). Again, we return to the image of ripples radiating

outward in a body of water, this time in “a movement that defies linearity” (Hughes 357).

Rather than a common event shared by two people at single point in time, three different

people share a common experience in three different time periods. Still, just as Woolf

demonstrated, Cunningham asserts “the oceanic interconnectedness between people, the

life of one human spirit animating that of another, the permeable boundaries between life

and death, and the burst bounds of time” (Hughes 353). What is the common experience

that connects all three narratives? It’s a kiss. James Schiff writes that “Cunningham

essentially mass-produces the kiss, including one in nearly every major scene. The

Woolfian kiss is replicated in multiple configurations and circumstances . . . these kisses

24
are depicted as awkward or ambiguous, and sometimes they serve as transgressive,

climactic moments in the text” (Schiff 370). This deeply affecting experience connects

the lives of Clarissa Vaughan, a lesbian publisher in the 1990’s; Laura Brown, a

housewife and mother in suburban Los Angeles circa 1949; and Virginia Woolf as she

begins work on Mrs. Dalloway in 1923. Just like the “caves” of Mrs. Dalloway, the past

will converge on the present. And just like Woolf, Cunningham hints at acts of

“re-creation and renewal” demonstrating this necessity by “ricocheting back and forth

between the story of Woolf’s life, the story of Laura Brown, and the story of his Clarissa

and Richard Brown, three generations of ripples in the water” (Hughes 355).

In Woolf’s novel, Clarissa Dalloway’s most lasting memory is a kiss shared with

another woman, Sally Seton. In Cunningham’s novel, Clarissa Vaughan also fondly

recalls a kiss from her past. The moment she shared as a young woman with her friend

Richard has remained with her, even though he is now a gay man dying of AIDS and she

is happily involved with another woman, who happens to be named Sally. At that time in

her past, how could she have known what the future would bring? At the time, it seemed

to her to be “perfection . . . perfect in part because it seemed at the time, so clearly to

promise more” (Cunningham 98). But time interrupts, and “Now she knows: That was

the moment, right then. There has been no other” (Cunningham 98). Time would

obviously change things for Clarissa Vaughan, as Cunningham suggests “strict

demarcations between queer and straight are problematic and . . . sexual orientation is

complex and fluid” (Schiff 368). It should not surprise any reader in the late 1990’s that

Clarissa Vaughan was once in love with a man, but now is in love with a woman.

Clarissa Vaughan is not unhappy with her life with Sally, but ultimately she is not unlike

25
Clarissa Dalloway in that she has some regrets about her past. Cunningham explains, “I

wondered what would happen if someone very much like Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway

were alive today and free of the constraints that were placed on Clarissa Dalloway in

London in the 20’s. What if she were set free? Would it be different or ultimately pretty

much the same? Would she impose her own restrictions?” (Schiff 113) Clarissa Vaughan,

in fact, represents Clarissa Dalloway transplanted to the end of the twentieth century. Her

friend Richard (who has nicknamed her Mrs. Dalloway) is a writer, and represents “an

amalgam of Septimus Smith, Sally Seton, Richard Dalloway, and Peter Walsh” (Schiff

367). And as aforementioned, “Although Cunningham’s Clarissa Vaughan is free to live

openly as a lesbian, her interior life is nevertheless plagued by similar regrets and

uncertainties about decisions she has made” (Schiff 368). Clarissa Vaughan “wondered

what might have happened if she’d tried to remain with him [Richard]; if she’d returned

Richard’s kiss . . . gone off somewhere (where?) with him . . . Couldn’t they have

discovered something . . . larger and stranger than what they’ve got?” (Cunningham 97).

Marilyn Charles suggests in a manner not unlike the unrequited love affair between

Clarissa Dalloway and Peter Walsh, “Richard is the person she might have loved had she

not opted for security” (Charles 307). These thoughts and memories will remain with

Vaughan throughout the day; even as she sets out to buy flowers for a party she is having

in honor of Richard, who has just won a literary award for his writing.

Having transplanted Clarissa Dalloway to 1990’s New York in the guise of

Clarissa Vaughan, Cunningham “sees that Mrs. Dalloway is a book in love with a city . . .

The city is where the party is going on” (Lee 48). So it was in 1920’s London, so it is

26
now in 1990’s New York. Observe the way in which Cunningham reinvents Woolf’s

description of London for New York. Woolf writes:

. . . Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then

the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air . . . . they

love life. In people’s eyes, in the swing, the tramp, and trudge; in the

bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans,

sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the

triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane

overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.

(Woolf 4)

Cunningham’s riff follows:

. . . men whisper offers of drugs (not to her) and three black girls whiz

past on roller skates and the old woman sings, tunelessly, iiiiiii . . . .

Still, she loves the world for being rude and indestructible and she knows

Other people must love it too . . . . Wheels buzzing on concrete . . . the

Bleat of car horns and the strum of guitars (that ragged group over there,

Three boys and a girl, could they possibly be playing “Eight Miles

High”?); leaves shimmering on the trees; a spotted dog chasing pigeons

And a passing radio playing ‘Always love you” as the woman in the black

Dress stands under the arch singing iiiii. (Cunningham 15)

27
Life plays out quite differently in the late twentieth century. Still, as Cunningham notes,

“Clarissa, Woolf’s as well as my own, doesn’t go around extolling the beauties of the

world to the people she encounters. It happens internally. We’re moved to the depths of

our souls, or whatever you want to call that ecstatic faculty, and we run into somebody on

the street and say ‘Hi, nice day, are you coming to my party tonight?” (Spring 78)

And the party is arguably the focal point of both novels. It is the place where the past

converges on the present. Both parties in both novels are celebrations of life in the face

of death. Both Clarissa’s have had encounters with mortality leading them “to a

heightened sense of awareness and a more positive attitude towards life” (Spengler 60).

Clarissa Dalloway embodies the hope of the present by offering her party as a gift and a

tribute to life: “What is this ecstasy? . . . It is Clarissa . . . For there she was”

(Woolf 194). For Clarissa Vaughan, it is the idea that the party must go on in spite of

tragedy. Even if there are only a few guests, “It is, in fact, a party, after all. It is a party

for the not yet dead; for the relatively undamaged; for those who for mysterious reasons

have the fortune to be alive” (Cunningham 226). Woolf imbues the immediacy of the

present moment upon a person who offers as gifts these celebrations of life, while

Cunningham finds similar meaning in the celebration itself echoing Woolf’s famous last

words: “Here, then, is the party” (Cunningham 226). For both Clarissa’s, the party comes

to represent “a reminder of the intensity and joy of . . . life” (Showalter xlv).

Another narrative in The Hours tells the story of Laura Brown, a housewife and

mother living in suburban Los Angeles circa 1949. As aforementioned, Laura Brown is

the name given to the ordinary reader by Virginia Woolf. Cunningham’s Laura Brown “is

sleepwalking through her ordinary life, which on this day, consists in trying to make a

28
cake for her husband’s birthday party” (Lee 49). This party is not so much a celebration

of life as a chore for Laura Brown. Hermione Lee notes that Laura is “fighting against a

strong sense of unreality, worthlessness, and longing for death” (Lee 49). Cunningham

describes it this way: “She is overtaken by a sensation of unbeing. There is no other

word for it . . . she is no one, she is nothing” (Cunningham 188). Inspired by her reading

of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and invigorated by a kiss she shares with her friend Kitty who

may be dying, Laura “transcends despair . . . at least for awhile” (Hughes 355). “It is, to

some extent, an accident of time and place,” explains Cunningham, “She shouldn’t be a

housewife, she shouldn’t be married, at least not to a nice regular guy . . . and she

probably shouldn’t be a mother, at least not yet” (Spring 78).

By setting Laura’s story in 1949, on the verge of the decade of the 1950’s,

Cunningham is able to deconstruct the nostalgic myth of this era. Seen as “an idealized,

simpler era of ‘real’ community values” (Hutcheon), sentiments expressing a better,

happier and more fulfilling time pepper our longing. Laura Brown’s life in 1949 is far

from the romanticism that is conveyed by our culture’s collective memory of this time in

American history. A look at Stephanie Coontz’s study of the American family at this time

confirms Cunningham’s characterization as accurate:

A successful 1950’s family . . . was often achieved at enormous cost to the

wife, who was expected to subordinate her own needs and aspirations to

those of both her husband and her children. In consequence, no sooner

was the ideal of the postwar family accepted than observers began to

comment perplexedly on how discontented women seemed in the very

roles they supposedly desired most.

29
 In 1949, Life magazine reported that “suddenly and for no plain reason”

American women were “seized with an eerie restlessness” . . . . By 1960,

almost every major news journal was using the word trapped to describe

the feelings of the American housewife. (Coontz 36-37)

This how Michael Cunningham describes the plight of Laura Brown:

Here is the brilliant spirit, the woman of sorrows, the woman of

transcendent joys, who would rather be elsewhere, who has consented

to perform simple and essentially foolish tasks, to examine tomatoes, to

sit under a hair dryer, because it is her art and her duty. Because the war

is over, the world has survived, and we are here, all of us, making homes,

having and raising children, creating not just books or paintings but a

whole world-a world of order and harmony where children are safe

(if not happy), where men who have seen horrors beyond imagining, who

have acted bravely and well, come home to lighted windows, to perfume,

to plates and napkins. (Cunningham 42)

What a burden to place on someone. No wonder Laura feels the need to escape the

pressures of being a housewife and mother. The fact that she escapes by reading is not

insignificant. The fact that she has to flee her family in order to do it is very telling.

Carolyn Byrd notes, “Most American homes built in the 1940’s did not have rooms that

the wife could use for her own purposes, although many husbands had a separate room as

30
their retreat/study/library” (Byrd 8). The absence of quiet time to herself will force her

into a hotel room, an action that Cunningham describes as “an attempt to create a room of

her own . . . an assignation. A little bit like having an affair with death” (Spring 78).

Already thinking of herself as dead inside, she finds the promise of new life within the

pages of Mrs. Dalloway because “In addition to generating a world into which the

trapped Laura can enter, Woolf serves as a mentor, an amalgam of genius, artist and

feminist icon, whom Laura can believe in” (Schiff 369). Cunningham characterizes her

as being “fascinated by the idea of a woman like that, a woman of such brilliance . . . She,

Laura, likes to imagine (it’s one of her most closely held secrets) that she has a touch of

brilliance herself, just a hint of it” (Cunningham 42). Through Laura Brown’s devotion to

reading, Cunningham is also trying to imply something about the power of literature to

transform. By escaping to a hotel room in order to read, Laura “is trying to lose herself,”

or more accurately “to keep herself by gaining entry into a parallel world”

(Cunningham 37). The impact of literature “goes beyond the text itself and the creative

act of writing; it includes the act of reading, too” (Wild). Paradoxically, in fictionalizing

the act of reading “Cunningham acknowledges that the reader is not a mere consumer of

literature but that the very act of reading calls the text into being . . . [and] a text cannot

be regarded as an absolute entity standing on its own and that the meaning of a text is

created through the process of reading” (Wild). In this sense, the reader may be

considered as much an artist as the writer.

Cunningham not only fictionalizes the act of reading, but the act of writing as

well. The third narrative strand that runs through The Hours is that of Virginia Woolf

herself. Perhaps it is Cunningham’s way of paying homage to the role her work has

31
played on his own literary aspiration as well as her place in the literary canon. In

Cunningham’s narrative Virginia is living in Richmond, a desolate suburb of outside of

London. She is here recovering from a nervous breakdown, and she is beginning to write

Mrs. Dalloway. Hermione Lee believes Cunningham “makes a sensitive reinvention of

Woolf’s inner life. He has a strong idea of what made Woolf’s life heroic, of her

dedication to her work in the teeth of illness, and her violent swings between moods of

pleasure in life and abysses of depression” (Lee 50). In fact, Cunningham becomes so

well versed in Woolf’s life and writing style that the “ ‘Mrs. Woolf’ strand of The Hours

also blurs the distinctions between fact and fiction and functions as Cunningham’s main

device for questioning traditional genre categories. The dichotomy between art and life-

or fiction and fact-is thus not only questioned by the novel’s subject matter, but also

reflected on a meta-discursive level” (Spengler 61). By bringing an author who is not

himself into his narrative, he has the opportunity to reflect on how fiction and the art of

writing intertwine. And in a nod to Woolf’s technique of eliminating the author’s

presence in the narrative, “Cunningham, by mimicking anterior authors and thus denying

the conventional concept of the author as the original source of all textual meaning, kills

himself into pastiche” (Wild). In The Hours, he is simply reincarnated as the reader

because, after all, one must be an avid reader to make such well established intertextual

connections. But ultimately, maybe what Cunningham wants to convey by including

Woolf in his novel is a belief in which postmodern interpreters need to be made aware:

“If you look with sufficient penetration, and sufficient art, at any hour in the life of

anybody, you can crack it open. And get everything” (Cunningham 35).

32
Conclusion

33
 Conclusion

There are many different ways to view the past. We can honor and pay homage to

our pasts by affirming our memories and experiences as a part of who we are as

individuals, perhaps even with a mixture of bitter sweetness. Or we can be haunted and

paralyzed by regrets of what might have been; an all consuming fire that threatens to

destroy. Both Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours

confront honestly the choice between life and death. While both works are ultimately

about choosing life over death, it would be remiss not to consider the choices made by

Septimus Warren-Smith and Richard Brown respectively. In both works they represent

the artist, the visionary. They are the minds for whom the rhythm of ordinary life in the

shadow of their pasts is too heavy a burden to bear. Septimus, who has a strong literary

mind and has studied the ancient Greek epics and Shakespeare, might have been a writer

had it not been for the interruption of World War I. Lucio Ruotolo explains the potential

importance of art to someone like Septimus:

At those moments when Septimus overcomes fear and allows a vision of

exquisite diversity to invade his being, his perceptions, while filtered

through the author’s consciousness, take on a creatively poetic form:

the quivering of a leaf in the wind, flying swallows, flies rising and falling,

the sound of a motor horn, “all of this, calm and reasonable as it was,

made out of ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty,

that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere.” (Ruotolo 150)

34
But, haunted by shell shock and the death of his friend Evans, “Septimus, fearing the

collapse of meaning, often freezes the moment, chooses in effect, to see and hear no

more” (Ruoltolo 103). He is instructed by his doctors (with whom Virginia Woolf had a

life long war of ideas herself) to sever himself from “matters not so organically connected

with his own feelings” (Ruotolo 104). According to Lucio Ruotolo, the prescription

proves detrimental because “This therapy of self-forgetfulness proves destructive of life

as well as art. As a growing indifference prevents relationship, his sense of alienation

becomes all but intolerable . . . his problem is not that he feels too much, but too little”

(Ruotolo 104). Similarly, the physical toll of AIDS pillages the mind of Richard Brown,

who “seems emptied out of the world, rather than providing us with a visionary

expression of the truth of a world that is simultaneously oppressive and filled with

moments of joy” (McVicker 8). The fact that neither of them is engaged with the creative

world leads to their deaths. Whether the interpretation is literal or figurative, the

postmodern reader should not overlook the contrast between the formal visionaries

represented by Septimus Warren-Smith and Richard Brown and the ordinary visionaries

represented by Clarissa Dalloway and Clarissa Vaughan. According to Nicholas Marsh,

readers are “clearly expected to treat creativity in life . . . and creative Art [sic] . . . as

essentially the same impulse” (Marsh 143). Birgit Spengler elaborates: “The Hours

addresses questions of what constitutes art and of what is appropriate subject matter for it

. . . Postulating an ‘egalitarian’ concept of art that presents preparing a party, baking a

cake and writing a novel as essentially the same impulse, Cunningham attempts to

continue and radicalize Woolf’s aesthetics with regard to the trivial and the contiguity of

art and life” (Spengler 59). Cunningham writes of the party Clarissa intends to create for

35
Richard, “She will try to create something temporal, even trivial, but perfect in its way”

(Cunningham 123), and remembers Virginia Woolf as someone who sees “true art in it,

this command of tea and dinner tables” (Cunningham 83). The more trivial, the more

potential for pregnant meaning in the moment:

Cunningham’s “artists in life” are perfectly aware that they might be

thought trivial-as indeed they may be-but they insist on the purpose of

their art as their own way towards self-realization. It is this degree of self

awareness and an almost defiant affirmation of the pragmatic value of

their “art,” regardless of its possible banality that suggest that

Cunningham’s artist figures are a “development” of Woolf’s

Mrs. Dalloway . . . The artist figures in The Hours [and] Mrs. Dalloway

. . . insinuate that it is not the métier or the outcome of creative work that

renders a person an “artist.” Rather, it is the characters’ striving for

perfection, their ceaseless creative efforts, and above all, the emotional

value assigned to their work that all “true” artists have in common.

(Spengler 63)

The past, as Woolf suggested, are only “caves” that converge on the present moment.

Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours are warnings that we should not become lost in them,

never to find our way out. What then are we to do with the present moment, and the

hours before us? Ruotolo writes that “Clarissa’s willingness continually to revise her

relationship to the extended world of past and present challenges all who surround her to

similar acts of re-creation” (Ruotolo 154). For us, now, in the present as for those in the

past, “waves collect, overbalance, and fall . . . the whole world saying ‘that is all’

36
(Woolf 39). We should watch the rhythm of life, listen to the rhythm of life, read a book,

write a poem, paint a painting, find our muse, create something new, re-create something

old, simply disappear from this world at the touch of the present moment.

37
 Annotated

Bibliography

38
 Annotated Bibliography

Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. Orlando, Austin, New York,

San Diego, Toronto, London: Harcourt, Inc., 1972.

Virginia Woolf’s nephew recounts her life as told by family members and through diary entries
essays and other writings.

Bishop, Edward. Virginia Woolf. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991.

The author writes of the rhythm of life in Mrs. Dalloway, and concludes that one must
become a participant in, as well as a creator of life sustaining moments.

Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001.

Referring to nostalgia as “hypochondria of the heart,” the author traces its history from
conception through post-communist Russia. The author references artists, writers and
immigrants in her exploration of longing.

Byrd, Carolyn. “An Examination of Two Wives and Mothers in The Hours.” Virginia
Woolf Miscellany. (2003), Fall-Winter; 64: 5-8.

Independent scholar Carolyn Byrd reflects upon the life and experiences of her own mother in
comparison to character Laura Brown in The Hours. “Laura Brown’s story was also my mother’s
story,” she writes. She also notes the societal view of the middle-class housewife in the 1940’s.

Charles, Marilyn. “The Hours: Between Safety and Servitude.” American Journal of
Psychanalysis. (2004), 64(3): 305-19.

Psychoanalyst Marilyn Charles examines the relationship between mother and child in
Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours. She asserts that Virginia Woolf was haunted by her mother’s
mastery of social graces, a characteristic she bestows upon Clarissa Dalloway in an attempt to
compensate for her lack of societal skill.

Coffey, Michael. “Michael Cunningham: New Family Outings.” Publishers Weekly.

(1998), 245(44): 53-55.

In an interview, author Michael Cunningham reflects upon his first reading of Mrs. Dalloway,
Woolf’s thoughts on human experience and alternative families.

Coontz, Stephanie. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia
Trap. New York: Basic Books, 1992.

The author deconstructs the myths of the American family, and examines the perception of
a past that never existed. She further traces the social context from the advent of television to
family gender roles.

39
Cuddy-Keane, Melba. “Mrs. Dalloway: Film, Time, and Trauma.” Virginia Woolf
and her Influences: Selected Papers from the Seventh Annual Conference
on Virginia Woolf. eds. Laura Davis, Jeanette McVicker, Jeanne Dubino.
New York: Pace University Press, 1998.

The author dissects the filmed version of Mrs. Dalloway comparing it to the source material.

Cunningham, Michael. “First Love.” PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers.
(2000), Winter; 1(1): 34-35.

In this short and concise article, author Michael Cunningham reflects upon his first reading of
Mrs. Dalloway at age 15, comparing it to the memory of one’s first kiss. He further notes Woolf’s
conviction that the whole of human experience is contained in the most ordinary of moments.

Cunningham, Michael. “Virginia Woolf: The quiet revolutionary.” Salon.Com. (2000),

http://dir.salon.com/books/feature/2000/06/22/woolf/index.html.

In a lengthier rumination on Virginia Woolf, author Michael Cunningham reflects upon her gifts
as a novelist. As a modernist writer she conveyed life as lived, breaking with traditional form
and gleaning relevance from the ordinary. At a time when novelists were expected to write of
“serious” concerns, Woolf considered the stories of ordinary people to be of greater or equal
import.

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

A postmodern reference to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, interweaving a single day in the lives
of three different women in three different time periods. Cunningham utilizes intertextual
references to Woolf’s novel to reinvent the idea of the common moment that connects each of us
in time and space, and not just a common moment seen differently in a single day.

Dowling, David. Mrs. Dalloway: Mapping Streams of Consciousness. Boston:

Twayne Publishers, 1991.

The author provides a helpful linear timeline of each character’s appearance in Mrs. Dalloway
as well as maps to show the movement of each character through Westminster.

Froula, Christine. “The Play in the Sky of the Mind: Dialogue, “the Tchekov method,”
and Between the Acts.” Woolf Across Cultures. ed. Natalya Reinhold.
New York: Pace University Press, 2004.

The author points out the differences between Clarissa Dalloway and Peter Walsh.

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Hughes, Mary Joe. “Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Postmodern Artistic
Re-Presentation.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. (2004), Summer;
45(4): 349-61.

The author uses the metaphor of ripples in water to explore the structure of time in
Mrs. Dalloway and in The Hours, its postmodern “re-presentation.” While Woolf’s
ripples interconnect different people within a single given day, Cunningham widens these
circles to indicate the interconnectedness between people within different time frames.
Further, she notes that Cunningham’s homage to Mrs. Dalloway indicates a
postmodern rediscovery of an old work and an invention of a new work that is at
the same time a gesture towards the future.

Hutcheon, Linda. “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern.” Methods for the Study of
Literature as Cultural Memory. (2000), [no pagination].
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/criticism/hutchinp.html.

The author examines the tension between irony and nostalgia in postmodern culture, and the
combination of the three to produce art, architecture and metafictions. She concludes that
nostalgia in a postmodern context comments just as much on the present as on the past.

Knox-Shaw, Peter. “The Otherness of Septimus Warren Smith.” Durham University

Journal 87.1 (January 1995): 99-110.

Cited in article by Melba Cuddy-Keane.

Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf’s Nose: Essays on Biography. Princeton and Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2005.

The author offers a collection of essays on several writers and the art of biography, including
Michael Cunningham’s fictional treatment of Virginia Woolf in The Hours.

Marder, Herbert. “Split Perspective: Types of Incongruity in Mrs. Dalloway.” Papers on

Language and Literature. (1986), Winter; 22(1): 51-69.

The author details social and artistic aspects that are seemingly at odds as portrayed in the
snobbish yet creative character of Clarissa Dalloway. Further dealt with is Woolf’s belief in the
interconnectivity of places and people.

Marsh, Nicholas. Virginia Woolf: The Novels. London: Macmillan, 1998.

A series of essays on the novels written by Virginia Woolf.

McVicker, Jeanette. “Gaps and Absences in The Hours.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany.
(2003), Spring; 62:8-9.

The author points out the stifling post-war culture inhabited by Michael Cunningham’s
Laura Brown.

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Miller, J. Hillis. “Mrs. Dalloway: Repetition as the Raising of the Dead.” Critical essays
on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Morris Beja. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1985.

The author writes about the repetition of the past through memory in Mrs. Dalloway, and asserts
that memories have an “immediate presence” for the characters. The author also refers to
temporality as a theme and Woolf’s use of time and placement in the novel.

Monte, Steven. “Ancients and Moderns in Mrs. Dalloway.” Modern Language

Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History. (2000), 61(4): 587-616.

If The Hours is metafiction because of its references to Mrs. Dalloway, this author believes
that Woolf also pays homage, or at least responds to those works that came before her
as well as the contemporary works of her time. He also traces Woolf’s use of perspectives and
close attention to the development of the novel’s form throughout the 18th-20th centuries.

Peregrin, Tony. “Michael Cunningham after Hours.” Gay and Lesbian Review
Worldwide. (2003), 10(2): 30-31.

This is an interview with Michael Cunningham regarding the evolution of The Hours as a novel.

Quick, Jonathan R. “The Shattered Moment: Form and Crisis in Mrs. Dalloway and
Between the Acts.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of
Literature. (1974), 7(3): 127-36.

The author reflects upon the many “moments” in Mrs. Dalloway and their interruption on the
flow of the narrative. He explains Woolf’s use of common moments as a device in which to
switch back and forth between the character’s minds.

Ruotolo, Lucio. “Mrs. Dalloway: The Unguarded Moment.” Virginia Woolf,

Revaluation and Continuity: A Collection of Essays. Ed. Ralph Freedman.
Berkeley: University of California Press (1980), 141-160.

The author writes about the importance of clock time in Mrs. Dalloway. Also noted is
Clarissa’s relationship with the past and present in the face of an uncertain, albeit promising,
future.

Ruotolo, Lucio. The Interrupted Moment: A View of Virginia Woolf’s Novels.

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986.

The author of “The Unguarded Moment” above writes a similar, but subtly different
analysis, focusing on the more quiet moments and serene rhythms of the everyday.

Schiff, James. “An Interview with Michael Cunningham.” Missouri Review 26.2
(Fall 2003); 111-27.

Cited in Schiff’s article, “Rewriting Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway: Homage, Sexual Identity, and the
Single-Day Novel by Cunningham, Lippincott and Lanchester.”

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Schiff, James. “Rewriting Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway: Homage, Sexual Identity, and the
Single-Day Novel by Cunningham, Lippincott and Lanchester.” Critique:
Studies in Contemporary Fiction. (2004), Summer; 45(4): 363-82.

The author analyzes three novels (one of which is The Hours) by contemporary authors, all
inspired in some way by Mrs. Dalloway or Virginia Woolf. He further critiques the theme
of sexual identity in each work.

Showalter, Elaine. Introduction to Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. 1925.

ed. Stella McNichol. London: Penguin, 1992. xi-xlviii.

Authored the Introduction to Mrs. Dalloway.

Spengler, Birgit. “Michael Cunningham Rewriting Virginia Woolf: Pragmatist vs.

Modernist Aesthetics.” Woolf Studies Annual. (2004), 10: 51-79.

The author writes about recurring images from Mrs. Dalloway borrowed by Michael
Cunningham in The Hours: birds, mirrors, flowers, clocks, etc. Further analyzed is
the social art involved in having a party. The author also refers to Cunningham’s
“artists in life” as the act of creating is considered.

Spring, Justin. “Michael Cunningham.” BOMB. (1999), Winter; 66: 76-80.

In this interview, Michael Cunningham says that Mrs. Dalloway is as much a part of his past
as was his first kiss or the loss of his virginity. He also discusses how early drafts of his novel
were inspired by his own mother, a model for the character of Laura Brown.

Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir,
The Collection. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993.

The author examines nostalgia as a social disease in relation to narratives of origin. She further
examines concepts of time in relation to interior thought and public life.

Walker, Nancy A. The Disobedient Writer: Women and Narrative Tradition. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1995.

The author writes of women writers as being part of a unique literary community.

Wild, Andrea. “The Suicide of the Author and his Reincarnation in the Reader:
Intertextuality in The Hours by Michael Cunningham. Xchanges. (2002), 1(2):
[no pagination]. http://www.americanstudies.wayne.edu/xchanges/1.2/wild.html.

The author writes about The Hours as a pastiche, asserting that Cunningham’s imitation of an
earlier work shatters the myth of the god like author. She primarily chronicles the intertextual
references used by Cunningham in his parallel to Mrs. Dalloway.

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Woolf, Virginia. “A Sketch of the Past.” Moments of Being: Unpublished
Autobiographical Writings. ed. Jeanne Schulkind. London:
The University Press Sussex, 1976. 64-137.

A collection of previously unpublished autobiographical writings by Virginia Woolf.

Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader: First Series. ed. Andrew McNeillie.
New York: Harcourt Brace, 1984.

A collection of essays regarding literature, originally written at the same time as Mrs. Dalloway.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt, Inc., 1925.

Woolf’s story of a single day in the life of one woman whose philosophy and outlook on life
deeply affect those around her. A parallel storyline involving a suicide is meant to make others
see more value in living. It is the inspiration for Michael Cunningham’s The Hours.

Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. ed. Nigel Nicholson and
Joanne Trautmann Banks, 6 vols. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1975.1980. 2: 548.

A collection of Virginia Woolf’s letters.

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