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Applying Carolyn Dinshaw 's How Soon Is Now

Decent Essays

Applying Carolyn Dinshaw’s How Soon is Now? to Michael Cunningham’s The Hours highlights the queering of time in the novel. The novel explores three women, including Woolf herself, from divergent eras. Notably, there is not a contents page, leaving no structural or temporal guide to reading the novel. Similarly, chapter titles are merely the name of the woman on which the chapter focuses, meaning many chapters share the same title (i.e. “Mrs. Dalloway”), causing the content and times of the chapters to blur. Moreover, the chapters are not placed chronologically for the overall novel or for the narratives of the individual women. The prologue centers on Woolf’s suicide, and the sequence of chapters randomly shifts from “Mrs. Woolf” to “Mrs. Dalloway” to “Mrs. Brown.” By close-reading of The Hours’ prologue, various structural and textual devices emerge that showcase Dinshaw’s conceptions of nonlinearity, lived time, and multiplicity.
The only chapter that does not follow the aforementioned naming convention is the “Prologue.” Moreover, although the term prologue denotes a beginning, the content of the chapter is essentially an endpoint, detailing Woolf’s suicide despite the fact that Cunningham’s later chapters narrate earlier moments in her life. Even the first four sentences present a nonlinear timeline of events: “She hurries from the house…It is 1941. Another war has begun. She has left a note for Leonard, and another for Vanessa.” In a linear telling, Cunningham

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