Parallel Experiences of Three Troubled Women in Cunningham's, The Hours
According to Chronicles magazine, "Woolf was undeniably a brilliant writer." Woolf's work of Mrs. Dalloway was read by fifteen-year-old Michael Cunningham in order to impress an older girl in school. As he stated, "the book really knocked me out." Once older, Cunningham wanted to write about Mrs. Dalloway, but thought not too many people would want to read a book about reading a book. He then thought he might want to read a book about reading the right book. Hence, The Hours was written. Cunningham would incorporate Mrs. Dalloway into "a book about reading a book." The Hours weaves through three woman's lives. As the novel unfolds, it shows that these three women
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The final narrative deals with Clarissa Vaughn. Clarissa lives in a Manhattan apartment in the 1990s with her 19 year old daughter and lesbian lover. She is overwhelmed with planning a party for a local poet whom she is the publisher. The local poet, Richard, once had a relationship with Clarissa, but is now a dying homosexual with AIDS.
When I look up the meaning of metaphors in Webster it says "a figure of speech in which a work for one idea or thing is used in place of another to suggest a likeness between them." The Hours by Michael Cunningham is enriched with many complex metaphors. While intertwining three different woman's lives, Cunningham uses a wide range of metaphors to help mean something in one story and tie into the next woman's story. Using deconstructive interpretation to investigate these strategically placed metaphors can be difficult and exciting, yet challenging.
The flow of the novel starts as Woolf finds the opening line of her new novel: "Mrs. Dalloway decided she would buy the flowers herself." The flowers would proof an important metaphor in the book. This thought of buying the flowers herself would link Woolf and Clarissa. Clarissa states the same words to her lover in preparing for Richard's party. And yet the flowers would reappear in Laura Browns life as her husband buys flowers for his own birthday. Flowers that normally represent life and color ironically represent sadness and loneliness in this novel.
Death hangs over this
Virginia Woolf has created Mrs. Dalloway. Laura is engaging into the life of Mrs. Dalloway as a respite from her own personal life. And the character of Dalloway is confronted with her own problems, which has themes that resonate with both women. The complicated method of portraying this in the story and film is effective, as there are scenes that show three days of three different years, bookmarked by the tragedy of Mrs. Woolf’s suicide. The way that the filmmakers showed this was very good, mainly because it was not confusing or boring which is
It is considerably easier to identify the queerness of the novel’s characters and author than its political purpose. Michael Cunningham, the novel’s author, is a gay male and openly acknowledges that his sexual orientation influences his work – as can be seen by the fact that many of his novels involve gay characters and gay experiences. In particular, The Hours features three women who each have same-sex experiences – Virginia Woolf, Laura Brown, and Clarissa Vaughn.
Virginia Woolf uses flowers to approach a different path of revealing characters’ way of showing their own feelings, thoughts, and affections without blatantly having to display their emotions to the open. The symbolization of flowers has become a way of expressing feelings for the characters. Through these flowers, there are so many emotions, whether it is being happy, sad, love, excited, and anything else in between all that. With this, a connection between humans and nature is introduced, and it creates a language between the two. Clarissa from Mrs. Dalloway is a prominent character that is affected by this technique
Metaphors are used to clarify and strengthen the effect the meaning of our words. They are usually used when describing a subject felt strongly about. For example, when someone says that marijuana is Satan’s lettuce, they are using a metaphor to explain how the green leafy substance is bad in essence because it came from the devil. They are saying that marijuana comes from the devil because it is illegal and looked down upon in society. Obviously the devil didn’t physically put marijuana on this earth, but the metaphor used in this example helps explain the point against marijuana that the people who use this metaphor are trying to make. Metaphors compare the known to the unknown in order to explain or just simply entertain the audience. Most
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.
Inspired by Virginia’s Woolf renowned novel, Mrs. Dalloway, the movie is an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Hours. In it, we get to glimpse a singular day in the lives of three women, who are contemplating suicide as they read the novel, whose protagonist’s struggle mirrors their own. The first woman depicted is Virginia Woolf herself in 1920s England. Although we first see her suicide, the movie than backtracks to examine her in a depressive episode, a product of her bipolar disorder. Woolf’s mental illness puts tension on all of her relationships as well as her artistic process, which can be seen in her difficulties when writing Mrs. Dalloway. Comparatively, Laura Brown is a 1950s housewife in LA and is pregnant with her second child. So clearly discontent with her life, Laura proceeds to do various underwhelming tasks before dropping her son off and heading to a hotel. She begins to commit suicide, but is suddenly unable. She returns home, but is still clearly depressed, which is only amplified once her husband comes home. The final woman that we get to follow is Clarissa Vaungn, a modern New Yorker, who is preparing for a party in honor of the work her friend, Richard, just published. Her story is very much inspired by the novel that the movie is centered around. As she organizes the event, her apparent distress slowly is revealed regarding her dissatisfaction with life and suicidal thoughts, which is amplified by Richard’s suicide. It is
Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf, was written in 1925, a time filled with many large changes to civilization. The book was written and set right after the biggest war human-kind can remember which killed millions of people, during the peak of industrialization which caused the mass production of items and created thousands of new inventions, while modernist arts and thoughts were growing and, and when national pride was very large for the citizens of the Allied countries in World War I. Virginia Woolf draws on many aspects of these changes in Mrs. Dalloway, especially on the idea of modernism which can be defined as new thought, art, and culture. Specifically Woolf focuses on how the new technologies brought about
However, instead of simply writing ‘Clarissa went out to buy flowers’ Woolf dives into each thought and action Clarissa goes through while buying flowers. During this scene Clarissa hears the sound of something squeaking, “with a little squeak of the hinges, […] she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton.” (Page 3) This squeak sound triggers Clarissa’s memories from the summer of her eighteenth year when she was with her friends. The action of buying flowers made connections within Clarissa’s mind. The connections that were made would only be understandable to Clarissa, but Woolf explains the fluidity of thought to the reader. Without the explanation from Woolf, the reader may have been left completely lost in the text because Clarissa is not 18 during the novel, but in her
"Mrs. Dalloway" written by Virginia Woolf is about the fictional life of a character by the name of Clarrisa Dalloway, who is seen to be this high class woman living in an era after the war, who is preparing for a party that she is to be hosting later on. Virginia Woolf seemed to use time as a main part of the setting of her story too by setting it in the morning and ending the next day at three in the morning. Using time like this is significant because then now the reader must really pay attention since every detail seems important. For example when characters reflect on past incidents that happened in their lives and then the story suddenly turns back into the present and in reality of the story a few minutes have only gone by. An example of that is when Clarrisa reflects her youth, "What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges,
Throughout the novel, there are flashbacks of Clarissa spending her summer at Bourton and her living in the present of wartime Britain. This is significant because most of the time Clarissa reflects on the past and she connects it to her current life while all of these events are happening in a single day. In the beginning of the novel Clarissa buy flowers for the party she is hosting later on in the evening, the flowers being symbolic in the novel representing her love and joy for them. “How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did,
The comparative study of texts and their appropriations reflect the context and values of their times, demonstrating how context plays a significant role. Virginia Woolf’s novel modernists Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Steven Daldry’s post modernists film The Hours (2002), an extrapolation, explore the rapid change of social and philosophical paradigms of the 20th century, focusing on women whose rich inner lives are juxtaposed with their outer lives. They place the characters in their respective context, to respond to, the horrors of the consequences of war and AIDS and the vagaries and difficulties of relationships, sexuality and mental illness. Through their differing intertextual perspectives the film and novel represent similar values, within different contextual concerns.
Multiple points of view are represented and shifted through various characters in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway through indirect discourse, which helps to describe the innermost thoughts of Woolf’s central characters using singular pronouns in the third-person. It is these multiple points of view that establish interconnectedness among the characters, mirroring the interconnectedness that comes with Clarissa’s gift: her parties; it is these parties in which she brings people together and creates a human dialogue.
Throughout Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf uses the characters Clarissa and Lucrezia not only to further the plot of the story but to make a profound statement about the role of wives in both society and their marriages. While these women are subjected to differing experiences in their marriages, there is one common thread that unites each of their marriages: oppression. These women drive the story of Mrs. Dalloway and provide meaning and reason in the lives of the men in the story; however, these women are slowly but surely forced to forsake their own ambitions in order to act in accordance with the social standards set in place by marriage for women. For women outside of many modern cultures, marriage has been a necessity for a woman’s safety and security, and it required her to give up her freedom and passions and subjected her to an oppressed lifestyle. Ultimately, through the wives in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf communicates that marriage is an institution where in women are forced to suppress their individual desires and passions in order to serve their husband and further his own ambitions as first priority.
Virginia Woolf opens her novel with a statement in reported speech: “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” (3). Clarissa then makes a list of reasons behind this decision, concluding it with a surge of elation at the day ahead of her: “And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning – fresh as if issued to children on a beach” (3). This unspoken exclamation announces her engaging stroll through the streets of London. Flowers are, of course, a mere excuse to enjoy the sunlit morning: as a wife of a MP, she has a number of servants to take care of the party preparations. Yet,
Dalloway is a study of life in Britain after the Great War. Mrs. Dalloway is a novel by Virginia Woolf that is set on a June day in 1923, as Clarissa, the protagonist, happens to be making preparations for a party that she is going to throw that evening. There are enough flashback scenes which describe Clarissa’s life and the inter war social structure. The central character of Mrs. Dalloway is fearful of life. The perfect hostess plans the perfect party. Mrs. Dalloway is a battle between herself and her brain. The story is focused on a day’s experiences in the life of Mrs. Dalloway. Having bought some flowers she comes back home. Her former lover Peter Walsh visits her house unexpectedly. Many years before Clarissa had rejected Peter’s marriage proposal and married her present husband. Peter was still unable to come out of that shock. At this point, the story shifts to Septimus, a First World War veteran who is mentally disturbed. His good friend Evans died in the war. After his death he felt little sadness suffering from severe mental problems. He struggles with the after effects of the war and this book shows that even though the war has ended, its effect is inevitable for those people who have lived through it. Clarissa begins to remember a special friendship she shared in her youth with Sally. The two shared a special bonding. Clarissa proves that she cherishes the independence that her marriage gives her knowing that she can never have that with Peter. Septimus claims that he would rather die and commits suicide than have doctors steal his