A Short Review of Michael Cunningham's 3rd Novel
Characters and Caves: Relationships within The Hours
Michael Cunningham’s third and perhaps most popular novel, The Hours was published in 1999. It is also his most celebrated novel, winning not only the PEN/Faulkner award, but also the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Woolf’s Caves
Cunningham includes an excerpt from Virginia Woolf’s diary which reads the following:
‘I should say a great deal about The Hours & my discovery; how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters; I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment.’ (Cunningham, 2003)
This is what Cunningham beautifully does: he tells the stories of three women, Virginia Woolf, Laura Brown and Clarissa Vaughan. He digs out caves behind these three women, that are simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary, and connects them across England and America and through time itself.
The Characters of The Hours
In 1923, Virginia Woolf is filling her days battling what she describes as ‘headaches’ but are really the descending fog of madness, and writing her novel Mrs Dalloway. She spends her days pondering the fate of her heroine, Clarissa Dalloway; her life, her loves, her death, whether or not she buys flowers.
She decides that Clarissa, her creation, will ‘have loved a woman…Clarissa will carry the memory of that kiss, the soaring hope of it, all her life. She will never find a love like that which the lone kiss seemed to offer… Clarissa will be bereaved, deeply lonely, but she will not die. She will be too much in love with life.’ (Cunningham, 2003, p.210 & 211)
Clarissa Vaughan
Clarissa Vaughan living in 1990’s New York is nicknamed Mrs. Dalloway by her friend and lover of years gone past, Richard. The novel follows her across the course of a single day reminiscing about the time she spent with Richard, wondering what might have been and buying flowers for the party.
Clarissa Vaughan is Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway; she has loved a woman, her partner of eighteen years, Sally. The memory of the lone kiss however, is not with Sally; it is with Richard. Like her fictional counterpart, she is both lonely and in love with life. This passionate love-affair is visible throughout her dialogue, it is present in everything Clarissa does, and everything she sees.
Laura Brown
Laura Brown lives in Los Angeles in 1949; she is a wife and mother. She should be happy, but is not. Laura Brown is trapped, suffocating in her life of domesticity; all she really wants to do is to be alone and read her copy of Mrs. Dalloway.
She spends her hours striving to be the perfect; the perfect wife, the perfect mother. However, no matter how hard she tries, these relationships are forced, contrived. She does not know why this is so; but she knows that she cannot continue this pretence.
When Caves Connect
The caves dug out behind the characters of The Hours do indeed meet in daylight, at the present moment, the moment following Richard’s suicide. Clarissa finally meets Laura Brown, Richard’s mother now immortalised in his poetry: ‘Here is the lost mother, the thwarted suicide; here is the woman who walked away.’
The Hours
The message of the novel is summarised beautifully by Cunningham: each of us face the hours. Not all of us can survive them: Richard jumped out of a window, Laura fantasised about overdosing on pills, even a literary genius, Virginia Woolf, drowned herself.
However: ‘There’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined.’(Cunningham, 2003, p.225)
References:
Cunningham, M., 2003, ‘The Hours,’ London: Forth Estate
