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3 Women in The Hours
2007/02/01 00:03:35瀏覽884|回應0|推薦2

     The Hours, a book motivated by Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, was written in 1988 by the American novelist Michael Cunningham[1] whose book describes three stories of very different women who live in various time zones yet whose lives are linked by Woolf’s book. As a literary project, Cunningham’s book borrows the names and key themes from Woolf’s novel. Cunningham’s reinterpretation has demonstrated his ambition to broaden Woolf’s leitmotifs in Mrs. Dalloway with a new postmodernist context by emphasizing the sense of interconnecting the female subjectivity and tunneling through time brought up in the various surroundings, such as L.A., New York, Richmond, and London. All in all, his novel could be structurally divided into three episodes. The first “Mrs. Woolf” episode transpires in one day in 1923 when Virginia[2] commits herself to write Mrs. Dalloway and then flashbacks to one day in 1941 when she commits suicide by drowning herself in the River Ouse. Ten yeas later, the second “Mrs. Brown” episode occurs in the 1951[3] Los Angeles, the city where the desperate and pregnant housewife Laura Brown discovers her hidden lesbian tendency and tries to make a new decision in her life during the process of reading Mrs. Dalloway. After half a century, the third “Mrs. Dalloway” episode details one day in the 2001[4] New York, where a modern-day editor Clarissa Vaughan, whose first name comes from a major leading female character of Mrs. Dalloway, prepares to set up a party for her one-time lover Richard, who happens to be Laura’s prestigious son, has just won a prize of poetry affirming his literary achievement. On the whole, The Hours has interwoven these stories of three women in a subtle relationship around the book Mrs. Dalloway. It seems properly to conclude that these three women represent three points of view to re-examine Woolf’s novel, namely the ones of a writer, a reader, and a character.



           [1] The American novelist Michael Cunningham was raised in Los Angeles in his early childhood and now lives in New York City. He finished his literature major at Stanford University (B.A.) and M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1980. The Hours (1998) won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award (1999) for Fiction, and was adapted into a major motion picture in 2002 made by Stephen Daldry. Recently his book A Home at the End of the World (1990) has also been shot into film and released in 2004 in U.S.A. My essay does not focus on Cunningham’s novel; instead I explore the intertextual relationship between Daldry’s adapted film version along with David Hare’s script. However for those who are interested in Cunningham’s novel, please refer to a recent thesis entitled “Virginia Woolf in Intertextuality: An Intertextual Study of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours.” The MA thesis is made by Shih-ming Tang in 2003 at Providence University. He explores the discourse of the masculine and its relationship with the absent mother in the tradition of the American literature. 

           [2] To differentiate two Virginia Woolfs mentioned in various contexts, the essay names Virginia as the fictional character in Stephen Daldry’s film and Woolf as the Modernist writer in the real world of England.

           [3] In Cunningham’s The Hours, the background time for Laura Brown is 1949.

           [4] The background time for Clarissa, in Cunningham’s novel, is the end of the 20th century.

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