| Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Hours, is a tribute to Virginia Woolf in two ways. One is by dramatizing her life. Michael Cunning ham has interpreted and immortalized events of her life. Ask someone who is not a scholar and is too young to remember the events what they know of Malcolm X or President Kennedy and they are likely to tell you about films by Spike Lee and Oliver Stone. And if asked of a lesser known personalities such as Patch Adams or John Nash, all we have are the portrayals by Robin Williams and Russel Crowe. As similar or dissimilar as these representations may be, it is somtimes the way they are remembered. And, in my (as yet) relatively uneducated mind, this is the effect that Cunningham has had on Woolf. The second way I think it is a tribute is that the entire book is about her. In preparation for writing this novel, Cunningham read everything he could find that had been written about Virginia Woolf. Then, I believe, he wrote three interpretations of her character - the women of each of the three sections of this novel: the fictional depiction of Woolf herself; the suburban housewife of the 1950s named Laura Brown; and Clarissa Vaughn, the aged hippy, who is Mrs. Dalloway's namesake, living in Greenwhich Village at the end of the 20th Century The depiction of Virginia Woolf shows a glimpse of her daily life leading up to her suicide, including her final moments. He took the factual tragedy of Woolf's suicide and gave it, through fiction (based on his research of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, her husband), life in the mind of the reader. The book begins with her death, a scene given heart-wrenching realism by the use of her actual suicide note to Leonard. The book from that point on, I believe, shows the evolution of Virginia Woolf in a way reminiscent of her own essay, "A Room of Her Own," where she writes "great poets do not die; they are cotinuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh" (p. 113, Woolf's "A Room of Her Own") So, we look to Laura Brown as the next incarnation of Virginia Woolf. She is, I believe, the central character of this novel. The book's chapters vary their focus among Woolf, Brown, and Vaughn - but the sections about Brown are always in the middle of the other two. They rotate around her, fixated on her as a turning point in character evolution. She rests in between Woolf who ended her life for lack of ability to live and express herself freely and productively and Vaughn who does so. She is the missing link that took the step that of grabbing at privacy and economic independence that is so important to Woolf - indeed, this is the theme of "A Room of Her Own." After taking care of all her household errands on a given day, Laura Brown deposits her only child with a neighbor and left. She knows she still has more to do at home, "But now, right now, she is going somewhere (where?) to be alone, to be free of her child, her house, the small party she will give tonight" (p. 42). She has begun The Awakening that Kate Chopin described in the 1890s in her novel by that name - she is claiming her life for herself. Clarissa Vaughn takes the next step. She accomplishes this independence without guilt or fear reminiscent of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystyque. She lives on Manhattan's West Tenth Street, in what appears to be a very nice apartment, with a female partner. She has a daughter who she conceived of through artificial insemination. There is no dominant, or even supporting, male in her life. She was living as a woman, this woman, would live - not as men lived, nor as men wanted her to live, nor even as women wanted her to live. She had overcome the oppression and impotence that drove Edna Pontellier to take her own life in Chopin's The Awakening. And here we have Cunningham's most positive tribute to Woolf: this novel that is about her is optimistic that woman can live their lives to fulfillment. Return to Writing Ryan's Feminism page Return to Writing Ryan's Page of Reviews Return to Writing Ryan's main page |
| Michael Cunningham's The Hours as a Tribute to Virginia Woolf by Ryan Cofrancesco |