| Michael Cunningham's The Hours is an incredibly rich, powerful novel. Being a Pulitzer Prize winner, this is hardly surprising. It's themes, motifs, and symbols are many and effective. This essay, however, will focus on the one symbol which is, arguably, the most interesting and most pervasive in the novel: water. Water, in many forms, effects and is presented by every major character in the novel. Fears or visions of submersion, overpowering tears and body fluids, visions of deep-sea creatures, aquatic death, and moistened qualities all seep into the pages of this sublime novel. Taken in aggregate these references to moisture have a negative meaning. In some cases, water creates a shuddering sensation as something clearly to be avoided such as Laura Brown's reluctance to stop reading and rejoin the real world. Soon after we meet Laura we see her, "Summoning resolve, as if she were about to dive into cold water, [as she] closes the book and lays it on the nightstand" (p. 41). Laura had found a warmth and security inside the novel of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. She does not want to put down the book and go on with her life of the day. She feels like there is life and experience in Woolf's words, perhaps more so than there is in her own existence. When we first meet Clarissa Vaughn she is stepping out of her home in the morning. We watch as she "pauses at the threshold as she would at the edge of a pool, watching the turquoise water lapping at the tiles, the liqued nets of sun wavering in the blue depths" (p. 9). And, as she surveys the streets of Greenwich Village, the metaphor continues: "As if standing at the edge of a pool she delays for a moment the plunge, the quick membrane of chill, the plain shock of immersion" (p. 9). Although this may be reminiscent of a time that the reader may have hesitated to jump into a pool or river on a chilled day, Clarissa is nowhere near an actual body of water. She is simply stepping onto the streets of Manhattan. It is the very world itself which causes this chillly, wet feeling. The water metaphor here symbolizes a lack of warmth and security, an exiting of the place where one belongs. For Virginia Woolf, in the prologue, water is an exit too - even an escape. She walks to a river, fills a pocket of her large coat with a heavy stone, and takes her life by walking into the river to drown. In her final moment "the current wrpas itself around her and takes her with such sudden, muscular force it feels as if a strong man has risen up from the bottom, grabbed her legs and held them to his chest. It feels personal" (p. 5). The water is personified; the water takes life. It is violent and cold and murky. And, despite the fact that she is using it as an escape from the headaches, the voices in her head, the guilt of having failed and becoming a burden to her family; despite all of these things, the water's does not symbolize escape. It symbolizes a loss of presence from the place where she belongs. She wrote to her husband (in both the novel and in real life), "I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been" (p. 7). In these contradicting statements, we see the guilt of failure that is a motif of the novel, but also the fact that she did have a warm, welcoming place with her husband. It was the water that took her from that place. The water has some less dramatic manifestations as well. Sea creatures are the symbols chosen for the pain that invades Virginia as her migraine headaches set in. "She might see [the entity that is her pain] while walking with Leonard in the square, a scintillating silver-white mass floating over the cobblestones, randomly spiked, fluid but now whole, like a jellyfish" (p. 70). Cunningham could have chosen any number of other creatures or objects to represent her pain. But, jellyfish conjure images of the sea. Their submerged habitat is very much like the one that he has created for all his main characters. When Richard is telling Clarissa about his delusions he says, "There was one that looked a bit like a black, electrified jellyfish" (p. 59). According to Clarissa, Richard appears "as a drowned queen still seated on her thrown" (p. 57) when he tells of these hallucinations that pain him. Clarissa has come in from the figuratively submerged city streets to see him sitting in an apartment which "has, more than anything, an underwater aspect" (p. 56) complaining of sea creatures who are attacking sanity and comfort. In 1950s vaudeville jargon, he's "all wet." Everything about this scene suggests the uncomfortable feeling of being wrapped in a wet blanket. It simultaneously symbolizes discomfort, surrealness, and confusion. And, how does Clarissa escape this morbid encounter with her ailing friend? "I'm going to go now. I've got to get the flowers in water" (p. 67). With that simple excuse she makes it clear that a thing of beauty or value would of course be on its way to submersion in water - for flowers in water on their way to die and rot. They have been plucked from the soil where they could grow and are now merely being preserved until decomposition. There are more characters yet who fall under the shadow of water's symbolism. Ray is a friend of Laura's. His character is given to us effectively in relatively few words: "At thirty, [he] is beginning to demonstrate how heroic boys can, by infinitesimal degrees, for no visible reasons, metamorphosis into middle-aged drubs. Ray is crew-cut, reliable, myopic; he is full of liquids" (p. 105). These liquids are aptly used, in the context of this novel, to describe him as a slight failure. "He sweats copiously. Small bubbles of clear spit form at the sides of his mouth whenever he speaks at length. Laura imagines (it's impossible not to) that when they make love he must spurt rivers, as opposed to her own husband's modest burble. Why, then, are there no children?" (p. 105) Through sweat, spittle and infertility water characterizes this man negatively. Water is used here as a symbol of patheticness. Water appears also as tears. Richie cries often. At the slightest sign of reprimand, "His eyes fill with tears" (p. 78). Then, "For a moment - a moment - Richie's shape subtly changes. He becomes larger, brighter. His head expands. A dead white glow seems, briefly, to surround him" (p. 78). He is beginning to cry. His mother's first reaction is a desire to leave; to get away from him. But, instead she reassures him, with great effect. When the episode repeats, she again reacts compassionately, but it takes some restraint: "Laura remains not angry. She remembers to smile. She keeps both hands on the wheel" (p. 193). The water coming from his eyes is as detestable as a skunk's spray - but a skunk's spray that gives her the feeling of guilty failure. Louis is different from Richie. It is more acceptable that he cries. "He has always been prone to tears" (p. 125). Although they are equally uncontrollable, they carry a different feeling. "It's that Louis feeling, and through it run traces of devotion and guilt, attraction, a distinct element of stage fright, and a pure untarnished hope, as if every time Louis appears he migh, finally be bringning a piece of news so good it's impossible to anticipate its extent or even its precise nature" (p. 124). Louis's last name is actually Waters. He, himself, is a symbol for all of these feelings and for Clarissa's past. This is because, according to this author's interpretation, Clarissa is the most highly evolved of the three main female characters. Virginia killed herself by water in the river. Laura sees water as a symbol of patheticness, but also a symbol of guilt for failing her family. She has the same feelings as Virginia, but does not succumb to them. Clarissa takes the next step, but not have such a negative reaction to these symbols. She has unloaded the baggage that carried Virginia to the bottom of the river; the weight that pulled Laura into the depths of guilt and depression. Clarissa had overcome these things, as she had overcome Louis Waters in, in personal friendships and inner happiness. Cunningham interwove all of these symbols and meanings like so many fine clothes into a scarf for the modern reader to wrap around her self, shielding her from the world's winter. This was done optimistically: clearly there was much less water in the life of Clarissa than there was in Virginia's. The tide is moving in a positive direction. Return to Writing Ryan's Page of Reviews Return to Writing Ryan's Feminism page Return to Writing Ryan's main page |
| The Symbolism of Water in Michael Cunningham's The Hours by Ryan Cofrancesco |