Queering the Familiar – Family, Gender and Sexuality in Michael
Cunningham’s The Hours
Eerika Kokkonen
University of Tampere
School of Modern Languages and Translation Studies
English Philology
MA Thesis
May 2008
Tampereen yliopisto
Englantilainen filologia
Kieli- ja käännöstieteiden laitos
Kokkonen, Eerika: Queering the Familiar – Family, Gender and Sexuality in Michael
Cunningham’s The Hours
Pro gradu -tutkielma, 99s.
Toukokuu 2008
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Pro gradu tutkielmassani käsittelen Michael Cunninghamin romaania The Hours (1998)
keskittyen sen sisältämään perhekuvaukseen, sekä sukupuoliroolimalleihin ja seksuaaliidentiteetteihin. Tutkin sitä, miten muuttuvat sukupuoliroolit kohtaavat yleisten odotusten
kanssa ja miten ne vaikuttavat perheen muotoutumiseen ja toisaalta yksilön, naisen,
suoritumista omien toivoidensa ja yhteiskunnallisten odotusten ristipaineissa.
Osittain tarkastikin noudattaen Virginia Woolfin romaania Mrs. Dalloway (1925), siihen
perustuva Cunnighamin teos avaa yhden päivän tapahtumat kolmen päähenkilönsä kautta,
jotka kolmena eri aikakautena, kahdessa eri maassa, kertaavat, uusintavat ja murtavat Woolfin
alkuperäisessä tekstissä esiteltyjä teemoja naisen elämästä. Sosiaaliset paineet suoriutua
ainakin ulkoisesti naisen ja perheenemännän roolista törmäävät kaikilla henkilöillä vapauden
ja individualismin kaipuuseen – ennen kaikkea vapauteen valita. Oman identiteetin
kyseenalaisuus, seksuaalisuuden ja sukupuoli-identiteetin häilyväisyys ja mahdollisten,
vaihtoehtoisien elämäntapojen kanssa tasapainoilusta syntyy lopulta pakottava performanssi,
josta naiseus ja naisen rooliin kuuluvat odotukset kumpuavat.
Teoreettisesti lähestyn aihetta kahdelta taholta; yhtäältä perheen ja toisaalta sukupuoli- ja
seksuaaliteorioiden kontekstista. Perheen kannalta tutkin sitä, miten traditionaalinen
ydinperhe ylläpitää perinteisiä nais- ja miesrooleja, miten päähenkilöt pyrkivät niitä
noudattamaan ja miten ne kyseenalaistuvat tarinan kontekstissa. Yhteiskunnallisessa ja
yhteisöllisissä paineissa selkeäksi muodostunut identiteetti paljastuukin joustavaksi ilmiöksi,
jota myös omat ristiriitaiset tarpeet ja toiveet horjuttavat, kun myös seksuaali-identiteetti
kyseenalaistuu. Tarkastellessani sukupuolimallien tuomia ongelmia ja seksuaalisen
suuntautumisen luomia haasteita, esiin nousevat kysymykset sukupuolen luonnollisuudesta
sinänsä ja heteroseksuaalisuuden normatiivisuudesta ja lopulta siitä, miten ja missä määrin
yksilö voi toimia omana itsenään ja tehden valintansa vapaasti ilman ulkoisia pakotteita.
The Hours yhtäältä kyseenalaistaa ja purkaa traditionaalisia perhe- ja naiskäsityksiä ja
toisaalta kokoaa niitä uudelleen eri valossa – siinä missä Mrs. Dallowaytakin. Lopulta
luopuminen naisen traditionaalisesta asemasta perheessä ensisijaisesti äitinä ja vaimona ei
tapahdu ongelmattomasti orjuuttavan maskuliinisen hegemonian kaaduttua, vaan se asettuu
yhdeksi naisen kohtaamista vaihtoehdoista ja valinnoista.
Avainsanat: perhe, sukupuoli, seksuaali-identiteetti, heteronormatiivisuus, performatiivisuus
Table of Contents:
1. Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………1
1.1. Mr. Cunningham and Mrs.Woolf………………………………………………………...1
1.2 Setting the Study Question………………………………………………………………..4
2. Theoretical Framework…………………………………………………………………..8
2.1 Family…………………………………………………………………………………….8
2.2 Gender and Sexuality……………………………………………………………………15
3. Laura Brown……………………………………………………………………………..21
3.1 The Housewife Syndrome……………………………………………………………….21
3.2 “Trouble Believing in Herself…………………………………………………………...32
4. Virginia Woolf…………………………………………………………………………... 45
4.1 The Angel in the House………………………………………………………………….45
4.2 “Oh, If Men Were the Brutes and Women the Angels”…………………………………54
5. Clarissa Vaughan/Dalloway……………………………………………………………..65
5.1. The Freedom of Choice – Gay Family………………………………………………….65
5.2. Gender, Sexuality, Identity……………………………………………………………...77
6. Conclusions………………………………………………………………………………89
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………..93
1. Introduction
1.1. Mr. Cunningham and Mrs. Woolf
Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours (1998) is to a great extent based on Virginia Woolf’s
Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Retelling the story of one woman’s day, starting from a walk in the
city to buy flowers, preparing for a party later that night and finally dancing with her husband
at the party, Cunningham not only revives the character in three of his own, but pays homage
to the classic text.
It is hardly possible to study English literature without running into Virginia Woolf, since
her theories and fiction have coloured not only literature, but even the whole of Western
thinking on a broader scale, offering an insight into what it means to be a woman and
furthermore, a woman who writes. Woolf is perhaps best knows for her groundbreaking text
in feminist theory, A Room of One’s Own (1929), in which Woolf explores the difficulties of
being a woman in a patriarchal society, and the possibilities of creating a new take on gender
itself.
Michael Cunningham is less known despite the acclaim he received with his Pulitzer Prize
win for The Hours (1998). Cunningham developed an interest in Woolf’s work at the age of
fifteen and was particularly captivated by Mrs. Dalloway which he read over and over during
the course of the years, finally developing his own novel on the basis of it. Naming his novel
after one of the discarded working titles Virginia Woolf had toyed with, Cunningham
continues in the theme of exploring the unrecognized possibilities of that book; revealing
issues only hinted at in Mrs. Dalloway concerning family, gender and homosexuality as
experienced by his protagonists.
Virginia Woolf started writing a short story entitled “Mrs. Dalloway on Bond Street” in
1922, after having been stylistically inspired by T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land and James Joyce’s
Ulysses – both published 1922 (Pawlowski, 2003, vi). However, by the end of that year the
2
idea of a middle class woman taking a walk through London to buy flowers for her party had
developed into an impulse for a new novel. Meeting people from her past and reliving her
memories, Mrs. Dalloway makes her way through the day towards an evening of final
understanding of life and her place in it.
Cunningham has taken the themes of Mrs. Dalloway and multiplied them in the
description of his own characters. The three part novel portrays three different women – Mrs.
Brown, Mrs. Woolf and Mrs. Dalloway – living in different times, on different continents and
– finally – in different types of families. Mrs. Brown is a California housewife, trying to raise
a son, run a household and bake the perfect cake for her husband all the while the only thing
she actually wants to do is read her copy of Mrs. Dalloway.
Laura Brown’s family is typical of the 1940’s and 1950’s America which, in an effort to
recover from the horrors of the Second World War, built the cult of a housewife while the
world outside of the home was solely left for their husbands. Betty Friedan says that in the
years after the Second World War the “feminine mystique” or, the cult of a woman who is
perfectly happy looking after the needs of her children, husband and house became “the
cherished and self-perpetuating core of contemporary American culture” (1992, 16) and
permeated all culture from magazines and television to people’s everyday lives.
The “Mrs. Woolf” –part of the novel then presents us with the tortured writer herself1 in
the middle of the process which produces the finished novel Mrs. Dalloway. Living in
Richmond, in the countryside near London, in virtual confinement after having resurfaced
from a fit of mental illness, her only focus is on returning back to the city, to the heart of
things. In stead of living in the stimulating atmosphere of the busy London she longs for, she
has to struggle to keep her sanity and to keep writing.
1
For the sake of clarity I would like to point out that I will be treating the Virginia Woolf who appears in
Michael Cunningham’s The Hours as a fictionalized character, and will not analyse her from a biographical
viewpoint.
3
Even though sick and working, Virginia has responsibilities as a wife and the mistress of
the household, which she is able to fulfil only poorly. She is juxtaposed with her sister
Vanessa who always “manages beautifully” (TH2, 87), meanwhile, for Virginia, even the
ordering of dessert is almost insurmountable; “If Virginia had performed properly and
appeared in the kitchen that morning to order lunch, the pudding could be almost anything”
(TH, 85). Everything is glossed over by the inconsistency between the way things should be
and the way they are.
Finally, the narration carries to the end-of-millennium New York, where another character
called Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Vaughan, is preparing a party for a writer friend who is slowly
dying of AIDS – Mrs. Brown’s son Richard. Clarissa Vaughan’s family life is considerably
different from that of the other two women; she is living in a long term lesbian partnership
while raising a daughter and nurturing her sickly friend.
All these stories are intricately intertwined with each other and with Mrs. Dalloway to
form a kind of network of one-day storylines where the women’s lives are connected through
reoccurring motifs and allusions. Cunningham has said that his approach to his work has been
that of improvisation; by using the same subject matter and themes he has tried to honour the
existing artwork while trying to create something new (Schiff, 2004, 367). Like the original
Mrs. Dalloway, all the women are preparing for a party in the evening and all of them
experience a very typical day.
Virginia Woolf became famous for employing a new technique, called stream of
consciousness – first introduced by Dorothy Richardson in The Pilgrimage (1915-1938) –
which allowed her to bore right into the thoughts of her characters and reveal the workings of
their minds. In Mrs. Dalloway this technique was perfected and appears fully developed as the
2
From now on the title of The Hours will be marked as TH in the references.
4
focus moves from one character to another in the course of just one day, finally escalating
into a revelation of the world deeply felt by the title character Mrs. Dalloway.
Cunningham also uses the basic, single-day storyline structure from Mrs. Dalloway and
employs it in The Hours by combining it with similar narration technique. As the stream of
consciousness technique requires the focus to be shifted in the internal world of the character,
the single-day frame allows for the outer experiences to remain mundane and ordinary.
Meanwhile, the one day is enough to reveal the essence of the character’s whole life. In an
interview (Coffey, 1998, 53) Michael Cunningham says that what is one of Woolf’s “great
accomplishments” is her “insistence that everything you need to know about human life can
be contained in two people having coffee together” – for Woolf “the really important life was
within” (Schiff, 2004, 363).
1.2. Setting the Study Question
Family, and its different forms, is one of the most important themes in The Hours; Michael
Cunningham says it himself: “when I look back at what I’ve written, the whole question of
family just jumps out, as I think it would do to anybody who’s read my books” (Coffey, 1998,
53). Besides the general family theme which Cunningham normally twists towards an
“extended, post-nuclear family” (ibid.), he often incorporates themes concerning sexual
minorities. Stretching the idea of family Cunningham restructures its limits; for Cunningham
a family “might include… a biological mother, a same-sex lover and the drag queen who lives
downstairs” (Coffey, 1998, 54).
The main focus of my study will be on the different family forms described in The Hours
and how they are impacted trough pressures from the world outside, or inside the main
protagonists themselves – their identities as sexual and gendered beings. As the narration is
mainly focused on the females who have to struggle within their chosen lifestyles, my study
5
will also be focused on the female experience as mother, wife, partner, sister or daughter as
depicted in the story.
I will also try to concentrate on the questions of gender and sexuality as determining factors
in family by analysing each of the characters from a viewpoint that is unique to their situation
while bearing in mind the broader topic of family. I will try to set a wider social background
for the analysis, for example focusing on the pressures to perform the gender roles set by the
society on the individual. Mrs. Dalloway portrayed a woman who experiments with same-sex
love in her youth, but ends up married to a man; Cunningham rewrites this storyline and
Clarissa Vaughan leaves her boyfriend to be with a woman. Thus The Hours revisits the
theme of homosexuality only brushed at in Mrs. Dalloway, queering its main theme which
deals with the relationship between the past choices and the present life.
Where Virginia Woolf is thoroughly studied independently, The Hours has received less
critiquing – being the newer text. Perhaps due to the great success of the 2002 film version of
The Hours3, most of the research done on the subject has focused on comparisons between the
movie and Mrs. Dalloway rather than studying the novel which the film was based on. I was
able to locate a few articles which deal with the book, by Mary Jo Hughes (2004) and James
Schiff (2004), respectively, entitled “Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Postmodern
Artistic Representation” and “Rewriting Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway: Homage, Sexual Identity,
and the Single-Day Novel by Cunningham, Lippincott, and Lancaster”. However, since the
main focus of these essays lies in the intertextual analysis, the ideas of family and familial
relations are not really placed on the foreground in these, as I intend to do and which I
consider to be some of the more important subject matter in the texts. I will also leave out the
discussion of the relationship between modernism and postmodernism easily identifiable in
3
The Hours 2002, director Stephen Daldry with Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore in the leading
roles.
6
Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours – and hinted at in Schiff’s article – as my main focus will be
primarily on the newer text.
Most of both Hughes’s and Schiff’s analysis focuses on intertextuality between these two
books. James Schiff (2004, 369) states that The Hours is primarily “a novel about reading and
writing” since Cunningham depicts three characters who essentially take up the positions of
reader, writer and character. However, in my study I would like to begin by slightly
contesting that view. Even though Schiff is partially right, I think his analysis is too narrow to
cover the intricate layers of time, space and female experience that the text offers. Therefore,
the issues surrounding reading and writing which the text undeniably offers, will in my
analysis be presented as a part of the process of sustaining and challenging female identities.
It can be said that Mrs. Dalloway permeates the latter novel so thoroughly that they can be
seen to be in a constant dialogue as from the structure of the narration to the motifs, thematic
choices and finally the textual allusions, The Hours continues in the vein set by the earlier
novel and allows it to flow through the narration. However, even though the intertextual
connections between The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway are obvious and undeniable, I will not
attempt an intertextual analysis on the two books, but will rather focus on the themes that the
latter novel brings up and emphasises. I shall only refer to Mrs. Dalloway where necessary
from the perspective of understanding the thematic shifts between the two books, but other
than that, my main focal point will be on The Hours.
My discussion on the identities is focused on how the feminine gender and sexual
identities are represented in the two books as changing and inconsistent – finally impacting
the family unit as a whole. One of the main questions concerning the concept of identity are
therefore how the gender roles are played out as complementary or competitive towards the
roles the main characters fulfil as family members. Moreover, I will study how the family –
on both personal and institutional levels – is challenged through the altering identities. I will
7
also try to answer a series of questions of what a woman’s individuality is within a family and
to what extent she is tied down to it; is the woman’s situation in the family descriptive or
prescriptive of her and to what extent do sexuality and gender impact her identity.
8
2. Theoretical Framework
2.1 Family
The most dominant view of the family in Western thinking must be that of the typical nuclear
family of mother, father and a few children. This idealized, heterosexual view is also a family
model which has been most vehemently opposed in both feminist and queer theories since
gender and family are so closely knit together. As Scott Coltrane (1998, 1) points out, “most
people think gender and family as two separate things, but they are tied together like the
proverbial chicken and egg. Asking which one comes first ignores that we cannot understand
one without reference to the other”. The way people adopt their identities as women or men is
done through a direct impact of the family and the definitions of identity are often tied
together with family roles such as mother, father, son or daughter.
However, as identities are fluid so are the types of families – even within the white
Western population. In Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, a typical nuclear family of mother, father
and daughter are preparing for a party, but meanwhile, Mrs. Dalloway’s past is still vividly
alive for her – a past where the choice to live with a woman is possible. Michael Cunningham
has taken this theme and reproduced and multiplied it by presenting several different family
settings all with the common theme of different, alternative lives in the background as
possible variations of the family ideology. In The Hours, families and their formations are as
fluid and changeable as identities: the housewife does the unthinkable and leaves the
supposedly ideal fantasy of suburban life complete with war-hero husband and two children;
the authoress Virginia Woolf struggles to maintain a respectable household while trying to
write a masterpiece of English literature; and the character living in the age of lesbian
liberation actually yearns back to the time when she was still a girlfriend of a promising male
poet.
9
The strict and confining nuclear-family structure has been under attack from various
feminist and queer theorists as there has emerged a need to deploy the narrow gender and
sexual roles it allows for. As Barrie Thorne (1982, 2) puts it, feminists have argued against
the monolithic view of the family which is seen to constitute a breadwinner husband and his
wife at the core. Like many queer theorists, Thorne lists the assumptions that family is a
natural and biological form as another main argument at the basis of feminist re-evaluation of
the family unit. Linked to the “analyses that freeze present family ideals in a language of
function and roles” (Thorne, 1982, 3), the naturalisation of the nuclear family and the gender
roles are found questionable in feminist and queer theories.
With the father in the role of the breadwinner while the mother concentrates on the
domestic concerns, the roles in the monolithic nuclear family are based on the division of
labour (Thorne, 1982, 4). This family form, then, has been elevated as the normative, as the
standard family – The Family – against which all other forms are played out as inferior. The
division of labour as well as the family roles are based on gender and they carry the implicit
meanings of what women and men are supposed to be; motherhood becomes the central
vocation for women while their husbands dominate the public sphere. The family becomes
prescriptive of how each of its members are supposed to behave, as Thorne says: “the
ideology of family infuse[s] general understandings of women’s ‘proper place’” (1982, 4).
The ideology of The Family is so embedded in the Western culture that it permeates
almost all the levels of society. The understanding that women’s proper place is primarily in
being somebody’s wife and mother have also had an impact on the labour and economic
systems: “that adult women usually have husbands to support them, and that motherhood is
women’s central vocation are used to legitimate the subordination of women in the economy”
(Thorne, 1982, 4). The division of labour in The Family has led to the understanding that
women are specifically suited for domesticity and nurturing. In its turn, this has caused
10
women’s work on the outside to be confined to jobs which resemble the mothering task of the
home, such as nursing, teaching children or service work (ibid.). As Thorne states: “The
ideology of The Family reinforces the exploitation of all women” (ibid.).
Despite the overwhelming influence of the ideology of The Family in the society, the fact
remains that only a small percentage of all families are actually constructed according to this
model. Barrie Thorne (1982, 5) points out that as early as 1977 only 16 percent of American
families had a housewife mother, a breadwinner father and children. The view of the
monolithic family is challenged by the realities of family life i.e. the fact that the number of
one-parent households, people living alone, gay and lesbian families and so on, is larger than
that of the families of more “traditional” formation (ibid.). Adrienne Rich also notes (1981, 7)
that there have always been women who have resisted the economic dependence on husbands
or fathers, but that they also have been neglected in historical and feminist theories alike. Rich
(ibid.) brings up witches, marriage resisters and spinsters – to name but a few – who have
lived, to an extent, a woman-connected existence without economic or emotional dependence
on men. The ideology of The Family then, has been revealed as myth.
The ideology of The Family endures in culture, politics and economy alike and the fact
that the real family has more variation causes anxieties of the state of the family (Thorne,
1982, 5). One task of the feminists then, has according to Thorne (ibid.) been to demand
recognition of “alternative family arrangements in public policy and law, in the organisation
of the economy, and in beliefs about legitimate choices concerning sexuality and
reproduction”.
The height of the idealization of the monolithic, heterosexual family norm was developed
in the United States in the 1950’s. Dana Heller (1997, 6) has tagged this with the term “family
romance” meaning that the nuclear family reached mythic proportions emphasizing the happy
heterosexual idyll in advertising, popular culture and politics alike. As a grand narrative for
11
generations of Americans, the nuclear family prototype has carried on in political
campaigning for family values up to the modern day, almost reaching mythological
proportions with its imagery of healthy children provided for by the hardworking head of the
family and the perfectly content housewife (Thorne, 1982, 5). However, as discussed by Betty
Friedan (in The Feminine Mystique,1963/1992) and portrayed in the housewife of The Hours
– Mrs. Brown – the reality of the flawless family existence was less than perfect even in the
50’s as the lives of the housewives, supposedly contently spent in the domestic sphere, were
in fact burdened with quiet despair.
One of the reasons why the myth of the nuclear family is so hard to deconstruct is probably
that it is so heavily based on biological theorisation. The production and care for children is
seen as one of its most important functions and they are understood to be primarily linked
with biology (Thorne, 1982, 6). Consequently motherhood has become perhaps the most
important role to be filled by women in families (ibid). Since the mother is in charge of the
family environment, for the physical and emotional care of the family members, she becomes
the epitome of the family itself, as Rayna Rapp points out (1982, 175) “women represent the
family”.
The character of Mrs. Brown in The Hours, is faced with the anguish of having to bear the
responsibility of parenting almost entirely by herself as her husband goes to work in the
morning. The bond between Laura Brown and son Richie becomes reminiscent of a prisoner
and a warden as she is constantly watched by him and forced to go through the performance
of mothering, to “maintain […] an ongoing mother-self” (TH, 47) just to get through the day.
Laura and her son are mostly each other’s only company and they are always together: “Her
son watches her adoringly, expectantly. She is the animating principle, the life of the house
[…] he watches her, and waits” (TH, 47).
12
Being left alone in the house Laura Brown and Richie form a closed circle which is for the
most part isolated and set apart from the rest of the society. Nancy Chodorow and Susan
Contratto (1982, 62) talk about “maternal isolation” when referring to the woman’s place
alone with her children. Mother and child are isolated and the mother is left alone to carry the
weight of the responsibilities of the family; not only are they barred inside the domestic
sphere, but the isolation is also psychological as the responsibility of the failure is placed on
the mother (Chodorow & Contratto, 1982, 61).
The idea of naturalized family roles itself – housewife-mother and breadwinner-father – is
also targeted with a lot of feminist criticism (Thorne, 1982, 7). The naturalized gender roles,
led from the functionalist theories, imply that the nuclear family is universal and that the
family roles it allows for are inevitable (ibid.). According to Thorne (1982, 8), the gender role
division does not only present the different spheres as fixed, but also gives the sense of them
being “separate but equal”. The power dynamics within families are thus neutralized as well
as the presence of conflict (ibid.) – the family roles show the nuclear reality as apparently
harmonious and free of problems.
The naturalisation of the nuclear family established on the basis of normative
heterosexuality is one of the main questions dealt with in the study of gay families. The
heterosexual family model where relationships are biological are contested within queer
theory with the term “family of choice” (e.g. Kath Weston 1991) where the emphasis of the
family formation is placed on the individual choosing a family instead of being born into one.
In the family of choice the functions and tasks performed by biological relatives in the
traditional family model, are now carried out by friends, etc. and nurturing, feeding and
housework, for example, are done by the chosen group of individuals one has bonded with
and calls family.
13
Clarissa Vaughan/Dalloway is a character in The Hours who is living on the other end of
the scale compared with Mrs. Brown. In stead of the strict nuclear family norm, her family is
constructed of a lesbian life-partner, a daughter – received by artificial insemination – and an
ex-lover who is dying of AIDS. Clarissa’s family only comprises of one biological tie while
her other close relationships are chosen.
Besides the term family of choice, the term fictive kin has been widely used in discussions
of gay families. It was first introduced by anthropologists to refer to friends and community
who are not related to an individual (Weston, 1991, 105). However, Weston (ibid.) states that
as all kin was in effect found to be fictive, in a sense, the term lost its credibility; as all
relations were found to be meaningfully constituted rather than absolute, the genes and blood
were to be understood as culturally specific symbols for demarcating and formulating
relationships. However, even as social sciences found the term fictive kin to be somewhat
invalid, the term is still being used to describe gay families, gay relationships, their families
and friends (Weston, 1991, 106).
Ultimately, the term fictive kin is still connected to the traditional family format; the
nuclear family is understood to be the standard of which fictive kin is a variation. Weston
points out that gay “relationships are said to be ‘like’ family, that is, similar to and probably
imitative of the relations presumed to actually comprise kinship” (1991, 106). Gay families
comprised of fictive kin are understood to aspire to a similar existence with heterosexual
families – according to Weston, the discussions of fictive kin often refer to a symbolic system
of a nuclear family which is understood to be universal, instead of making actual observations
of how people live (1991, 106). Moreover, Weston (1991, 106) makes a deviation from the
definitions of fictive kin and uses it in reference to a “historical transformation” of family
forms – the gay kinship ideologies as one among many – rather than a variation from the
nuclear standard.
14
Both the characters of Virginia Woolf and Clarissa Vaughan live in a kind of fictive kin
family organisations; Virginia’s family is comprised of a medley of staff, relatives and workmates all of whom she is supposed to be able to manage successfully and according to norm.
The appearance of good housekeeping is essential. Clarissa Vaughan represents a gay family
which is mostly comprised of gay friends and only a few blood relatives. Clarissa’s role in
relation to her family is also varied between the different members; to her partner Sally she is
a wife, to her daughter a nuisance and finally to her sick friend Richard, something like a
mother.
What is noticeable about gay families is that even though the term “family of choice” is
widely used in reference to it, especially in the American context, (e.g. Weston 1991, Weeks
& al. 2001, Carrington 1999) the formation of the family itself has often been anything else
since – especially in the past – the gay family members have been cut of the biological family
unit. In fact, some lesbians and gay men refuse to use the term family altogether because of its
oppressive heterosexual connotations (Weeks & al. 2001, 10).
The various family forms presented in The Hours, the 1950’s nuclear family, the 1920’s
post First World War English upper class family and the pre-millennium New York gay
family, each reproduce the heterosexual family portrayed in Mrs. Dalloway showing the
actual fluidity of the family. All the families are different and yet families nonetheless. Jeffrey
Weeks, Brian Heaphy and Catherine Donovan (2001, 37) note that family should be seen as a
set of practices, acts and interactions instead of a fixed unit. Thus it becomes “less important
whether we are in a family than whether we do family-type things” (Weeks & al., 2001, 38).
Like gender, thus family itself becomes performative and the exclusion of gay families from
the sphere of families and kin becomes pointless.
In his classic text The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884/1975),
Frederick Engels discusses the development of the family from the beginning of history to its
15
more current forms and states that even though the familial ties vary in different societies “the
names of father, child, brother and sister […] involve quite definitive and very serious mutual
obligations” (1975, 95). Thus family first and foremost becomes the expression of certain
functions which are to be expected in relations to other people. According to Engels, these
expectations were originally very equal in value between the different sexes, but with the
overthrow of the matrilineal inheritance, with the appearance of the monogamous family and
the strengthening of the man’s position in the family, women were gradually reduced into a
reduced state of independence (1975, 119-120).
Engels came to the conclusion that in a marriage based on the traditional, monogamous,
nuclear model, the wife assumes an inferior, servile position in relation to her husband
marriage thus representing slavery to her (1975, 137). Engels states that in a patriarchal
family the woman’s position was privatized to the unpaid service of the family: “the wife
became the head servant, excluded from all participation to social production” (ibid.) –
meanwhile the value of her work and her functions in the family diminishing. As the upper
class lady whose work thus became invisible lost her position in society, it is to be noted that,
as Engels finds, in a less civilized society the working woman retained her respected situation
(1975, 113).
2.2 Gender and Sexuality
One of the most striking elements in The Hours is the sense of constant movement, fluidity of
the stream of consciousness technique and the identities of the characters. Bodies, thought,
sexuality and reality are in a process of incessant change and they stream onwards and
backwards in time and space, only to be captured in the one day frame of the narrative.
Schiff (2004, 364) suggests that both Woolf’s text and Cunningham’s have this in
common; ambiguities of both gender and sexual identities are defining characteristics in both
16
novels. Furthermore, Schiff (2004, 364) points out that these issues are even more topical for
a contemporary reader, since there has been a change to more tolerant public attitudes toward
the acceptance of more fluid identities. The ambiguities in sexuality and gender also enable
the research of gender construction as a whole (ibid.).
Sexuality and gender identity have been challenged in the field of queer and lesbian
theories. Adrienne Rich (1981) argues that the patriarchal society has tried to keep the sexual
and gender identities fixed for the purposes of maintaining a male-dominated society.
Heterosexuality has been offered as the primary choice for most women and naturalized on
the expense of other possible ways to live. Rich (1981, 4-5) names compulsory
heterosexuality as an institution which has been organised to promote heterosexuality in the
society while lesbian existence based on female bonding has been left to the margins as a
deviation.
Rich (1981, 4) makes two basic arguments as the starting points of her theorization; that in
the institutionalized compulsory heterosexuality the women’s choice of other women as
companions, lovers and confidants has been invalidated and destroyed, and that the existence
of lesbian experience has been negated, brushed aside or ignored. Heterosexuality then, has
been put up only to reflect “male needs, male fantasies about women, and male interest in
controlling women” (Rich, 1981, 6) while romanticising heterosexual experience as such, but
also the home and the woman’s place in it as a mother and a wife (ibid.). Laura Brown,
Virginia Woolf and Clarissa Vaughan can each be seen to struggle within the limits of
confining feminine identities; caught in the traditional, heterosexual roles.
Rich (1981, 10) sees compulsory heterosexuality as a manmade and – she stresses –
political institution designed to rob women of their essential, female experience. She is
making a point in breaking through the confines of naturalized heterosexuality by referring to
psychoanalysis in which the primary source of affection for both boys and girls is the mother
17
(Rich, 1981, 8). For Rich, lesbianism, which was denied and discriminated by the patriarchal
institution, is actually more natural for women than the enforced heterosexuality. Rich (1981,
20) also states that women’s male-identified experience – that is women’s will to rather form
alliances with men than women to re-enforce the needs of the patriarchal society – should be
replaced by the primary bond between women (Rich, 1981; 33). In The Hours Michael
Cunningham can be seen to do something to that effect. Cunningham has taken to rewriting
the lesbian subplot of Mrs. Dalloway, by turning the original setting upside down; while Mrs
Dalloway marries a man conforming to the social expectations and puts her dormant lesbian
desire aside, Clarissa Vaughan is in a long-term relationship with a woman.
When discussing lesbian experience, Rich (1981, 23) makes one important distinction
between lesbian existence and lesbian continuum. She states that the former “suggests both
the fact of the historical presence of lesbians and our continuing creation of the meaning of
that existence”, while the latter, termed lesbian continuum refers to “a range – through each
woman’s life and throughout history – of woman-identified experience” (Rich, 1981, 23)
without the idea of sexual desire towards another woman. Each of the women in The Hours
can be seen as testing the limits of their identities by having lesbian experiences, but they are
also linked together by the lesbian continuum – if only by being linked together by their
connection to the book written by a one of the first wave feminists – forming support for each
other and finally families.
Monique Wittig is another lesbian feminist who questions the naturalness of
heterosexuality, but she also takes the materialist feminist approach and opposes the treatment
of women as a “natural group” – a special, unified group set apart from men by their different
bodies (1992, 9). She states that lesbianism at once destroys the idea of women as a group and
also reveals its inconsistency. Wittig (ibid.) argues that the division between the sexes is first
and foremost a political one and it is ideologically built to offer women a distorted view of
18
who they really are: “We have been compelled in our bodies and in our minds to correspond,
feature by feature, with the idea of nature that has been established for us” (ibid.). However, if
it is understood that the category of women perceived as natural is actually politically and
ideologically constructed in social contexts – as Wittig points out – the idea of female identity
becomes more open and less fixed.
The floating sense of identity, experienced by the characters in both The Hours and Mrs.
Dalloway, seems to emphasize the point of uncertainty of the self within the social construct
which is supposed to be natural. All of the main protagonists can be seen agonizing over the
questions of identity which seem to escape even though it should be firmly fixed and
everyday life becomes a performance, an attempt to fit in. Naturalized compulsory
heterosexuality moves lesbianism outside the realm of experience, unnameable, yet existent;
as Wittig says “a lesbian has to become something else, a not-woman, a not-man, a product of
society, not a product of nature” (1992, 13).
Within the field of women’s studies there is a rift, however, between traditional
feminism and queer and lesbian studies which are more or less derived from it. Adrienne
Rich, for example, does not only attack the male-dominated society, but also lays blame on
the feminist tradition for marginalizing lesbianism and denying it its status as the source of
feminine empowerment as a thoroughly feminine experience (1981, 22). The questioning of
the heterosexual norm has gone as far as to refuse the title woman completely in some cases
(for example Wittig) as the genders have been seen only as heterosexual social constructions
which would ultimately leave out lesbians altogether.
According to Biddy Martin (1996, 72) one of the most critical points in feminist theory has
been the overemphasis it lays on gender as defining women’s experience and “has come to
colonize all female experience” to which an antinormative queer identity offers relief. In
queer studies and lesbian studies, there has been a tendency to break the mould of traditional
19
gender roles and furthermore, to completely deconstruct the gender structures. Rather than
argue over the justification of female empowerment, many theorists have attempted to
redefine femininity as one of the possible gender constructions instead of basing their
argumentation on the male-female binary opposites. Martin states that “a great deal of queer
theory […] seeks to complicate hegemonic assumptions about the continuities between
anatomical sex, social gender, gender identity, sexual identity, sexual object choice, and
sexual practice” (1996, 73).
Gender and its performative quality are some of the most dominant themes in queer theory.
The realisation that gender is created socially by certain behavioural patterns was most
famously introduced by Simone de Beauvoir (1949) and has been further developed by Judith
Butler (1990/1999). In her groundbreaking argument, Judith Butler came to the conclusion
that gender is indeed first and foremost a performance, not a “natural fact” (1999, viii).
According to Butler, gender is not a given, but a rather constant repetition of the correct
gestures and behaviours which create the illusion of impenetrable natural social fact (1999,
173). Breaking away from the criticism of the male-female binary opposites and broadening
the view for sexual and gender variation – and broadening the idea of gender itself – has
allowed for wider perspectives concerning gender and its meanings. Lois McNay points out
that “women do not remain prisoners of their sex” (2000, 13), but that the relationship
between the body and subjectivity is more fluid:
The monistic approach expresses a revised understanding of gender identity as
not only imposed through patriarchal structures, but as a set of norms that are
lived and transformed in the embodied practises of men and women. (McNay,
2000, 13).
Women’s plight is not in being born a representative of the female sex, but – as Martin says –
“in the performance or embodiment of it” (1996, 74).
Adrienne Rich also brings up the important question of locating the self as a woman and a
feminist on the field of women’s struggle. As white mainstream feminism proposed to address
20
the problems experienced by all women, collectively, they nonetheless ended up ignoring the
specific issues and difficulties which, for example, black women had to face in their daily
lives. With Black liberation raising the issue of black women’s struggle, the radical feminist
claim of universal female identification was challenged as it was acknowledged that “white
women are situated within white patriarchy as well as against it” (Rich, 1986, x). It was only
now that it was becoming necessary to place, to locate, oneself as a subject – as Rich says, “a
woman, a Jew, a lesbian, a feminist” (1984, 212) – within the feminist field as it was
discovered that the white woman’s voice cannot speak for the women of all races and that the
white woman’s view is not “in the center” (Rich, 1984, 226), that is, not the all-encompassing
universal view to feminine experience.
21
3. Laura Brown
3.1. The Housewife Syndrome
Estella Tincknell (2005, 2) states that historically the family has been mediated by the
division of the public and private spheres, where the public domain has been strictly
masculine and the private – i.e. the home and the family – feminine. The Second World War
had a distinctive role in reorganizing this division in the western countries – specifically the
USA and England. Professions which had earlier been filled by men were now open for
women, as the men were fighting the war. Focusing her research on the dominant culture in
the US, Tincknell discovered that women were suddenly leaving the home in thousands and
their participation in the war effort by maintaining the society by their work was both
appreciated and encouraged (2005, 8).
The ending of the war, however, meant for women the return back to the home and
emphasized the importance of the homebound mother (Tincknell, 2005, 9). Coming to the
1940’s and ‘50’s the idealized career girl of the 1920’s had become a happy home-maker
(Friedan, 1992, 41). It was suddenly important for the good of the country that women drop
out of work and prioritize being wives and mothers more highly. In her study of magazines of
the era, Betty Friedan (1992, 41) detected that while the heroines of the magazine stories were
in the 20’s independent and industrious, they changed for a more homebound heroine after the
war.
The cult of the housewife was cross-cultural in that it penetrated all layers of society.
According to Friedan (1992, 54), the duties of a housewife had become intensely politicized
and they were discussed in political speeches as well as magazines. What had been private
had now become increasingly political and the public discourse emphasized the pleasures of
the private. The men who had left for war as young men suddenly returned looking for the
22
comfort and ease of the warm hearth of the home (Friedan, 1963, 42). According to Friedan
(1992, 164), women, in turn, were required to provide it and posed as mother figures for the
men who had left for the war at a very young age, but who could no longer return to their
father’s houses as children. The same is visible in Laura Brown’s story in The Hours:
Because the war is over, the world has survived, and we are here, all of us,
making homes, having and raising children, creating not just books or paintings
but a whole world – a world of order and harmony where children are safe (if
not happy), where men who have seen horrors beyond imagining, who have
acted bravely and well, come home to lighted windows, to perfume, to plates
and napkins (TH, 42).
Marriage had gradually become the only way for women to have a fulfilling life and –
implicitly – a duty, which is visible in the account that Cunningham’s narrator gives of Laura
Brown; “Laura is married to a celebrated boy, a war hero” (TH, 104). And furthermore, “she
has married him out of guilt; out of fear of being alone; out of patriotism” (TH, 106).
Marriage for women was not only a question of following one’s heart, but also a matter of
creating a comfortable home for the returning war hero who has deserved it by fighting;
“what else could she say but yes?” (TH, 104).
Even though the feminine and masculine spheres were once more strictly separated in the
years after WWII, the two sexes were considered to be equal in public discourse (Friedan,
1992, 54). The idea of the importance of personal fulfilment had become popular with the
introduction of Freudian psychology and housewifery was seen as the way for women to
express their individualism. Through being primarily mothers and wives, women were
thought to be given the opportunity to shine as equal yet different partners in the marriage
(Tincknell, 2005, 13). Through the flawless execution of household tasks such as cooking and
cleaning as well as childrearing and entertaining women were seen to be truly able to reach
their full potential as women and individuals. Tincknell states that “the modern housewife
was not a drudge, she was a ‘home economist’ or ‘domestic scientist” (2005, 13).
23
The post WWII social discourse which reassigned women to the private sphere of the
home and allowed them to seek personal gratification in mothering and housework has been
termed by Betty Friedan as feminine mystique (1992, 17). Friedan (1992, 18) studied
housewives and the development of the housewife cult in the 1960’s, discovering that many
women she interviewed suffered from similar symptoms of unspoken anxiety the reason of
which they were unable to put a finger to. According to Friedan (1992, 20), the magazines
which had originally emphasized the joys of housewifery were now publishing stories
discussing the unhappiness felt by the frustrated housewives who were suffering from fatigue
and general unhappiness.
Friedan has called the unspoken anxiety experienced by homebound wives and mothers as
“the problem with no name” (1992, 21), referring to the impossibility to even discuss
women’s unhappiness in the role which was supposed to be most natural and rewarding for a
woman. In Friedan’s (1992, 28) view, the myth of feminine fulfilment had spread so widely
across American culture that it impacted media, political discourse and the personal lives of
individual citizens alike. Friedan (1992, 47) notes a significant change in women’s magazines
of the era – 1945-1960 – where the previously industrious, even independent, woman
suddenly luxuriated in the bliss of the ignorant placing the duties of the household above her
own ambitions.
While the popular culture and political speech alike were saturated with the praises of the
“happy housewife heroine”, it is no wonder, that the message they put forward was
thoroughly internalized by the growing generations of girls and women (Friedan, 1992, 30).
As girls were brought up to believe in the blessings of a homebound life over a career by the
media and the model their mothers offered them, women were themselves quite unable to
address the growing anxieties of unchallenged lives (Friedan, 1992, 28). The magazines
which were filled with topics surrounding hair-care and children worked, according to
24
Friedan (1992, 68), to stunt their growth leaving women as intellectual and emotional
inferiors to men, despite the embellishment of the equality of the different gender roles.
The devastating task of living a life which Laura Brown in The Hours does not discover
satisfying, comes through in the depiction of her life during just one day, her husband’s
birthday, when she is trying to bake the perfect cake for the little party the family is about to
have later that night. As being a wife and a mother were seen to be the most important and
rewarding tasks in a woman’s life, and the only true way of achieving feminine fulfilment, it
presented a slight problem when viewed against the simultaneous demand of equality between
the sexes. As Estella Tincknell (2005, 13) has argued, suddenly housework was demanded the
same kind of status and importance as nuclear physics and other great inventions which were
coming up as the United States entered the cold war with Russia. While men were walking on
the moon, women were expected to reach new, unexplored heights of childrearing and
dishwashing, and certainly, cake-baking.
In an attempt to excel as a housewife, to perfect the craft of housework, Laura wants her
cake to be perfect:
She is going to produce a birthday cake – only a cake – but in her mind at this
moment the cake is glossy and resplendent as any photograph in any magazine;
it is better, even, than the photographs of cakes in magazines (TH, 76).
The simple act of baking a cake comes to symbolize the whole of feminine achievement. It is
necessary for Laura to master the skill of baking the cake in order to justify herself as a
woman and the craft of making it exceeds the limitations of mere housework. Against the
background of her dissatisfaction as a housewife, the cake baking grows in significance:
The cake will speak of bounty and delight the way a good house speaks of
comfort and safety. This, she thinks, is how artists or architects must feel (it’s
and awfully grand comparison, she knows, maybe even a little foolish, but still),
faced with canvas, with stone, with oil or cement (TH, 76).
25
Laura’s obsession to produce the perfect cake speaks of her need to justify herself as a
good mother, wife and woman, but it also speaks of her need to truly find fulfilment in her
own personal life and what she is doing. She wants to relate to those glossy magazine pictures
with their images of perfect housekeeping all the while she wants to really do something
significant. She compares her cake to a house designed by an architect and imagines herself
endowed with some of the same talent. Homemaking is her “art and her duty” (TH, 42).
The cake-baking can be seen as a representative for successful femininity. When
household chores are the only place where a woman is allowed to excel, it becomes crucial
that she does. However, Laura fails. The cake does not give her the sense of achievement and
fulfilment, it does not have “a touch of the same brilliance” (TH, 42) with which the works of
real artists are endowed:
There is nothing really wrong with it, but she’d imagined something more.
She’d imagined it larger, more remarkable. She’d hoped (she admits to herself)
it would look more lush and beautiful, more wonderful. This cake she’s
produced looks small, not just in the physical sense but as an entity. (TH, 99).
Even though Laura tries to tell herself that the cake is “only a cake” (TH, 99), it becomes the
one object which changes the odds of her day turning out well for the negative and ultimately
defines her life as worthless.
The capable and beautiful neighbour Kitty is the exact opposite of Laura. She personifies
the feminine glamour and achievement which Laura is trying to reach, but fails at. Kitty
seems to have reached the full expression of feminine mystique having married her high
school sweetheart and settled down in the suburbs. She looks flawless and is able to perform
the tasks of a perfect housewife and hence, the perfect woman to the extreme. Furthermore, in
the world which has efficiently labelled women as consumers of the new rising capitalist
force of the USA (Tincknell, 2005 21; Oakley, 1974, 3), the perfect woman has the sheen of a
brilliantly polished product herself, the page filler of the magazine, a movie star:
26
Kitty’s preciousness, the golden hush of her, the sense of enlarged moment she
brings to a room, is like that of a movie star. She has movie star’s singularity, a
movie star’s flawed and idiosyncratic beauty; like a movie star she seems both
common and heightened, in the way of Olivia De Havilland or Barbara
Stanwyck (TH; 105).
For Laura, Kitty is a perfect role model of how to be a perfect wife and what to aspire to;
while Laura feels herself less than presentable: “Her hair is hardly brushed; she is wearing her
bathrobe” (TH, 101), Kitty “enters, and brings with her an aura of cleanliness and a domestic
philosophy” (TH, 102). Kitty’s judgement of Laura’s performance as a housewife is also
crucial when it comes to the cake baking. With a simple utterance of “aw, look” (TH, 103),
Kitty dismisses Laura’s efforts and she ends up throwing it away to start again, for the cake
has to be flawless (TH, 112): “She wants (she admits to herself) a dream of a cake manifested
as an actual cake.” (TH, 144).
When the female and masculine spheres were so distinctly separated to the public and the
private, the importance of the woman for the family became increased. Ann Oakley (1974,
60) goes as far as to say “the family is women” and the task of keeping the family together
and fully functioning falls on the woman. She is a wife and a mother, the provider of comfort,
beauty and relief for the husband and considered the primary caretaker of the children’s
feeding, clothing and hobbies – in other words their moral and social upbringing (Oakley,
1974, 61).
The women of 1950’s felt an increasing sense of loneliness as they were faced with the
burden of childrearing almost single-handedly. The solitude was however not only mental.
Estella Tincknell (2005, 11) points out that the post WWII move to the suburbs actually
isolated the women inside their homes far away from the city with nothing much to do besides
housework and parent-teacher meetings. Cities such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles
– where the character of Laura Brown resides with her family – grew brand new suburbs all
around them, a good distance away from the centre. The economical progress of the nation
27
was reflected on individual families, but the cost was the solitude of the housewife who was
left alone during the day to mind the children and the household while the husband was able
to leave for work and the social life connected to it (Tincknell, 2005, 11).
The task of caring for the family was left on the women and, as seen in The Hours, the task
of creating the illusion of the perfect family idyll was one of the feminine tasks also; the cake
has to be perfect, the husband has to be happy and Laura has to be cheerful and not “the
woman of sorrows” (TH, 42). The wives owe it to their war hero husbands returned against all
odds from oblivion, madness and even death:
So much has been risked and lost; so many have died. Less than five years ago
Dan himself was believed to have died, at Anzio, and when he was revealed two
days later to be alive after all (he and some poor boy from Arcadia had had the
same name), it seemed he had been resurrected. He seemed to have returned,
still sweet-tempered, still smelling like himself, from the realm of the dead […]
(TH, 39).
The creation of the perfect, safe little household in the suburbs of Los Angeles of 1949
seems to be a pretence for Laura. What Laura really wants to do is stay in bed and read her
book – Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway – but she needs to get up and start her daily chores in
stead like a proper housewife (TH, 38). Laura has married and settled down to comfortable
life with her husband and child and yet, there is something that does not seem to be right, she
has to talk herself into even meeting her family;
Laura closes the book and lays it on the nightstand. She does not dislike her
child, does not dislike her husband. She will rise and be cheerful. (TH, 41).
Laura Brown is no longer allowed to be the quiet, lonely, bookish girl of her youth, but she
is supposed to adopt the role of the capable wife and a devoted mother, “Laura Zielski, the
solitary girl, the incessant reader, is gone, and here in her place is Laura Brown” (TH, 40).
Still, the transition from Laura Zielski does not appear seamless; her cake-baking is for her a
catastrophe, so much so that she ends up throwing it away, and she does not perform her
duties with the kind of zeal expected of someone in her position. Even Laura’s first meeting
28
with her family in the morning is juxtaposed with images of an actress preparing to go on
stage:
She […] starts downstairs. She pauses several treads from the bottom, listening,
waiting; she is again possessed (it seems to be getting worse) by a dreamlike
feeling, as if she is standing in the wings, about to go onstage and perform in a
play for which she is not appropriately dressed, and for which she has not
adequately rehearsed. (TH, 43)
Laura’s performance as a homemaker is just that, a performance, for which she has to be
dressed properly and know her lines. Nonetheless, her husband and child are dependent on it:
“all the man and the boy require of her is her presence and, of course, her love”. In an era
where the feminine and masculine spheres have been separated and women should be
dependent on their husbands, Laura’s husband is actually very dependent on her. Dan is
ignorant of what is truly going on in his household and in the mind of his wife who is
constantly in between staying and leaving. It seems that the gender roles are reversed in
Laura’s family; while women were supposed to be – for example according to Friedan (1992,
65) – stunted in their intellectual and emotional growth and men to be in charge and
knowledgeable of the ways of the world, Dan is actually completely unaware that his wife is
only putting up a front for him and Laura is secretly “improving her mind” (TH, 42).
Even the image of the perfect housewife, Kitty, keeps things hidden from her husband.
Kitty comes to Laura to tell her that she may have a tumour in her uterus and needs to go to
the doctor (TH; 108). Ray, Kitty’s husband, is aware that there is a problem, but he does not
know about the struggle she goes through to keep up the façade of herself as capable to the
end, not like Laura:
They are both afflicted and blessed, full of shared secrets, striving every
moment. They are each impersonating someone. They are weary and
beleaguered; they have taken on such enormous work. (TH, 110).
It is necessary to keep up the appearance and Kitty does not show her vulnerability in front of
her husband, only Laura:
29
Here are the depths of Kitty, the heart beneath the heart; the untouchable
essence that a man (Ray of all people!) dreams of, yearns toward, searches for
so desperately at night. (TH, 109).
Laura is the one in whom she seeks comfort and like the cake-baking, a simple act of feeding
the dog while Kitty is in the hospital becomes tantamount to Kitty asking Laura to care for her
home while she is gone (TH, 111).
Not only does Laura feel like she has to put on performances in front of her family to
qualify as a worthy wife and mother, the Brown family’s daily life seems to be full of rituals.
They follow habits and traditions which appear to be governed by a carefully drawn
choreography of what to do and how and when. Staying in bed in the morning when she
should actually be ready to smile and socialize with her husband in the morning is a lapse of
these rituals, which is something Laura is well aware of. Still, her pregnancy excuses her of
having to do everything according to the unspoken rule of the household:
Because she is pregnant, she is allowed these lapses. She is allowed, for now, to
read unreasonably, to linger in bed, to cry or grow furious over nothing. (TH,
38).
The family life is carried out by following certain lines of conduct, it serves to keep the
family together and maintain the sense of continuation – especially for Laura’s husband Dan
and her son Richie:
[…] his wishes, like his father’s, have mainly to do with continuance. Like his
father, what he wants most ardently is more of what he’s already got. (TH, 206).
From rising out of bed to be ready to serve breakfast to the husband leaving, Laura and her
husband have rituals ready to guide them trough the time they spend together. Laura and
Richie are left as spectators to the scene of Dan leaving with “the taking on of jacket and
briefcase; the flurry of kisses; the waves” (TH, 46-47). However, after mother and son are left
alone, comes “the daily transition” (TH, 47), and Laura is suddenly without the comfort of the
30
rite, she is not entirely sure how to behave: “With her husband present, she is more nervous
but less afraid. She knows how to act” (ibid.).
While Laura feels she can manage the performance when her husband is present, it falls
apart when the mother and the son are alone together:
When her husband is here, she can manage it. She can see him seeing her, and
she knows almost instinctively how to treat the boy firmly and kindly, with an
affectionate maternal offhandedness that seems effortless. Alone with the child,
though, she loses direction. She can’t always remember how a mother would
act. (TH, 47).
Richie however, sees through the rituals and Laura’s act. He is ever watchful of his mother,
following every move she makes. Their relationship almost resembles that of a guard and a
prisoner with Richie looking and seeing through the appearances Laura is frantic to put up.
The relationships between mothers and their children became an important question for
several researchers of homebound wives. In the period following the end of the Second World
War the society was concerned of the impact stay-at-home mothers had on their offspring.
According to Oakley (1974, 69), with the Freudian theories of healthy childhood, mothers
were suddenly placed under a magnifying glass, available to be blamed for either being too
distant as mothers or smothering their children altogether. Not surprisingly, considering the
fact that mothering was one of the few careers open to women. Many women were left to
mind their children alone with the aid of childrearing guidebooks such as Dr Spock’s
(Friedan, 1992, 165), with the fear of turning their children delinquent or homosexual.
Laura too seems to be questioning herself as a mother and is not able to relate to her son or
decipher his moods:
He cries mysteriously, makes indecipherable demands, courts her, pleads with
her, ignores her. […] She knows or at least suspects, that other mothers of small
children must maintain a body of rules and, more to the point, an on-going
mother-self to guide them in negotiating the days spent alone with a child (TH,
47).
31
Laura is baffled by her son, almost afraid of him, which is sometimes felt as pure abhorrence,
because Richie is so dependent on her, so unpredictable with his overflowing emotions and
always watching her, waiting to see what will happen: “He seems, almost always, to be
waiting to see what she will do next” (TH, 47).
Despite the difficulties Laura experiences in communicating with her son, and knowing
how to behave around him, she has a love for him which comes through when she manages to
put together the image of herself as the mother and wife she is supposed to be, and the real
person she actually is. When Laura Zielski merges with Laura Brown:
[…] she is precisely what she appears to be: a pregnant woman kneeling in a
kitchen with her three-year-old son, who knows the number four. She is herself
and the perfect picture of herself; there is no difference. (TH; 76).
Laura and Richie have a relationship which is full of tensions and contradictions. On one
hand, Richie’s wellbeing is solely dependent on Laura: “he is devoted, entirely, to the
observation and deciphering of her, because without her there is no world at all” (TH, 192).
Meanwhile, on the other hand, Laura’s emotions towards her son move from near abhorrence
to an all-devouring love – almost sexual in its intense quality:
At this moment she could devour him, not ravenously but adoringly, infinitely
gently, the way she used to take the Host into her mouth before she married and
converted (her mother will never forgive her, never). She is full of a love so
strong, so unambiguous, it resembles appetite (TH, 76).
The relationship between mother and son is full of unresolved hostility and desperate love
which is just as easily turned to exasperation as Laura feels herself overwhelmed by her son’s
emotions:
“Oopsie,” his mother says. He looks at her in terror. His eyes fill with tears.
Laura sighs. Why is he so delicate, so prone to fits of inexplicable remorse?
Why does she have to be so careful with him? (TH, 78).
The day in the life of the Brown family – and specifically Laura – is finally brought to a
conclusion with the little party Laura arranges for her husband’s birthday. Everything is
32
finally as it should be for one irretrievable moment. Dan and Laura fall into a familiar pattern
of birthday celebration complete with lit candles, the singing of the birthday song, and yes the
cake. Finally successful, the cake functions as a healing, binding entity offers Laura the relief
she needs to continue as a housewife – this time she has not failed:
[…] it seems she has succeeded suddenly, at the last minute, the way a painter
might brush a final line of color onto a painting and save it form incoherence;
the way a writer might set down the line that brings to light the submerged
patterns and symmetry in the drama. (TH, 207).
Echoing the ending of yet another novel by Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927), where the
protagonist Lily Briscoe finishes her painting of Mrs. Ramsay4, Laura too finishes her own
masterpiece performance as a housewife. And, for a moment Laura is able to continue, in a
“room that seems almost impossibly full: full of the lives of her husband and son; full of the
future” (TH, 207).
3.2. “Trouble Believing In Herself”
The power imbalance between men and women and the strife for equality have always been
targeted by feminist scholars. From the resistance of a world view which was deemed
patriarchal and thus restrictive for women, lesbian feminists rose to oppose an assumed,
naturalised heterosexuality which was to be seen as a root of women’s oppression. For lesbian
feminists, such as Adrienne Rich and Monique Wittig, the main argument has been the
realisation of heterosexuality as an ideological – even political – structure which promotes
masculine dominance in the society. Lesbian feminism has attempted to counter heterosexual
4
“Quickly, as if she were recalled by something over there, she turned to her canvas. There it was – her picture.
Yes, with all its greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in
the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush
again. She looked at the steps: they were empty; she looked at her canvas: it was blurred. With a sudden
intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes,
she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision” (Virginia Woolf, To the
Lighthouse, 239, 1927/2004.).
33
ideology by doing away with gender altogether, as gender and the roles attached to it can be
seen to be on the bottom of the heterosexual dominance.
Lesbian feminists have seen lesbianism as the ultimate way to fight masculine dominance
as it allows women complete detachment from a masculine culture (e.g. Jeffreys, 2003, 1920) which is why it poses a threat to the heterosexual hegemony. Adrienne Rich (1981, 4)
states that within the heterosexual ideology the existence of lesbians has been either
completely denied or they have been demonized. Like Sheila Jeffreys, Rich (1981, 5)
emphasizes lesbianism as a conscious choice and wonders whether women would choose
heterosexuality if it was not made compulsory through the infiltration of that ideology.
Lesbian feminism then, sees heterosexuality as an institution which actually robs women
of the choice of what Adrienne Rich (1981, 4) refers to as woman-identified experience and a
woman-identified way of living. It bans women from relating to other women as “passionate
comrades, life partners, co-workers, lovers, tribe” (Rich, 1981, 4), demonizes these relations
and thus makes heterosexuality – which is seen as structurally oppressive to women – the
norm. According to Rich (1981, 6), heterosexuality is based on “male needs, male fantasies
about women, and male interest in controlling women” and is designed to keep women
economically as well as emotionally dependent on men, ignorant on the fact that their needs
would be better met in connection to other women.
According to Betty Friedan (1992, 161), the reason underlying the patterns of maleidentification, that is the conformity to the heterosexual model, is the need to love which is
further embellished by heterosexual tradition of romance. Especially in post WWII US, the
loneliness felt when the soldiers left for war, brought on a rush to the altar when they
returned, since girls would not want to miss out on the fulfilment of feminine duty (Friedan,
1992, 161) which is according to Rich (1981, 6) – and as Engels deduced before her –
tantamount to servitude. Thus the heterosexual model of marriage would be seen to create a
34
trap for the women who want to be loved and are not allowed any other places to find it. As
Laura Brown states in The Hours:
Why did she marry him? She married him out of love. She married him out of
guilt; out of fear of being alone; out of patriotism. He was simply too good, too
kind, too earnest, too sweet-smelling not to marry. He had suffered so much. He
wanted her. (TH, 106).
According to Rich (1981, 11-13), heterosexuality is something that is forced upon women
through various different mechanisms which are all either straightforwardly violent or
somehow oppressive and range from the denial of women’s sexuality to the refusal of
education. All of this then, would work to enforce “heterosexuality on women as means of
assuring male right of physical, economical, and emotional access” (Rich, 1981, 22). The
resulting compulsory heterosexuality, an institution set to keep women under the restrictions
of a heteronormative lifestyle, would also rob women of their desire and keep them from
forming more equal and lasting bonds with other women.
Laura’s story in The Hours can be seen to describe a woman whose experience of life is
thus hindered. She shares a rare moment of female bonding in her kitchen with her neighbour
and friend, Kitty, kisses her and is forced to examine the nature of her sexuality, continuing to
desire her husband as well as fantasizing about secret encounters with Kitty:
She can kiss Kitty in the kitchen and love her husband, too. She can anticipate
the queasy pleasure of her husband’s lips and fingers (is it that she desires his
desire?) and still dream of kissing Kitty again some day, in a kitchen or at the
beach as children shriek in the surf, in a hallway with their arms full of folded
towels, laughing softly, aroused, hopeless, in love with their own recklessness if
not each other, saying Shhhh, parting quickly, going on. (TH, 143).
What is noticeable about the account of Laura’s desire for Kitty and Dan is the different
ways in which each are described. “Laura desires Kitty. She desires her force, her brisk and
cheerful disappointment, the shifting pink-gold lights of her secret self and the crisp,
shampooed depths of her hair.” (TH, 143). Kitty is clean, golden and crisp; a positive lifeforce despite her looming illness, someone with whom Laura can truly share the experience of
35
having to fulfil the task of feminine mystique. But Laura desires Dan too – but in a
significantly different way, it is darker somehow, more sinister: “Laura desires Dan, too, in a
darker and less exquisite way; a way that is more subtly haunted by cruelty and shame” (TH,
143). The narration makes a clear deviation from the demonization of homosexuality and
shows the way in which the women relate to each other as natural and pure while Laura’s
notion of the husband is more brutal, laden with the “cruelty and shame” which Adrienne
Rich (1981, 6) describes to be at the heart of heterosexuality.
It can be said that the narration of The Hours is breaking apart the naturalization of
heterosexuality where Kitty herself – the way she looks and behaves – is compared with the
two husbands. If Kitty is crisp and clean, Dan and Ray are somewhat unpleasant, even
downright disgusting:
Ray is crew-cut, reliable, myopic; he is full of liquids. He sweats copiously.
Small bubbles of clear spit form at the sides of his mouth whenever he speaks at
length. (TH, 105).
[Dan] exudes a complex essence made up of sweat, Old Spice, the leather of his
shoes, and the ineffable, profoundly familiar smell of his flesh – a smell with
elements of iron, elements of bleach, and the remotest hint of cooking, as if deep
inside him something moist and fatty were being fried. (TH, 206).
Compared with Kitty’s “preciousness, the golden hush of her, the sense of enlarged moment
she brings to a room, is like that of a movie star” (TH, 105) she seems very natural as the
object of Laura’s desire whereas the men and their needs seem sullied and even perverse.
Furthermore, Dan and Kitty’s husband Ray are returning war heroes, but there seems to be
very little about them that is traditionally heroic, masculine in a way that the image of a war
hero assumes. Therefore, it can be stated that the traditional image of masculinity is perhaps
also challenged in the text. Underneath the mythical warrior, there is something more
ominous, something damaged:
So many of these men are not quite what they were (no one likes to talk about
it); so many women live uncomplainingly with the quirks and the silences, the
fits of depression, the drinking. (TH, 108-109).
36
The myth of feminine fulfilment, which was built to cater to the needs of the returning heroes
(Friedan, 1992, 160), seems also questionable in comparison; the myths – masculine and
feminine – are truly revealed as myths. The new post-war community is shown as a fictitious
structure with underlying conflicts where men and women are unable to fill the masculine and
feminine roles as a heroic patriot and his “happy housewife heroine” (Friedan, 1992, 30).
Suddenly the lesbian life choice is made more understandable – perhaps even more natural.
Rich has divided her concept of lesbianism in two categories, the first of which is lesbian
existence. It refers both the historical existence of lesbians and the “continuing creation of
that existence” (1981, 23). Lesbian existence underlines the fact that there have always been
lesbians, i.e. women who refuse to comply with compulsory heterosexuality and who take
same-sex lovers and live with them despite the pressures of a heterosexual majority.
Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a
compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on male right of
access to women. But it is more than these, although we may first begin to
perceive it as a form of nay-saying to patriarchy, an act of resistance. (Rich,
1981, 24)
Lesbian existence can be thus seen as direct resistance to the model of compulsory
heterosexuality and includes lesbian sexuality and experiences as well as the historical
identification of their existence.
In The Hours Laura Brown experiences a moment of lesbian existence by sharing a kiss
with Kitty, which leads her to question and compare her desire towards both Kitty and her
husband and ultimately her chosen lifestyle. She still has a desire for her husband, but it is
now juxtaposed with her fantasies about renewing the kiss with Kitty (TH, 1443), which is
simultaneously illicit and pure, secretive and unabashed. Richard Schiff points out that the
“Woolfian trope of kiss” (2004, 370) – evokes the kiss shared by Clarissa Dalloway and Sally
Seton in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and further underlines the ambiguity of sexuality and self-
37
identification by opening up a window of an alternative self for Laura (Schiff, 2004, 371). As
Mrs Dalloway is left to wonder about her decision to conform and marry a man, so is Laura
now plunged into a questioning of her own choices.
Laura’s lesbian experience becomes emblematic of a different kind of life; Schiff notes
that like Mrs Dalloway in Woolf’s text, all Cunningham’s leading characters possess “various
alternative selves” (2004, 371). Laura’s performance as a perfect happy housewife is ruptured
and the possibility of a different life opens up to her in front of the eyes of her most loyal
audience, her son, Richie (TH, 111); for a brief moment her façade is broken and her absolute
identity as a mother and wife, even as a woman falls apart. Suddenly that which is considered
natural and even imminent in a woman’s life in a post World War II United States is not so
obvious anymore and that which Adrienne Rich questions (1981, 5) – “whether in a different
context, or other things being equal, women would choose heterosexual coupling and
marriage” – becomes very acute.
Through the meeting in the kitchen Laura and Kitty can relate to each other on a very
different level from the one they both share with their husbands. Even though Kitty is the one
who is truly able to put up the performance of the perfect wife with her presence, reminiscent
of a movie-star, and in comparison Laura “is neither glamorous nor a paragon of domestic
competence” (TH, 107), they share the pressures of having to produce flawless femininity and
the impossibility of doing so; “They are both impersonating someone. They are weary and
beleaguered; they have taken on enormous work.” (TH, 110). They are able to relate to each
other in their imperfect feminine identities; Laura because her true self is found on the pages
of a book and Kitty because she can not get pregnant, nor is she motherly towards other
people’s children; she “does not attempt to seduce the children of others. They can come to
her, if they like; she will not go to them” (TH, 103).
38
Even though Laura and Kitty relate to each other as women and housewives of war heroes,
it is noticeable how there is a sense of identity in constant change as the two kiss. As Schiff
mentions, there is an “ambiguity of sexual identity and desire” (2004, 371) which shows in
the “Woolfian kiss” of the two women, but it could be said, that there is also a sense of
ambiguity of gender and identity as a whole, “the self is fragmented and unstable, comprising
of multiple selves” (Schiff, 2004, 371).
In just one kiss, holding Kitty in her arms, Laura’s whole personality goes through various
positions:
“Come here,” Laura says, as she would say to a child, and as if Kitty were
Laura’s child she does not wait for Kitty to obey but goes to her. […] Laura can
feel the relinquishment; she can feel Kitty give herself over. She thinks, This is
how a man feels, holding a woman. […] here are the depths of Kitty, the heart
beneath the heart; the untouchable essence that a man (Ray of all people!)
dreams of, yearns toward, searches for so desperately at night. (TH, 109).
Laura and Kitty’s meeting fluctuates from that of a mother and child, a man and woman and
finally a woman and woman without finding a certain place of origin, challenging the idea of
a fixed gendered self as well as a fixed identity. Laura’s identity and her anxieties float
beyond lesbian feminist dichotomies and her identity becomes more fluent and more open to
interpretations. Kissing Kitty is revealed not only a lesbian experience but even – and perhaps
rather – a queering experience. Therefore, the place where the kiss ends and the identities are
once again stabilized as two housewives in a kitchen is somewhat open-ended; Laura could be
seen to be left in a position which can be seen traditionally masculine, that of a “dark-eyed
predator” (TH, 110) or she might be interpreted as posing a lesbian threat to the calm nuclear
family atmosphere: “Laura is the odd one, the foreigner, the one who can’t be trusted” (TH,
110).
39
Rich’s (1981, 23) second term for lesbianism, lesbian continuum, does not require actual
lesbian desire or sexual experience with another woman. The span of lesbianism then would
grow wider to include a range of relations from schoolgirl friendships to working together:
If we consider the possibility that all women […] exist on a lesbian continuum,
we can see ourselves moving in and out of this continuum, whether we identify
ourselves as lesbian or not. It allows us to connect aspects of womanidentification as diverse as the impudent, intimate girl-friendships of eight- or
nine-year olds and the banding together of those women of the twelfth and
fifteenth centuries known as Beguines who “shared houses, rented to one
another, bequeathed houses to their room-mates… (Rich, 1981, 26).
Through female bonding, sharing experience of being female and offering assistance when
needed to other women, according to Rich (1981, 23) women move in a kind of matrix of
“woman-identified experience” which allows for the resistance of the traditional, naturalized,
heterosexual ideology.
Even though Laura and Kitty are able to meet each other on the same level for a moment
in the Browns’ kitchen, it is a world of fiction Laura goes to for a more lasting solace. She is
unfulfilled in her role as a housewife and longs to find brilliance in herself, thus Virginia
Woolf, the writer of Mrs Dalloway, gains importance in her imagination; she admires her and
is fascinated by her:
[…] she is reading Virginia Woolf, all of Virginia Woolf, book by book she is
fascinated by the idea of a woman like that, a woman of such brilliance, such
strangeness, such immeasurable sorrow […] (TH, 42).
And Laura wants to imagine herself capable of the same genius, “that she has a touch of the
same brilliance herself, just a hint of it” (TH, 42). Through the pages of Mrs Dalloway the
author and the reader are able to meet each other and Virginia Woolf becomes a counsellor, a
guide and a type of role model for Laura, they are linked together in a kind of lesbian
continuum which in this case spans through decades across the pages of a book of fiction. As
Schiff mentions, Laura, who is trapped in a life she does not seem to want and is just barely
able to keep up, is able to find in Woolf “a mentor, an amalgam of genius, artist, and feminist
40
icon, whom Laura can believe in and aspire to” (2004, 369). Only her means of aspiring to the
same brilliance are tied to the place she is forced to inhabit as a woman; the home, the child,
baking the perfect cake.
The Hours is very much infused with the motives of reading and writing on several
different levels and James Schiff (2004, 367) goes as far as to say that the book is essentially
about reading and writing. I would slightly contest that view as in my opinion, to classify the
text as merely an examination of literature itself would be to disregard the complexities of the
female protagonists and their circumstances in life. In the life of Laura Brown for example,
literature functions as an adhesive which links her to a lesbian continuum which is free from
the constraints of her existence as a housewife in a post World War II California.
Reading is how Laura identifies herself or “locates herself” (TH, 38), finds herself in the
middle – and despite of – of the housewife-performance. Viewed against the backdrop of
Laura’s experience as a housewife, reading has a major significance in her life as a means of
escape, rebellion and finally an aid to negotiate the world into something tolerable. In
Adrienne Rich’s terms (1984), locating oneself for Laura translates as self discovery, finding
her true self in the world of literature. Reading represents the part of her which is still Laura
Zielski, the bookish, quiet child and the awkward and foreign-looking young woman (TH, 40)
while Laura Brown belongs irreversibly to her family and is to be located inside the confines
of the household and the ideologies surrounding successful femininity.
The importance reading has for Laura is introduced right at the very beginning of her story
– and her day. She clings to reading without wanting to rise to the day and face her duties and
her expectant family.
She glanced over at this new book on her nightstand, stacked atop the one she
finished last night, she reached for it automatically, as if reading were the
singular and obvious first task of the day, the only viable sway to negotiate the
transit from sleep to obligation. (TH, 38)
41
From the first, the readers are introduced to the dualistic nature of Laura’s experience; on one
hand, she has her duties as a wife and a mother and, on the other, she is still herself, the girl
who loves to read and to whom reading represents a realisation of the self.
It is this dualism which causes tension in Laura’s whole life. She is ultimately not able
to fulfil herself through the task of housewifery, despite her efforts, and the way for her to
truly remain herself is reading.
Laura Brown is trying to lose herself. No, that’s not it exactly – she is trying to
keep herself by gaining entry to a parallel world. (TH, 37) (italics added)
The part of her which comes most alive when reading is nonetheless the part which had to be
sacrificed when she married, and yet: “In another world, she might have spent her whole life
reading. But this is the new world, the rescued world” (TH, 39). The possibility of another life
is reintroduced – this time in relation to Laura herself; she is removed from questions of
desire and sexuality and brought to something which is perhaps more essentially her.
In Rich’s opinion (1981, 12), one of the ways to control women in a heterosexual
hegemony is to restrict their movements. This becomes apparent when Laura attempts to find
a place to go and read her book, escape her life as a housewife; echoing Virginia Woolf’s
desire for “a room of one’s own”: “[…] what she wants – some place private, silent, where
she can read, where she can think – is not readily available” (TH, 145). Public places such as
the restaurant, a store, and the library are full of regulations as to how to act, to move, to
browse, to order something etc, these are places where she would be required to put up yet
another performance not to attract attention (TH, 145). The role of the housewife, the little
woman, is not to be easily discarded; even if Laura was to sit in her car she could not count on
being left alone: “[…] a woman alone, she’ll be vulnerable to criminals and those who’ll try
to protect her from criminals. She’ll be too exposed; she’ll look too peculiar” (TH, 145).
42
Rich argues (1984, 211) against the idea represented in Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas
(1938) that women have no country, but are citizens of the whole world by way of the shared
experience of being female. In stead, Rich (1984, 212) writes that as a woman, it is important
to find oneself on the map as well as in history, to find one’s identity and attain ownership of
the surrounding world from that specific vantage point of which is created in the self location.
Laura Brown locates herself in her literature, in Mrs. Dalloway, where she will have a history
as a woman and a place of reference how to be one – whether in the title character herself or
the author of the text – as well as her own identity as a reading individual. Meanwhile, to find
a place where she can actually go and be by herself in a legitimate undisturbed manner is
nearly impossible. Locating oneself thus becomes an issue of positioning one self on the map
in terms of place and race, but also of finding a space for oneself and claiming possession of
it.
Laura’s solution is to check into a hotel, which offers the solitude Laura needs to read her
book; she has to concoct a story of a husband (TH, 147):
“For my husband and myself. He’s coming with our luggage.”
The clerk glances behind her, looking for a man struggling with suitcases.
Laura’s face burns, but she does not waver.
“He’s coming actually, in an hour or two. He’s been delayed, and he sent me
on. To see if there’s a vacancy.”
A woman’s movements seem to be always controlled by the scrutiny of the outside world. In
Laura’s case whether it is the demands of the son and husband or the codes of conduct
imposed by the society as a whole, she is caged inside a very narrow space where it is
acceptable for her to move. She is allowed to take the car and drop her son off in the care of a
nanny and go shopping or running errands, but any deviation from these confined
circumstances and acceptable behavioural patterns may result in her being returned back
home with the shame of having been discovered and possibly a scolding; she even has to be
ware of those who would “try to rescue her from criminals” (TH, 145).
43
Laura Brown is connected to the character of Virginia Woolf by similar emotions and will
to create something wonderful, but Laura is also connected to Mrs. Dalloway, the title
character of the book she is reading. Mrs. Dalloway’s life traverses that of Laura’s as she
navigates through her day; from the pages of the book Mrs. Dalloway’s capable preparation
for her party mixes with the sense of inadequacy Laura is feeling in anticipation of her own.
Next to Laura Mrs. Dalloway is almost unbearably competent, the image of the fantastic
homemaker, housekeeper and entertainer and yet even their emotions have parallels in the
scenes where even Mrs Dalloway questions her own mortality – which is the passage which
Laura is reading in the hotel room: “did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely;
all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe
that death ended things absolutely?” (TH, 150; italics in TH, direct quote form Mrs.
Dalloway).
Mrs. Dalloway becomes more than just a book Mrs. Brown is reading, but it gains in
importance when studied against the background of Laura’s plight as a housewife. Reading it
is a way to escape, but also a way to organize and cope with the demands of her own life;
reading is “the only viable way to negotiate the transit from sleep to obligation” (TH, 38).
Therefore Laura’s decision to escape to a world which is built around the cult of feminine
fulfilment which is exactly what she is trying to escape becomes less paradoxical. The world
of Mrs. Dalloway is a parallel universe where it is possible to discover happiness by following
the guidelines of the perfect housewife, to fulfil the duties and yet be herself:
Laura Brown is trying to lose herself. No, that’s not it exactly – she is trying to
keep herself by gaining entry to a parallel world. Already her bedroom (no, their
bedroom) feels more densely inhabited, more actual, because a character named
Mrs. Dalloway is on her way to buy flowers. (TH, 37).
The gender and sexual identities in The Hours are shown to be very flowing and constantly
changing from one to another; from Laura’s performance as a housewife to the ever changing
positions she assumes when kissing Kitty to her finally momentarily morphing with Mrs
44
Dalloway. She is shown to penetrate the layers of femininity in order to threaten the
boundaries of correct behaviour and gender itself. Therefore, it can be said that the object of
lesbian feminism is somewhat redundant where she is concerned; her problem does not lie in
not being allowed to bond with other women, but in doing away with gender altogether.
As Monique Wittig points out (1992, 13), lesbian feminism – such as perhaps Adrienne
Rich’s, for example – can be said to possess a significant flaw in that it tends to demonize
masculinity while placing women on the pedestal. However, as Wittig says: “It puts us in a
position of fighting within the class “women” not as the other classes do, for the
disappearance of our class, but for the defence of ‘woman’ and its reinforcement” (1992, 1314). Meanwhile the myth of “woman” would continue to remain intact.
45
4. Virginia Woolf
4.1. The Angel in the House
As Estella Ticknell (2005, 2) suggests, there has traditionally been a division between private
and public spheres which have been assigned to women and men, respectively. Some of the
aims of feminist thinking and women’s struggle have been to be released from the confines of
the private sphere of the home, to have their voices heard and to become valued members of
the society alongside men. Especially for white middle class women, one of the ways of
achieving these goals has been the right to enter the workforce, to earn a living and the right
to posses one’s own earnings, leaving behind the unpaid housework service which multitudes
of women have been designated to in the traditional, nuclear family models.
It can be said that in The Hours the family which is arranged most in the traditional,
heterosexual family model, with the bread-winner husband and a home-maker wife, is the
family of Mrs. Brown who tries to cope with the demands of that role in the 1949 California
suburb. Katherine R Allen and Alexis J. Walker (2000, 4-5) explain the functionalist roots of
the work division in the family ideology: it has been considered most “efficient” that the
family constitutes of two adults of separate sexes with appropriately specialized tasks to
produce a family capable of fulfilling the social tasks assigned to it. In the ever-pervasive
functionalist family theories the home and the work place are given separate characteristics,
where the home becomes a place of love and recreation and the work place aggressive and
competitive and, similarly, the different genders occupying the spheres are socialized
accordingly; nurturing traits thus becoming female and instrumental male characteristics.
As Allen and Walker point out (2000, 5), much of the feminist criticism on gender and
families has attacked the perspectives on gender which bestows certain characteristics on
either sex and placing them inside differentiated spheres since the work division facilitates
46
female subservience to the masculine hegemony by keeping them from effectively earning the
financial status which would offer them independence. The division of labour is central to the
formation of families and gender, Allen and Walker (ibid.) state:
Work, both paid and unpaid, is at the center of gender, because the development
of equality between women and men is stalled by the misalliance between wage
labour and family life.
Virginia Woolf speaks in several of her essays (e.g. “Professions for Women” 1931,
“Women and Fiction” 1929 and “A Room of One’s Own” 1929) about the dilemma of certain
obscurity in the lives of women, which can be said to be caused by the fact that women have
been so thoroughly restricted in the private sphere and to invisible household tasks. There is
an anonymity to women’s lives which is the result of the functionalist family ideology of
familial gender roles:
Often nothing tangible remains of a woman’s day. The food that has been
cooked is eaten; the children have been nursed or have gone out into the world.
Where does the accent fall? What is the salient point […] to seize upon? It is
difficult to say. Her life has an anonymous character which is baffling and
puzzling in the extreme. (Woolf, 1979, 49-50)
There is an obscurity which surrounds the very identity of women and a shroud of uncertainty
about their lives outside the feminine role of loving and nurturing mother and a wife.
The character of Virginia Woolf5 – or Mrs. Woolf as she is called in The Hours – is not
however, fulfilling the traditional role of a mute homemaker reserved for women, any more
than the real Virginia Woolf. Her day begins and ends in the work of writing her novel Mrs.
Dalloway as much as her poorly executed tasks of a mistress of the household revolve around
her ability to write. Uncompromisingly she stays in her room to write – echoing Mrs. Brown
who stays in bed to read the book – and neglects the filling of the duties of a competent
housewife on the account of finally being able to write, to work. She avoids giving orders to
the servants, which is something instrumental to the role of the housewife in an upper middle
5
For the sake of clarity, I will refer to the fictitious character of Virginia Woolf as Virginia, and to the real life
Virginia Woolf with the use of the whole name or only the last name.
47
class household in Britain in 1923, in stead she fetches herself a cup of coffee and returns to
her work:
Virginia pours herself a cup of coffee in the dining room, walks quietly
downstairs, but does not go to Nelly in the kitchen. This morning, she wants to
get straight to work without risking exposure to Nelly’s bargainings and
grievances. It could be a good day; it needs to be treated carefully (TH, 31).
In her essay “A Room of One’s Own”, Virginia Woolf famously said:
[…] a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction;
and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman
and the true nature of fiction unsolved. (2001, 2414).
The “true nature of woman” as the malleable and selfless creature ever ready to sacrifice
herself for the good of her family having kept women away from the work force, had also
contributed in her economic dependence on a man, whether it be a husband or a father – in a
word, her poverty. Woolf (2001, 2425) continues by stating that the poverty of women was
facilitated by the fact that it was near impossible for women to earn money and even if they
had been earning money they would not have been allowed to retain it as it was illegal for a
woman to possess money she earned. Therefore, according to Woolf, past generations of
women would have found it extremely difficult to write and thus create a more visible history
for feminine achievement.
Monique Wittig picks up on the labour division and builds a theory which is based on the
criticism of the inequality brought upon by the traditional, heterosexual family model. Where
Adrienne Rich (1981, 5) describes what she calls compulsory heterosexuality as an institution,
Wittig (1992, xiii) emphatically argues that instead of an institution, heterosexuality is a
“political regime” which is constituted on the unequal power balance between the two sexes.
According to Wittig (1992, 2), the two sexes should be seen as sites of class struggle, where
women are kept in a subservient position in relation to their male masters on the account of
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naturalized heterosexual gender, work and ultimately family roles. The woman must remain
poor and dependent for the sustenance of the society as a whole.
Despite of the difficulties facing a woman who intended to work, the real life Virginia
Woolf was able to work, to write, and to earn money with her own writing, and so the
character of Virginia is found in the middle of the process of writing Mrs. Dalloway.
Virginia’s need to work and her ability to work override all her responsibilities as a wife and a
proper matron; unlike Mrs. Brown she is able to fulfil her desire to express herself, to attain
“the most profound satisfaction she knows” (TH, 35). Her work at writing is what makes her
herself, or rather, a better version of herself and at best she reaches that which Mrs. Brown is
aspiring to with her cake baking, a touch of brilliance:
She can feel it inside her, an all but indescribable second self, or rather a parallel,
purer self. If she were religious, she would call it the soul. It is more than the
sum of her intellect and her emotions, more than the sum of her experiences,
though it runs like veins of brilliant metal through all three. (TH, 34-35).
Virginia’s day follows the rhythm of her capacity to write and she identifies herself mainly
through her writing, not household tasks. However, Virginia is not working class, nor does
she work solely to earn money. In “A Room of One’s Own” (2001, 2414), Woolf names the
possession of a quiet, peaceful space and money as vital preconditions for a woman’s writing
career, which actually makes for an interesting paradox; a female writer does not work for
money, but actually needs money to work. No matter how fulfilling personally, work itself
does not guarantee self-sufficiency for a female writer. In her lecture and essay “Professions
for Women” Woolf declares that “it is true I am employed; but what professional experiences
have I had? It is difficult to say” (1979, 57).
Meanwhile, the character of Virginia is juxtaposed with another working woman, her
housekeeper Nelly, an epitome of working class competence sprung from the solid
understanding of how a household should be properly run. Unlike Virginia, who has to force
49
herself into the character of a dutiful housewife in order to either command her servants or
communicate with them, Nelly is stable, always the same, without pretence:
Nelly is herself, always herself; always large and red, regal, indignant, as if she’d
spent her life in an age of glory and decorum that ended, forever, some ten
minutes before you entered the room. Virginia marvels at her. (TH, 84).
Their relationship is that of a reluctant mistress and a servant, who knows how things should
be done and despises Virginia for not managing her duties:
If Virginia had performed properly and appeared in the kitchen that morning to
order lunch, the pudding could be almost anything. […] But instead she skulked
straightaway to her study, fearful that her day’s writing (that fragile impulse, that
egg balanced on a spoon) might dissolve before one of Nelly’s moods. Nelly
knows this, of course she knows, and in offering pears she reminds Virginia that
she, Nelly, is powerful; that she knows secrets […] (TH, 85).
Where Mrs. Brown is struggling to carry out her role as a housewife in California, Virginia
is doing the same in Richmond. Mrs. Brown is able to reach a real sense of fulfilment by
reading and Mrs. Woolf by writing, but each have their feminine duties to carry out all the
same. Each of these characters also have the element of performance in their daily lives, each
failing somehow to keep the performances flawless. Laura’s performance falls apart in front
of her child, Richie, and Virginia’s in front of Nelly; faced with her disapproval, Virginia’s
housewife façade crumbles:
Virginia walks through the door. She feels fully in command of the character
who is Virginia Woolf, and as that character she removes her cloak, hangs it up,
and goes downstairs to the kitchen to speak to Nelly about lunch. […]
“Is that pie for lunch?”
“Yes, ma’am. I thought a lamb pie, there’s that lamb left over, and you was so
hard at work this morning we didn’t speak.”
“A lamb pie sounds lovely,” Virginia says, though she must work to stay in
character. (TH, 84-85).
Virginia is not able to carry out the feminine task of managing the servants and the
household in which she is contrasted with her mother and sister, Vanessa, who are both
excellent at organising the servants’ tasks and performing their wifely duties.
50
Why is it so difficult dealing with servants? Virginia’s mother managed
beautifully. Vanessa manages beautifully. Why is it so difficult to be firm and
kind with Nelly; to command her respect and her love? (TH, 87)
Virginia is aware of her trespass on her role as a manager of servants and the household, but
she chooses to retire in her study in stead of working out the meals of the day with Nelly.
They are both well aware of the trespass and therefore both have to struggle to maintain the
façade of the proper servant-mistress relationship. Unlike her mother and Vanessa, Virginia
allows her work to override the fulfilment of the female role and is stepping out of line with
behaviour which is incongruous with the demands of that role. Yet from her mother and
Vanessa, Virginia knows how she should behave:
Virginia knows just how she should enter the kitchen, how her shoulders should
be set, how her voice should be motherly but not familiar, something like that of
a governess speaking to a beloved child. Oh, let’s have something more than
pears, Nelly, Mr. Woolf is in a mood today and I’m afraid pears won’t do nearly
enough to sweeten his disposition. It should be so simple. (TH, 87)
In her essay “Professions for Women” (1979), Virginia Woolf discusses the idea of an
angel in the house which she derived from a “famous poem6” (1979, 58). She states that in
order to write, she had to fight and finally kill the ghost of the angel, because she was
constantly coming between herself and her work. By the angel Woolf not only refers to a
personal demon, but to the concept of the ideal woman who is capable and well-adjusted to
the role of the perfect, self-sacrificing wife and mother whose only competence is in the
maintaining of the household and minding the people in it.
I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was
immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts
of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg;
if there was a draught she sat in it – in short she was so constituted that she never
had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the
minds and wishes of others. (1979, 59)
Woolf assigns her nemesis, the angel in the house, and the appearance of the ideal woman
to “the last days of Queen Victoria” (1979, 59). Ann Oakley states that the extreme gender
6
Woolf refers to a poem by Coventry Patmore entitled ”Angel in the House”, first published in 1854, it gained
popularity as it dictated the virtues of the perfect Victorian wife.
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differentiation of a Victorian family has its repercussions even in the modern family, as the
“contemporary family ideals” are based on it (1982, 126). Likewise, features of the Victorian
family can be detected in the family of the fictitious Virginia in The Hours, despite the fact
that the story is set in 1923 – not in the Victorian era. Even though Virginia is working and
her work is appreciated by her husband Leonard - “He is still, at times, astonished by her. She
may be the most intelligent woman in England, he thinks. Her books may be read for
centuries. He believes this more ardently than does anyone else” (TH, 33) – she is still
expected to carry out the duties of the angel in the house; to have servants and employees and
manage the household flawlessly.
According to Neil Smelser (1982, 59) the origin of the Victorian family ideology was
established between 1830 and 1870 when the British pride of its institutions was at its height.
The Victorian family with its careful separation of gender roles, its strict formality and its
incessant strive for sexual purity was one of the institutions that were revered in the British
society (ibid.). No matter how stifling, the ideals of the Victorian family still linger in the
modern family values – as Smelser points out like Oakley – the Victorian family still “persists
as a kind of ghostly model” for the modern family (ibid.).
Even though working class women have always been a part of the work force, Smelser
(1982, 62) notes that women were completely shut outside the workforce in Victorian
aristocratic and middle class families, hence men were in charge of all productive work in the
families. The division of gender roles in the families was further emphasized by the support of
the legal system which “systematically disabled women in the eye of the law, and by an
ideology that consigned women to the home and endowed them with the soft domestic
virtues” (ibid.) – no doubt those of the angel in the house. Women’s place was the home, the
private sphere, where they were responsible for management of the household and its upkeep,
either directly or by commanding the servants (Smelser, 1982, 64).
52
The management of the household, conversing with her servant Nelly, proves difficult for
Virginia who is still carrying the weight of her Victorian upbringing. She is reflected in the
image of her sister Vanessa “who manages beautifully” (TH, 87), knows just what to say and
the correct intonations to urge the servants in the right direction. With her mastery of the
household chores and easy demeanour with the help, Vanessa is from the first established as
the quintessential Angel in the House.
Yes, Virginia thinks, that’s it, just that tone of stern, rueful charity – that is how
one speaks to servants, and to sisters. There’s an art to it, as there’s an art to
everything, and much of what Vanessa has to teach is contained in these
seemingly effortless gestures. (TH, 115)
However, there is something in the description of her, which perhaps seems to slightly
contradict and surpass the ideal of the angelic woman in a family.
Vanessa is more like a figure sculpted in rosy marble by a skilled but minor artist
of the late Baroque. She is a distinctly earthly and even decorative figure, all
billows and scrolls, her face and body rendered in an affectionate, slightly
sentimentalized attempt to depict a state of human abundance so lavish it edges
over into the ethereal. (TH, 114-115)
She is a lavish, abundant figure, almost overflowing in her unearthly perfection. But she is
also powerful; with a few carefully selected words she is able to create and restore a world of
her own, which is brimming with the same abundance that defines her. When she arrives too
early to have tea with Virginia, Vanessa simply states that “Nelly must bear it” (TH, 115)
meaning the sudden change of the schedule:
One arrives too early or late, claiming that it could not be helped. One offers
one’s hand with motherly assurance. One says, Nelly must bear it, and by so
doing forgives servant and mistress alike. (TH, 115-116)
She masters the art of perfect femininity, but at the same time she seems to rise above it, to
a more powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing and all-fixing entity which cannot be returned to a
meek and quiet angelic figure ready to fade back to the wallpaper as soon as she is not needed
anymore. To some extent, Vanessa even holds the matters of life and death in her hand, in
53
explaining the death of bird to her children so that “the circle of love and forbearance could
not be broken; that all were safe” (TH, 74). The world stays in tact; it is not harmed by the
death of a bird, because Vanessa always remains in charge of it, controlling it with her
wisdom and understanding.
“We can make it comfortable,” Vanessa says. “But this is the bird’s time to die,
we can’t change that.”
Just so, the seamstress cuts the thread. This much, children, no less but no more.
(TH, 116-117)
Even though the gender roles are strictly divided in Virginia’s family, it is not a “typical”
heterosexual family, but in fact consists of Vanessa and her children; Nelly; Ralph and
Marjorie who work at the press adjacent to the house, besides Leonard and Virginia. In their
introduction to their book Families as Relationships (2000), Robert M. Milardo and Steve
Duck state that even though the traditional idea of western family consists of two parents of
different sexes and a number of children who share the same household, the reality of the
matter is quite different with only a small percentage of American families constructed in this
manner in 1998 (2000, xi). Smelser points out (1982, 60), that there was major variation even
in the Victorian families, the most significant modifier being the class distinction, the ideal
Victorian family being a middle- or upper-middle-class one.
Even though it can be said that Virginia’s family is still somewhat Victorian, the family
roles are not fixed inside it. There is a clear sense of shifting family roles and the relationships
between the members are in no means stable and unchanging – especially in relation to
Virginia herself. Virginia is in several places depicted as being like a child to Vanessa, Nelly
and her husband Leonard:
[…] Vanessa takes Virginia’s hand in much the same way she would take the
hand of one of her children. (TH, 115)
[Nelly’s] tender, practiced movement reminds Virginia of changing a baby’s
nappies and briefly she feels like a girl witnessing, in awe and fury, the
impenetrable competence of a mother (TH, 86)
54
[Leonard’s] expression fades almost immediately and is replaced by the milder,
kinder face of the husband who has nursed her through her worst periods, who
does not demand what she can’t provide and who urges on her, sometimes
successfully, a glass of milk every morning at eleven. (TH, 32)
Yet, she is also depicted as a sister, mistress and wife to each respectively; the balance of
power shifts with the changing of roles leaving the family roles somewhat indefinable.
The childless Virginia is also depicted as being in a position to act as a mother to
Leonard’s employees Marjorie and especially, Ralph. However, she declines it and will not
side with him over the authority of her husband after Ralph has been given a scolding:
She knows these young people are often criticised unfairly but she will not side
with them against him. She will not be the mother who intervenes, much as they
beg her to with their eager smiles and wounded eyes. […] Leonard may be
autocratic, he may be unfair, but he is her companion and caretaker, and she will
not betray him, certainly not for handsome, callow Ralph, or Marjorie, with her
parakeet’s voice. (TH, 72-73)
Virginia’s loyalty rests with her husband who is her support and companion; it is for him that
Virginia makes the effort to attain some of her sister’s angelic, almost divine nature, in
lightening the mood and restoring a peaceful balance in the room:
[…] in much the same way her mother might have made light of a servant’s
blunder during dinner, declaring for the sake of her husband and all others
present that the shattered tureen portended nothing; that the circle of love and
forbearance could not be broken; that all were safe. (TH, 74)
4.2. “Oh, If Men Were the Brutes and Women the Angels”
The Victorian era is perhaps most distinguished by its attitudes towards sexuality and
gendered bodies. Smelser (1982, 65) states that the term “Victorian” is saturated with the
connotations of coolness and repression, however, the Victorian family became the site where
sexuality was legitimized, not in the least for reproductivity. Jonathan Ned Katz (1995, 44)
uses the term “true love” to describe the conditions of the Victorian family formation; true
love – the love between a heterosexual couple – spiritual in its quality, justified the “marriage,
55
reproduction, and an otherwise unhallowed sensuality”, in other words the formation of
family in an era of otherwise asexual ideal.
The idea of the angel in the house established in the Victorian era included the demand for
sexual purity – of course, specifically for women. As Katz points out, in the era of the angel
in the house, “a woman’s lack of erotic response had proved her purity” (1995, 68). Remnants
of the Victorian reserve can be detected in the character of Virginia Woolf as she has no
bodily existence or experience outside the headaches induced by her illness. She shares two
kisses with a woman, but that woman is her sister and for her, “writing is the most profound
satisfaction she knows” (TH, 35). Only in the scene which depicts her dying, Virginia’s body
dissolves and merges with the surrounding nature (TH, 8).
In “Professions for Women” (1931/1979) Woolf wrote that the demand of angelic purity
for female writers was stopping her from really exploring her own thoughts and bodily
experience:
Her imagination had rushed away. It had sought the pools, the depths, the dark
places where the largest fish slumber. And then there was a smash. […] She was
indeed in a state of the most acute and difficult distress. To speak without figure
she had thought of something, something about the body, about the passions
which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say (1979, 61).
There were certain topics which were regarded as unsuitable for a female writer. Even the
mind was to be kept away from impure things.
For Woolf however, the best writer was androgynous. In “A Room of One’s Own” Woolf
sketches an outline for a theory of an androgynous mind; for her, in each brain there existed a
feminine and a masculine half which should work in unison to form the ideal circumstances
for creativity, “complete satisfaction and happiness” (2001, 2466). She continues by
expanding the ideal of androgyneity to absorb feminine and masculine genders:
And I went on to amateurishly sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two
powers preside, one male, one female; and in the man’s brain, the man
predominates over the woman, and in the woman’s brain, the woman
predominates over the man. The normal and comfortable state of being is that
56
when the two live in harmony together, spiritually cooperating. If one is a man,
still the woman part of the brain must have effect; and a woman also must have
intercourse with the man in her. (Woolf, 2001, 2466).
Through the idea of an androgynous mind the pitfalls of correct feminine behaviour can be
avoided and the female writer released to search all topics that come to mind without having
the censoring angel looming behind one’s shoulder.
The gender divisions of the repressed Victorian era or the post World War II nuclear
family era are not fully realized in the Woolf household of The Hours. Virginia after all, does
get to work and her work is very much appreciated by her husband Leonard. In fact, it seems
that like Dan Brown in the “Mrs. Brown” -sections of the book, Leonard is somehow
effeminized in his ignorance of her wife’s condition, the realities on which his life is built
upon. He is not fully in control of the household like a proper Victorian head of the family
would be, in that he is completely unaware that Virginia is pretending to be healthy in front of
him in the purpose of getting to leave the country house.
Despite the fact that Virginia’s behaviour towards Leonard can be in places seen as that of
the proper wife in the properly wifely role – for example with the attempt to reassure him that
the family is still intact, “the circle of forbearance is unbroken” (TH, 74) – Leonard does as
much come across as a companion and a confidant; for him, nothing is important enough to
interfere with Virginia’s work; “he does not, will not, interfere with her work” (TH, 33). But
Leonard is also her caretaker and nurturer (TH, 32), again taking on a traditionally feminine
role. Virginia herself is aware of Leonard’s fragility in his ignorance and eagerness to nurture
his sick wife; “She thinks suddenly of how frail men are; how full of terror” (TH, 171).
Marilyn Charles (2004, 310) states that the idea of marriage representing death is strongly
present in Woolf’s writing. The Hours is full of references to something akin to this with Mrs.
Brown longing back to her old self as Laura Zielski and even with the brief mention of
Virginia seen as Virginia Stephen through her husband’s eyes (TH, 33); there is certainly a
57
sense of a part of the characters’ lives disappearing with marriage. The same is reflected in
Virginia’s musings of her heroine Mrs. Dalloway:
[…] Clarissa will believe that a rich, riotous future is opening before her, but
eventually (how, exactly, will the change be accomplished?) she will come to
her senses, as young women do, and marry a suitable man (TH, 82).
Marriage and death are juxtaposed in the character of Mrs. Dalloway as Virginia is plotting
out her life in her mind deciding that she will commit suicide:
Yes, she will come to her senses, and marry.
She will die in middle age. She will kill herself, probably, over some trifle (how
can it be made convincing, tragic instead of comic?) (TH, 82).
Like marriage, the concepts of living and dying are attached to the opposition between
London and the countryside and furthermore they are intertwined with health and illness.
Virginia has been taken to the peaceful Richmond so as not to be over-exited by the
exuberance of London, but her thoughts are turned towards the possibility of being allowed to
return to the city, to its vibrancy and vitality:
If she can remain strong and clear, if she can keep on weighing at least nine and
a half stone, Leonard will be persuaded to move back to London. The rest cure,
these years among the delphinium beds and the red suburban villas, will be
pronounced a success, and she will be deemed fit for the city again (TH, 34).
Meanwhile, Virginia “despises Richmond” although, in its boredom, she is relieved of her
“headaches and voices, the fits of rage” (TH, 83). Once more reflecting the issue of self
location, Virginia wants to return to London where she feels mostly herself, even if consumed
with illness; London is ultimately the place where she can truly find herself, where she can
reassume the identity she is struggling to maintain and where she can be truly creative and
write.
London represents life for Virginia, but it also represents the looming illness, the dangers
of plunging back into its recesses. Charles notes how this speaks of the relationship between
the two spouses, Virginia and Leonard; Leonard only wants his wife to remain healthy, but is
at the same time slowly killing her will to live, “the price of being kept alive” (2004, 310) is
58
that of losing the illness, the headaches, which Virginia suspects to be necessary for her
ability to work, to create (TH, 71). As Charles (2004, 310) states Leonard does not understand
that Virginia experiences London as the last vestiges of life, for him, London becomes a
staple of Virginia’s madness and emphasises his fears of losing her. Richmond, then again,
represents Virginia’s safety from her madness. Nonetheless, what Leonard does not realize, is
that “for Virginia, London represents life; Richmond represents a living death” (ibid.).
Despite her attempts to normally pretend to act more healthily than she really feels in front
of Leonard (TH, 71), she finally tries to escape to London on the evening train, to spend a few
hours wandering the streets there, as easily as Nelly might have gone to run her errands (TH,
167). She does not however, manage to fulfil her plan, she has to wait for the train and the
worried Leonard, who has left the house in his slippers, catches up with her (TH; 170). His
fear and worry again deconstruct the image of him as a patriarchal, Victorian head of the
household and reveal his dependency on Virginia’s health:
Although he has come after her like a constable or proctor, a figure of
remonstrance, she is impressed by how small he seems, in slippers on Kew
Road; how middle aged and ordinary. She sees him, briefly, as a stranger might
see him: merely another of the many men who walk on the streets. She is sad for
him and strangely moved (TH, 170).
Virginia’s marriage is then full of contradictions which cannot be flawlessly reconciled to
the statement ‘marriage equals death’; in fact, in a paradoxical way, Leonard is the one who
keeps her alive, albeit not living the life she yearns for. As Charles states: “Leonard seems to
have been given the somewhat thankless task of trying to keep her alive and in reasonable
equilibrium, in spite of herself” (2004, 313). Leonard and Virginia both must attempt to
maintain their respective familial roles of husband and wife under the pressures of illness and
creativity and they both trespass the boundaries of those roles; Virginia with her writing and
Leonard with his nurturing of his wife, which actually leaves her experiencing something like
59
the echo of the feminine isolation Mrs. Brown is struggling with. She is stranded in the
lifeless suburb, healthy, but without the stimulation which makes life liveable:
[…] he’s entirely right and horribly wrong at the same time. She is better, she is
safer, if she rests in Richmond; if he does not speak too much, write too much,
feel too much; if she does not travel impetuously to London and walk through
its streets; and yet she is dying this way, she is gently dying on a bed of roses
(TH, 169).
Virginia and Laura’s days are similar also because they each kiss a woman, however, as
Laura kisses her neighbour, Virginia kisses Vanessa. The difference is in the quality of the
kiss; for Laura, the kiss represents something of a turning point, a new possibility of a
different kind of life, for Virginia, the kisses she shares with Vanessa are either sisterly and
chaste or forbidden and reckless. For Virginia, kissing her sister is a somewhat mundane and
ordinary thing to do, even though it can be said that their relationship – like Laura and
Richie’s – contains certain sexual elements:
One moment there are two young sisters cleaving to each other, breast against
breast, lips ready, and then the next moment, it seems, there are two middleaged married women standing together on a modest bit of lawn before a body of
children (TH, 116).
The slight sexual tension between the sisters is detectable particularly in the second kiss
they share in the kitchen while having tea:
Nelly turns away and, although it is not at all their custom, Virginia leans
forward and kisses Vanessa on the mouth. It is an innocent kiss, innocent
enough, but just now, in this kitchen, behind Nelly’s back, it feels like the most
delicious and forbidden of pleasures. Vanessa returns the kiss (TH, 154).
The kiss is also juxtaposed with Virginia’s desire to return to London and the busy, vibrant
atmosphere of its streets, “What a lark! What a plunge!” (TH, 167). Mischievous in quality,
and full of the pulsating excitement comparable with that experienced of the city, the kiss
represents the life she cannot reach and which she can only reinvent for her character of Mrs.
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Dalloway with her trip to buy flowers through the familiar throng of the city which feels like
a village in its familiarity.
Vanessa and Virginia are each other’s opposites in many ways: Vanessa is the perfect
Victorian angel in the house with her luxurious appearance as if she were “a figure sculpted in
rosy marble” (TH, 114) while Virginia is dowdy in her “disheveled housedress, the lank
disorder of her hair” (ibid.). She reflects and emphasizes Virginia’s unkempt look, but also
offers a glimpse to the alternative of a life as an almighty angel in the house, a domestic
goddess which is something Virginia cannot hope to achieve: “Vanessa will be her mirror,
just as she’s always been” (ibid.). Woolf herself described women as mirrors for men
“reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size” (2001, 2432), without whom the grand
actions of history would have gone without anyone to carry them out, since, according to
Woolf (ibid.), grandeur demands inferiority. Similarly Virginia reflects Vanessa as even a
more sumptuous figure.
Rich’s (1981, 23) concept of lesbian continuum can be applied when it comes to the
women in Virginia’s life as well as Laura’s. Vanessa wanders in her sister’s garden like an
ancient goddess “sculpted in rosy marble” (TH, 114), able to create and recreate the world
over and over again to her children and everyone surrounding her, so that it will always
remain whole and unbroken, safe from harm. However, Vanessa is not the only female
character who takes on features of the mythological; Nelly the indignant servant is seen
through Virginia’s eyes as the overthrown Amazon, a female warrior, who has been reduced
to servicing an undeserving mistress:
So the subjugated Amazon stands on the riverbank wrapped in the fur of animals
she killed and skinned; so she drops a pear before the queen’s gold slippers and
says, “Here is what I’ve brought. Unless you’d like something fancier.” (TH,
85).
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Mythical female characters form a continuum which is evocative of female history and
connectedness, even Virginia herself is referred to as “queen” (ibid.).
Nonetheless, compared with the two strong female characters, Nelly and Vanessa, Virginia
herself seems to be somewhat lacking. She lacks the certainty of the world that Nelly and
Vanessa share, as well as their capability to form and produce the world, to assure its unity.
Virginia’s talent and skill rests in her ability to create literature, to write; where Vanessa can
make the world unbreakable by uttering the right words to the right people, Virginia can only
find the right words in her novel to create fictitious worlds. Furthermore, through her writing,
Virginia can create the flawless woman in Mrs. Dalloway and through her experience the life
she has not been able to do in her own life:
Clarissa will have had a love: a woman. Or a girl, rather, yes, a girl she knew
during her own girlhood; one of those passions that flare up when one is young
– when love and ideas seem truly to be one’s personal discovery, never before
apprehended in quite this way […] (TH, 81).
Mrs. Dalloway is given the experience of loving a girl who is “brash and captivating” (TH,
82), against which her sensible marriage with a man seems dull and drained of colour (ibid.).
Vanessa’s daughter, Angelica, can also be studied as a link on the lesbian continuum. At
the age of five she has the decorum and energy to perform the traditionally feminine tasks at
the funeral set up for a dead bird:
Angelica is clearly the most enthusiastic member of the funeral party, the one
whose tastes in decoration and decorum must be respected. Angelica is
somehow the widow here (TH, 118).
She arranges the flowers and the deathbed for the bird and decides on the ceremony. Smelser
(1982, 64) notes that in the Victorian middle-class family where the men were allowed to
work while the women stayed at home, the women were also in charge of the “statusexpressing activities” one of which might have been the arrangements for weddings and
funerals alike. Angelica then, can be seen as imitating the behaviour of other women in her
vicinity, traditional womanhood.
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Angelica does however seem to combine something of the behaviour of both her mother
and her aunt:
“Yes,” Angelica says. Already, at five, she can feign grave enthusiasm for the
task at hand, when all she truly wants is for everyone to admire her work and
then set her free (TH, 120).
As the proper little woman she cannot show her boredom at the mundane task of bringing a
ritual to conclusion, but at the same time, she wants people to admire her creative
achievement in constructing the deathbed. As Virginia is often placed in a childlike position
in relation to the people closest to her, she is also, at times, on the same level with Angelica,
not only in creativity, but in immaturity: “You would, she thinks, argue with a five-year-old
girl about such things” (TH, 119). Nonetheless, the two are connected in the process of
preparing the deathbed for the bird, as women carrying on a feminine tradition:
Virginia leans toward Angelica as if they shared a secret. Some force flows
between them, a complicity that is neither maternal nor erotic but contains
elements of both. There is an understanding here. There is some sort of
understanding too large for language (TH, 120).
Like Angelica, Virginia herself is caught between performing her housewifely duties and
her writing, neither one being very effortless in completion. Similarly, for Laura Brown,
managing the household is a performance which she is having trouble executing and writing
is full of the obstacles set by her illness. Having to perform a capable mistress in front of the
servants and pretend to be healthy in front of Leonard makes Virginia’s personality seem
somewhat blurred and certainly unfixed. Reflecting Laura Brown, she has the experience of
morphing together with Mrs. Dalloway looking at life and London though her eyes for a
moment when she is thinking about leaving Richmond:
What a lark! What a plunge! It seems that she can survive, she can prosper, if
she has London around her; if she disappear for a while into the enormity of it,
brash and brazen now under a sky empty of threat, all the uncurtained windows
(here a woman’s grave profile, there the crown of a carved chair), the traffic,
men and women going lightly by in evening clothes; the smells of wax and
petrol, or perfume, as someone, somewhere (on one of these broad avenues, in
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one of these white, porticoed houses), plays a piano; as horns bleat and dogs
bay, as the whole raucous carnival turns and turns […] (TH, 168) 7.
Akin to Laura Brown, Virginia is constantly on the edge of losing the sense of self
altogether, having to convince herself that she is truly herself, that the illness is not taking
hold:
It’s alright. It’s alright. The walls of the room do not waver; nothing murmurs
from within the plaster. She is herself, standing here, with a husband at home,
with servants and rugs and pillows and lamps. She is herself (TH, 164).
The boundaries of self and femininity are constantly ruptured by the fluctuating sense of self
brought on by Virginia’s illness, but also her need to return to London which for her means
life but also the vicinity of madness. Just as Laura, Virginia is struggling to manage the
household like she properly should, but unlike Laura, her biggest battle is that against losing
her ability to write and live, to manage her illness and ultimately – as the readers are told in
the very first chapter of the book – against time. Only in death she can achieve her freedom:
She appears to be flying, a fantastic figure, arms outstretched, hair streaming,
the tail of the fur coat billowing behind. She floats, heavily, through shafts of
brown, granular light (TH, 7).
The ideology of the Victorian family and a woman’s place in it reverberates through to
modern family, as can be seen in Virginia’s family setting from the 1920’s. She is still
struggling with the right to work and especially to write while facing the pressures to
conform, to yield her artistic talent in order to follow in the footsteps of the ideal woman
while creating her home into a haven for her husband. Virginia, however, only manages to
locate herself in writing where she can freely express herself, even venturing into the more
daring topics of sexuality and bodily experience – issues completely denied of the fine
Victorian lady. In the attempt to receive permission to leave the quiet, if safe, countryside and
return to the vibrancy of London, Virginia does end up hiding the full measure of her illness,
7
”What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her when, with a little squeak of the hinges,
which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air.”
Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway, 1925.
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for Virginia, the city becomes an epitome of life, which even under the threat of full blown
insanity is a better option than forgetting how to live. Like Laura Brown in Los Angeles,
Virginia too is imprisoned in the seclusion of a suburban setting; meanwhile the third main
protagonist Clarissa Vaughan has managed to build her life in the city and find a certain
amount of liberty there, but is nonetheless battling with the legacy of traditional femininity.
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5. Clarissa Vaughan/ Dalloway
5.1. Freedom of Choice – Gay Family
Despite the differences in the family forms, the nuclear family has persisted through history
as the most dominant ideal of the ultimate happy family. Reaching its pinnacle in the 1950’s,
the nuclear family has been idolized and idealized as the most productive family form in
terms of mentally and physically healthy children, satisfied husbands and fulfilled wives.
However, as Desmond F. McCarthy (1997, 1) notes, since the 1950s there has been a decline
in the actual number of nuclear families in the United States, so much so that it can be said to
be in a kind of “crisis”. Yet, as McCarthy states, the monolithic family ideal persists even
among those who have been raised in different kinds of families and all the “deviations from
or alternatives to this household arrangement are somewhat unfortunate, unhealthy, or even
unnatural” (ibid.).
The idea of family itself represents safety, love, support and responsibility and the ideal of
the nuclear family contains many assumptions of the roles and functions of its members,
including the place of women, regulation of sexuality in the society, and different methods of
child-rearing (McCarthy, 1997, 2). Therefore, Tom Scanlan’s (1978, 4) view that the
American family has been isolated seems inconsistent and romanticized. It seems that the
American family has not stood alone against the “institutions and hierarchies” (ibid.) of the
society, but has rather been instrumental to them and, certainly, permeated by their influence.
McCarthy (1997, 11-12) points out that the boundaries of the American family have not only
been permeated by social control, but the family ideology has been used in politics –
especially Republican – as the steeple of American culture. This despite the fact that the
nuclear ideal has never in actuality been the only form of family – not even the dominant one.
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On the surface Clarissa Vaughan’s family in The Hours seems most non-traditional of the
other families depicted in the book. She lives in an openly lesbian relationship with her
partner Sally; has a daughter, Julia, conceived by artificial insemination, and dedicates large
amounts of time in caring after her ex-lover and friend Richard who is dying of AIDS. Her
family is not, however, as controversial as it might look at first glance and Clarissa is placed
in a situation where she comes at odds with her daughter’s friend Mary Krull who is a radical
lesbian. Clarissa’s choices do not seem to challenge the ideal of the nuclear family, she has
merely changed the nuances of it and Mary Krull resents her for it:
Anything’s better than queers of the old school, dressed to pass, bourgeois to the
bone, living like husband and wife. Better to be a frank and open asshole, better
to be John fucking Wayne, than a well-dressed dyke with a respectable job (TH,
160).
Compared with radical gay and lesbian views, Clarissa has compromised and succumbed
to the pressures of the heterosexual society to conform. Her relationship with Sally has lasted
for eighteen years, it seems to be steady and reliable, after all, “they are a couple who never
fight” (TH, 135). Michael Warner (2000, 41) criticises the idea of gay marriage as an attempt
to normalize homosexuality while retaining the stigma of shame in the sexuality itself. After
the 1980’s AIDS scare, the gay movement woke up to insist on their normalcy and to demand
the same rights to marry as heterosexual couples (Warner, 2000, 61) which from a legal
perspective – in terms of inheritance, tax rates, etc. – would have provided them the longed
for equality in the society. However, Warner (2000, 28) states that with the conformity to the
heterosexual standard of marriage, homosexual couples have invited the social sexual control
into their homes conforming with that as well and thus working to illegitimate the sexuality
and sexual practices outside of marriage (Warner, 2000, 96).
Clarissa’s relationship can be said to teeter on the verge of conformity of heterosexual
pressures, perhaps rather than posing a threat to it or a promise of change. On the other hand,
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its “normality” can be seen as subversive towards the naturalized heterosexual family ideal; a
steady partnership and motherhood can be reached in a balanced home between a lesbian
couple as well as a heterosexual one. Meanwhile, she struggles with partially the same
impulses to discard everything as Laura Brown “[s]he could simply leave it and return to her
other home, […] where there is only the essence of Clarissa, a girl grown into a woman, still
full of hope, still capable of anything” (TH, 92). Despite of what she has accomplished, living
the life others have only longed for, in a lesbian partnership with a child and a fulfilling career
as a book editor, she is still, nonetheless, “only a wife” (TH, 94).
Even though Clarissa’s family life seems rather unproblematic, she has achieved the life
both Laura Brown and Virginia Woolf only wish for and strive for, with her sexuality, work
life and family life perfectly reconciled, she still finds herself in a position where she is
referred to and she calls herself “only a wife” (TH, 94) of the enigmatic and interesting Sally.
The lesbian co-existence does not seem to be liberating for Clarissa, not at least in terms of
the ever persistent demand for housewifery and the domesticated femininity. Christopher
Carrington (1999, 9-10) notes that according his study the equality expectancy between
“lesbigay” couples is actually as much a fallacy as it might be between their heterosexual
counterparts. According to Carrington (ibid.), the gender expectations persist even in lesbigay
families while each partner adopts “masculine” and “feminine” roles. Inequality is created
when it is more often than not the partner who earns less in his/her job who takes on the
“feminine” task of the caring, cleaning and household maintenance (Carrington, 1999, 11;
188). This does not prove pathology of lesbigay families, but rather, underlines their
ordinariness (Carrington, 1999, 11).
The appreciation of house work in lesbigay families is not any greater than it is in
heterosexual families either and it often remains invisible and undervalued (Carrington, 1999,
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9). Also, it lays a strain on the gender identities of the lesbigays who nonetheless often feel
the need to conform to the heterosexual standards:
Gay or bisexual men who do domestic things, and lesbian or bisexual women
who do not must carefully manage such information in order to avoid the stigma
associated with violating widely held expectations about domesticity and its
assumed links to gender (Carrington, 1999, 9).
The assumption that caring, nurturing and domesticity are feminine characteristics forces
lesbigay people to yet another closet, this time in that of concealed domesticity since, as
Carrington (1999, 17) points out, it turns those men who do more caring work and those
women who do less of it, into gender deviants which has to be negotiated with the stigma of
sexual difference. Carrington (1999, 178) goes as far as to claim that domestic work is not
only the creator of inequality in the relationship, but also, the creator of gender. The longer
the couple has been together the more specialized are their roles in terms of housework
division and the time spent on it (Carrington, 1999, 187).
Clarissa is not only placed in the position of family caretaker, the wife, but by virtue of
being the sole biological parent of their daughter Julia, she is also established in the role of the
mother. Her relationship with Julia is another point which underlines the normality of her
family. There is resentment, admiration, love and jealousy between the mother and the grown
daughter, nothing out of the ordinary when compared with a heterosexual family:
Julia’s face darkens with contrition and something else – is her old fury
returning? Or is it just ordinary guilt? A silence passes. It seems that some force
of conventionality exerts itself, potent as the gravitational pull. Even if you’ve
been defiant all your life; if you’ve raised a daughter as honorably as you knew
how, in a house of women (the father no more than a numbered vial, sorry, Julia,
no way of finding him) – even with all that, it seems you find yourself standing
one day on a Persian rug, full of motherly disapproval and sour, wounded
feelings, facing a girl who despises you […] (TH, 157).
Yet there is tension of not knowing who the real father is; despite the perhaps implicitly
masculine role of Sally, she does not take the place of the family patriarch and the man of the
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family remains “a numbered vial”, this seems like Rich’s lesbian continuum coming full
circle.
Nonetheless, it is the absence of the test tube father which creates tension and resentment
between Clarissa and Julia: “[…] facing a girl who despises you (she must, mustn’t she?) for
depriving her of a father” (TH, 157). E. Ann Kaplan (1992, 3) points out that the figure of a
mother is omnipresent, but never speaking, who selflessly takes the blame for her children
upbringing and guilt. Like the typical mother Kaplan describes, Clarissa is eager to take the
blame of depriving her daughter of a father while keeping her own anxieties an unspoken part
of her inner monologue. Absent, yet always present and vice versa, the mother in critical
writing has been the spoken of, but silent figure who, when in focus, has been made the
“brunt of attack, a criticism, a complaint, usually in the discourse of a child (male or female)
or in that of and adult (male or female) concerned to attribute all ills to the mother” (Kaplan,
1992, 3). The same remains true for Clarissa; she is a lesbian and a mother, but the cult of
motherhood goes unchallenged and she remains in sisterhood of guilt with Laura Brown.
According to Kaplan (1992, 3), the mother’s place is to be something of an object; her
opinions are not asked and she is the topic of critical discussion only in case there is
something reprehensible in her child-rearing. The mother’s rights are always surpassed by the
rights of the child; she becomes a vessel, a place for holding the foetus and then the haven for
their upbringing, the subjectivity of the mother always undone by the subjectivity of the
foetus, as Kaplan states “in a bitterly ironic exaggeration of the way patriarchal culture has
always positioned the mother” (1992, 14). The ideal, self sacrificing and non-subjective,
angelic mother is often pitted against an evil witchlike opposite (Kaplan, 1992, 9) which
draws from the phallic pathological imagery of fear promoted by the Freudian
psychoanalytical views complete with the threat of being devoured (Kaplan, 1992, 77).
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The terminology of ‘good’ mother versus ‘bad’ mother may not be directly applicable
when it comes to the problems of lesbian mothering, but there is something of the same here.
Both motherhood and lesbianism are loaded with definitions and tradition, history and
responsibilities; in a word, meaning. As Pat Romans explains, both terms are very stereotyped
and “carry deeply influential implications for women” (1992, 98); motherhood is idealized,
not only as the angelic figure in the house, but also as the single most fulfilling and
meaningful experience available to women – especially if they want to achieve the standard of
normalcy in their lives (ibid.). Lesbianism, on the other hand is “stigmatized and ridiculed”,
labelled deviant and associated with a type of sexual behaviour rather than a choice of
lifestyle (ibid.).
Like the idea of the “evil mother”, lesbianism is threatening towards the dominant views of
gender ideology, established motherhood and the family as a whole which, according to
Romans (1992, 99), are the staples of the construct of the society. Romans (ibid.) continues
by stating that as the ideology of family carries so many implications of the woman’s role in it
as a mother and a wife, women who are lesbians and mothers upset many of these ideological
constructions and are therefore found threatening. While there are institutional barriers and
legal regulation such as relegating lesbian headed families as “pretend families” (ibid.),
lesbian mothers themselves often adopt strategies to better simulate the traditional family
forms. Romans (1992, 104) points out that the lesbian mothers are the ones with most
pressure to accommodate the homosexual community as well as to take part in the
heterosexual world.
Based on her own experience as a lesbian mother, Bonnie Mann (2007, 151) explains that
for a lesbian mother who has not had children in a previous heterosexual relationship,
motherhood has to be a choice which is made with “an explicitness and determination that is a
stronger act of choosing than most heterosexual mothers”. The process of finding the suitable
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sperm donor; battling the adoption procedure; handling mountains of paperwork become a
labour of love which requires enormous conviction and dedication to the project of becoming
a mother (Mann, 2007, 151). What is achieved by the process, is according to Mann (ibid.) a
dual existence; on one hand, motherhood links a lesbian into a kind of normalcy which
actually renders her unthreatening to the heterosexual community, on the other hand, she has
to come to a realisation that real normalcy requires no celebration, it is merely and unspoken
fact. While you are welcomed to a somewhat liberal heterosexual community which affirms
their sense of tolerance you are yet left somewhere on the outskirts of the natural order.
According to Mann (2007, 155-157), lesbian motherhood does become the point where the
position of a homosexual in the society is really tested and she points out the differences in
two of the main veins of lesbigay theory: the view adopted by Monique Wittig of a lesbian as
a revolutionary outsider and Judith Butler’s argument that a lesbian is an outsider who is
nonetheless part of the heterosexual structure.
Clarissa and her family seem to embody this dichotomy of being both on the inside but on
the outside at the same time. Their domestic arrangement seems very traditional with Clarissa
focusing more to the domesticity, the chores and simple, mundane caring work by keeping in
touch with the friends of the family as well as her daughter’s comings and goings, and Sally
the quiet and a little distant figure whose loyalties lie in the life outside of the home. Clarissa
states: “That’s who I am – a decent woman with a good apartment, with a stable and
affectionate marriage, giving a party” (TH, 97). Nonetheless, the absence of the patriarchal
masculine father figure brings a rupture to the normalcy – at least in the form of a potential
rift between Clarissa and Julia.
The male character is still not completely missing from the family of Clarissa as the man
of the family reappears in the character of Richard Brown, Clarissa’s long suffering friend
and ally, an award winning poet who is dying of AIDS. The masculine figure is no longer a
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sole breadwinner or a patriarch, not even a husband, but his role has changed. The man has
here been moved from the center of the family to its periphery – from the driving force to a
patient, from the lover to the friend, even from the companion to a child. Nonetheless, the
man has not been erased; rather Clarissa and Richard belong together in a more romanticized
fervour than Clarissa and Sally. They share a past when they were young and in love and a
present where that image of the summer of 1965 is an unfulfilled possibility, a chance of a
different life wasted, even a regret:
How often since then has she wondered what might have happened if she’d tried
to remain with him; […] It is impossible not to imagine that other future, that
rejected future […] as being a vast and enduring romance laid over friendship so
searing and profound it would accompany them to the grave and beyond (TH,
97).
The familiar setting is thus queered here; twisting the plot of Mrs. Dalloway, Michael
Cunningham has allowed Clarissa to end up with her beautiful and outrageous Sally, but the
problem of Mr. Dalloway remains un-reconciled. So he joins the family at a disadvantage, as
a “missed opportunity” (TH, 97), he is ousted by Sally, but not completely for with a slight
role reversal, Clarissa and Richard continue to belong to each other and form a relationship
akin to that of a mother and a child. Completely helpless and already out of this world,
Richard awaits Clarissa in his squalid apartment waiting to be nurtured, if not back to life then
indeed to death, they kiss, but on the forehead or cheek since “a common cold would be a
disaster for him” (TH, 68) and to Clarissa’s caretaking and fussing Richard answers with
“reluctant candor of a child” (TH, 59).
The mother-child relationship between Richard and Clarissa is further highlighted with
Richard’s relationship with his own mother, the same Laura Brown from the “Mrs. Brown”
sections of the book. Richard has dedicated his career as a writer to these two women,
Clarissa and Laura Brown who both end up mothering him. In this scenario however, Clarissa
remains the “good” mother as it is revealed that Laura decided to leave her family: “Here she
73
is, then, Clarissa thinks; here is the woman from Richard’s poetry. Here is the lost mother, the
thwarted suicide; here is the woman who walked away” (TH, 221). Meanwhile the ideal,
heterosexual, nuclear family from the 1950’s is once again proved mythical, this time perhaps
for good, and the new family type represented in Clarissa, Sally, Richard and Julia seems to
have more stability and strength – after all, they have managed to stay together.
Kath Weston (1991, 22) writes that the adoption of a lesbigay identity was equalled for
years as a rejection of family and kinship due to the naturalisation of the heterosexual family
forms on one hand, and the resistance of heterosexist social control, which Michael Warner
(2000) discusses, on the other. Public discussion and discourse has represented the lesbigay
population by reducing them to “sexual identity, and sexual identity to sex alone” without
showing them as full members of the society, destined to loneliness8 outside the legitimized
community (Weston, 1991, 22-23), further emphasized by the outbreak of AIDS. What
Weston (1991, 25) found, was that if there was any alienation from biological kin among the
outed lesbigay people it was mostly due to the rejection or the fear of rejection from the
biological kin – meanwhile, the need for a connection with the family remained, more so,
because of the difficulty of having biological children (Weston, 1991, 27).
In the absence of biological kin, the lesbigay community often takes on the tasks normally
appointed to them and the familial functions are fulfilled by close friendships (Carrington,
1999, 5). The concept of family itself has to be redefined as family is no longer something
one is born into, but rather a set of functions – such as housework, kin work and caring work
– which cater to the needs of each member of the family – instead of being family, one can
“do family” (ibid.). Close friendships function as biological families, as Carrington points out,
single individuals often gathering around a stable couple who are in charge of “the planning,
organization, and facilitation of social occasions (picnics, holiday gatherings, vacations,
8
Radcliffe Hall’s classic text The Well of Loneliness (1928) adresses the subject from the lesbian perspective.
74
commitment ceremonies/holy unions, birthday parties, gay-pride celebrations, hiking trips)”
(1999, 113). During major holidays, someone makes sure that “everyone has a place to go”
(ibid.).
Clarissa’s family in The Hours certainly follows the kind of chosen family structure
suggested by Carrington. Her and Sally at the center with their daughter Julia and Richard on
the edge, are surrounded by friends such as Louis who shares the past experience of being
young and carefree with Clarissa and Richard; Walter Hardy and his boyfriend Evan, and
even Oliver St. Ives, an iconic gay movie star. All these men are connected to the family in a
way that cannot be erased; as full of mixed emotions, resentment and annoyance as these
relationships are, they still need to be maintained and no-one can be insulted by not being
invited to Clarissa’s party: “These days, Clarissa believes, you measure people first by their
kindness and their capacity for devotion” (TH, 18). Just as Carrington suggests, someone in
the family has the role of a “kin keeper” (1999, 114) and Clarissa is that for her family.
Tirelessly she keeps everyone included and makes sure they stay in touch despite of the
animosities building inside the family:
It’s a cruel joke, of a sort, inviting Walter to Richard’s party, but Walter after
all, is alive, just as Clarissa is, on a morning in June, and he’ll feel horribly
snubbed if he finds out (and he seems to find everything out) Clarissa spoke to
him the day of the party and deliberately failed to mention it (TH, 19).
Like an elderly aunt who cannot be avoided, even the annoying Walter has to be invited, he is
family.
Peter M. Nardi (1992, 108) points out that the chosen family, the one constructed of
friends in stead of biological family members, is for the lesbigay community also a political
statement. Since the idea of friendship inherently implies acceptance and identification to a
similar group, it becomes a major influence in maintaining a sense of self, a sense of
belonging and an identity which when shared with a group of similar people becomes
politically powerful as the friendships develop into a marginalized identity with enough force
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to confront the dominant social organisation (Nardi, 1992, 115). In Nardi’s (1992, 110) view,
the subversive power of friendship is doubly in force when it comes to friendships between
gay men as men usually do not share a great level of intimacy with same sex friends.
The level of intimacy between lesbigay friendships is also a variant (Nardi, 1992, 114) and
the former lovers often remain connected as friends, lesbian particularly are able to maintain a
relationship after the sexual relationship is over – “unlike in crossgender heterosexual
relationships” (ibid). In Clarissa Vaughan’s family the same pattern, going from lovers to
friends, is detectable in the relationship between Clarissa and Richard, subversive even as
they have had a heterosexual relationship in the past and are still able to remain in a close,
intimate relationship. And almost as an argument against Nardi, Richard and Louis have not
been able to do this:
All those years with Richard, all that love and effort, and Richard spends the last
years of his life writing about a woman with a town house on West Tenth Street.
Richard produces a novel that meditates exhaustively on a woman (a fifty-pluspage chapter on shopping for nail polish which she decides against!) and old
Louis W. is relegated to the chorus (TH, 126).
Nardi (1992, 108) also states that the formation of friendships is not only dependent on
personal attraction, but rather it is governed by social structural components. The places
where it is possible to meet other people and the frequency of those opportunities and what
the relationships contain are all factors which have an impact on construction of friendships
(ibid.). The social isolation felt by the lesbigay part of the population together with the direct
threat of violence has often urged them to remain hidden and adopt pretended identities as the
image of the lonely gay man or lesbian woman figure in the background as the future for an
openly gay person. Christopher Carrington (1999, 76) says that many lesbigay families only
choose to socialize with other lesbigay people and refrain from any heterosexual contacts
altogether in fear of heterosexism and homophobia.
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Traditionally there has been a pull for gay population to migrate to the urban centres
forming lesbigay “ghettos” there where culturally specified and culturally segregated gay
communities have been able to live in peace without the outside threat (Carrington, 1999, 76).
The members of the same community are known to each other and form a family for each
other in the absence of biological kin. In the first scenes of the “Mrs. Dalloway” -sections of
The Hours where Clarissa is followed while running her errands in the city, there is something
evocative of such a familiar, village-like quality to New York – portrayed by the
neighbourhood of Greenwich Village – first of all, everything she needs is within walking
distance, which, according to Carrington is typical for the “gay ghetto” (1999, 77):
She loves the vendor’s cart piled with broccoli and peaches and mangoes, each
labelled with and index card that offers a price amid abundance of punctuation:
“1.49!!” “3 for ONE Dollar!?!” “50 cents EA!!!!!” Ahead, under the Arch, an
old woman in a dark, neatly tailored dress appears to be singing, stationed
precisely between the twin statues of George Washington, as warrior and
politician, both faces destroyed by weather” (TH, 14).
And when she approaches Richard’s apartment the feeling is intensified:
This neighbourhood was once the center of something new and wild; something
disreputable; a part of the city where the sound of guitars drifted all night out of
bars and coffeehouses; where the stores that sold books and clothing smelled the
way she imagine Arab bazaars must smell: incense and rich, dung-y dust, some
sort of wood (cedar? camphor?), something fruitily, fertilely rotting; and where
it had seemed possible, quite possible, that if you passed through the wrong door
or down the wrong alley you would meet a fate: not just the familiar threat of
robbery and physical harm but something more perverse and transforming, more
permanent (TH, 51).
The isolation of the homosexual, on one hand, and the isolation of the homosexuals as a
group in the centres of big cities, on the other, are reflective if not comparative to the feminine
isolation experienced by the 1950’s housewife. While Laura Brown cast away in the Los
Angeles suburbia is left alone to cope with the demands and expectations of the feminine
tradition, only getting to leave the house on specific errands to go to specific places, Clarissa
Vaughan is able to go anywhere she wants and everything she needs is within walking
distance. The isolation of the homosexual is now turned into a freedom, certainly a freedom
77
of the traditional feminine role if nothing more, and the countryside, the place which Virginia
Woolf was desperate to quit, becomes the setting for utopia, the unreachable youth, the mighthave-been:
She feels every bit as good as she did that day in Wellfleet, at the age of
eighteen, stepping out through the glass doors into a day very much like this
one, fresh and almost painfully clear, rampant with growth. There were
dragonflies zigzagging among the cattails. There was a grassy smell sharpened
by pine sap (TH, 10).
Clarissa and Richard were lovers in the past, but they still keep belonging to each other.
The compulsory heterosexuality and the way of life it promises becomes just another, wasted,
possibility, and even with everything she has, Clarissa wonders
How is it possible that she feels regret? How can she imagine, even now, that
they might have had a life together? They might have been husband and wife,
soul mates, with lovers on the side. There are ways of managing (TH, 6).
Perhaps paralleling the lives of Laura and Virginia, it is shown that the compulsory
heterosexuality can in the end only exist in the isolation, in the past, away from the realities of
human experience where it too, becomes nothing but nostalgia.
5.2. Gender, Sexuality, Identity
One of the most prominent themes in The Hours is the fluid, non-stagnant and unfixed nature
of gender, sexuality and the variety of identities which arise from these. Laura Brown,
Virginia Woolf and Clarissa Vaughan are all faced with their lifestyle choices and left to
wonder whether their choices have been the right ones since there always seems to be some
unfulfilled aspect of themselves in the background waiting for recognition – even for Clarissa
whose lifestyle choice as a lesbian leaves her wondering whether a life could have been
possible with Richard. Doing away with the descriptive pressures of compulsory
heterosexuality does not erase the essence of having to choose something while turning back
78
on something else. The Hours defies the essentialist views of sexuality and sexual identity and
describes it as a choice which Clarissa has made excluding other choices.
The making of that choice of adopting a lesbian lifestyle is not, however, done merely by
breaking away the barriers of compulsory heterosexuality as Adrienne Rich (1981) has
suggested. Valerie Jenness (1992, 70) notes that in order to adopt a lesbian identity, it is
necessary to break away from the typical definitions of what it means to be lesbian as well.
Jenness (1992, 67) points out that a woman who is about to adopt a lesbian identity has to
ultimately acknowledge that as a social category lesbian is a vague one without much
connection to real experience and the connotations attached to it are either neutral or – more
often – negative. Jenness (ibid.) concludes by saying that self-categorisation as a lesbian is
further hindered by the fact that the imagery attached to it is usually far removed from the
actual experience of living as a lesbian. Jenness (1992, 70) suggests that in order to make the
self-categorisation, one has to acquire more detailed information of what it is to live as a
lesbian in actual reality and reconstruct a more positive image of lesbianism – as an individual
then attaches lesbianism with real, lived experience it becomes easier to adopt as an identity.
Monique Wittig, like Adrienne Rich, sees the social categories of sex as oppressive to
women as it enables the structures of compulsory heterosexuality which makes the
exploitation of women and their product possible. In Wittig’s (1992, 2) opinion the division of
the genders into dichotomous categories masculine/feminine or male/female hide the social
constructs on which they are built normalizing the inequality between them. According to
Wittig – like Engels – the category of sex renders women as “slaves” (1992, 2) to men with
the task of caring for the home and producing children as well as constant sexual availability
as the main work to which women have been assigned (Wittig, 1992, 6-7). In stead of
identifying with the category of women which when naturalized and unquestioned (Wittig,
79
1992, 9), Wittig (1992, 3) states that the oppression of women should be rather seen as a site
of class struggle.
For Wittig (1992, 13), the way to escape the oppression of the category of sex, on which
the society of compulsory heterosexuality is based, is to become lesbian. Lesbianism destroys
the ideology of the naturalised social order where men are considered superior to women and
women are seen as a “natural group” (Wittig, 1992, 9) because it reveals it as a political one;
lesbians do not desire a relationship with men and are therefore liberated from the social
order:
The refusal to become (or to remain) heterosexual always meant to refuse to
become a man or a woman, consciously or not. For a lesbian this goes further
than the refusal of the role of “woman.” It is the refusal of the economic,
ideological, and political power of a man (Wittig, 1992, 13).
The lesbian social category is for Wittig (1992, 14) deeply revolutionary and it not only
enables the destruction of the category of woman, but also makes feminism itself obsolete in
the face of class struggle. For Wittig (1992, 20) a lesbian is “not a woman” in terms of the
historical implications of the term, according to her, only a lesbian can be completely free.
Clarissa Vaughan is lesbian living in a long-term relationship with her girlfriend Sally,
surrounded by her extended lesbigay family. However, the alternative of a different life with
Richard and the regret of not having taken a chance on it remain in her life like in that of
Laura Brown’s. And, no matter how much she may be self-categorized as a lesbian, she
nonetheless, uses heterosexualized terms to define herself by describing herself as a “wife”
(TH, 20) having a daughter who resents her like she has resented her own mother (TH, 156).
Even as a lesbian it seems she has not managed to avoid the roles and performances of
femininity, she is somehow still the housewife, still the mother, still the perfect hostess. Louis
who pays her a visit notices this amid her “wise, hostessy performance” and thinks “[…] she’s
gone beyond wifeliness. She’s become a mother” (TH, 130).
80
Valerie Jenness (1992, 66-67) maintains that identity is formed essentially from “the
‘kinds’ of people it is possible to be in the society”; identities then emerge as people are able
to recognise a group as a social category and place themselves inside it. It also includes
resolving the question between sex as an act and sexuality as an identity, that is between
being and doing (Jenness, 1992, 72). For Jenness (ibid) this has to do with the detypification
of the term ‘lesbian’ so that actual experience makes it seem more positive as an identity and
so capacitates self-identification as one. However, as Michael Warner says, the homosexual
and the gay movement has long been combating both the shame of the act itself and a stigma
for being the kind of person who could be expected to be capable of it:
Sexual deviance once was more a matter of shame than of stigma. Sodomy was
like a sin of fornication, not the sign of identity. Anyone could do it. In the
modern world that shame has deepened into stigma. It affects certain people,
regardless what they do (2000, 28).
According to Warner the identification as lesbigay is the root of stigmatising the whole of
the community as the essentialist views on homosexuality, which suggest that sexuality is
something people are either born with or not, enable the discrimination of them as perverts
with “only a theoretical relation to any sex they might or might not have” (2000, 29).
However, the gay movement itself has embraced the definition of lesbigay as an undeniable
identity (ibid.) which Warner attacks since in his opinion, the stigma of the identity
paradoxically distances lesbigays from the “manifestation of queerness” (2000, 31); it enables
the gay identity to be removed from sex, which it has originally been based on and
strengthens the shame involved in it (ibid). It challenges the stigma on identity “only by
reinforcing the shame of sex” (ibid) and thus reinforcing the dilemma of an ambivalent
identity (Warner, 2000, 32). A similar rift can be detected in The Hours between the selfidentified lesbian Clarissa and the queer theorist Mary Krull who mocks her for her “quaint
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(she must consider them quaint) notions about lesbian identity” (TH, 23) and is certain that
Clarissa would not be left behind when the deviants are “rounded up” (TH, 160).
Clarissa is a lesbian living comfortably in her great New York apartment, her lifestyle is
noticeably unremarkable resembling that of any middle aged housewife and a mother. While
this may earn her the contempt of a more radical lesbian activist, her self-identification as a
mother and a wife – even before lesbian – can be seen to defy Monique Wittig’s definitions of
a lesbian. It is hard to detect anything revolutionary in her living arrangements or even
particularly defiant towards the heterosexual society. Jacob Hale (1996) argues against
Wittig’s statement that a lesbian is not a woman at all since they are not in binary
relationships with men, that is married, and that they are therefore able to escape the male
control of compulsory heterosexuality. According to Hale (1996, 105), there are other ways to
facilitate the heterosexual regime; besides the fact that lesbians can be subjected to violence
or reproductive control in terms of having their parental or adoption rights cancelled, they can
also “add to the perpetuation” of heterosexuality by taking on roles such as schoolteacher,
librarian, nurse or nun – none of which requires a sexual relationship with a man, but all of
which are nonetheless sexualized.
One of the pitfalls of Wittig’s theory is, according to Hale, the fact that she does not really
take into account the ways in which people actually live, the way they behave, how they are
gendered and how far the social control of a heterosexual matrix extends, especially with
“people who do not fit clearly into the binary distinction between heterosexuals, on the one
hand, and gays and lesbians, on the other hand” (1996, 100). In The Hours, Mary Krull and
Julia are masculine women who wear combat boots, no bras, have shaved heads and a general
disinterest to their looks; Clarissa Vaughan seems very ordinary in her appearance, she
occupies the role of the caretaker, wife and mother in the family, but she is in a lesbian
relationship having had a heterosexual one in her youth with a man she is now nursing and
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thus placing herself in a servile position to a man; furthermore, her partner Sally, by the grace
of Clarissa being the wife, has to be the husband, even though she is obviously biologically a
woman. It could be said that none of these characters really fit inside the category of ‘woman’
– with the possible exception of Clarissa – but also, that all them possibly fall outside of
Wittig’s categorisation altogether since their identities do not fall neatly into the
heterosexual/homosexual binary.
Hale (1996, 101) states that since the term ‘woman’ is both prescriptive and prohibiting,
there has to be both positive and negative images of womanhood available, and the so called
bad girl serves as a negative example of a possibility of an unfortunate future for the good
girls, thus becoming an integral part of the heterosexist structure. According to Hale (1996,
105) these negative examples of woman include sex workers, single “welfare mothers”,
mothers who kill or harm their children during or after pregnancy and, finally, lesbians.
Nonetheless, Hale (1996, 105) points out that women who can be recognised as bad girls do
not “fall out of the category woman entirely”, nor is it easy to see themselves to be excluded
from it, not to mention the categories of sex as woman and man.
Judith Butler (1999, 155) criticises Wittig for not taking into account that there might be
volitional or optional heterosexuality and that all heterosexuality may not be “radically
determined”, but opts for creation of a binary between heterosexual and homosexual which
only replicates and recalls the binary that compulsory heterosexuality is based on. Moreover,
Butler (1999, 155) states that the binary suggested in Wittig’s theory is utterly false since
there are elements of both included in both; she writes that there are “structures of psychic
heterosexuality within gay and lesbian sexuality and relationships” and vice versa.
Furthermore, Butler maintains that the homosexual/heterosexual binary is not the only power
center which is involved in the creation of the construct and structure of both types of
sexuality. The creation of a binary where lesbianism is the only way to radically refuse the
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confines of compulsory heterosexuality is therefore a fallacy which only makes lesbianism
dependent on the very terms that compulsory heterosexuality can be accused of (Butler,
1999, 158) – totalitarian political regime:
If sexuality and power are coextensive, and if lesbian sexuality is no more and
no less constructed than other modes of sexuality, then there is no promise of
limitless pleasure after the shackles of the category of sex have been thrown off
(1999, 158).
The characters in Clarissa’s immediate family seem to emphasize the fluid, unstable nature
or gender and identity. Mary and Julia and, perhaps, even Sally can be seen as masculine
either by dressing or filling a masculine role. Even Clarissa, a society wife by heart (TH, 20),
is challenging the structures of compulsory heterosexuality which in their naturalized state
seem stable; having experimented with both heterosexual and lesbian identities, she remains
uncertain of her choice. Richard, on the other hand seems to put forward the question of
traditional masculinity. His relationship to women, be it his mother Laura or Clarissa, is
always somewhat submissive; always the child or the patient, even as a lover Richard has
been the dependent one and Clarissa’s choice to leave him has been her decision:
[…] they had kissed or not kissed, they had certainly argued, and here or
somewhere soon after, they had cancelled their little experiment, for Clarissa
wanted her freedom and Richard wanted, well, too much, didn’t he always? He
wanted too much. She’d told him that what happened over the summer had been
exactly that, something that happened over the summer (TH, 52).
All the main characters in The Hours seem to have unstable identities from Laura Brown
to Clarissa and Richard – even Virginia has moments where she struggles to maintain the
balance between brilliance and insanity with her identity teetering between the two. What
unifies all the three protagonists Laura, Clarissa and Virginia, is the emphasis on the
importance of performance; Laura tries to perform as a housewife, Virginia tries to perform
insanity and finally Clarissa – who succeeds in both – is nonetheless described as perfecting
the art of “wise, hostessy” performance (TH, 130).
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Judith Butler offers the idea of gender as a performance as an alternative for a sexual
binary. For her gender identity is not to be found in essentialist views of body as a being with
an internal and organising core of gender identity, but gender should rather be seen as a
boundary without an internal reality, as a surface on which the signs of gender are reflected
(Butler, 1999, 174, 177). When understood in terms of a boundary which is politically
regulated when it comes to both its permeability and signifying practices (Butler, 1999, 177),
the gendered body becomes a site of constant shift and change and allows for a fluidity of
identities – both lesbigay and heterosexual – to be revealed as what they really are: a set of
naturalized rules which are not really as fixed as they seem. Gender itself is thus revealed as a
set of cultural practices, acts, gestures, dress codes and behaviours which are changeable and
fluid, not a sign of real gender at the core, but rather a performance whose force relies on the
repetition of the culturally assigned markers of gender (Butler, 1999, 173, 178).
The understanding of gender as a performance which is created and recreated in the
repetition of those behaviours, gestures and so forth has been, while celebrated by others for
doing away with the binary system of gender categories, criticised by several lesbian feminist
critics. Biddy Martin (1994, 102) writes that while gender and psychic life are not fixed as
unchanging states, the assumption that the idea of gender as a performative would be also
liberating from the confines of gender is false. That gender is understood to be performative
does not eradicate gender, but only makes it less controlling, at best (Martin, 1994, 102-103);
although gender is performative, it is not only that, but operates on various different levels,
meanwhile gender is not the only constituent of the psyche (ibid.). I Martin’s (1994, 101)
opinion, queerness should therefore not be seen as mobile and fluid against a feminism that is
then “construed as stagnant and ensnaring”.
Martin (1994, 122) argues that some queer theory is based on the Foucaultian theory that
political and social power is based on the normalisation, discipline and regulation of sexuality
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which is internalized and perceived as objective truths, and that this has led to the assumption
that gender is actually irrelevant to desire and infinitely changeable. She writes that this kind
of simplifying theorisation hides the other power structures, which leads them to abandon the
discussion of lesbigay rights (Martin, 1994, 122). Furthermore, Martin states that while
focusing on the normalisation of outside norms, rules, and political regulation constructs the
psyche as easily manipulable and suggests that power only works from outside in which
points to a “utopian or dystopian social control” (ibid.).
Sheila Jeffreys has criticised queer theory on perhaps a more practical level. She states that
new queer politics have always run on a masculine agenda and are based on a “cult of
masculinity” which has first and foremost led to the repudiation of lesbian feminist ideas
(Jeffreys, 2003, 2). Like Martin, Jeffreys is not convinced that queer theory with its ideas of
unfixed and freely flowing identities really manages to offer the kind of liberation which it
boasts of. She accuses the queer movement for damaging the interests of women, including
lesbians (ibid.). Jeffreys’ views depart radically from Wittig as well – while getting closer to
those of Adrienne Rich; for Jeffreys (2003, 19) the most profound experience of lesbianism is
in the self-identification as a woman first and in the woman-loving, woman-identified world
view from which follow the politics of lesbianism as a choice, rejection of hierarchy and the
criticism of sexualized male supremacy.
Clarissa and Mary Krull are represented in The Hours almost as the opposite
personifications of “old school” lesbian feminism and queer theory with a hardly hidden
resentment in between them. Clarissa is living in a relatively traditional, in some ways even
heterosexualized, life situation while Mary Krull is always the outsider, the rebel and the
radical: nonetheless
You respect Mary Krull, she really gives you no choice, living as she does on
the verge of poverty, going to jail for her various causes, lecturing passionately
at NYU about the sorry masquerade known as gender (TH, 23).
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Mary Krull on the other hand expresses the derogatory sentiments Sheila Jeffreys (2003, 35)
accuses queer theorists of having; no matter how all inclusive and open the ideas of queer
theory seems on the surface, it seems to have specifically excluded lesbians and lesbian
feminists. Besides rejecting lesbian feminism, according to Martin (1994, 123), a lot of queer
theory has also rejected all and any forms of social formation which could be seen as
heterosexual in origin; in the name of radical activism such things as family, kin and
community have been eradicated as signs of oppression. Martin (1994, 123) points out that in
all the celebration of freedom from gender lies a threat of limitless existence without bodies
or psyches.
Due to the rift between differing views Clarissa does not get along with Mary Krull, but is
in fact closer to Richard who as a victim of AIDS needs more attention from Clarissa even
than Sally who is more wrapped up in her working life. It could be argued that Clarissa only
becomes bound again to the heterosexist normativeness by placing herself in a position where
she ends up essentially mothering her friend; however, as a member of her chosen family he
is to be looked after by Clarissa, the appointed kin keeper. Beth E. Schneider (1992, 160)
writes that during the 1980s, with the attention targeted towards AIDS for the first time,
lesbians were excluded from the discussion altogether as the one group of people least
unlikely to be affected. AIDS seemed finally to justify lesbian activist goals of deliverance
from the yoke of compulsory heterosexuality as lesbians were the only people not having sex
with men who were seen as the primary carriers of the virus. It can be said that in Clarissa and
Richard the rift between masculinity and femininity inside lesbigay theory seems to be
resolved into a common goal of survival.
After the social pressures and regulations experienced by both Laura and Virginia as
women who also have the need to express themselves as individuals, there is finally a woman
who has the right to choose both a career and mothering, both the feminine fulfilment of
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being a wife and having a relationship with a woman. The equation constructed in Laura and
Virginia’s stories between marriage and death is now turned around in Richard, marriage no
longer equals death, but sex does in a very concrete fashion. Marriage, or a steady
partnership, on the other hand can be seen as almost a safe haven from the risks of
contamination; Richard and Clarissa’s friends Evan and Walter seem to be a good example of
this, as even though Evan is recovering from AIDS, the promise of a steady relationship
seems to keep him protected as well as the medication he received on time, and Walter’s
promise to faithfully look after him seems to echo their lives together: “I’ll keep an eye on
him. I won’t let him overdo it. He just wants to be in the world again” (TH, 16). On the other
hand, as Warner states:
Marriage, in short, would make for good gays – the kind who would not
challenge the norms of straight culture, who would not flaunt sexuality, and who
would not insist on living differently from ordinary folk (2000, 113).
The most prominent alliance between an AIDS victim and a healthy person is nonetheless
the one between Clarissa and Richard who despite a failed romance, different partners,
families and time have stayed together as friends and allies with the possibility of a different
life, the one they could have shared as husband and wife, ever present in the background. As
Schneider (1992, 160) suggests the lesbian alliance with the gay men suffering from the HIV
epidemic was slow to form as the lesbian politics were shunned by many gay theorists with
the formation of queer theory, lesbians simply were excluded from discussion when it came to
the spread of the virus. Nonetheless Schneider (1992, 161) has been able to find domains in
which HIV impacts lesbians, including the social and reproductive levels through friends and
families – sometimes very immediately since many children of lesbians have been conceived
through donors (Schneider, 1992, 186). Like Clarissa, according to Schneider (1992, 168)
many lesbians also work often as unpaid caregivers for AIDS patients.
88
The nature of marriage changed from a constricting compulsory structure to a choice
among others, the recurring theme of kissing also changes; from Laura’s illicit kiss with Kitty,
through Virginia and Vanessa’s kiss behind Nelly’s back to Clarissa and Sally’s
commonplace, even mundane, kiss and finally Clarissa and Richard’s kiss in their youth the
trope of kissing is multiplied and repeated throughout the book. It is noticeable that finally the
kiss between Clarissa and Sally does not posses any radical elements, for Clarissa the most
important kisses are the ones shared with Richard, first by the pond in their youth and again
when separating at his apartment, avoiding his lips for the sake of his health (TH, 68). Kissing
Richard in the past is now what culminates Clarissa’s story and it lives on in present time with
more meaning and feeling than her relationship with Sally, laden with regret.
“You kissed me beside a pond.”
“Ten thousand years ago.”
“It’s still happening.”
“In a sense, yes.” (TH, 66).
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6. Conclusions
Despite the fact that all the families represented in the text are located in different times and
cultures from the English countryside in the 1920s, through Californian suburbia of the late
1940s to the modern cityscape in the 1990s, they all represent English-speaking white middle
to upper middle class. As far as families go, certainly there is more variation both historically
and socially in their structure and functions simply brought on by differences in
circumstances such as cultural background, wealth and education.
Renate Bridenthal (1982, 230) states that as much as the social class is a major factor in
determining the form of the family, the “family organization”, it also a factor to how much
knowledge there is available of the family. As far as historical sources go, there is generally
more information concerning upper class families as “the peasantry and wage earners left few
written documents” (ibid.). In contrast, contemporary research has very little information on
the upper class while the vast majority of study has focused on the middle class families
(ibid.). Bridenthal (ibid.) suggests that middle class families are best represented in research
because the researchers themselves tend to have the same background, meanwhile there is a
danger that the middle class family begins to represent a norm – even though the amount of
research does not necessarily reflect the number of families.
The characters and their relations to their families and surrounding social structures not
only break the naturalized notions of heterosexuality, but also the essentialist views on
homosexuality. In the same vein with Adrienne Rich (1981), The Hours suggests that
sexuality is first and foremost a choice among many others and not a stable, steady
construction one is born with. The commitment to a certain lifestyle always requires the
refusal of another and the possibility of a different kind of life always remains in the
90
background reverberating through time, “in a sense” playing out a continuous present which
can only be revived in memories.
Each of the characters is faced with life-altering choices as Laura finally leaves her family
to live in solitude, Virginia pretends sanity for the permission to move to London, but ends up
losing her life to mental illness and Clarissa is left to wonder whether her life with Sally has
been worth losing the one she could have had with Richard. Gender and sexuality do not
finally determine the way these characters end up living their lives, nor is the greater freedom
to self-identification automatically synonymous with happiness. Gender and sexuality are not
the end-all and be-all of social articulations or identification, as Martin states, gender should
rather be understood as a feature of personality:
We might […] value it as an aspect of the uniqueness of personalities without
letting it bind and control qualities, experiences, behaviors that the culture
divides up rigidly between two supposedly different sexes (1994, 103).
All in all, it can be said that The Hours does promote a pluralism of identities and lifestyle
choices and the female protagonists are resolved to be whole as people with choices,
possibilities and regrets. It is noticeable, however, that in terms of family it is the women who
remain at the core. The feminine role of a wife and a mother which persisted in some form
through Laura and Virginia’s stories remains a constructive part of Clarissa Vaughan; like
Laura, she wants to “create something temporal, even trivial, but perfect in its way” (TH, 123)
and find fulfilment in the task. Her self-sacrifice which is characteristic of femininity becomes
apparent even when in order to safe Richard from committing suicide she claims not to mind
him calling her Mrs. Dalloway, even though she had previously decided to ask him to stop
(TH, 198, 55). Even after Richard’s death when there is no-one left to call her that, the
question remains unanswered whether the women manage to move past the designated gender
roles – after all, Clarissa may not be Mrs. Dalloway anymore, but Laura remains Mrs. Brown
(TH, 226).
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The ideas of gender and its prescriptive qualities towards the behaviours expected from the
protagonists do dictate their places in the family; nonetheless gender is not the only factor in
the way their lives are finally formed. Within the framework of gender, which does form
rather rigid outlines for the proper behaviour for a woman, the female protagonists do make
their choices to escape the confines of acceptable social conduct and end up in unconventional
choices despite every obstacle against them. Nonetheless, in case of Laura and Virginia, at
least, the necessity to make those choices arises only when the performance of the perfect
hostessy housewife fails. Both Laura and Virginia recognize the performance of gender as
such, but are both equally dissatisfied with it, not being capable to perform it in a satisfactory
manner.
It can be said that female experience is nonetheless permeated by the assumption on
gender and sexuality, even though Cunningham’s text seems to promote a plurality; all the
main protagonists make attempts at fulfilling the gender roles – even Clarissa Vaughan who
could be seen as liberated from the binaries of heterosexual social structures actually manages
to fulfil the feminine gender role better than the other leading characters. Clarissa does
however renegotiate the dichotomy between public and private spheres better than Laura or
Virginia. Not only is it stated that she goes to work outside the home, but the outside world of
New York City is somehow familiarised in itself to an extent where it becomes a part of
Clarissa’s interiority, a part of her world which she covers and governs as a subject – with a
certain amount of sovereignty.
Something of the private sphere vs. public sphere binary of the tradition of feminine and
masculine worlds is resonant in the lifestyles of lesbigay people. With the persecution of the
heterosexist social reality many people who committed homosexual acts and certainly those
who identified themselves as homosexuals spent decades, even centennials, hiding their
lifestyle and personal choices concerning their partners. Therefore homosexual culture itself
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has remained hidden, in the private sphere as it were, out of the public eye and condemnation.
According to Ken Plummer (1992, 5) the Stonewall Riots started in New York City in June
1969 between openly lesbigay people and the New York City police started a new wave of
criticism in lesbigay theory but also marked a new visibility for their cause. Plummer (1992,
17) writes that today’s gay culture is global with an international gay community whose
values, targets, trends in politics as well as dressing and music spread far with, for example,
literature, magazines and organisations and certainly the internet.
Despite the confining social structures of compulsory heterosexuality and feminine roles as
wives and mothers, the family forms in The Hours are impacted, perhaps more than anything,
by the internal pressures to live in different ways. Laura has difficulties putting aside her own
inclinations to live life without her family, reading books, and so she leaves her family and
doing so leaves behind a family constituted by a father and two children; Virginia is unable to
perform as a housewife due to her illness as well as her creativity and is finally reduced to
suicide, while Clarissa has made the choice to live with a woman, but cannot put the
possibility of a life with a man out of her mind either. Gender and sexuality thus seem to mix
in the production of family and self in it with the needs and wants which seem to be first and
foremost individual, yet unfixed and not without regret. And, The Hours finally seems to
allow that for its characters, individuality as fully rounded people in stead of representatives
of gender or sexual identities:
And here she is, herself, Clarissa, not Mrs. Dalloway anymore; there is no one
now to call her that. Here she is with another hour before her (TH, 226).
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