AN INTERTEXTUAL STUDY OF
THE HOURS AND MRS. DALLOWAY
by
Xie Ye
A Thesis
Submitted to the Graduate School and College of English
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the Degree of Master of Arts
Under the Supervision of Professor Li Weiping
Shanghai International Studies University
November 2007
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ·············································································································· i
Abstract······························································································································· ii
中文摘要 ··························································································································· iii
Introduction························································································································· 1
Chapter One Similarity in Plot and Characters································································· 8
I. Symmetry in Plot.........................................................................................................8
II. Similar Arrangement of Characters..........................................................................12
Chapter Two
Thematic and Symbolic Reinterpretation ·················································· 23
I. Thematic Reinterpretation .........................................................................................23
A. The Theme of Death ······················································································· 24
B. Response to Life ····························································································· 26
C. The Essence of Banality and Triviality ··························································· 30
II. Symbolic Reinterpretation .......................................................................................32
A. Party ··············································································································· 32
B. Flowers ··········································································································· 33
C. Mirror ············································································································· 35
D. Clock ·············································································································· 36
E. Water & Jellyfish ···························································································· 37
Chapter Three
Adoption of the Same Techniques ·························································· 39
I. Similarity in the Openings.........................................................................................39
II. The Stream of Consciousness Technique: Both Clock Time and Psychological Time
......................................................................................................................................41
III. Interaction between Reader, Author and Text.........................................................47
Conclusion ························································································································ 50
Bibliography ····················································································································· 54
i
Acknowledgements
Professor Li Weiping, my supervisor, is the person whom I owe most thanks to, for it is he
that inspired me to start the search and research for this topic, and assisted me in choosing
the subject matter; moreover, his encouragement shed a flood of light on my attitude
towards a number of crucial points, and he helped to solve a couple of technical problems
such as providing a few indispensable reference books as well. His willingness to spend his
time so generously in the midst of pressing affairs has been very much appreciated. My
gratitude would also extends to all the other teachers both in my undergraduate and
graduate years in Shanghai International Studies University, particularly those specialized
in the literature orientation, such as Professor Yu Jianhua, Professor Zhang Dingquan and
Professor Wu Qiyao, for having cultivated in me a distinctive interest in and enthusiasm
towards English and American Literature. My friends: Jing, Sylvia, Susan, Claire, just to
name a few, all in one way or another supported and motivated me while I was struggling
against the paper writing. Their generosity, sympathy and devotion make our friendship
such a treasure that I can never imagine finishing all this alone without their company. Last
but not least, I owe a deep debt to my loving parents, whose unfailing affections freed me
from all the household duties and daily chores, as well as gave me innumerable spiritual
support, without whom this thesis would be a sheer mission impossible.
ii
Abstract
Michael Cunningham’s The Hours has been treated as the contemporary review and
revision of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Despite its intertexts with other anterior works
such as the diaries and letters of Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and
To Room Nineteen, Mrs. Dalloway remains the central source for his fiction. By entitling
his novel “The Hours”—one of the titles Woolf considered for her novel in its early stages,
Cunningham manipulates Mrs. Dalloway in his “Mrs. Woolf”, “Mrs. Brown” and “Mrs.
Dalloway”, either as the three narrative strands or as three major characters. Besides, he
expressed his viewpoint about some themes, such as theme of death, response to life, and
infused his own conception in some images, like parties and flowers, all of which can be
traced back to Woolf’s text. In addition, Cunningham also shows his indebtedness as a
postmodernist writer to his modernist canon by employing similar techniques such as the
technique of stream of consciousness. By adopting and adapting the anterior text in a
variety of ways, Cunningham weaves the intertextual elements in his own writing and
creates an innovative text.
Adopting the theory of intertextuality this thesis is intended to explore the intertextual
connection between the two texts and investigate how Cunningham manipulates and
transforms the anterior texts and, accordingly, establishes a two-way relationship between
himself and Woolf.
Key Words: intertextuality, Kristeva, Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf, The Hours, Michael
Cunningham
iii
中文摘要
迈克尔·坎宁安的《时时刻刻》一直被视为弗吉尼亚·伍尔芙小说《达洛维夫人》的
现代修改版本，但是国内将这二者进行比较研究的著作少之又少。伍尔芙凭借其娴熟
的意识流技巧运用、细腻的女性主义关怀早已奠定了文学巨匠的地位，
《达洛维夫人》
为其代表作之一。而通过《时时刻刻》，坎宁安运用巧妙的角色安排，以《达洛维夫
人》为中心点，将处于不同时空的三位女性达洛维夫人、布朗夫人、伍尔芙夫人置于
同一文本并互相联系，手法新颖，匠心独具。凭借清澈流畅的语言、对女性心灵世界
的细腻描述，辅以内心独白、深度意象和蒙太奇等手法，坎宁安深入角色们万花筒般
的意识，对一系列问题如生与死、癫与智进行了严肃探讨。其独特的视角和手法在评
论界引起巨大反响，它是作者以小说的形式对伍尔芙精神世界的一次遐想式的探询和
论证，以及对她性格的可能性延伸艺术上的重塑；而同时他又通过 20 世纪早期、中
期和晚期三个不同时代女性的精神风貌，来反映西方整个 20 世纪的精神特征。这一
双重目的，构成了这部小说不同凡响的品格。
本文试图借用茱莉娅·克丽丝蒂娃的互文性理论来分析两个文本之间的互文性联系，
分别从情节与角色、主题与意象、以及写作技巧等要素进行分析，探讨《达洛维夫人》
对《时时刻刻》的影响，以全新的视角发掘伍尔芙对后代作家的深远意义。
关键词：互文性、克丽丝蒂娃、
《达洛维夫人》、弗吉尼亚·伍尔芙、
《时时刻刻》、迈
克尔·坎宁安
1
Introduction
Mrs. Dalloway has remained a distinguished work attracting sustained attention and
research for more than a half century. It was first published in 1925 by Virginia Woolf
(January 25, 1882—March 28, 1941), a brilliant English feminist writer, essayist and
literary critic. She is renowned for the experimental, lyrical style of the novels that she
produced in her mid-career, with Mrs. Dalloway as a typical example. After being inspired
by both T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses which were mingled in her
creative imagination with her own memories and experiences, she produced a new
combination which turned out to be “a feminist quest to buy flowers and give a party in a
social waste land shaken to its core in the aftermath of world war”1. The focus on external
events is limited; instead of chronicling action, she trains her narrative attention on more
evanescent shapes of thought and feeling as they are distributed among a seemingly
random but actually carefully selected group of people. In the novel she gives full play to
her imaginative freedom and concentrates mainly on the psychological development of
female characters. Her description of the intrinsic and subtle emotion of the characters has
been one of the most impressive features of her works. Realistic and well-storied, yet on
the other hand delicate and touching as well, Mrs. Dalloway has been a bestseller both in
Britain and the United States. It has generated a great deal of critical attention and is one of
the most widely studied of Woolf’s novels, among all the readers and critics there being a
man called Michael Cunningham.
Treated as the contemporary version of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway as well as the
winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award, Michael
Cunningham’s The Hours (1998) has dealt with various issues such as life and death,
sanity and insanity. In his novel three women are depicted, Mrs. Dalloway, Mrs. Brown,
1
M. M. Pawlowski, introduction, Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf (London: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1996) vi
2
and Mrs. Woolf. By breaking the limitation of time and space, Cunningham successfully
creates the combination of fictional characters and realistic figures, resulting in a
modernized Mrs. Dalloway image, a subtly cornered Mrs. Brown image, and a distinctive
Woolf image, thus enormously contributing to the theme of human presence and
significance. Clarissa Vaughan, a book editor in present-day Greenwich Village, is
organizing a party for her closest friend, Richard, an AIDS-stricken poet who has just won
a major literary prize. Laura Brown, a young wife and mother in 1949 Los Angeles, is
caring for her toddler and preparing a birthday cake for her husband as she tries to resist
increasing waves of panic and feelings of alienation from her humdrum yet demanding life.
And Virginia Woolf herself, the third woman, working on her new novel, Mrs. Dalloway,
chats with her husband and sister, bickers with her cook, and attempts to come to terms
with her deep, ungovernable longings for escape and even for death. As the novel
jump-cuts through the century, the lives and stories of the three women converge,
stunningly and unexpectedly, on the night of Clarissa’s party for Richard. It is obvious that
this novel, as a revolutionary text, borrows much both in content and writing skill from
Virginia Woolf’s work Mrs. Dalloway, and as one of the readers, Cunningham becomes a
writer of Woolf.
It is true that the individual study about these two novels has been so far many and various;
however, few make an effective comparison and contrast between the two texts, especially
from the perspective of intertextual analysis. Cunningham received much influence from
Woolf. According to him, Mrs. Dalloway is the first novel he has ever read with full
attention and interest, therefore it is also understandable that his novel The Hours is to a
great extent shadowed by this book. In light of intertextuality as an interaction between
author, text and readers, as a reader as well as an author, Cunningham employs the book
Mrs. Dalloway as the central knot to link all the three parts together and creates the
innovative version of The Hours. Thus adopting Julia Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality,
this thesis aims to analyze the dialogue between the two and discuss the topic about how
Cunningham breaks through the shackles of time and space and achieves the successful
reinterpretation of Woolf’s work and life.
3
The theory of intertextuality, to some degree similar to the concept of Multiple
Locatedness, has played an essential role in postmodernism. It was first developed from
Bakhtin’s dialogism which believes that texts are the “results of the intersection of a
number of voices”1, and later has been expanded by subsequent writers like Wendy Steiner
to mean the interrelations between a work of visual art and its title, works and their sources
and influences, and multiple contemporary works. Their notion that an artist learns not
from nature but from earlier art is a rudimentary expression of this expanded sense of
intertextuality. And later having worked for years with John Barthes, the master of
postmodernism, and absorbed theories from Bakhtin, Kristeva raised her conception in
textual analysis. In the late 1960s she coined the term of intertextuality in her work Word,
Dialogue and Novel, and concludes that “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations;
any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality
replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double” 2 .
According to Kristeva, intertextuality is a postmodern term which involves interplay of
both form and content, as is stated in An Interview with Julia Kristeva that “in
postmodernism, the question of intertextuality is perhaps even more important in certain
ways, because it assumes an interplay of contents and not of forms alone” (Waller 282). It
is a particular type of coextension where a variety of diverse meanings overlaps and
interrelates within a text in ways that can seldom been forecast by either the author or
readers.
As Kristeva contends, novel is an intersection of genres and a generalized form of
intertextuality. If it is identified with intertextuality, then every contemporary type of
writing participates in it. With sustained dialogs with pre-texts, a novel provides the reader
with infinite possibilities for interpretation. Following the theory of intertextuality, there’s
no fully independent text, and every piece of literary work is related to previous texts. In
Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva regards intertextuality as something taking place
1
Margaret Waller, “An Interview with Julia Kristeva,” Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction, ed. Patrick
O’Donnell and Robert Con Davis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) 281. Further references to this
edition will be indicated by quoting page numbers in parentheses.
2
Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue, and Novel,” Desire In Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon
S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980) 66.
4
in the unconscious, “the passage from one sign system to another”1. Being “a tissue, a
woven fabric”2, every text is related to other previous ones and is constructed out of the
discourses that have already been existent. For both Barthes and Kristeva intertextuality
posits the notion of a text which is a “mosaic” or “tissue” of quotations without quotation
marks, with a preexistent author exercising agency in the construction of the text. A text,
with no exceptions, is bound with other texts for any kind of relationships, in other words,
intertextuality is omnipresent. With ambivalence as a vital feature of a text, Kristeva
asserts, each word (text) is an intersection of word (text) where at least one other word
(text) can be read (Word, Dialogue and Novel 66).
Two principal features of intertextuality are negativity and productivity. As stated in the
Encyclopedic Dictionary of Literary Criticism, the definition of intertextuality is as follows:
a term proposed by Julia Kristeva in La Revolution du Language Poétique to describe the
way a single work can actually consist of several texts and / or the transposition of one set
of signs into another3. Negativity refers to the process of denying the previous text and
creating a new one, while nonalternating negation is the law of narrative. It is always an
innovatory act to revolt against the previous texts, infuse the new text with elements from
this or that preexistent text, and finally produce a brand-new revolutionary one.
Productivity is another important characteristic. As is mentioned above, no text is
completely independent and self-sufficient. It is unavoidable for the author to borrow
familiar elements from other texts either at random or deliberately, and this brings to the
text numerous possibilities in diversity. Kristeva does not only focus her study on the
significance of the finished text, but on the process of producing a text. Text, as a
translinguistic apparatus, redistributes the order of language by relating communicative
speech, with an aim to inform directly to different kinds of anterior or synchronic
utterances, and therefore text becomes a productive embodiment. Intertextuality is, to some
degree, a way to examine and distil the relationship between the target text and other texts.
The term intertextuality has been used to signify the diverse ways in which any one literary
1
Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia UP, 1984) 59. Further
references to this edition will be indicated by quoting page numbers in parentheses.
2
Graham Allen, Intertextuality (London: Routledge, 2000) 5.
3
Lawrence Shaffer, Encyclopedic Dictionary of Literary Criticism (Delhi: IVY Publishing House, 2005) 252.
5
text is made up of several other texts, through the open or covert citations and allusions, its
repetitions and transformations of the formal and substantive features of earlier texts, or
simply its inevitable participation in the common stock of linguistic and literary
conventions and procedures that are always already in place and constitute the discourses
into which we are born. Since the term of intertextuality was first defined by Julia Kristeva
in the late 1960s, a number of scholars and critics started to examine the relevant theory
and practice from then on. For instance, books such as Intertextuality and contemporary
American Fiction and Intertextuality: Theories and Practices are widely available in
domestic libraries1, and some university lecturers in western countries even set this topic as
the main issue for discussion in literature classes, witnessing an amount of distinctive
attention from the academic circle. However, the number of works dealing with this aspect
in China is rather limited, far to be sufficiently developed. While Woolf has already been
widely recognized, Cunningham, as an outstanding modernist and a winner of the Pulitzer
Prize, definitely deserves more profound and thorough research. Provided that
intertextuality is distinguishingly noticeable in Cunningham’s The Hours with Woolf
especially her famous book Mrs. Dalloway, an integrated study of these two sources is
crucial. Therefore, inspired by an attempt to fill the gap which has hitherto existed in the
study of English Literature, this thesis is intended to explore the book The Hours and its
relation with Virginia Woolf in a situation where relevant research in domestic literary
circle is rather insufficient. Despite the fact that The Hours also interrelates with other
works such as Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and her short story To Room Nineteen,
the thesis, mainly probing into the intertextual analysis between these two books in
character and plot, theme and symbols, and technique, aims to contribute some helpful
results in this field.
Concerning the elements of intertextuality, namely, repetition of specific sentences or
phrases rather than quotation, employment of certain characters, symmetry in plot,
adoption of same techniques, development of thematic reinterpretation, and interaction of
text, author and reader, this thesis will devote the first chapter to the analysis of the
1
Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction is edited by Patrick O’Donnell and Robert Con Davis, whereas
Intertextuality: Theories and Practices is edited by Michael Worton and Judith Still. These are two of the major resources
of this paper.
6
similarities in plot and characters between Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours. By employing
Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality and listing the direct and indirect intertextual relations
between the two texts, it aims to explore the intertextual significance particularly in plot
and characters. The part “Mrs. Dalloway” gives birth to a creative and modern Clarissa on
the basis of Clarissa Dalloway. Cunningham repositions this female in contemporary
America and surrounds her with friends such as Richard and her homosexual partner Sally.
Another part “Mrs. Brown” deals with the dilemma a housewife is confronted with when
both the traditional mirth as a member of a complete family and the irresistible desire for
freedom are tempting her. In the third part “Mrs. Woolf” Cunningham creates a rebellious
yet cornered Woolf image by describing her mental clasps while composing the work Mrs.
Dalloway before her death.
The second chapter will be focused on the analysis of thematic issues the two texts are
discussing, as well as symbolic representation used to better express the topics. It is
satisfying that we can easily find quite a couple of subject matters in common. Woolf has
long been renowned as a feminist writer for her close inspection on feminine development
and psychological condition, while Cunningham’s book is commended and recommended
as “a skillfully wrought novel thoroughly imbued with the spirit of Virginia Woolf and
crafted in keeping with her rare excellence” by The Miami Herald. Both of them deal with
issues such as female’s social role and personal maturity, the paradoxical view towards life
and death, and endeavor to explore the significance of life by approaching its ordinariness
and triviality. Typical images are also discussed, such as party, flower, kiss and mirror,
most of which display ambiguous yet unique feminine features.
The last chapter of the thesis examines the techniques the two texts adopt, that is, the
stream of consciousness technique. Through describing people’s act and action,
Cunningham successfully explores the characters’ mind, digging the “caves” behind the
physical time. The exceptional way of treatment of time both in linear and winding patterns
along with the meticulous design of structure such as delicate arrangement of the
beginning paragraphs are cautiously employed to present a writing style of great similarity.
Interaction of reader, author and text is also conspicuous in The Hours. The writer was
7
treated as the “writing subject” (Revolution in Poetic Language 7) by Kristeva and much
more significance has been attached to the reader. Therefore, this chapter will discuss how
Cunningham manipulates the relations among these three elements and creates a
triumphant intertextual work.
As is stated above, The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway share conspicuous intertextual relations,
and it is more than obvious that Cunningham has borrowed much from Woolf’s writing
language and content of novels, and deliberately molded them into a work of his own style.
It is expected that through careful analysis and examination in different respects, this thesis
is able to uncover the interwoven connection between the two texts and yield some
innovative results and introduce a brand-new view about these two novels as well.
8
Chapter One
Similarity in Plot and Characters
According to Kristeva, one feature of intertextuality is the similarity in plot and characters
of the two texts. The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway bear distinctive resemblance to each other,
for they share surprisingly great similarity in the arrangement of plot and characters. In a
sense, Mrs. Dalloway is a novel without a plot. Instead of creating major situations
between characters to push the story forward, or, highs and lows that foreshadow the
climax of the story, Woolf directs her narration by following the passing hours of a day.
The story is composed of movements from one character to another, or of movements from
the internal thoughts of one character to the internal thoughts of another. The characters are
connected as they walk and coincide in space. On the other hand, as an enthusiastic reader
of Virginia Woolf, Cunningham acknowledges that his works are greatly influenced by her
concept and novels. He opens The Hours with a chilling description of Virginia Woolf’s
suicide in 1941. It is then followed by three distinct narrative strands that overlap one
another, say, “Mrs. Dalloway”, “Mrs. Brown” and “Mrs. Woolf”, developed into seven
episodes while each part is a story about a female striving for a life that she cannot define
or identify. Clarissa Vaughan is a contemporary woman who lives in the New York City of
the United States and works as an editor, Laura Brown is a housewife in Los Angeles in
1949, while Virginia Woolf, the famous writer, is now in 1923, a period after the First
World War, staying in the suburbs of London with her husband Leonard. This novel, telling
the stories of three different women in different periods of time and locations, repeatedly
echoes with Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, either in plot or characters, just like a riff on the latter.
I. Symmetry in Plot
9
The new millennium, the Second World War and the First World War are the respective
backgrounds for the three episodes in The Hours, which are all events of extreme
importance in human history, especially in the part of “Mrs. Brown”, where Dan is
described as a hero returning from “the realm of the dead”1 and that becomes the reason
Laura cannot refuse his proposal. The war is also the general background of Woolf’s Mrs.
Dalloway. It is a time when the war veteran were expected by the society to return to
normalcy immediately but meanwhile few of them could instantly adjust themselves to the
new social life. In Woolf’s original, the setting is London and many of the characters are
members of the British upper-middle class. Septimus’ madness reflects the primary social
ill of the day, the debilitated physical and mental state of many World War I veterans. Doris
Kilman (Kiehlman) is the tutor who teaches Elizabeth history, “degrading poor”, of
German origin, thus suffered in the war, which leads to her distorted grudge towards the
world.
In addition, the title of The Hours is also meaningful. “The Hours”, which is the name of
Cunningham’s work, was originally used in Woolf’s manuscript for her novel Mrs.
Dalloway. By early November 1922, Woolf had begun to sketch out the novel and by June
of 1923 she had named the book The Hours. In August of 1923, she wrote in her diary: “I
should say a good deal about The Hours, and my discovery; how I dig out beautiful caves
behind my characters; I think that gives exactly what I want: humanity, humor, depth. The
idea is that the caves shall connect, and each comes to daylight at the present moment”2.
The provisional title implies that an ingredient has been included in Woolf’s creative
cauldron. By slowing down the pace and magnifying Clarissa’s movements through
London together with wandering of other characters in one day, the writer uses the Big Ben
St Margaret’s as the central image, signifying the chiming of the hours, “the leaden circles
dissolved in the air”3. But later by August of 1924 she changed it into “Mrs. Dalloway”.
1
Michael Cunningham, The Hours (New York: Farrar, Staus and Giroux, 2002) 39. Further references to this edition will
be indicated by quoting page numbers in parentheses.
2
Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Leonard Woolf (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1981) 59.
3
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (London: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1996) 135. Further references to this edition
will be indicated by quoting page numbers in parentheses.
10
The eventual change of title from “The Hours” to “Mrs. Dalloway” reflects not only the
new depth that Woolf’s tunneling process enabled her to give her central character, but also
the loosening of the tight chronological structure she had at first planned to use. Even after
all these years, there is still more to discover in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which is the
reason why it seems appropriate that Michael Cunningham should use Woolf’s working
title to name his book. More than just a commentary on Virginia Woolf’s life, her madness,
and her words, Cunningham draws from literary history and experience to create a new
story. Hence Cunningham deliberately chooses the descriptive name to cohere with
Woolf’s work, and in his story this theme is also repeatedly mentioned in various ways. For
example, Richard resents the endless days, and it seems that one hour after another is
silently killing him; and Laura also feels it unbearable to continue with the monotonous
hours; even the river where Woolf drowns herself is flowing like the days and hours.
The emotional pattern in both stories is also distinctive and unique. They boast a
combination of heterosexual pattern and homosexual pattern, which has remained a
sensitive topic ever since. As is known to all, Cunningham, born in 1952, is a renowned
American writer confessed as a gay man with AIDS. In his writing career he has concerned
himself with issues about homosexuality and bisexuality, and has included much of his
own observation and experience in his novel. For Virginia Woolf, she has a special
affection towards female as well. According to Hawthorn, “many of her acquaintances
were homosexual or bisexual in inclination, and that her interest and experience seem to be
reflected in her fiction”1. Actually homosexuality and bisexuality are commonplace in
Bloomsbury, the literary and artistic group she belongs to. Probably because of their
distinguishing sexual orientation, both writers have adopted the integration of homosexual
and heterosexual pattern in their novels and make it the fundamental keynote. For the most
part, the characters in The Hours have either a different gender or a different sexual
orientation from their prototypes in Mrs. Dalloway. All this gender-bending has affected or
changed the situations, the relationships, and the people in The Hours.
In the part “Mrs. Dalloway” of The Hours, Richard Brown is an award-winning novelist
1
Jeremy Hawthorn, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway: A Study in Alienation (London: Sussex UP, 1975) 49.
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and poet, physically and mentally ravaged by AIDS. Clarissa Vaughn, whose first passion
was for the bisexual Richard years earlier, has settled down with the woman she loves,
Sally, a public television producer. They have been committed to each other for almost
eighteen years, and thanks to the sperm bank they have a daughter Julia, which is a real
challenge and irony to the conventional society where patriarchal and heterosexual pattern
dominates. In “Mrs. Brown”, Laura has a kiss with Kitty, which is derived from a complex
feeling and has homosexual implications. In “Mrs. Woolf”, Woolf’s complex feelings for
her sister Vanessa, though exquisitely concealed behind “an innocent kiss” in
Cunningham’s episode, can be traced in many other sources. Typically in the novel Mrs.
Dalloway, Woolf expressed her homosexual orientation by a brief account of Clarissa’s
secret kiss and her days with a woman, Sally. Woolf’s characters follow the sexual codes of
the 1920s bourgeoisie. Clarissa’s first passion is her friend Sally Seton, but the question of
a committed lesbian relationship would never enter her mind. She rejects her more ardent
suitor, Peter Walsh, in favor of a bloodless marriage to the loving but staid Richard
Dalloway. Now Peter, still struck by her, turns up after years in India, just in time to attend
her party. So in some senses The Hours is the continuation as well as subversion of Mrs.
Dalloway.
In spite of their different sexual orientations, most of the characters in the two novels
embody distinctive feminine features: fragility, delicacy, sensitiveness and considerateness.
They are fluid in motion and rich in emotion, which is unidentifiable and disturbing. They
are conquered by the transient time, and their agony is originated from intelligence and
consciousness. Their unique emotional pattern is more telling than simple narration or
exposition, with the indication that the monotonously unvarying routine of life is another
form of murder to bury human alive. Sex is not equivalent to gender. A generalization of
sex is never applicable when dealing with these two novels.
It is important to observe that both of the novels share an ending of reunion and
combination. The last episode of “Mrs. Dalloway” in Cunningham’s The Hours assembles
Mrs. Dalloway and Mrs. Brown by Richard’s death. “Here we are” are the words Vaughan
says to Laura. They have arrived at where they are in the spatial sense, and they also accept