The Hours

The Hours, an homage to Mrs. Dalloway, is replete with references to its inspiration. Some of the references are explicit—e.g., quotations—while others are allusive and are apparent only to readers familiar with Woolf’s novel. Characters, themes, symbols, and plot points from Mrs. Dalloway all reappear in The Hours, though rarely exactly as they are in Woolf’s book.

Some characters merely share a similar name—e.g., Walter Hardy’s partner Evan and Septimus Warren Smith’s dead friend Evans—while others are composites of multiple characters from Mrs. Dalloway. Richard shares Septimus’s fate—suicide by jumping out of a window—and also shares many of Woolf’s own experiences, such as attraction to others of the same sex, literary genius, and mental illness. Additionally, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is married to a Richard. This Woolfian influence is most explicit in Clarissa Vaughan, whom her friend Richard nicknames Mrs. Dalloway. He gave her this nickname because of her shared first name with that character and because, he asserted, both Clarissa and Mrs. Dalloway share a destiny of “charm” and “prosperity” (unlike, for example, such tragic heroines as Isabel Archer or Anna Karenina, whose names Clarissa might have preferred). Richard also grandly claims that the nickname is a matter of “fate,” and indeed, the nickname appears to tie Clarissa to Mrs. Dalloway’s fate: In her fifties, Clarissa has settled into a domestic life and is in crisis about her aging and fading social significance, just like Mrs. Dalloway. Clarissa only escapes this kind of nominative determinism when Richard dies: There being no one to call her Mrs. Dalloway anymore, Clarissa is finally able to be herself.

With this intertextuality, Cunningham also re-contextualizes a number of the major themes from Woolf’s novel. The attraction Clarissa Dalloway feels for her friend Sally Seton in 1923 England plays out differently in 1990s New York City between Clarissa Vaughan and her partner, Sally. In Cunningham’s novel, these characters can pursue their attraction, whereas Mrs. Dalloway’s world restricted this possibility. This highlights how societal attitudes toward sexual orientation alter the fates of characters.

The intertextual resonances also spawn new themes. The outsize influence of Mrs. Dalloway and Woolf’s life on Clarissa’s, Richard’s, and Laura’s lives raises the question of how much they are shaped by Woolf and her novel. There is also an added postmodern layer: If the reader has read the Woolf novel, they may sense that The Hours characters’ fates are almost determined by their counterparts’ in Mrs. Dalloway. This blurring of the boundaries between life and fiction raises the question of the nature of fiction itself, and to what extent the reader’s own life is shaped by the ideas and character types they inherit in fiction.