The Hours

Laura Brown is a housewife in the suburbs of 1949 Los Angeles. As an adolescent, Laura was somewhat of a loner—represented by her “foreign-looking” appearance—who spent much of her time reading. She married Dan Brown—a handsome, decorated war hero from her town—after he returned from World War II, because the match seemed too good to decline. Laura feels a duty to perform her role in the postwar rebuilding, worrying it would seem ungrateful if she didn’t rejoice in the miracle of the war’s end like everyone else. However, with one child, Richie, and another on the way, Laura feels trapped by her domestic life, unable to pursue her love of literature. She suppresses this feeling of imprisonment as well as her disgust for her husband, trying to play the perfect housewife. She doesn’t understand that a large part of her suffering is due to the fact she’s lesbian. Laura escapes her world into Mrs. Dalloway, taking refuge in that fictional world. Despite this escape, Laura feels increasingly that she’s losing her true self—Laura Zielski—and begins dissociating. Two main things prompt her to realize there’s no way to accommodate her desires into her life: the aftermath of her kiss with Kitty, in which Laura realizes both what desire feels like and that her world prohibits this desire; and the aftermath of her trip to the hotel, in which she sees that no matter how responsible she is, she will hurt Richie by taking time for herself. The reader learns through Clarissa that Laura’s crisis culminates in a suicide attempt—the only escape she thought possible. Afterward, Laura flees to Canada to become a librarian, realizing her dream to live a life in books. 

The character of Virginia Woolf is, of course, based on the historical Woolf. Virginia is a writer living in Richmond (a suburb of London) with her husband, Leonard. Migraines and auditory hallucinations afflict Virginia, sapping her strength and preventing her from working; however, they also provide her with the creative vision necessary to her fiction. Her illness has aged her considerably: “She’s grown craggy and worn […] as if a layer of air has leaked out from under her skin” (43).

Virginia’s illness is also existential. She feels alienated from her suburban surroundings—which stifle the exciting literary life she craves to return to in London—and increasingly withdraws, feeling as if no one, not even Leonard, can understand her. The nascent Mrs. Dalloway is her outlet: In it, she hopes to express the full reality of her suffering by showing that a domestic woman’s life can be full of just as much suffering as a man’s. Mrs. Dalloway is Virginia’s fictional avatar, the figure in which she both corrects the things about herself that her from the world (such as her literary sensibility and her un-domestic disposition) and through which she expresses her pain and lost loves.

By placing Virginia’s suicide in 1941 in the Prologue, Cunningham inflects her following chapters in 1923 with a sense of doom. Virginia sinks into an increasingly fatalistic attitude about her own fate, coming to think that her affliction—which is both the cause of her suffering and the source of her creative vision—makes it impossible to live the literary life she wants to without worsening her poorly understood illness. Virginia appears to be writing her own fate by developing a character in her book who will die by suicide instead of Mrs. Dalloway because of their incapacitating hypersensitivity to the world. Virginia describes this character as “someone with sorrow and genius enough to turn away from the seductions of the world” (170), as “someone who is, technically speaking, insane, because that person sees meaning everywhere, knows that trees are sentient beings and sparrows sing in Greek” (231). This character concept reflects Virginia’s split sense of self: Though Clarissa Dalloway is an avatar for Virginia, so is this sorrowful genius, who is nevertheless a foil to Clarissa Dalloway. This particular notion of genius also expresses Virginia’s conflict between her literary sensibility and her doomed love of life itself. The doomed genius of Virginia’s self re-manifests in Cunningham’s Richard Brown while the part of her that loves life—Clarissa Dalloway—re-manifests in Clarissa Vaughan. The fates of these tandem characters play out in 1990s New York City, suggesting a certain eternality to Virginia’s conflict.