The Hours

Cunningham uses immersion in water, whether actual or figurative, to symbolize a kind of Buddhist presence in the world, an attunement to the true nature of things. This state of mind is absent of anxiety, insecurity, loss, and sehnsucht.

When Clarissa first steps outside into the beautiful June morning, she feels as if she were about to dive into a pool, “[a]s if standing at the edge of a pool she delays for a moment the plunge, the quick membrane of chill, the plain shock of immersion” (18). Entering the outside world is akin to diving into water: Just as Clarissa is surrounded on all sides by the profusion of life in New York City, so too is a body surrounded and supported by water. The city is so immersive it pushes all of Clarissa’s inner conflicts out of her mind, replacing them with an engrossing, deeply satisfying world through which to swim. Clarissa loves everything she sees, from the decaying to the flowering, because she reads in these things a meaning beyond language: “[E]verything in the world is part of a vast, inscrutable intention and everything in the world has its own secret name [...] the sight and feel of the thing itself” (19-20). For Clarissa, this immersion in life, where her self dissolves into the surrounding world, is more pleasurable than literature or any of her relationships.

While the outside world is metaphorical water for Clarissa, literature is such for Laura. To escape her unhappy life, Laura immerses herself in Mrs. Dalloway. Not only does she physically distance herself from her family in reading—remaining in bed and longing to return there after going downstairs to her family—she also enters another world mentally. While reading, she feels like a beached sea creature finally returned to sea, “as if she had been returned from a realm of crushing gravity to her true medium, the suck and swell of saltwater, that weightless brilliance” (50). Laura belongs in the mysterious, oceanic world of literature she left when she became Laura Brown, not on the beach, where she feels obligated to join everyone else in the postwar boom. To extend the analogy, while everyone around her enjoys the beach, Laura feels imprisoned by the sun’s glare, which, by fixing her role as a housewife, prevents her from living a life of discovery in the mysterious world of books. The world of Mrs. Dalloway, with its characters and profusion of life, is like a return to the world she forsook; in reading, she regains a part of her former, true, self: “[S]he is trying to keep herself by gaining entry into a parallel world” (47). In this world, the light is not glaring as on the beach—symbolizing discomfort and exposure—but brilliant—symbolizing ecstasy and illumination—the “weightless brilliance” of floating (50).

Virginia’s storyline complicates the symbolism of water, giving it a dual significance. This is nowhere clearer than in the Prologue. In Virginia’s initial submersion in the river—when she crosses the boundary from safety into mortal peril—the cold water and the strong current represent the danger of the impassive power of nature and the violence of death. However, afterward, the water isn’t forceful and suffocating, but liberating: “She appears to be flying, a fantastic figure, arms outstretched, hair streaming, the tail of the fur coat billowing behind” (20). The figurative image of “flying” connotes the freedom the water gives her—freedom from her debilitating genius. Additionally, when her body comes to rest against the bridge piling, there is a sense of peaceful attunement to the world. The water acts as a clear shield, protecting her from the world above with its passing army trucks and excruciating migraines. Against the bridge piling, Virginia’s body maintains the fine attunement she had to the world in life, as the sounds of the world above resonate through the piling into her body: “Her face, pressed sideways to the piling, absorbs it all: the truck and the soldiers, the mother and the child” (22). This image symbolizes the depth of Virginia’s attunement to the world: Even in death, her body remains attuned. For the reader, there is tragedy but also peace in this image of death. Virginia, though, must pay the ultimate price for this peace.