The Hours
 Virginia Woolf
 Michael
Cunningham
Michael Cunningham
 1. Life:
 Born in November 6, 1952 in
Cincinnati, Ohio, growing up in
Pasadena California.
 B. A. of English literature at Stanford
University; Master of Fine Arts degree
from the University of Iowa
Michael Cunningham
 2. Awards:
 1989: White Angel, ‘The Best
American Short Stories’
 1993:Guggenheim Fellowship
 1995: the Whiting Writers’ Award
 1998: National Endowment for the
Arts Fellowship
Michael Cunningham
 3. Work: teaching at the Fine Arts
Work Center in Provincetown,
Massachusetts and in the creative
writing MFA program at Brooklyn
College; a producer
 4. Novel:
 1984: Golden States
 1990: A Home at the end of the
World
Michael Cunningham
 4. Novel:
 1995: Flesh and Blood
 1998: The Hours (establishing Cunningham
as a major force in American writing;
awarded Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1999;
PEN/Faulkner Award, 1999; Gay, Lesbian,
Bisexual, and Transgendered Book Award,
1999)
 2005: Specimen Days (not well received by
American critics)
Michael Cunningham
 Although Cunningham is gay and has
been partnered for 18 years, he
dislikes being referred to as only a
“gay writer”, because while being gay
does greatly influence his work, he
feels that it is not (and should not be)
his defining characteristic.
Virginia Woolf
 1. Early life
 Raised in an environment filled with the
influences of Victorian literary society:
 Father: Sir Leslie Stephen, an editor, critic,
and biographer; connection to William
Thackeray
 Mother: Julia Stephan, descended from an
attendant of Marie Antoinette, coming from
a family of renowned beauties who left
their mark on Victorian society as models
for Pre-Raphaelite artists and early
photographers
Virginia Woolf
 Parents’ association: Henry James,
George Elliot, George Henry Lewes, Julia
Margaret Cameron, and James Russell
Lowell
 22 Hyde Park Gate: classic and English
literature
 St Ives in Cornwall: childhood memories,
a place for the Stephan family to spend
summer until 1895 (the Talland House, the
Godrevy Lighthouse informed the fiction
she wrote in later years, notably To the
lighthouse)
Virginia Woolf
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Nervous Breakdowns: led by
1. Family members’ death:
1895: mother died of influenza
1897: half sister Stella died
1904: the death of her father
provoking her most alarming collapse
and her being briefly institutionalized
Virginia Woolf
 Nervous Breakdowns:
 2. the sexual abuse by her half-brothers
George and Gerald (recalled in her
autobiographical essays A Sketch of the
Past and 22 Hyde Park Gate)
 3. bipolar disorder, a posthumous diagnosis,
an illness which coloured her work,
relationships, and life and eventually led to
her suicide
Virginia Woolf
 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury:
 Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Saxon
Sydney-Turner, Duncan Grant and
Leonard Woolf, forming the nucleus of
the intellectual circle known as the
Bloomsbury Group
 The ethos of Bloomsbury discouraged
sexual exclusivity
Virginia Woolf
 2. Personal life
 Marriage: married writer Leonard Woolf in
1912 (a penniless Jew); a close bond but
never fully consummated; Virginia’s diary
wrote “Love-making— after 25 years can’t
bear to be separate…you see it is
enormous pleasure being wanted: a wife.
And our marriage so complete.”
 Hogarth Press
Virginia Woolf
 Sexuality: women directed
 A Lesbian relationship with Vita
Sackville-West: through most of the
1920s (In 1928, Woolf presented
Sackville-West with Orlando, a
fantastical biography in which the
eponymous hero’s life spans three
centuries and both genders— the
longest and most charming love letter in
literature
Virginia Woolf
 Other intimate friendships: Madge
Vaughn (the daughter of J. A.
Symonds, and inspiration for the
character of Mrs. Dalloway), and
Violet Dickinson, composer, and
Suffragette Ethel Smyth; sister
Vanessa Bell
Virginia Woolf
3. Death
Events that caused her death:
1. mental depression
2. the ongoing war and the
destruction of her homes in London
during the air raid
 3. the cool reception of her biography
on her late friend Roger Fry
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Virginia Woolf
 On 28 March 1941, rather than
having another nervous breakdown,
Woolf drowned herself by weighing
her pockets with stones and walking
into the River Ouse near her home.
Her body was not found until April 18.
Her husband buried her remains
under a tree in the garden of their
house in Rodmell, Sussex.
Virginia Woolf
 4. Contribution
 1. One of the greatest innovators in the
English literature
 2. stream-of-consciousness, the underlying
psychological as well as emotional motives
of characters, and the various possibilities
of fractured narrative and chronology
 3. E. M. Forster: she pushed the English
language “a little further against the dark.”
Virginia Woolf
 5. Critics against Woolf:
 1. epitomizing the narrow world of
the upper-middle class English
intelligentsia, lacking in universality
and dept, without the power to
communicate anything of emotional
or ethical relevance to the
disillusioned common reader.
Virginia Woolf
 5. Critics against Woolf:
 2. an anti-Semite and a snob:
 In her diary: “I do not like the Jewish
voice; I do not like the Jewish Laugh.”
 In her 1930 letter to Ethel Smyth:
“How I hated marrying a Jew—What a
snob I was, for they have immense
vitality.”
Virginia Woolf
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6. Work:
Novels
The Voyage Out (1915)
Night and Day (1919)
Jacob's Room (1922)
Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
To the Lighthouse (1927)
Orlando: A Biography (1928)
The Waves (1931)
The Years (1937)
Between the Acts (1941)
Mrs Dalloway
 Characters:
 1. Clarissa Dalloway: based on Woolf’s
childhood friend, Kitty Maxse;
 2. Richard Dalloway:
 3. Elizabeth Dalloway
 4. Peter Walsh
 5. Sally Seton/Lady Rosseter
 6. Miss Kilman
 7. Septimus Warren Smith
Mrs Dalloway
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Characters:
8. Lucrezia Warren Smith
9. Dr. Holmes
10. Sir William Bradshaw
11. Lady Bradshaw
Mrs Dalloway
 Themes
 1. The sea as symbolic of life: The ebb and
flow of life. When the image is portrayed as
being harmonized, the sea represents a
great confidence and comfort. Yet, when
the image is presented as disjointed or
uncomfortable, it symbolizes disassociation,
loneliness, and fear
 2. Doubling: Septimus as Clarissa’s
doppleganger, the alternate persona, the
darker, more internal personality compared
to Clarissa’s very social and singular
outlook.
Virginia Woolf
 Themes:
 3. The intersection of time and
timelessness: Woolf’s prose has
blurred the distinction between dream
and reality, between the past and
present.
 4. Social commentary: the flimsy
lifestyle of England’s upper classes at
the time of the novel
Virginia Woolf
 Themes
 5. The world of the sane and insane
side by side: Woolf portrays the sane
grasping for significant and
substantial connections to life, living
among those who have been cut off
from such connections and who suffer
because of the improper treatment
they, henceforth, receive.
The Hours (novel)
 1. The book concerns three generations
of women affected by Virginia Woolf:
 A. Woolf herself writing Mrs. Dalloway in
1923 and struggling with her own mental
illness.
 B. Mrs. Brown (the name from Woolf’s short
prose Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown), wife of
a WWII veteran, who is reading Mrs.
Dalloway in 1949 as she plans her
husband’s birthday party.
The Hours
 C. Clarissay Vaughn, a lesbian, who
plans a party in1999 to celebrate a
major literary award received by her
good friend and former lover, the poet
Richard, who is dying of AIDS.
 2. Written in the stream-ofconsciousness style
The Hours
 Themes:
 1. LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,
Transgender) issues: To some extent the
novel examines the freedom with which
successive generations have been able to
express their sexuality freely, to the public,
even to themselves.
 2. Mental illness: Cunningham’s novel
suggests to some extent, perceived mental
illness can be a legitimate expression of
perspective.