[Vwoolf] BBC Culture on The Hours

[Pat Laurence]

Following up on the Lillian Crawford review, here's mine of the
Cunningham *novel,
**The Hours*, that appeared in *English Literature in Translation* (2000)
in which I assert--that despite certain breakthroughs--he does not "get the
rhythm right."

Michael Cunningham, *The Hours (*New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1998)



Michael Cunningham’s *The Hours* is a novel about reading: a homage to
Virginia Woolf. It is one of many books to come out in the past few years
in which a writer or critic reflects not only on the process of reading
itself but also rambles among the works of a particularly-loved author:
Harold Bloom’s *Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human*; Alain de
Botton’s *How
Proust* *Can Change Your Life*, * Not a Novel*; Stephen Marlowe’s *The
Lighthouse at the End of the World *(involving Edgar Allen Poe). Now in
Michael Cunningham’s novel, we have a fictional exploration of Virginia
Woolf’s *Mrs. Dalloway* that was called *The Hours* among other titles in
an earlier stage of the project. The idea is a fascinating one and in
Cunningham’s writing the experience of reading turns in upon itself. It is
a postmodern critical and fictional turn described by the French literary
critic, Gerard Genette:



The text is that Moebius strip in which the inner and outer sides, the
signifying and the signified sides, the side of writing and the side of
reading, ceaselessly turn and cross over, in which writing is constantly
read, in which reading is constantly written and transcribed. The critic
must also enter the interplay of this strange reversible circuit and thus
become, as Proust says, and like every true reader, “one’s own reader.” 1



We are in a hall of mirrors as we read ourselves reading Cunningham reading
Woolf. We “participate” as readers (and writers!) of this novel in new ways.



Why are so many writers and critics preoccupied with writing about the
process of reading? Perhaps the images on the computer screen have already
darkened our reading sky as we intellectually venture into the Internet
rather than ride the well-worn magic carpet. Are we as a culture already
nostalgic about the demise of THE BOOK? Browse through any popular
periodical, and you will find that the number of articles and images of
technology far outnumber discussions or, indeed, images of books. Perhaps
then writers and critics turn to the authors they have read and loved to
pay tribute or to find inspiration and material. Perhaps they are
preserving authors from the threat of being unread as “story” takes new
forms in hypertext, and on the Internet, CD-ROMs, television, and books on
tape.



Michael Cunningham has written of his own introduction to reading Virginia
Woolf. He remembers he “was in high school, where a very rough, difficult,
slightly crazed girl with teased hair and long fingernails, who used to
hang around behind the gym and smoke cigarettes, proclaimed her to be a
genius.” Admitting that he was not particularly “bookish,” Cunningham
found *Mrs.
Dalloway* in the local bookstore “and the book just nailed me; I’ve thought
about it almost constantly ever since” (PW 11/2/98).



It’s refreshing to me as a Virginia Woolf scholar to read a male reader
reading Woolf: a male reader, a novelist, a male-homosexual reader-writer
reading Woolf. In my attendance at the annual Virginia Woolf Society
Conference over the past nine years, I have always been struck by the small
number of men who attend or deliver papers. Is Virginia Woolf a gendered
novelist? Do only women read and like her?  I remember mentioning to a Dean
in my college that I was writing a book about Virginia Woolf. He looked at
me patiently and said, “yes, my wife reads Virginia Woolf.” Hmmm. But
perhaps this is changing, and it is interesting that some of the male
readers who may be drawn to Woolf and the sexually-liberated Bloomsberries
are homosexual. Cunningham has also written, *Home at the End of the World*,
a well-received novel which presents in alternating voices, the stories of
two boys from Cleveland (one, gay) and their families, reflecting new
formations of gender and desire. It is this exploration of gender and
desire as well as Woolf that motivates Cunningham’s Pulitzer prize-winning
novel. Through reading Woolf and reinventing (and sometimes parroting) some
of her characters and stories, Michael Cunningham writes about new kinds of
heterosexual friendship as well as heterosexual and homosexual romance. It
is this that belongs to him.



But this is also a book about translation: “It is New York City. It is the
end of the twentieth century.” Cunningham translates the story of a 1920’s
London society hostess, Mrs. Dalloway, into an American context in 1990. *Mrs.
Dalloway* is now Woolf’s hottest novel given Eileen Atkin’s film version
starring Vanessa Redgrave last year. In her *Diary*, Woolf announces “I
want to criticize the social system, & to show it at work” (D 2, 243-44) as
well as sketch the society ladies she knew, like Sybil Colefax and Lady
Ottoline Morrell whose lives were shaped by giving parties. They were women
who like Clarissa “could feel nothing for the Albanians, or was it the
Armenians? but she loved her roses (didn’t that help the Armenians?)”
(p.182). She worried instead about the flowers, the silver, her dress, and
most importantly, the “art” of the guest list. For Mrs. Dalloway is Woolf’s
exploration of the “party consciousness” just as her other books explore
other states of mind.  Woolf “deconstructs” the socialite wife of
Parlimentarian, Richard Dalloway. She “digs tunnels behind her characters”
and shows us that Mrs. Dalloway is a woman with a youthful past as
Clarissa, a beautiful vivacious young woman in love with both the intense
Peter and the scintillating Sally. Clarissa, it should be noted, is one of
the few married women in Woolf’s novels with a first name (i.e. Mrs.
Ramsay). She is a woman who finds that “death” happens into the middle of
her party. She overhears one of her guests, Dr. William Bradshaw, the
psychiatrist, tell the story of the sad, shell-shocked Septimus, returned
soldier from World War I, who has jumped to his death from a window that
afternoon. And so, both the party and death--“What a lark! What a plunge!”
announces Mrs. Dalloway on the first page of the novel--structures the
novel.



Cunningham also uses this structure of the party and the death in his
novel. In fact, the structure, the themes, the characters, the author as
character, phrasings, and attempts at Woolf’s writing rhythm could all be
said to be derived—if we attend to slippery “origins.” But
deconstructionists have taught us that such pursuits are futile. Let’s
observe instead how successful Cunningham is in achieving his own effect
intertwined as he is with Woolf.



In his novel, he skillfully intertwines three stories all of which happen
on a single day, each told from a different woman’s point of view. First,
in Cunningham’s novel, there is the story of Woolf herself trying
desperately to work on her manuscript of *Mrs. Dalloway* in 1923 as she
deals with the distractions of a visit from her sister Vanessa and her
husband Leonard’s work on the Hogarth Press, a press they acquired in 1915
as part of Virginia’s therapy.  The second tale, takes Woolf’s legendary
character, Mrs. Brown, from a 1923 article, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,”
in which Woolf queries how she, as a modernist author, is to describe a
dowdy woman whom she observes in the corner of a railway car. It is an
important essay in which Woolf sets out modernist principles for the
development of “character.”  Here she questions the Edwardian authors, John
Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells, who will describe the legendary
Mrs. Brown according to “realist” modes—where she resides, how much income
she earns--what is she like from the “outside.” Challenging this mode of
character development, Woolf will advance the modernist platform, and her
interest in interiority. She will be interested in what Mrs. Brown thinks
and feels, or as described in another novel, “what is unsaid.” Since this
is a review that is not only about Cunningham reading Woolf  but I, as a
critic and scholar, reading Woolf and reading Cunningham reading Woolf, you
may very well say, “leave your knowledge of Mrs. Brown  out of this
review.” But how can I?



The traces of Woolf’s Mrs. Brown and Woolf’s larger fictional questions are
present in my mind as I read Cunningham. How do we describe and develop
“character” in fiction. I read and observe Cunningham’s transformation of
Mrs. Brown from a frumpily dressed 1920’s Englishwoman in the corner of a
railway car to a 1990’s American housewife, mother of a young son, Laura
Brown. The translation of British themes and times, England in 1921 with
shell-shocked soldiers struggling with insanity just after the war, to the
America of the 1990’s experiencing an Aids epidemic and the fallout from
the women’s liberation movement of the 1960’s. The story of Laura Brown,
the depressed housewife, is the best of Cunningham’s three. Here he hits
his OWN stride. The plot is simple. Mrs. Brown is an unfulfilled housewife
with a  young  child who adores her (much like James with Mrs. Ramsay in *To
the Lighthouse*), pregnant with another child, living in Los Angeles. On
this particular morning in 1923, we find her planning a small party, a
birthday party, and attempting to make a proper cake. Delightfully (for all
literary mothers with such fantasies), she escapes her unsuccessful baking
day to go off to a hotel to rent a room (no. 19 where Doris Lessing also
places her suicidal housewife) for a few hours to read (can you guess?) *Mrs.
Dalloway*. The wickedness of modern brainy moms: an illicit day in June
spent in a hotel room reading Woolf. As Mrs. Dalloway says in Woolf’s
novel, “It is very very dangerous to live even one day.” And one of the
messages of this novel is that reading can sometimes save one from danger.



For in the third story in Cunningham’s novel that artfully intertwines with
the second, is about Richard, the young son of Laura Brown. He has watched
her every unhappy mood, thought and action with unnatural attention and
love, and he grows up to become a writer born of his mother, the reader. He
is now dying of Aids. One of his best friends is Clarissa Vaughan, a woman
of about fifty, a lesbian who lives in Greenwich Village, with whom he has
shared intimacy of a certain sort in youth. He is modelled on Peter in
Woolf’s novel but there is a homosexual reversal in the plot. Judith
Butler’s challenge to the “heterosexual matrix” of literature is actualized
in Cunningham’s new glance at relationships. The happiness of the
traditional marriage plot (Laura Brown and her husband) is reconsidered;
homosexual relationships become more central.  Clarissa, a lesbian in
Cunningham’s novel is planning a party for Richard who has just received a
literary prize. But the party never happens for this Richard like Septimus
in Woolf’s novel plunges out of a window to his death, unable to deal with
his deteriorating physical condition. Is there an implied connection
implied between Laura Brown’s depression, thoughts of suicide, and her
son’s plunge to his death? In this novel, the party, a metaphor for the
continuing celebration of life, does not prevail as it does in Woolf’s
novel. The party never happens; death does. And herein lies the difference
between Woolf and Cunningham’s vision.



His novel is the underside of Woolf’s: he teases out the homosexual subtext
that Woolf critics have observed. He plays upon the knowledge of Woolf’s
brief physical relationship with Vita SackvilleWest which began in 1925
just when *Mrs. Dalloway* was published. Though Clarissa makes a
heterosexual choice in Woolf’s novel, Cunningham’s Clarissa and Richard
make another, questioning and creating new forms of romance and
relationship, culturally and fictionally.



But another reader, not the scholarly reader, but the “common reader” might
say to this reviewer: I’ve never really read Woolf. Or I tried to read *To
the* *Lighthouse* in college but nothing ever seems to happen or didn’t
Woolf commit suicide or wasn’t she a lesbian or I don’t know who Mrs. Brown
is or I’ve only seen the movie. Such a reader might say, “I like Michael
Cunningham’s novel because he helps me to read Woolf.” Woolf is now so
burdened with the cult of personality haunting most authors today: her
manic-depressive patterns, her notorious suicide, walking in a trance into
the River Ouse with her walking stick. Death in the middle of the river of
her words. Perhaps for these readers—for this essay is about different
readers—Michael Cunningham has done a service. We read a version of Woolf
through reading Michael Cunningham.



But for those of us who do read and love Woolf, Cunningham can be clever,
yes; imaginative, yes; slick, yes: a writer of ambition. Given that he has
created three ingenious plots and taken his characters and inspiration from
Woolf, what might we now say about his writing style and presentation of
mind on the page, Woolf’s great gifts to the twentieth-century novel.
Cunningham himself mentions in interviews that he greatly admires her style
and has ambitions to achieve it in his own writing, and reviewers, in turn,
praise his “poetic” style comparing it to Woolf’s. Let’s compare parallel
scenes to illuminate the differences. Interestingly, as someone who knows
Woolf’s novel well, one feels the ghostly presence of Woolf throughout, as
if Cunningham has Mrs. Dalloway open before him as he pens his shadow
novel. Let’s compare Cunningham’s passage about Clarissa on 8th Street & 5th
Avenue in New York with Woolf’s Clarissa crossing Victoria Street in London:



She straightens her shoulders as she stands at the corner of Eighth Street
and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the light. There she is, thinks Willie Bass,
who passes her some mornings just about here. The old beauty, the old
hippie, hair still long and defiantly gray, out on her morning rounds in
jeans and a man’s cotton shirt, some sort of ethnic slippers (India?
Central America?) on her feet. She still has a certain sexiness; a certain
bohemian, good-witch sort of charm; and yet this morning she makes a tragic
sight, standing so straight in her big shirt and exotic shoes, resisting
the pull of gravity, a female mammoth already up to its knees in the tar,
taking a rest between efforts, standing bulky and proud, almost nonchalant,
pretending to contemplate the tender grasses waiting on the far bank when
it is beginning to know for certain the it will remain here, trapped and
alone, after dark, when the jackals come out. She waits patiently for the
light. (Cunningham, p.13)









Woolf’s Clarissa:



She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall’s van to pass. A
charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her (knowing her as one does know
people who live next door to one in Westminster); a touch of the bird about
her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty,
and grown very white since her illness. There she perched, never seeing
him, waiting to cross, very upright.

     For having lived in Westminster—how many years now? Over twenty,--one
feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was
positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a
suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza)
before Big Ben Strikes. There! (Woolf p. 4)



Woolf’s sentences here pass through time, minds, and emotion as she
collapses the partitions of the mind, boundaries between narrator and
characters, speech and thought, indeed, what is outward and what is inward.
She weaves in and out of different kinds of consciousness: from third
person narration to Scope Purvis’s mind, to the narrator’s brilliant
metaphor that merges narrator and character, to Clarissa’s mind. Deftly,
she describes Clarissa with “a touch of the bird about her, of the jay.”
She is never physically described; indeed Clarissa like many of Woolf’s
characters does not seem to have a body. On the other hand, note the leaden
adjectives in Cunningham’s description: his Clarissa “treads” the ground in
ethnic slippers, “a female mammoth,” with a slick “good-witch sort of
charm.” Mired in literal, cliched adjectives, Cunningham barely touches the
flight of Woolf’s mind, sentences and metaphors. And herein lies the
difference.



Woolf said of her own writing of a morning: “style is a very simple matter;
it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words” (
*Letters* III, p.242). Those who know the pulses of Woolf’s scintillating,
dancing sentences and expressions of mind and heart on the page know that
Cunningham--despite his accomplishments in this novel--does not get the
rhythm right.



1 Gerard Genette, *Figures of Literary Discourse*. Trans. Alan Sheridan.
New York: Columbia

      UP, 1982, p.70.



Patricia Laurence,

Professor Emerita

English Department

City College of New York

*English Literature in Translation* (2000)





























On Thu, Aug 10, 2023 at 1:29 PM Neverow, Vara S. via Vwoolf <
vwoolf at lists.osu.edu> wrote:

> Online ones would be more fun…. !!! Vara Neverow (she/her/hers) Professor,
> English Department and Women’s and Gender Studies Program Managing Editor,
> Virginia Woolf Miscellany Southern Connecticut State University New Haven,
> CT 06515 203-392-6717
> Online ones would be more fun….!!!
>
> Vara Neverow
> (she/her/hers)
> Professor, English Department and Women’s and Gender Studies Program
> Managing Editor, Virginia Woolf Miscellany
> Southern Connecticut State University
> New Haven, CT 06515
> 203-392-6717
> neverowv1 at southernct.edu
>
> I acknowledge that Southern Connecticut State University was built on
> traditional territory of the indigenous peoples and nations of the
> Paugusett and Quinnepiac peoples.
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Vwoolf <vwoolf-bounces at lists.osu.edu> on behalf of Mark Hussey
> via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>
> *Sent:* Thursday, August 10, 2023 1:27:26 PM
> *To:* vwoolf at lists.osu.edu <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>
> *Subject:* [Vwoolf] BBC Culture on The Hours
>
> I am seeing refs to this article pop up in various places, and wondered
> what people think of the headline’s accuracy: did The Hours (I guess they
> really mean Nicole Kidman’s portrayal of VW in the film) really “change how
>
> I am seeing refs to this article pop up in various places, and wondered
> what people think of the headline’s accuracy: did *The Hours* (I guess
> they really mean Nicole Kidman’s portrayal of VW in the film) really
> “change how we see” VW?  Offline responses welcome!
>
>
>
>
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230808-the-hours-at-25-the-book-that-changed-how-we-see-virginia-woolf__;!!KGKeukY!3_4LjtStkE7B5OzmZ2k-c04wMVfQwF0TTrveUW9eWMJp11qiTdbmdgpsMihHrdmCA0xaz3qay1OeO1V8XJzwgZQXDQ$ 
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230808-the-hours-at-25-the-book-that-changed-how-we-see-virginia-woolf__;!!KGKeukY!w5PVwvRZFQykXOrinAgSOKgcVuep8KtG_uyBIN2_DYpnUfd9xGQ1QtQAvolGGnzW_TN93bZ4PxNdejQl3hc9Zg$>
>
>
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