[Vwoolf] BBC Culture on The Hours

Fri Aug 11 09:23:25 EDT 2023

 Thanks Pat and Trudi. And much as I am enjoying the cozy mysteries posts, I’m still hoping for more responses to my question about The Hours…😉
    On Thursday, August 10, 2023, 02:02:38 PM EDT, Pat Laurence <pat.laurence at gmail.com> wrote:  

 I meant to add that observations on Woolf conferences are, of course, dated in the review.
On Thu, Aug 10, 2023 at 1:59 PM Pat Laurence <pat.laurence at gmail.com> wrote:

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 aboutreading: a homage to Virginia Woolf. It is one of many books to come out in thepast few years in which a writer or critic reflects not only on the process ofreading itself but also rambles among the works of a particularly-loved author:Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human; Alain de Botton’sHow Proust Can Change Your Life,  Not a Novel; Stephen Marlowe’s TheLighthouse at the End of the World (involving Edgar Allen Poe). Now inMichael Cunningham’s novel, we have a fictional exploration of Virginia Woolf’sMrs. Dalloway that was called The Hours among other titles in anearlier stage of the project. The idea is a fascinating one and in Cunningham’swriting the experience of reading turns in upon itself. It is a postmoderncritical and fictional turn described by the French literary critic, GerardGenette:

The text is that Moebius strip inwhich the inner and outer sides, the signifying and the signified sides, theside of writing and the side of reading, ceaselessly turn and cross over, inwhich writing is constantly read, in which reading is constantly written andtranscribed. The critic must also enter the interplay of this strangereversible 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 readingCunningham reading Woolf. We “participate” as readers (and writers!) of thisnovel in new ways.

Why are so many writers and critics preoccupied with writingabout the process of reading? Perhaps the images on the computer screen havealready darkened our reading sky as we intellectually venture into the Internetrather than ride the well-worn magic carpet. Are we as a culture alreadynostalgic about the demise of THE BOOK? Browse through any popular periodical,and you will find that the number of articles and images of technology faroutnumber discussions or, indeed, images of books. Perhaps then writers andcritics turn to the authors they have read and loved to pay tribute or to findinspiration and material. Perhaps they are preserving authors from the threatof 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 toreading Virginia Woolf. He remembers he “was in high school, where a veryrough, difficult, slightly crazed girl with teased hair and long fingernails, whoused to hang around behind the gym and smoke cigarettes, proclaimed her to be agenius.” Admitting that he was not particularly “bookish,” Cunningham found Mrs.Dalloway in the local bookstore “and the book just nailed me; I’ve thoughtabout it almost constantly ever since” (PW 11/2/98).

It’s refreshing to me as a Virginia Woolf scholar to read amale reader reading Woolf: a male reader, a novelist, a male-homosexualreader-writer reading Woolf. In my attendance at the annual Virginia WoolfSociety Conference over the past nine years, I have always been struck by thesmall number of men who attend or deliver papers. Is Virginia Woolf a genderednovelist? Do only women read and like her? I remember mentioning to a Dean in my college that I was writing a bookabout Virginia Woolf. He looked at me patiently and said, “yes, my wife readsVirginia Woolf.” Hmmm. But perhaps this is changing, and it is interesting thatsome of the male readers who may be drawn to Woolf and the sexually-liberatedBloomsberries are homosexual. Cunningham has also written, Home at the Endof 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 ofgender and desire as well as Woolf that motivates Cunningham’s Pulitzerprize-winning novel. Through reading Woolf and reinventing (and sometimesparroting) some of her characters and stories, Michael Cunningham writes aboutnew kinds of heterosexual friendship as well as heterosexual and homosexualromance. It is this that belongs to him.

But this is also a book about translation: “It is New YorkCity. It is the end of the twentieth century.” Cunningham translates the storyof a 1920’s London society hostess, Mrs. Dalloway, into an American context in1990. Mrs. Dalloway is now Woolf’s hottest novel given Eileen Atkin’sfilm version starring Vanessa Redgrave last year. In her Diary, Woolfannounces “I want to criticize the social system, & to show it at work” (D2, 243-44) as well as sketch the society ladies she knew, like Sybil Colefax andLady Ottoline Morrell whose lives were shaped by giving parties. They werewomen who like Clarissa “could feel nothing for the Albanians, or was it theArmenians? but she loved her roses (didn’t that help the Armenians?)” (p.182). Sheworried 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 ofmind.  Woolf “deconstructs” the socialitewife of Parlimentarian, Richard Dalloway. She “digs tunnels behind hercharacters” and shows us that Mrs. Dalloway is a woman with a youthful past asClarissa, a beautiful vivacious young woman in love with both the intense Peterand the scintillating Sally. Clarissa, it should be noted, is one of the fewmarried women in Woolf’s novels with a first name (i.e. Mrs. Ramsay). She is awoman who finds that “death” happens into the middle of her party. Sheoverhears one of her guests, Dr. William Bradshaw, the psychiatrist, tell thestory 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 theparty and death--“What a lark! What a plunge!” announces Mrs. Dalloway on thefirst page of the novel--structures the novel.

Cunningham also uses this structure of the party and thedeath in his novel. In fact, the structure, the themes, the characters, theauthor as character, phrasings, and attempts at Woolf’s writing rhythm couldall be said to be derived—if we attend to slippery “origins.” Butdeconstructionists have taught us that such pursuits are futile. Let’s observeinstead how successful Cunningham is in achieving his own effect intertwined ashe is with Woolf.

In his novel, he skillfully intertwines three stories all ofwhich 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 tryingdesperately to work on her manuscript of Mrs. Dalloway in 1923 as shedeals with the distractions of a visit from her sister Vanessa and her husbandLeonard’s work on the Hogarth Press, a press they acquired in 1915 as part ofVirginia’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 thedevelopment of “character.”  Here shequestions 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 advancethe modernist platform, and her interest in interiority. She will be interestedin what Mrs. Brown thinks and feels, or as described in another novel, “what isunsaid.” Since this is a review that is not only about Cunningham readingWoolf  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  outof this review.” But how can I? 

The traces of Woolf’s Mrs. Brown and Woolf’s largerfictional questions are present in my mind as I read Cunningham. How do wedescribe and develop “character” in fiction. I read and observe Cunningham’stransformation of Mrs. Brown from a frumpily dressed 1920’s Englishwoman in thecorner 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 withshell-shocked soldiers struggling with insanity just after the war, to theAmerica of the 1990’s experiencing an Aids epidemic and the fallout from thewomen’s liberation movement of the 1960’s. The story of Laura Brown, thedepressed housewife, is the best of Cunningham’s three. Here he hits his OWNstride. 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 theLighthouse), pregnant with another child, living in Los Angeles. On thisparticular morning in 1923, we find her planning a small party, a birthdayparty, and attempting to make a proper cake. Delightfully (for all literarymothers with such fantasies), she escapes her unsuccessful baking day to go offto 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 wickednessof modern brainy moms: an illicit day in June spent in a hotel room readingWoolf. As Mrs. Dalloway says in Woolf’s novel, “It is very very dangerous tolive even one day.” And one of the messages of this novel is that reading cansometimes save one from danger.

For in the third story in Cunningham’s novel that artfullyintertwines with the second, is about Richard, the young son of Laura Brown. Hehas watched her every unhappy mood, thought and action with unnatural attentionand love, and he grows up to become a writer born of his mother, the reader. Heis now dying of Aids. One of his best friends is Clarissa Vaughan, a woman ofabout fifty, a lesbian who lives in Greenwich Village, with whom he has sharedintimacy of a certain sort in youth. He is modelled on Peter in Woolf’s novelbut there is a homosexual reversal in the plot. Judith Butler’s challenge tothe “heterosexual matrix” of literature is actualized in Cunningham’s new glanceat relationships. The happiness of the traditional marriage plot (Laura Brownand her husband) is reconsidered; homosexual relationships become more central.  Clarissa, a lesbian in Cunningham’s novel isplanning a party for Richard who has just received a literary prize. But theparty never happens for this Richard like Septimus in Woolf’s novel plunges outof a window to his death, unable to deal with his deteriorating physicalcondition. Is there an implied connection implied between Laura Brown’sdepression, thoughts of suicide, and her son’s plunge to his death? In thisnovel, the party, a metaphor for the continuing celebration of life, does notprevail as it does in Woolf’s novel. The party never happens; death does. Andherein lies the difference between Woolf and Cunningham’s vision. 

His novel is the underside of Woolf’s: he teases out thehomosexual subtext that Woolf critics have observed. He plays upon theknowledge of Woolf’s brief physical relationship with Vita SackvilleWest which beganin 1925 just when Mrs. Dalloway was published. Though Clarissa makes aheterosexual choice in Woolf’s novel, Cunningham’s Clarissa and Richard makeanother, 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 Itried to read To the Lighthouse in college but nothing ever seemsto happen or didn’t Woolf commit suicide or wasn’t she a lesbian or I don’tknow who Mrs. Brown is or I’ve only seen the movie. Such a reader might say, “Ilike Michael Cunningham’s novel because he helps me to read Woolf.” Woolf isnow so burdened with the cult of personality haunting most authors today: hermanic-depressive patterns, her notorious suicide, walking in a trance into theRiver Ouse with her walking stick. Death in the middle of the river of herwords. Perhaps for these readers—for this essay is about differentreaders—Michael Cunningham has done a service. We read a version of Woolfthrough reading Michael Cunningham.

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

She straightens her shoulders asshe stands at the corner of Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for thelight. There she is, thinks Willie Bass, who passes her some mornings justabout 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 ofethnic slippers (India? Central America?) on her feet. She still has a certainsexiness; a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm; and yet this morningshe makes a tragic sight, standing so straight in her big shirt and exoticshoes, resisting the pull of gravity, a female mammoth already up to its kneesin the tar, taking a rest between efforts, standing bulky and proud, almostnonchalant, pretending to contemplate the tender grasses waiting on the farbank when it is beginning to know for certain the it will remain here, trappedand alone, after dark, when the jackals come out. She waits patiently for thelight. (Cunningham, p.13)

Woolf’s Clarissa:

She stiffened a little on thekerb, waiting for Durtnall’s van to pass. A charming woman, Scrope Purvisthought her (knowing her as one does know people who live next door to one inWestminster); 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 manyyears now? Over twenty,--one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or wakingat night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; anindescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, theysaid, by influenza) before Big Ben Strikes. There! (Woolf p. 4)

Woolf’s sentences here pass through time, minds, and emotionas she collapses the partitions of the mind, boundaries between narrator andcharacters, speech and thought, indeed, what is outward and what is inward. Sheweaves in and out of different kinds of consciousness: from third personnarration to Scope Purvis’s mind, to the narrator’s brilliant metaphor thatmerges narrator and character, to Clarissa’s mind. Deftly, she describesClarissa with “a touch of the bird about her, of the jay.” She is neverphysically described; indeed Clarissa like many of Woolf’s characters does notseem to have a body. On the other hand, note the leaden adjectives in Cunningham’sdescription: his Clarissa “treads” the ground in ethnic slippers, “a femalemammoth,” 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 verysimple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrongwords” (Letters III, p.242). Those who know the pulses of Woolf’sscintillating, dancing sentences and expressions of mind and heart on the pageknow that Cunningham--despite his accomplishments in this novel--does not getthe 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 203-392-6717Online ones would be more fun….!!!
Vara Neverow(she/her/hers)Professor, English Department and Women’s and Gender Studies ProgramManaging Editor, Virginia Woolf Miscellany Southern Connecticut State University New Haven, CT 06515
203-392-6717neverowv1 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: didThe 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!zL1vuRWGd2jH_jaMM8h7MJZa4TU6hMIr-ZmqYb4ZBtJp_-PSOsbDmA6wjv2Cbv9dbygU7OhvguSkIyq0xOtCAQ$ 

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