Re- : An Intimate Look at Virginia Woolf’s "Mrs Dalloway" and Michael Cunningham’s "The Hours"

Revisiting a book or a film is rarely seen as a virtue; in fact, the act has a ring of nerdiness to it. You must be thoroughly bored with yourself, or without a date, if re-watching The English Patient for the tenth time is your idea of spending a Friday evening. What is usually left unmentioned is that for some, re-watching a film or re-reading a book may amount to re-imagining a long-forgotten love affair. You recall that first blush. You re-submerge in the freshness of the thrill. You know beforehand where the plot leads and yet are surprised by its original turns. There is satisfaction to be had in familiarity.

What is more important than familiarity is something that is a lot more personal. The act of revisiting a film or a book may also allow you to discover surprises that you, perhaps due to immaturity or some other limitation of the mind, had overlooked the first few times. To use the “love affair” analogy, you are in fact looking at an old flame from a different perspective and seeing, for the first time, engaging qualities that you cannot believe you had missed all this time.

Over the years I have had the pleasure of encountering the following lovers and seeing them over and over again, taken aback each time by their multi-facetedness and depth. The example I am using to illustrate this point is a double whammy: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998).

Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway was not love at first sight. I was young and impatient, an inexperienced lover. Woolf’s style is dreamy and introspective; it is rich with semi-colons and broken phrases. A sentence in Mrs Dalloway can trail on for a page without making a specific point. The reader is compelled to meander along, to humour Woolf’s peculiar take on reality. What is the book about? It is about Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class housewife, who walks across Central London in the morning to buy flowers for a dinner party she is preparing. Its plot covers only one day, from morning to night (think James Joyce’s Ulysses).  As Mrs Dalloway manoeuvres through the streets of London, the reader is fed fragments of her thoughts about married life, friendship, sensual love, lost dreams, ageing, social responsibility, identity, consciousness, and death. Hardly what one would call a “Hollywood” plot. As a twenty-something reading such a book, I had not been able to appreciate what it was trying to share with me. It was not until I was in my early thirties that I decided to pick up the book once more (by this time I had read most of Woolf’s works) and reintroduce myself. The chemistry was instant. Several pages into the book, I saw clearly what Woolf was trying to do: she was creating for me the verisimilitude of the thinking process of a fellow human being. One of the key passages, which also appears in Cunningham’s The Hours, sums up what Clarissa thinks of life:

Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar, the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June (2).

If the passage seems chaotic and overcrowded to you, it is because that is the impression it is supposed to perpetuate. Life (as it is in London) is overwhelmingly full of sounds and motions. Despite its flaws, you cannot help but love every moment of it. Even the “veriest frumps,” says Woolf, love life. It is a life-affirming passage, and it is incredibly ironic that it should have come from an author who would go on and drown herself before the start of the Second World War.

In the late 90s, I came across the Pulitzer-winning The Hours by the American author Michael Cunningham. Our first meeting was one of trepidation: it was by reputation a literary colossus, and it uses Mrs Dalloway as a blueprint and has Virginia Woolf as one of its central “fictional” characters. It did not promise to be a smooth ride.

It only took several chapters for my anxiety to relent. The prologue of The Hours is a touching fictionalising of Virginia Woolf’s final moments, including even that notorious suicide/apology note Woolf left for her husband that no-one can read without feeling a tightening of the heart. The prologue then segues into the first chapter simply and familiarly entitled “Mrs Dalloway.” The reader is first given the (false) impression that he is reading Woolf’s work, but in fact, Cunningham has cleverly conjured up his own Mrs Dalloway who, though sharing certain traits with Woolf’s invention, is a whole new creation with a mind, life and history of her own. Cunningham’s Mrs Dalloway lives in modern-day Manhattan (an ocean away from London) but she, like Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, is going out on a glorious morning to buy flowers for a party she is organising in the honour of her dying ex-husband who has just won a major poetry prize. Throughout her walk the reader is treated to a kaleidoscopic view of how Mrs Dalloway sees the world and herself:

Clarissa (Dalloway) is skittish and jubilant about her luck, her good shoes (on sale at Barney’s, but still); here after all is the sturdy squalor of the park, visible even under its coat of grass and flowers; here are the drug dealers (would they kill you if it came to that?) and the lunatics, the stunned and baffled, the people whose luck, if they ever had any, has run out. Still she loves the world for being rude and indestructible, and she knows other people must love it too, poor as well as rich, though no one speaks specifically of the reasons. Why else do we struggle to go on living, no matter how compromised, no matter how harmed? (14)

It would be pedantic of me to point out the similarities between this passage and the one quoted from Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. Suffice it to say had I not looked at the cover of the book first, I would have thought Woolf had returned from the grave and composed a new book.

For Cunningham, being an expert imitator of Woolf’s inimitable style was not enough; he had a higher goal. This becomes evident as the reader moves into the subsequent chapters “Mrs Woolf” and “Mrs Brown.”  All the chapters entitled “Mrs Woolf” combine to provide an intimate look at the author’s struggle to put together a book which would later become the celebrated Mrs Dalloway. These chapters paint a mentally unstable, emotionally warped Woolf; they bring the reader into her private world in the year of 1923 and introduce him to all the possible reasons that might have driven her to suicide less than two decades later. What the reader walks away with is a palpable portrait (though fictional) of a possibly mad wordsmith who would come to be recognised as one of the iconic figures of the 20^th century. 

The “Mrs Brown” chapters are entirely Cunningham’s inventions but are no less familiar. Laura Brown is a typical Californian suburban housewife of late 1940’s America: prim, responsible, self-sacrificing. She has married a war hero, borne him a beautiful boy, and lives in an immaculately clean house. All the trappings of happiness are there, and yet her hours during the day are filled with thoughts of desolation. To distract herself, she reads Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. This becomes an obsession as she sees herself in the make-up of Mrs Dalloway and the unfulfilled life of her creator.

As an undergraduate reading the book, I was most impressed by the novel’s structure and the sensitive techniques used to render a fragmented plot coherent. Having finished the novel, I was proud to have spotted the many allusions to Woolf’s life and her work. Imagine my surprise when I attempted to read it again some ten years later in preparation for my IB lessons and discovered that my appreciation of it had altered shape. What I saw and was impressed by the second time around was not the novel’s structure. It was something of a more personal nature.

Re-reading the novel had helped cast new light on the three women: Mrs Dalloway, Mrs Woolf and Mrs Brown.  I saw for the first time (how could I have missed it before?) that this was not a novel about Woolf or the greatness of Mrs Dalloway; it was a novel that posed the only relevant question in life: What is happiness? The three women go through life constantly seeking the answer to that question: Mrs Dalloway wonders if her aging means the end of happiness and whether taking care of her dying husband is in fact an adequate substitute; Mrs Woolf finds happiness in her union with Leonard and the creative process but perpetually lives in fear of another nervous breakdown; Mrs Brown, blessed with a family of her own, wonders if she has sacrificed personal happiness by conforming to social expectations and if it is too late to turn back.  None of the women find the answer they seek, but Cunningham’s message is clear: life without certainty is the only one available to us.

In the final chapter “Mrs Dalloway,” Clarissa, after a traumatic experience, thinks to herself:

There’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more (225).

There is nothing truer to life than this.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. London: Vintage, 2004 ed.

Cunningham, Michael. The Hours. Harper Perennial, 2008 ed.