The Hours

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1998

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-13

Chapters 14-17

Chapters 18-20

Chapters 21-22

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 18-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 18 Summary: “Mrs. Dalloway”

Having gone to Richard’s apartment to help him get ready, Clarissa gets no response to her knock. She anxiously unlocks the door with her key and finds the apartment flooded with light and air, revealing the true extent of the chaos. She finds Richard straddling a windowsill, admiring the day. He is emaciated and statuesque in his astronaut-themed robe.

Clarissa begs him to get down from the windowsill. Richard responds that he won’t be able to make the party. Clarissa feels she’s in a moment that has already happened. She assures him he doesn’t have to go. He responds there will still be the ceaseless procession of time to fill: “[T]here are still the hours, aren’t there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there’s another. I’m so sick” (218). Richard feels free up on the windowsill.

He asks Clarissa to tell him the most ordinary moment from her day. She recounts the beautiful morning, which he says sounds “[f]resh as if issued to children on a beach” (219), like the morning in Wellfleet when they were young and in love. She agrees. Richard insists he’s failed in his ambition to write something that could compare to that morning or any morning. He tells Clarissa he thinks they’ve been happier together than any other couple and that he loves her. He slides off the windowsill into the air.

At first, Clarissa refuses to believe Richard is dead. Down in the lobby, she panics because she can’t find the entrance to the air shaft into which Richard jumped, and feels as if she’s in hell: “Hell is a stale yellow box of a room, with no exit, shaded by an artificial tree, lined with scarred metal doors (one bears a Grateful Dead decal, a skull crowned with roses)” (221). She finds his crumpled body atop the broken glass of beer bottles. She rests her head on his spine. She wants to tell him he was courageous to write and to love. She wants to tell him that she loved him deeply but left him out of her desire for a conventional life. She wants to ask his forgiveness for avoiding his lips earlier that day and telling herself it was for his health.

Chapter 19 Summary: “Mrs. Brown”

Dan enrages Laura by sending a mist of spit onto the cake as he blows out the candles. She remains composed while thinking of how disgusting he is and how she’s trapped playing the role of his wife. She fantasizes about the ease of suicide.

Laura asks if Richie made a wish, too. He nods, but Laura knows he didn’t actually make a wish. She becomes aware that all around her neighborhood, people are following the same dinner routine as her family. As she places the silverware on the white tablecloth, she feels that in doing so she has rescued their home from meaninglessness in the way a painter’s final brush stroke rescues a painting from incoherence (227). The dining room seems like the perfect dining room: The life overflowing in it, the good it represents, stands victorious against the devastation of World War II.

Laura becomes detached from her reality, as if reading a book: “Laura reads the moment as it passes. Here it is, she thinks; there it goes. The page is about to turn” (228). She smiles, distantly, at Richie.

Chapter 20 Summary: “Mrs. Woolf”

Over dinner, Virginia convinced Leonard to return to London. She looks forward to returning to a full life: writing full time, being among other writers, and regaining control of her literary gift.

Virginia ponders her and Vanessa’s kiss. She realizes it wasn’t entirely innocent. It encapsulated something like what she wants in London, something that has remained elusive—a moment of heedless joy that transcends the dissatisfaction that predominates the day:

[T]he central mystery itself, the elusive brightness that shines from the edges of certain dreams; the brightness which, when we awaken, is already fading from our minds, and which we rise in the hope of finding, perhaps today, this new day in which anything might happen, anything at all (230).

Virginia decides Mrs. Dalloway, in her youth, will share a kiss with another girl—a kiss that will haunt the rest of her life as the memory of an irrecoverable, irreplaceable love. As Virginia watches the windblown patterns of moonlit tree branches on the table, she knows that Mrs. Dalloway will grieve the lost love but not die by suicide; she will enjoy her ordinary life. Instead, someone touched by genius and crushed by the world’s oppression will die: “someone who is, technically speaking, insane, because that person sees meaning everywhere, knows that trees are sentient beings and sparrows sing in Greek” (231).

Chapters 18-20 Analysis

As The Hours nears its close, the intertextual connection with Mrs. Dalloway and the intratextual resonances between Richard, Laura, Clarissa, and Virginia become more pronounced. The scene preceding Richard’s suicide resounds with echoes of Mrs. Dalloway and Woolf’s life. Richard’s final words—that he couldn’t imagine two people being happier than he and Clarissa had been—are verbatim from Virginia Woolf’s suicide note to Leonard, which appeared in the Prologue. The parallels create a sense of dread and predetermination in both the reader and Clarissa, who feels “as if she is witnessing something that’s already happened” (216). The parallel between Richard and Virginia makes Richard’s fate a fait accompli.

Virginia’s decision to haunt Mrs. Dalloway with the memory of a kiss with another girl seems to retroactively predetermine Clarissa’s fate: She is haunted by the singular, unrepeatable moment of happiness of her pond-side kiss with Richard. In Woolf’s actual novel Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway remembers attending a party in her young adulthood, where she met another young woman, Sally Seton—and, though Clarissa had attended the party with a man, she could not take her eyes off Sally, who was gracefully smoking a cigarette. Later, the two of them kissed, and, even in her fifties, Mrs. Dalloway now remembers this moment as “the most exquisite moment of her life” (Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Harcourt, Brace, 1925). Likewise, in Cunningham’s novel, Virginia’s plan for this kiss expresses what all the characters are searching for: those transcendent moments of utter happiness in which anything feels possible. Virginia terms this “the central mystery itself, the elusive brightness that shines from the edges of certain dreams; the brightness which, when we awaken, is already fading from our minds” (230). The image of this mystery as dreamlike suggests both that these moments are fleeting and that they are extraordinary insofar as, like dreams, they transcend the rules of life that keep moments ordinary.

Laura’s vacillation between feeling disaffected with her life and telling herself that it’s almost enough becomes more extreme. After feeling in her dining room that she’s living the perfect version of the life allowed her, she suddenly dissociates, feeling as if she’s reading her life from a remove. This radical shift in perception signals a helplessness different from that which Clarissa feels at being unable to save Richard. Laura’s detachment is like the reader’s: She has no say over the story—her life. She thus shares a sense of predetermination with Clarissa. The difference between the two is freedom of choice. Clarissa feels helpless because Richard’s decision to die by suicide is not her own; she cannot choose for him, only herself. Laura has free will, but her choices are so prescribed that she sees none that align with her true self; the only way she feels she can reassert her agency is through suicide. At the end of this chapter, her serene, distant smile at Richie suggests she’s become detached from him (228)—the one thing that she loved, the one thing that tied her to her false life. Now nothing stands between her and suicide.