The Hours

“What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously privileged, with a simple errand to run.”

This is one of the many lines in The Hours that mimics in syntax and content a line from Mrs. Dalloway, drawing one of the first parallels between that titular character and Clarissa. The joy of being alive on this morning, with only an errand to run, indicates that Clarissa is content with the pleasures of an ordinary life. As the beautiful morning shows, the extraordinary sometimes springs up within an ordinary life.

“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 that it will remain here, trapped and alone, after dark, when the jackals come out.” 

Willie Bass’s description of Clarissa, as he sees her across the street, recalls a similar moment from Mrs. Dalloway. The metaphor of the doomed mammoth evokes not only obliviousness in the face of death and fading significance, but also extinction: Within this metaphor, there is no longer a place for Clarissa in the world. The description, however, creates an irony. While Clarissa herself harbors such fears of aging and irrelevance—she cannot help but internalize these judgements from a society bent on reducing women’s value to their outward youth and sexual appeal—Willie’s evaluation occurs pointedly after Clarissa’s character has been vividly introduced as the opposite of that evaluation. The chapter opens with her resolute introspection that she still feels as though she is 18 (the age that she and Richard were lovers), and her enthusiastic sense of wonder reflects an immutable youthfulness of spirit. Moreover, her extraordinary attentiveness to the metaphysical vibrance of the world makes her anything but oblivious (though she is prone to sentimentality). Willie’s “insight” plays into thematic concerns with societal sexism.

“There is no comfort, it seems, in the world of objects, and Clarissa fears that art, even the greatest of it (even Richard’s three volumes of poetry and his single, unreadable novel), belong stubbornly to the world of objects.”

Clarissa’s belief about art challenges the supremacy that she, Laura, and Virginia ascribe to it. Richard and Virginia regard art as a transcendence of life, as a higher expression of the human condition, and as the means of greater fulfillment than they could ever otherwise achieve. As Clarissa ponders a gift for Walter Hardy’s partner, Evan, she realizes that no object, even a piece of art, can convey the sense of empathy and human connection she wants to convey to Evan. 

“[A] branch tapping at a window as the sound of horns began; as if the tree, being unsettled by wind, had somehow caused the music. It seems that at that moment she began to inhabit the world; to understand the promises implied by an order larger than human happiness, though it contained human happiness along with every other emotion. The branch and the music matter more to her than do all the books in the store window.” 

Clarissa cherishes her childhood memory of a kind of magic—a tree tapping on the window just as jazz music started on the phonograph, making it seem like the branch caused the music. Her attachment to the recollection indicates that she’s appreciative and attuned to the story of her life. This memory is also more meaningful to her than any book could be, reflecting her belief that ultimately life is more important than art; dedicating oneself to understanding one’s own life is more important than understanding any book, which should only be used to help understand life.

“But this is the new world, the rescued world—there’s not much room for idleness.”

Laura feels obligated to submit to her assigned role in the postwar world. She shares the broader sentiment that the world was miraculously rescued from evil, and, for this reason, she thinks she must take part in prosperity and rebuilding like everyone else. This role, however, entails forsaking her former self, Laura Zielski, who preferred the idleness of reading to anything else.

“It is only after knowing him for some time that you begin to realize you are, to him, an essentially fictional character, one he has invested with nearly limitless capacities for tragedy and comedy not because that is your true nature but because he, Richard, needs to live in a world peopled by extreme and commanding figures.”

Clarissa explains Richard’s distorted view of himself and those around him. The world Richard imagines is like a fictional world insofar as everything is more extraordinary, more suffused with meaning. Richard’s aggrandizement is his fatal flaw because, rather than actually enhancing his life, it separates him from it.

“Oh, pride, pride. I was so wrong. It defeated me. It simply proved insurmountable. There was so much, oh, far too much for me. I mean, there’s the weather, there’s the water and the land, there are the animals, and the buildings, and the past and the future, there’s space, there’s history. There’s this thread or something caught between my teeth, there’s the old woman across the way, did you notice she switched the donkey and the squirrel on her windowsill? And, of course, there’s time. And place. And there’s you, Mrs. D. I wanted to tell part of the story of part of you. Oh, I’d love to have done that.”

In Richard’s moment of anagnorisis, he realizes the folly of aggrandizing his life. He lists a number of quotidian things—things that exceeded his vision of the world, the profusion of things he wasn’t able to capture in his fiction. Too late, he realizes these everyday things constitute the fundamental stream of life and that he has forsaken them for deluded grandeur. 

“The trick will be to render intact the magnitude of Clarissa’s miniature but very real desperation; to fully convince the reader that, for her, domestic defeats are every bit as devastating as are lost battles to a general.”

As Virginia writes Mrs. Dalloway, she worries that readers will be uninterested in a day in the life of a domestic woman. Her goal for Mrs. Dalloway is a feminist one: to reveal an average woman’s suffering in all its granularity and, by doing so, show that it’s just as important as a man’s suffering. Virginia also hopes to save herself by expressing the devouring and otherwise ineffable suffering of existential displacement: She feels she cannot perform her designated role in the world.

“Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you’ve made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port.”

After fantasizing about a literary life with Richard in the style of Woolf’s life, Clarissa acknowledges that the freedom she imagined in having multiple partners could become imprisoning in its own right. While she’s constrained by the monogamy of her partnership with Sally, that very restriction affords Clarissa the love she cherishes. The freedom Clarissa fantasizes about isn’t as liberating as she thought it would be.

“What lives undimmed in Clarissa’s mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it’s perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more.”

Clarissa’s kiss with Richard haunts her as a moment of happiness to which nothing since has compared. That the memory remains “undimmed” suggests the past holds just as much significance to her as the present, if not more. That moment was more than itself in that it contained the promise of a future life with Richard. Now settled down with her partner, Sally, Clarissa no longer feels the promise of anything exciting and new. 

“Her cake is a failure, but she is loved anyway. She is loved, she thinks, in more or less the way the gifts will be appreciated: because they’ve been given with good intentions, because they exist, because they are part of a world in which one wants what one gets.”

Observing Dan’s appreciation of her gift-giving rather than of the gift itself, Laura feels that it symbolizes the marriage’s disconnect. For Dan, wanting what he gets follows naturally from loving Laura; on the other hand, Laura must try to contort herself into this same love because she doesn’t love Dan the way he loves her. Laura is “part of world in which one wants what one gets”; she has “gotten” a heterosexual marriage, so she must manufacture her desire after the fact.

“Before going with Angelica into the rose garden, Virginia stands another moment, still holding hands with Vanessa, watching Vanessa’s children as if they were a pool of water into which she might or might not dive. This, Virginia thinks, is the true accomplishment; this will live after the tinselly experiments in narrative have been packed off along with the old photographs and fancy dresses, the china plates on which Grandmother painted her wistful, invented landscapes.”

Cunningham uses water to symbolize an immersion and attunement to what is essential in life. Here, Virginia sees that family, not art, is the true essence of life. Virginia feels that she has committed herself to frivolous things—to “tinselly experiments in narrative”—and that by doing so has missed her chance at a fulfilled life. This feeling shows the extent of Virginia’s psychological bondage to the societal insistence that a woman’s only role is to raise children and that this alone should make women happy. This expectation is anathema to Virginia’s true self.

“She’s been here in these rooms with her girlfriend (or partner, or whatever they call themselves), going to work and coming home again. She’s been having a day and then another, going to plays, going to parties.

There is, he thinks, so little love in the world.”

Bitterness underlies Louis’s refrain that there is “so little love in the world.” He both envies and disdains Clarissa and Sally’s love, believing that love cannot exist within a domestic setting. In the background are Louis’s and Clarissa’s histories with Richard. Louis resents that Richard preferred Clarissa to him, despite that she left him while Louis committed 12 years of his life to Richard. Now, Clarissa is partnered and happy, while Louis is alone and miserable—a cruel twist of fate in his eyes. 

“Love is deep, a mystery—who wants to understand its every particular?”

Following her kiss with Kitty, Laura avoids acknowledging the intense emotion she felt. She doesn’t want to understand why her attraction to Kitty is so much brighter than her desire for Dan because if she did, she would realize she must abandon her life with him in order to be happy. Instead, Laura questions why she can’t accommodate both of these desires into her life.

“She can anticipate the queasy pleasure of her husband’s lips and fingers (is it that she desires his desire?) and still dream of kissing Kitty again someday, in a kitchen or at the beach as children shriek in the surf, in a hallway with their arms full of folded towels, laughing softly, aroused, hopeless, in love with their own recklessness if not each other, saying Shhhh, parting quickly, going on.”

This scene presents themes of feminism and sexual orientation. Earlier, Laura wondered why she shouldn’t be able to accommodate her desires for both Kitty and Dan. However, this passage reveals an irony: Her “desire” for Dan is not true desire. Instead, she enjoys being desired by him. This “desire to be desired” is not an uncommon realization for women who, already wed in heterosexual marriages, eventually discover they are lesbians. Because the dominant cultural narrative is that a man’s sexual desire legitimizes a woman’s worth (a premise implicit in Willie Bass’s assessment of Clarissa), even a lesbian can feel a confused fulfillment when a man shows interest in her, and she may mistake that sensation for her own sexual or romantic desire; this would be especially likely in the conservative milieu of midcentury America. Slowly becoming conscious of the steep and suffocating limitations in her marriage, Laura fantasizes about a forbidden love with Kitty, a love so strong it’s reckless. This is the vision of love that both she and Louis pursue, to tragic ends.

“By going to a hotel, she sees, you leave the particulars of your own life and enter a neutral zone, a clean white room, where dying does not seem quite so strange.”

The hotel setting affords Laura perspective on her suffocating life. Unthinkable possibilities such as suicide suddenly become thinkable, giving her a sense of liberation. In its anonymity, the hotel room represents freedom from the constraining particulars of her life. The room makes her realize both that she must return to her life and that it’s impossible for her to re-subject herself to its constraints. Suicide appears as the only escape.

“Here, then, is the world (house, sky, a first tentative star) and here is its opposite, this small dark shape in a circle of roses. It’s trash, that’s all. Beauty and dignity were illusions fostered by the company of children, sustained for the benefit of children.”

Virginia is distressed to see that the beauty of the bird’s burial and grave was fleeting. Now, at night, the bird in its bed of roses has no redeeming meaning; it’s just trash. Rather than confront the painful truth that beauty and meaning are ephemeral, Virginia resorts to believing that they never existed: Any beauty or meaning is an illusion constructed for children. Virginia views adult life as a landscape barren of meaning and beauty.

“Better, really, to face the fin in the water than to live in hiding.”

By living in Richmond for convalescence, Virginia thinks she’s hiding from her fear of losing herself to her affliction in London. She resolves that a life lived in fear is no life at all, setting in motion the chain of events that will lead to her eventual suicide. This is her central dilemma between a physically healthy but stifling life and a dangerous, existentially fulfilling one.

“Mrs. Dalloway, she thinks, is a house on a hill where a party is about to begin; death is the city below, which Mrs. Dalloway loves and fears and which she wants, in some way, to walk into so deeply she will never find her way back again.”

Virginia often uses her fiction to indirectly make sense of her life. Here, she shows how her desire for a full life is inextricable from a sort of death drive—the desire to annihilate herself. The house on the hill (Hogarth House) symbolizes the life she is expected to live, while the city (London) symbolizes the life she wants to live, however costly. This passage indicates the tragic dilemma at the core of Virginia’s being.

“This love of theirs, with its reassuring domesticity and its easy silences, its permanence, has yoked Sally directly to the machinery of mortality itself. Now there is a loss beyond imagining.”

This passage illuminates a thematic tension between freedom and constraint. Choosing a life with Clarissa has put Sally on track to suffer a terrible loss when Clarissa dies. Love always comes with loss, a truth that many characters avoid facing. By doing so, characters such as Richard and Clarissa ironically subject themselves to even greater suffering: the suffering of fleeing love.

“I’ve felt it for some time now, closing around me like the jaws of a gigantic flower. Isn’t that a peculiar analogy? It feels that way, though. It has a certain vegetable inevitability. Think of the Venus flytrap. Think of kudzu choking a forest. It’s a sort of juicy, green, thriving progress. Toward, well, you know. The green silence. Isn’t it funny that, even now, it’s difficult to say the word ‘death’?”

Richard’s acknowledgement that it’s difficult to talk about death highlights to what extent all of the characters skirt this topic as well. Fear of death lurks behind characters’ crises and feelings of sehnsucht, driving them to self-defeating actions. Richard’s metaphor of death as nature de-centers humanity and removes him from his egoism, which made him the center of the world. The image of ever-encroaching nature indicates there are larger, more long-lasting forces at play than human will.

“Clarissa, sane Clarissa—exultant, ordinary Clarissa—will go on, loving London, loving her life of ordinary pleasures, and someone else, a deranged poet, a visionary, will be the one to die.” 

As Virginia ponders potential characters, she expresses a dichotomy: Clarissa Dalloway holds happiness, “sanity,” and the ordinary, while another character holds misery, “insanity,” and the extraordinary. Virginia believes herself to be securely in the latter camp—a blessing and a curse. In establishing this dichotomy, Virginia appears to be inadvertently influencing how Laura, Clarissa Vaughan, and Richard—as readers of her work—will think about these existential issues. They, too, will suffer by understanding their lives within this dichotomy, suggesting the profound influence literature can have.

“It would be as simple as checking into a hotel room. It would be as simple as that. Think how wonderful it might be to no longer matter. Think how wonderful it might be to no longer worry, or struggle, or fail.”

Laura returns to the metaphor of the hotel room as a space that allows her to consider previously unthinkable things. Laura’s suffering has become unbearable because her world denies a crucial part of her identity: her sexuality. She cannot imagine any other escape, so she resorts to suicide.