Just as Richard Dalloway buys roses for his wife because he is too shy to declare his feelings, so Sally buys flowers for Clarissa Vaughan and Dan buys flowers for Laura. The famous person that Clarissa just glimpses is no longer royalty or an important politician but a famous actress: Susan Sarandon, Vanessa Redgrave or Meryl Streep, which is highly ironic given the film adaptation with Ms Streep playing Clarissa.ģSimilarly certain themes or scenes from Woolf’s novel are picked up and expanded upon: the stolen kiss between Clarissa Dalloway and Sally Seton becomes a kiss between Virginia Woolf and her sister, between Laura Brown and her neighbour. The upper middle-class society of England in the nineteen twenties has been replaced by New York in the nineties. The latent relationship between Sally Seton and Clarissa Dalloway is now an open lesbian relationship between Clarissa Vaughan and Sally.
Peter Walsh has been transformed into Louis, and Richard’s lover, not Clarissa’s. Richard himself, dying from AIDS, is less like the husband of Woolf’s novel and more like Septimus Smith, committing suicide at the end of the novel in a similar fashion. Clarissa Vaughan is only nicknamed Mrs Dalloway by her erstwhile lover Richard. If the characters seem all too familiar, their names, relationships and sexes have often undergone changes. By so doing, he offers all readers, whether they have read Mrs Dalloway or not, the pleasure of recognising the various allusions.ĢYet The Hours is no mere copy.
For the non-literary reader who has never opened Virginia Woolf’s novel, and is unaware that The Hours is in fact the very title that Woolf first gave her manuscript of Mrs Dalloway, Cunningham has underlined the connection in the opening of all three storylines: Virginia Woolf in Richmond in 1923, putting pen to paper and writing the first lines of her novel, Laura Brown, a Californian in 1949, avidly reading Mrs Dalloway with passages quoted verbatim, and Clarissa Vaughan, a New-Yorker whose actions one June morning at the end of the twentieth century bear so close a resemblance to those of Clarissa Dalloway herself. The opening of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, for example, with Clarissa preparing for her party one fine June morning and leaving the house to buy some flowers finds its echo in the opening of the second chapter of The Hours, right down to the details of her chance encounter with an old friend, whom she invites on the spur of the moment to the party, her walk past various shops, her desire to buy a present for her daughter and the violent explosion that she hears once inside the florist’s.
1Michael Cunningham’s indebtedness to Virginia Woolf is all too obvious in The Hours, so much so that some critics have used the term “pastiche” to describe his novel.
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