This website will explore the similarities and connections in the Characters, Plot, Settings, and Themes in The Hours by Michael Cunningham and Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Through this analysis, we will better understand how Cunningham expands Woolf's writing and transforms the ideas of Mrs. Dalloway to connect to people of different time periods and lifestyles. The imagery in The Hours is the basis of how Michael Cunningham uses his writing to communicate these ideas.
Virginia Woolf's famous novel, Mrs. Dalloway, captures one day in the life of several characters living in London. While the two main characters, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith, are not acquainted, their struggles, regrets, and doubts in life are similar. Michael Cunningham deemed the novel "Beautiful, complex, incisive... One of the most moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century," and based his novel, The Hours, off of the ideas, characters, and inner turmoil that appears in Mrs. Dalloway.
The Hours, parallel to Mrs. Dalloway, follows one day in three women's lives. Not only are they strangers to each other, but each live in different time periods in the story until a twist where two of them come together and the third is tragically quoted. Virginia Woolf, Laura Brown, and Clarissa Vaughan are all struggling with depression or a feeling of losing control of their life. All three are pushing boundaries in their time period and are caught between conforming to society and being unhappy, or breaking the barrier of society's expectations and possibly finding their happiness while hurting others in the process.