This summary analyzes Cunningham's novel The Hours and how it expands upon themes from Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway through strategic narrative choices. Cunningham sets his three protagonists in different time periods and locations but connects their conscious experiences through themes of love, identity, and madness. By using present tense across the different timelines, Cunningham makes their experiences feel equally immediate and linked. He also combines qualities of Woolf's original characters into new amalgamated characters, further complicating themes of identity. These narrative choices allow Cunningham to take Woolf's theme of universal human interconnectedness to new dimensions, demonstrating how experience can transcend time and place.

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Lydia Paar
English 500
Professor Paxton
12/12/10
Cunningham’s Cunning: Narrative Tactics Expand Mrs. Dalloway’s Themes in The
Hours
Mrs. Dalloway, written by Virginia Woolf, was first published in 1925. The
Hours, written by Michael Cunningham, is a secondary narrative to this text that,
although published nearly 75 years later, successfully readdresses and rearticulates
important themes of the first work: forms of love, the effects of social order and the
changing of social orders the subjectivity of perception, the relativity of time in the
human mind, the struggle with (and definition of) “madness,” questions about the
makeup of human identity, and most importantly, the theme of the “universal subjective.”
Although Cunningham remains largely faithful to Woolf’s themes, it is interesting that he
adopts only a portion of her narrative techniques to convey them; although Cunningham,
for instance, frames The Hours in a single day (as does Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway), and
utilizes Woolf’s free-indirect narrative technique, he deviates from Woolf’s narrative
approach in that he sets his “single day” across three different time periods and divides
his free-indirect text into chapters named after specific characters. Cunningham also uses
the present tense in contrast to Woolf’s past tense, and seems to lump multiple Woolfian
characters into different characters in The Hours, or, conversely, split original characters
apart. Though it was Cunningham’s “avowed aim […] to draw on [Woolf’s] knowledge
and inspiration without imitating her voice,” (Girard) from a narratological approach,

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there is something as deliberately strategic as personally “preferred” at work in
Cunningham’s rerendering of Woolfian themes; Cunningham “clips her style and
popularizes her technique” (Schiff 369) to draw new or expanded meanings from the
foundational text.
David Barry, in his introduction to critical theory, writes that:
Narratology […] is the study of how narratives make meaning, and what
the basic mechanisms and procedures are which are common to all acts of
storytelling…[it] is not the reading and interpreting of individual stories,
but the attempt to study the nature of “story” itself, as a concept and
cultural practice. (215)
Culturally, Cunningham inhabits a different space and time than Woolf did when she
undertook to write Mrs. Dalloway. However, the themes and ideas explored in Mrs.
Dalloway were recognizable to Cunningham as still relevant and important today1
, and
“he managed to branch [Woolf’s story] out, to multiply possibilities, plots and sub-plots
and to intricately intersect them” to create a renewed resonance of Woolf’s themes with
contemporary readers (Girard). The thematic dialogue that blossoms over time and space
between the texts (especially that which reinforces “universal subjectivity” as an
important/persistent cultural theme) is a result of Cunningham’s shrewd narrative
choices.
1 Cunningham, Michael. “First Love,” The Mrs. Dalloway Reader. Francine Prose, ed.,
New York: Harvest, 2003, 137.

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“Universal subjectivity” is a term I define and describe as the effect of “shared
consciousness” between characters and between audience members and characters, “the
way one individual’s being ripples out into others, drawing them from their isolation into
something more general” (Hughes 353). Note that Woolf and Cunningham both use
“free-indirect” narration style:
Free-indirect discourse…occurs when a character’s thoughts or words are
interwoven with the voice of the narrator, enters the mind of the character,
and reports his or her thoughts verbatim, but using the past tense of
narration and the third person, such that the first- and second-person
pronouns of direct interior monologue are absent. (Snaith 63)
On the page, this technique looks like this: the narrator begins in the mind of one
character (in third person but seeing the world through a certain character’s lens). At a
certain point (usually upon observation of some external/worldly stimulus), the narrator
lifts out of the first character’s mind and drops down into observing the external stimulus
from the (still third person) perspective of another character. For instance, in Mrs.
Dalloway, when Richard Dalloway brings Clarissa flowers, we see the world through his
eyes: “happiness is this, is this, he thought” (116). The two characters have some
dialogue then, at the end of which Richard advises Clarissa to take “an hour’s complete
rest after lunch” (117). The immediately following line (that begins the next paragraph)
is “How like him! He would go on saying ‘an hour’s complete rest after lunch’ until the
end of time,” (117) and the narrative continues in Clarissa Dalloway’s voice. The
narrative, although broken by the start of a new paragraph, interrupts in no other way and
the audience is given no external marker that the narrator has changed from Richard to

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Clarissa; we simply feel the shift of one voice into another, one persona into another, one
way of seeing the world of the story into another. Woolf’s use of such a “mobile
narrator” has the effect of joining two characters in their perception of the world; though
two characters will often view the same noticeable object/external circumstances
differently (for instance, in Mrs. Dalloway, all the characters who notice the same
skywriter plane and perceive it to be spelling different letters in the sky2
), moments of
consciousness are almost seamlessly shared…one character, narratively, becomes another
without any obvious separation, and a kind of unity, of shared stream-of-consciousness,
is forged between them.
This “universal subjectivity” is presented, in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, in a single,
chapterless narrative that streams from character to character, as previously mentioned,
throughout the course of one day. Her characters are all located in one city and are joined
by the “mobile narrator” when one character notices the same external world
circumstance(s) as another. And although Cunningham uses this technique in The Hours,
what does one make of his technical shift in setting, of his decision to set his three major
protagonists in “a tripartate novel that moves freely through time and space, linking three
distinct, loosely related narrative strands” (Schiff 366)? The three protagonists: Virginia
Woolf, Mrs. Brown, and Clarissa Vaughn, exist in very different places, over time gaps
of many years: Virginia Woolf, in a 1923 London suburb3
; Laura Brown, who reads Mrs.
2
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. 1925. Mark Hussey, ed., Intro. Bonnie Kime Scott.
Orlando: Harcourt, 2005, p. 20
3
Cunningham, Michael. The Hours. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.p.29

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Dalloway in 1949 Los Angeles, California4
; and Clarissa Vaughn, who throws a party
much like the original Clarissa Dalloway’s own party, but this time in late 1990’s New
York City5
. Cunningham also breaks these narrative strands into distinct chapters titled
by each protagonist’s name before the narration departs from that title character into the
free-indirect movement from the consciousness of that main character into other
characters. Why these specific differences?
I would argue, here, that the chapters titled by name are simply a secondary
function of splitting the narrative into three different timescapes, that they function as a
way to orient the reader over such large jumps in consciousness; because the narrative is
not located in one place and time (as in the post WWI London of Mrs. Dalloway),
characters cannot always be joined in consciousness by looking at or noticing the same
external circumstances and perceiving them in chronologically sequential passages. The
characters from different times and places, instead, end up being linked in other ways: in
Laura’s reading of the source text Mrs. Dalloway, in all three protagonists’ struggle with
madness/feelings of social isolation, in questions that multiple characters experience
about the value of “safe” versus risky romantic relationships, etc. Cunningham’s
chapters are simply frames that move us from one place and time to another, where more
subtle commonalities carry through time and space to join the “consciousnesses” of the
characters: the complexity of sexual identity, for example how “[Cunningham] indicates
that even if [Clarissa] were to live an openly gay existence, for example, she would still
experience doubts (Schiff 368),” or, as Aimone discusses, the importance social ordering
4
Cunningham, Michael. The Hours. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.p. 37
5
Cunningham, Michael. The Hours. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. p. 9

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and change plays in the characters’ lives (161-62). Because Cunningham connects the
“subjective universal” consciousness of these characters over such disparate timescapes, I
would argue that he intentionally transposes the idea of consciousness-connection beyond
the momentary (as depicted in Mrs. Dalloway) meaning to convey that human experience
can transcend time and place, thus taking Woolf’s original theme of human
interconnectedness to increased dimensions, with expanded implications.6
Another technique that Cunningham uses to expand this sense of universality is
his use of the present tense, which has the effect of joining all the seemingly disparate
time/placescapes by making them all equally immediate, all equally “happening” and
relevant. The past, as it is rendered in Laura Brown’s 1950’s sections, and in Virginia
Woolf’s 1923 sections, are given the same weight and sense of “presentness” as the
contemporary Clarissa Vaughn sections via the use of the same “still occurring” present
tense; all sections have a certain narrative equality despite two of the sections existing
further in the chronological past than the Clarissa Vaughn section. This choice of
narrative perspective reflects the time-bending quality present in Mrs. Dalloway, where
certain important events seem to take up more space in the minds of the characters than
6 Seymour Chatman, using Gerard Genette, locates The Hours as a “transposition”-part of
a group of texts that “do not continue the lives of the original characters, but rather use
them as patterns for new characters whose experience is somehow parallel. They
preserve important elements of the story, but move it to a new spatiotemporal world,”
(Chatman 271).

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all the years and hours between these events (such as Clarissa Dalloway’s kiss with Sally:
“the most exquisite moment of her life”), or mere moments in a friendship, as Peter
Walsh describes: “You were given…the actual meeting; horribly painful as often as not;
yet in absence, in the most unlikely places, it would flower out, open, shed its scent, let it
touch, taste, look about you, get the whole feel of it and understand it, years after lying
lost” (35, 149). Clarissa, Peter, and Septimus all spend a good portion of their narratives
thinking about events of the past, only to be rushed along back into the present when Big
Ben begins striking, and they must move on from their thoughts to the next moments of
the day: “the clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her
feel the beauty, made her feel the fun. But she must go back. She must assemble. She
must find Sally and Peter (182). Time, it seems, is something that speeds up and slows
down, depending on the moment. When time slows down, Clarissa can spend it thinking
about Bourton and Peter, and Peter can spend it thinking about her, and Septimus, well,
he can think about the romance of time and timelessness itself: “the word ‘time’ split its
husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells…(68).
Likewise, in The Hours, time is also a moderating, an ordering factor, but time, as
in Mrs. Dalloway, is experienced in a flexible and organic way throughout the text, as it
aligns with human emotion. The Hours’s Clarissa Vaughn “will always have been
standing on a high dune in the summer. She will always have been young and
indestructibly healthy…(131); time stretches in her mind to render events from her past
still part of her “resent” and still unchangeably part of how she views herself and the
world around her.

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For the protagonists in both texts, then, time is a governor of action (things
characters must attend to), but not of memory, experience, or understanding. And,
although this theme comes across clearly in Mrs. Dalloway (via the number of times
“time” and clocks are references alone), in The Hours, the characters’ experiences of time
as flexible is highlighted by the use of the present tense, so that time (wide swathes of it)
becomes even more “present” and characters can have interlocking emotional
experiences (related, as previously mentioned, to themes of love, identity struggle,
madness, etc.) despite existing in completely different cultural periods. As Fetzer notes,
“the present tense of all three narratives underlines the coexistence of Mrs. Woolf, Mrs.
Brown, and Mrs. Dalloway” (67). The characters’ present-tense coexistences across time
furthers Woolf’s theme of shared consciousness, of the “universal subjective.”
Coexistence is an interesting term Fetzer uses, especially because of how
characters deviate, in The Hours, from acting as direct physical and emotional parallels of
Woolf’s original cast. The character of Richard in The Hours, for instance, is described
by Schiff as “an amalgamation of Septimus Smith, Sally Seton, Richard Dalloway, and
Peter Walsh” (367), who:
…parallels Richard Dalloway through his name, Virginia through his
being an author who commits suicide, Laura by his passion for Mrs.
Dalloway, Peter Walsh by being the one Clarissa did not in the end favor
and Septimus Smith by throwing himself out the window. (Fetzer 67)
Likewise, Schiff writes that the character of Clarissa has an identity “neither fixed nor
absolute…[and] Cunningham follows Woolf in that each of his three central female
figures…possess various or alternate selves…identities-in-relation, aspects of a female

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collective self” (371). Although a few of Cunningham’s characters are modeled directly
on one corresponding Woolfian character, for instance Cunningham’s Mary Krull derives
from Woolf’s Mrs. Kilman, more often than not, the “new” set of characters contain a
mix of qualities of the old: “no figure in The Hours is comprehensible entirely within any
single, determining role” (Singer 11), and so identities are stretched, interwoven, and
implications about identity made even more complex for a reader who is aware of both
the original Woolfian characters and Cunningham’s. One might be tempted to suspect
that all identities, throughout time, are a mish-mash of other identities, that personalities
and the factors that create them derive in different combinations from people and events
of the past; therefore, the past is always relevant to people and resonates in their lives.
This implication, the “universal subjective,” is the theme that carries forth so strongly via
Cunningham’s expansion of Woolf’s treatments of identity, love, loss, time fluidity, and
madness, when he chooses specific/strategic techniques set to broaden them: the use of
the present tense across time/place gaps and his amalgamating of characters in the
Woolfian single-day, free-indirect narrative form.
In the end, Cunnginham’s attention to these choices allow him to make distinct
and deliberate expansions to Woolf’s original themes:
“When Michael Cunningham takes up these same themes in The Hours,
including the oceanic interconnectedness between people, the life of one
human spirit animating that of another, and the permeable boundaries of
life and death, the burst bounds of time, he allows them to ripple out in
wider and wider circles” (Hughes 353).

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Thus, Cunningham makes an effective statement about the “universal subjective,” the
shared consciousness of people, and gives writers and narratologists alike a reminder
about the importance of setting, point of view, and tense, and how these elements of
fiction relate undeniably to how content is conveyed.

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Works Cited
Aimone: Laura. “In the Footsteps of Virginia Woolf; The Hours by Michael
Cunningham.” Woolf in the Real World; selected papers from the Thirteenth
Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, Smith College, Northhampton,
Massachusetts: 5-8 June, 2005.
Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, 3rd
ed. Manchester/New York: Manchester UP, 2009.
Chatman, Seymour. “Mrs. Dalloway’s Progeny: The Hours as Second Degree
Narrative.” A Companion Guide to Narrative Theory: Blackwell companions to
literature and culture: 33. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2005.
Cunningham, Michael. “First Love,” The Mrs. Dalloway Reader. Francine Prose, ed.,
New York: Harvest, 2003. 137.
Cunningham, Michael. The Hours. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.
Fetzer, Margret. “Reading as Creative Intercourse: Michael Cunningham’s and
Stephen Daldry’s The Hours.” Anglistik: International Journal of English
Studies 19:1 (March 2008). 65-83.
Girard, Monica. “Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway; Genesis and Palimpsests.”
Rewriting/Reprising: plural intertextualities. 2009.
Hughes, Mary Joe. “Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Postmodern Artistic
Representation.” Critique, Summer 2004. 45:4. 349-361.
Singer, Sandra. “Awakening the Solitary Soul: Gendered History in Women’s Fiction
and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours.” Doris Lessing Studies. 23:2, 2004
(12/22).

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Snaith, Anna. “’I Wobble.” Narrative Strategies: Public and Private Voices.” Virginia
Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations. Houndsmill: MacMillan/ New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 2000. 63-87.
Schiff, James. “Rewriting Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway: Homage, Sexual Identity, and the
Single-Day Novel by Cunningham, Lippincott, and Lanchester.” Critique;
Summer 2004. 45:4. 363-382.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. 1925. Mark Hussey, ed., Intro. Bonnie Kime Scott.
Orlando: Harcourt, 2005.