Film Analysis

The Suicide of the Author and his Reincarnation in the Reader: Intertextuality in the Hours by Michael Cunningham Andrea Wild

In his novel The Hours, Michael Cunningham weaves a dazzling fabric of intertextual references to

Virginia Woolf’s works as well as to her biography. In this essay, I shall partly yield to the academic itch to tease out the manifold and sophisticated allusions to the numerous intertexts. My aim, however, is not to point out every single reference to Woolf and her works–such an endeavour of source-hunting would fail alone because of the sheer abundance of intertextual references–and to strip The Hours down until its threads lie bare in front of me, but to take the theories of influence (as voiced, for example, by Bloom) and their concept of a unidirectional relationship between an anterior text and a posterior text as a point of departure to investigate how Cunningham manipulates and transforms the anterior texts and, accordingly, establishes a two-way relationship between himself and Woolf.

The critical term of intertextuality was coined in 1966 by Julia Kristeva, who — following Mikhail Bakhtin– writes in her ground-breaking essay “Word, Dialogue, and Novel” [1] : “[E]ach word (text) is an intersection of word [sic] (texts) where at least one other word (text) can be read any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another” (66).

However, as Kristeva in a later interview explains, the dynamics of intertextuality does not only take place between author and text but also between text and reader: “If we are readers of intertextuality, we must be capable of the same putting-into-process of our identities, capable of identifying with the different types of texts, voices, semantic, syntactic, and phonic system at play in a given text” (Waller 282). In fact, it is the reader who traces the intertextual references, which in their turn guide him or her towards a better understanding of the text: “The term [intertextuality] indeed refers to an operation of the reader’s mind, but it is an obligatory one, necessary to any textual decoding. Intertextuality necessarily complements our experience of textually. It is the perception that our reading of the text cannot be complete or satisfactory without going through the intertextual . . .” (Riffaterre 142). Correspondingly, readers of The Hours, a postmodern novel densely interwoven with references to Woolf’s works, do not need to have read all the intertexts Cunningham draws upon in order to understand the story; however, a certain familiarity with the central intertexts will lead them to appreciate his novel more fully.

Michael Cunningham makes no attempt to hide his intertexts, both the historical intertexts such as the

Biographies he has used for his account of a single day in the life of Virginia Woolf and hich he declares in “A Note on Sources” at the end of the novel (229-30), and his central intertext taken from fiction, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. By entitling his novel “The Hours” — one of the titles Woolf considered for her novel in its early stages (Hussey 172)–he shows his indebtedness as a postmodernist writer to one of the principal texts of the modernist canon. In The Hours, all three narrative strands are in one way or the other connected to Mrs. Dalloway: the sections entitled “Mrs. Woolf” follow the author Virginia Woolf through a single day in 1923, the day she puts the first line of her new novel to paper; the sections under the heading of “Mrs. Dalloway” are Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway rewritten and reinterpreted, set now in New York City at the end of the twentieth century (instead of London in the twenties); while the sections named “Mrs. Brown” narrate one day in the life of Laura Brown, living in Los Angeles in 1949, who on that day begins to read Mrs. Dalloway.

The Hours, a postmodernist fabric woven out of intertextual references, uses pastiche as its primary rhetorical device. Pastiche, like parody, involves “the imitation or, better still, the mimicry of other styles” (Jameson 113), but in contrast to parody, the compilation of both the forms and the contents of anterior texts is “neither necessarily critical of its sources, nor necessarily comic” (Rose 72): “Pastiche is blank parody, parody that has lost its sense of humor” (Jameson 114). By writing a pastiche out of anterior texts, by mimicking an earlier author, Cunningham destroys the romantic image of the god-like author who creates a text out of nothing; Cunningham kills the author and the conception of him or her as the sole origin of meaning. What, then, happens to the author, who has symbolically killed himself and now is a mere compiler of anterior texts? He reads. As a writer of pastiche, in order to weave a dense fabric of intertextual references, he has to be a voracious and observant reader. By devoting one of the three narrative strands to Laura Brown, the reader, Cunningham introduces a third element into the traditional binary relationship author-text and thus stresses the importance of reading for the creation of literature.

Although all three narrative strands of The Hours are in one way or the other connected to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Michael Cunningham approaches his central intertext from different directions: while the sections entitled “Mrs. Woolf” and “Mrs. Brown” are related to Mrs. Dalloway insofar as they represent the point of view of the author or the reader respectively, the third narrative strand draws on Mrs. Dalloway more closely by reinterpreting and rewriting it in terms of plot, structure, characterisation, and style.

Like Cunningham’s The Hours with its three narrative strands, Mrs. Dalloway is also set on a single day (in June 1923) and weaves together several narrative perspectives, which are organised in two parallel-running stories: one of them centres on Septimus Warren Smith, a soldier suffering shell shock after the First World War, while the other — and Cunningham mainly focuses on this strand of the dual narrative — recounts Clarissa Dalloway’s preparations for a party she will give the same evening. During the day, she now and then reminisces on the time she was eighteen and lived at her parents’ house at Bourton. Her thoughts turn to her past love Peter Walsh and her rejection of his marriage proposal and to another old friend from Bourton, Sally Seton, with whom she was once in love. However, those times are all long gone now, and Clarissa is married to Richard Dalloway and has not seen her old friends for years; Sally having married into a prosperous family in Manchester and Peter living abroad in India — or this is what Clarissa thinks because, while preparing for the party, she is surprised by a visit from Peter, who has just returned to England in order to attend to the legal affairs of his fiancé, and, later on that day, Sally will unexpectedly arrive at the party and thus complete the reunion of the old friends who were together at Bourton more than three decades earlier. [2]

Taking the plot of Mrs. Dalloway as a starting point, Cunningham transcodes it into North-American turn-of-the-millennium terms. The London upper-class wife Clarissa Dalloway receiving illustrious guests in the evening is the model for Clarissa Vaughan giving a small party for her friend Richard, who has just won the Carrouthers Prize in recognition of his literary merits. It was also Richard’s idea to name her after a great figure in literature, Mrs. Dalloway, on the one hand, because of her existing first name and, on the other hand, because he thought that she was “destined to charm, to prosper” (10-11). [3]

While the plot and the main characters taken from Mrs. Dalloway are basically retained, the covert, hinted-at homosexuality, especially the latent lesbian dimension of Clarissa Dalloway’s attraction to Sally Seton, has been replaced in The Hours by overt homosexual relationships. Clarissa, now an old hippy, lives together with her partner Sally Seton in a flat on West Tenth Street in New York City, and her lost love Richard, with whom she and Louis formed a love triangle in the sixties and who then entered a long-term relationship with Louis, is now a victim of AIDS.

However, Cunningham inverts the heterosexual pattern of Mrs. Dalloway in favour of homosexual relationships not only for the protagonists but also for minor characters. While the Clarissa of Mrs.

Dalloway is vexed by her daughter Elizabeth being “closeted” in her room with Miss Kilman, her private tutor with a missionary zeal for Christianity (130), in The Hours, Clarissa regrets that she cannot buy a lovely little black dress for her daughter Julia because she is “in thrall to a queer theorist and insists on T-shirts and combat boots” (23). Mary Krull, like Miss Kilman living on the verge of poverty, is seized by a missionary zeal for feminism, “going to jail for her various causes” and “lecturing passionately at NYU about the sorry masquerade known as gender” (23). And correspondingly, Hugh Whitbread, whom Clarissa Dalloway meets in Green Park and who tells her that he and his wife Evelyn have just come up to London because Evelyn has “some internal ailment” (8), keeps his initials, though switched, and is rewritten as Walter Hardy, whom Clarissa Vaughan meets in Washington Square Park and who is staying in New York for the weekend because his partner Evan, who is ill with AIDS, feels better on a new drug cocktail and wants to go dancing (15-19). And while the “admirable Hugh” (7) “with his little job at Court” (8) likes “nothing better than doing kindness” (190), the end-of-the-millennium gay equivalent of a court flatterer is a writer of queer romances: “Walter Hardy . . . makes an obscene amount of money writing romance novels about love and loss among perfectly muscled young men” (17). Hugh Whitbread, who possesses “the art of writing letters to the Times” (121) and helps Lady Bruton draft a letter to the editor, is echoed in Walter Hardy, who “writes embarrassingly lavish blurbs for younger writers” (18) and who writes the screen play for a thriller with a gay hero starring the gay actor Oliver St. Ives (175-6).

Even though the predominant homosexual relationships in The Hours both invert and mirror the heterosexual structure of the relationships in Mrs. Dalloway, the essential character traits and the fundamental plot are retained and serve Cunningham as a structural framework. For instance, when Richard Dalloway is invited for lunch by Lady Bruton to help her draft a letter to the Times together with Hugh Whitbread and Clarissa Dalloway is not invited and feels passed over; The Hours offers an echo of this in Oliver St. Ives’s lunch invitation to Sally alone and Clarissa draws the conclusion that she is not interesting enough for the film star: “He probably thought Clarissa was a wife; only a wife” (94). Cunningham continues using the original plot as a framework when Hugh and Sally, after having had lunch with Oliver St. Ives, enter an expensive fashion shop — a jeweller in Mrs. Dalloway (125) — because Hugh wants to buy a present for his ill partner Evan (180) and Sally remembers her past failures to find the perfect present for Clarissa (181) and her failure to put her love for Clarissa into words (182). Subsequently, she buys a bouquet of yellow roses for Clarissa (184) — in Mrs. Dalloway, Richard, too shy to say “I love you,” buys a bunch of red and white roses (127).

While Cunningham’s characterisation originates in Woolf’s characters with their concealed homosexual feelings and updates them for the end of the millennium when everybody has come out of the closet, he basically retains the plot. And he proceeds in the same way when he takes Woolf’s style as a starting point, from which his own style gradually evolves, though remaining faithful to the anterior text. A juxtaposition of the two beginnings — the beginning of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway serving as a model for Cunningham’s beginning of the narrative strand “Mrs. Dalloway” — demonstrates in what ways the previous style is adapted but also adopted:

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning–fresh as if issued to children on the beach.

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?” (Woolf 5)

This early-morning scene of Clarissa Dalloway about to go out and buy the flowers for the party,

represented in free indirect style, is echoed in The Hours, as is the way Clarissa experiences the fresh Westminster morning, and her thought that the doors would be taken off the hinges, which triggers the nostalgic memory of her opening the door onto a similar morning, accompanied by the squeak of the hinges:

There are still the flowers to buy. Clarissa feigns exasperation (though she loves doing errands like this), leaves Sally cleaning the bathroom, and runs out, promising to be back in half an hour.

The vestibule door opens onto a June morning so fine and scrubbed Clarissa pauses at the threshold as she would at the edge of a pool, watching the turquoise water lapping at the tiles, the liquid nets of sun wavering in the blue depths. As if standing at the edge of a pool she delays for a moment the plunge, the quick membrane of chill, the plain shock of immersion what a thrill, what a shock. She feels every bit as good as she did that day in Wellfleet, at the age of eighteen, stepping out through the glass doors into a day very much like this one, fresh and almost painfully clear, rampant with growth. There were dragonflies zigzagging among the cattails. There was a grassy smell sharpened by pine sap. Richard came out behind her, put a hand on her shoulder, and said, “Why, hello, Mrs. Dalloway.” (Cunningham 9-10)

Cunningham thus re-voices Mrs. Dalloway from the very first sentence by beginning in medias res with some flowers which have to be bought. In the manner of the stream of consciousness, the reader is confronted with the two characters Clarissa and Sally without any introductory information. The stepping through a door into a new day and Woolf’s conception of it as “a plunge” and other similar metaphors connected with water (“beach,” “wave”) are elaborated in The Hours into the image of Clarissa pausing at the threshold “as she would at the edge of a pool, watching the turquoise water lapping at the tiles, the liquid nets of sun wavering in the blue depths. As if standing at the edge of a pool she delays for a moment the plunge, the quick membrane of chill, the plain shock of immersion” (9). Cunningham thus does not simply copy Woolf’s imagery; on the contrary, the images generate new associations, which are developed further into new images.

Cunningham’s “What a thrill, what a shock” (10) echoes Woolf’s ejaculations “What a lark! What a plunge!” (5), which mark a transition from the initial scene to the flashback in which Clarissa reminisces about her time at Bourton, her parents’ country house, herself at age eighteen and also past love Peter Walsh (which Woolf introduces here). This is rewritten in The Hours, where the eighteen-year-old Clarissa

paralleling her namesake in Mrs. Dalloway — is standing at the door leading out into the garden of her parents’ house and then plunges into a new day, her now-lost love Richard following and addressing her with her nickname Mrs. Dalloway. As a comparison of these two beginnings shows, Cunningham adopts but also adapts Woolf’s style as if he were a painter copying one of the old masters in order to come to a better understanding of the anterior (modernist) style and, at the same time, to improve his own (postmodernist) style. Cunningham does not simply edit his intertext for the twenty-first century, but he uses it as a framework from which he gradually liberates himself, developing his own style and his own ideas, and yet he frequently reverts to his intertext, consulting it as if it were a style manual.

Cunningham continues his style exercise when he copies the Mrs. Dalloway passage in which an outside view of Clarissa is introduced and she is seen from the perspective of Scrope Purvis, whose route through London briefly intersects with hers when she is waiting to cross Victoria Street (6). In The Hours, then, this scene is expanded and Scrope Purvis’s comparison of Clarissa to a bird is converted into Willie Bass’s more sarcastic description of her as “a female mammoth already up to its knees in the tar, taking a rest between efforts, standing bulky and proud, almost nonchalant . . .” (13).

And so does Cunningham revert to his intertext in his description of Clarissa’s love for the cacophony of the city. Clarissa Dalloway, having crossed Victoria Street, hears Big Ben striking the hour and is delighted by the sounds of London:

. . . Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air they love life. In people’s eyes, in the swing, the tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June. (6)

Cunningham retains this fascination for the urban cacophony, although he updates some of the by now-outmoded sounds which were reverberating through the London of the twenties, such as the shuffling of the sandwich men, the brass bands, and the barrel organs: men whisper offers of drugs (not to her) and three black girls whiz past on roller skates and the old woman sings, tunelessly,Still, she loves the world for being rude and indestructible, and she knows other people must love it tooWheels buzzing on concrete . . . the bleat of car horns and the strum of guitars (that ragged group over there, three boys and a girl, could they possibly be playing “Eight Miles High”?); leaves shimmering on the trees; a spotted dog chasing pigeons and a passing radio playing “Always love you” as the woman in the black dress stands under the arch singing (14-15)

For his style exercise, Michael Cunningham draws upon his central intertext not only — as I have demonstrated above — at the beginning of his updated version of Mrs. Dalloway, but he continues to use Mrs. Dalloway as a framework throughout the whole novel. Parallel to Cunningham’s citation of Mrs. Dalloway in terms of plot, structure, characterisation and style, Richard, the author in the text, recalls Cunningham’s intertext when he insists on naming Clarissa Vaughan after a great figure in literature: “The name Mrs. Dalloway had been Richard’s idea–a conceit tossed off one drunken dormitory night as he assured her that Vaughan was not the proper name for her. She should, he’d said, be named after a great figure in literature she was destined to charm, to prosper” (10-11).

However, he not only teases Clarissa with her nickname, he also quotes her namesake when he says to her: “It’s always wonderful to see you, Mrs. Dalloway” (67). He thus parodies Clarissa Dalloway, who in a letter to Peter Walsh after his surprise visit writes “how heavenly it was to see him” (170) and who later at the party says to every guest: “How delightful to see you!” (184). Cunningham carries on with this interplay between Richard, the author embedded in the text, and his quotations of Mrs. Dalloway when Clarissa Vaughan tells Richard how beautiful and fresh the morning was and he replies: “Fresh as if issued to children on a beach” (199). At the end of his life, he cites a line taken from the beginning of Mrs. Dalloway (5).

Cunningham, by undermining a canonical text and yet drawing on it, manipulates a continuous parallel between modernism and postmodernism, and this is duplicated in a mise-en-abyme when Richard, the fictionalised author, pays homage to and yet mocks Mrs. Dalloway. Richard, the fictionalised author in The Hours quoting Mrs. Dalloway, may be understood as the internal repetition of Cunningham, the author of the story as a whole. Richard, however, goes beyond Mrs. Dalloway, and his last words — “I don’t think two people could have been happier than we’ve been” (200) — quote the famous letter Virginia Woolf wrote to her husband three days before she committed suicide; a direct quotation of the entire letter can be found in the prologue to The Hours, where her suicide is related (6-7). With his last words quoting Virginia Woolf, Richard imitates the suicide of another author. Therefore, his suicide, on the one hand, imitates life and, on the other hand, imitates art as it distinctly echoes the suicide of Septimus Warren Smith. In Mrs. Dalloway, it is his suicide that connects the isolated subplot with the main plot in a most ephemeral way when Lady Bradshaw and Sir William Bradshaw, the doctor who was treating Septimus, give the suicide of “a young man” as the reason for their delayed arrival at Mrs. Dalloway’s party (201). In the same way that Woolf,

throughout the novel, leaves the reader puzzled regarding whether the two plots should ever connect and what the missing link would be, the final dénouement in The Hours with the merging of the two independent plots — arranged around Clarissa Vaughan and Laura Brown respectively — catches the reader unawares when he or she discovers with surprise that the old widow living across from Richard is his mother Laura Brown (221)–throughout the novel, the reader has been following a day in her and her son Richard’s life five decades earlier.

While Mrs. Dalloway is the central intertext, it is not the only work by Virginia Woolf that Michael

Cunningham draws upon. One of those texts partly rewritten and woven into The Hours is — though not explicitly referred to — “A Sketch of the Past.: This draft memoir is not only Woolf’s most extended autobiographical statement but also discusses on a metalevel the “fictional” nature of all biography and autobiography. Woolf argues here that any representation of the past (which is based on “facts”) is actively shaped and changed by our memory and, therefore, fictionalised. Woolf begins with her earliest memories:

— I begin: the first memory.

This was of red and purple flowers on a black ground — my mother’s dress; and she was sitting either in a train or in an omnibus, and I was on her lap. I therefore saw the flowers she was wearing very close; and can still see purple and red and blue, I think, against the black; they must have been anemones, I suppose. Perhaps we were going to St Ives; more probably, for from the light it must have been evening, we were coming back to London. But it is more convenient artistically to suppose that we were going to St Ives, for that will lead to my other memory, which also seems to be my first memory, and in fact it is the most important of all my memories It is of lying half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery at St Ives. It is of hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach; and then breaking, one, two, one, two, behind a yellow blind. It is of hearing the blind draw its little acorn across the floor as the wind blew the blind out. It is of lying and hearing this splash and seeing this light, and feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive. (64-5)

Not only is it hardly accidental that Cunningham re-uses the name of the seaside town in Cornwall where Woolf spent her childhood summers with her family as a family name for one of the characters, Oliver St. Ives (89), but he also adopts and adapts the content and the style of this passage as he did with Mrs. Dalloway. However, despite being taken from an autobiographical essay recalling Woolf’s childhood, it is not rewritten into one of the sections entitled “Mrs. Woolf” but is used as a model for the description of Clarissa Vaughan’s earliest memories:

Standing in front of the bookstore window, she is visited by an old memory, a tree branch tapping against a window as, from somewhere else (downstairs?), faint music, the low moan of a jazz band, started up on a phonograph. It is not her first memory (that seems to involve a snail crawling over the lip of a curb) or even her second (her mother’s straw sandals, or maybe the two are reversed), but this memory more than any other feels urgent and deeply, almost supernaturally comforting. Clarissa would have been in a house in Wisconsin, probably; one of the many her parents rented during the summers (rarely the same one twice each proved to have some defect for her mother to stitch into her ongoing narrative, the Vaughan Family’s Trail of Tears Tour of the Wisconsin Dells). Clarissa would have been three or four, in a house to which she would never return, about which she retains no recollection except this, utterly distinct, clearer than some things that happened yesterday: 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. (22-3)

A detailed comparison of this passage with its intertext shows in what ways Cunningham (while keeping

the original scene of a holiday house rented out for the summer) again updates and transfers the content to a North-American setting more than half a century later but essentially retains the style of the intertext, even though he adjusts the first-person narrative to the third person and, consequently, abandons the metalevel, on which Woolf as the author perceives literature’s need for altering the past in order to gain more fluid transitions. However, the uncertainty when recollecting the past is expressed by both Virginia Woolf and Clarissa Vaughan in their difficulty in pinpointing their very first memory. They both at first describe a visual memory, which is then abandoned for a more important aural memory, which itself can be broken down into two separate rhythmical aural sensations: in Woolf’s text, the breaking of the waves in the distance and the wind blowing the blind out, which in its turn draws its acorn across the floor, whereas in Cunningham’s text, the wind is the cause for the tree branch tapping against the window, and Clarissa can make out faint music from a phonograph. And they both experience a strong emotion of being alive and of immense joy at this moment, though the words chosen to depict this moment are not the same.

In “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf also describes what she calls “moments of being,” exceptional moments in which “something happened so violently that I have remembered it all my life” (70). They form a contrast to the “moments of non-being,” the greater part of the day which is “not lived consciously” (70). Modelled on these two terms coined by Woolf, Cunningham introduces the notion of “unbeing”: upon her return from the hotel, where she had spent the afternoon reading Mrs. Dalloway, Laura Brown “is overtaken by a sensation of unbeing. There is no other word for it she is no one, she is nothing” (188). After having spent a couple of hours on her own outside her role as a wife and mother, she feels that she has “slipped out of her life” (188). Even though Cunningham does not explicitly declare “A Sketch of the Past” as an intertext for The Hours, the strongly implied similarities between the two passages presented here and the creative manner in which Cunningham deals with his intertext are not lost on an attentive reader familiar with Woolf’s major works.

However, The Hours echoes not only — as shown above — Woolf’s works in terms of style and plot but also in terms of ideas. That Cunningham names one character “Mrs. Brown” is not purely accidental, moreover, it is an intertextual reference to Woolf’s article “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” which formed the basis for the paper “Character in Fiction” (which was later issued as a pamphlet under its original title). In these two essays — both exerted a powerful influence on literary modernism — Woolf evokes the figure of Mrs. Brown, who rose before her and said: “My name is Brown. Catch me if you can” (Character 420). The capture of Mrs. Brown, the representation of the character who is “eternal” and stands for “human nature” (430), is the major purpose of any novel. The (modernist) writer “must set about to remake the woman after his own idea” (Mr. Bennett 387); “it is from the gleams and flashes of this flying spirit that he must create solid, living, flesh-and-blood Mrs. Brown” (388). In The Hours, the only protagonist who is neither based on historical facts (like the characters in the biographical sections on Mrs. Woolf) nor on fiction (like the characters in the sections rewriting Mrs. Dalloway) is Laura Brown. It seems as if Cunningham had set out here on the pursuit of Mrs. Brown, as if he was going to “remake the woman after his own idea,” but — as I am going to show — the character of Laura Brown is not entirely free of intertextual references, not even of references to the essay which discusses the very idea of Mrs. Brown, in which Woolf, during a journey in a railway carriage, invents a story for the woman sitting opposite her and whom she comes to call “Mrs. Brown.” She imagines “that, having been deserted, or left a widow, years ago, she had led an anxious, harried life, bringing up an only son, perhaps, who, as likely as not, was by this time beginning to go to the bad” (Character 423). And so is Laura Brown at the end of the novel all alone, after her ex-husband has been carried off by liver cancer, her daughter has been killed by a drunk driver and her son, the only member of the family left, has committed suicide (222).

The — for the novelist, imperative — pursuit of Mrs. Brown, however, is not the only concept Cunningham takes from Woolf’s works and rewrites into The Hours. In her paper “Professions for Women,” Woolf speaks of her own professional experience as a woman writer and the obstacles she encountered first while reviewing other writers and then while writing novels. One obstacle for the professional woman writer of her generation was The Angel in the House:

I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was a chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it — in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. (1987)

This phantom of The Angel in the House — which Woolf, acting in self-defence, had to kill in the end in order to be able to write freely — is modelled on the heroine of Coventry Patmore’s long poem of the same name, itself an intertext to Cunningham’s intertext. This best-seller of the Victorian era (Woolf’s mother owned a copy of it with a personal inscription by the author himself) is dedicated to Patmore’s first wife and expresses the Victorian ideal of married love. It tells the courtship and marriage of Honoria, a g