'The Hours' is a tribute worthy of Woolf

Cunningham’s novel makes use of several overlapping themes, including insecurity, art, women’s roles and how they relate to passion and the creative process. Cunningham’s Woolf often loses herself in her writing and blurs the lines between fiction and real life:

It seems good enough; parts seem very good indeed. She has lavish hopes, of course — she wants this to be her best book, the one that finally matches her expectations. But can a single day in the life of an ordinary woman be made into enough for a novel? Virginia taps at her lips with her thumb. Clarissa Dalloway will die, of that she feels certain, though this early it’s impossible to say how or even precisely why. She will, Virginia believes, take her own life. Yes, she will do that. Virginia lays down her pen. She would like to write all day, to fill thirty pages instead of three, but after the first hours something within her falters, and she worries that if she pushes beyond her limits she will taint the whole enterprise. She will let it wander into a realm of incoherence from which it might never return.

Skip forward in time to California, 1949: Young wife and mother Laura Brown, pregnant with her second child, pulls herself away from “Mrs. Dalloway” to make a birthday cake for her husband and take care of her son. She is fascinated by Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway, and tries to tamp down worries that her own life is lacking something, that she does not measure up to the standards she has set for herself:

What would she prefer then? Would she rather have her gifts scorned, her cake sneered at? Of course not. She wants to be loved. She wants to be a competent mother reading calmly to her child; she wants to be a wife who sets a perfect table. She does not want, not at all, to be the strange woman, the pathetic creature, full of quirks and rages, solitary, sulking, tolerated but not loved. Virginia Woolf put a stone into the pocket of her coat, walked into a river, and drowned. Laura will not let herself go morbid. She’ll make the beds, vacuum, cook the birthday dinner. She will not mind, about anything.

Clarissa Vaughn, too, worries that her “perfect” life isn’t enough, that’s she’s missed something vital, not lived up to the potential of her youth. As she plans a party for her dying friend and former lover, Richard, she begins to think about their long-ago affair and doubt her comfort in her current relationship. Like Laura, she tries to reaffirm her identity and reassure herself:

That’s who I am — a decent woman with a good apartment, with a stable and affectionate marriage, giving a party. 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. Still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe it’s as simple as that. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment. Richard had stood beside her at a pond’s edge at dusk, wearing cut-off jeans and rubber sandals. Richard had called her Mrs. Dalloway, and they had kissed.