The Hours

It's human nature to know our lineage, as well as the lineages of others. We learn often about how vital family crests and histories were (and still are) in many cultures. We hear about Rockefellers and Carnegie-Mellons, about Sally Hemings and about scads of others who have begotten history. Human nature is to know your roots. The same can be said for books. We’ve discussed in other classes the lineage of some books, most recently Things Fall Apart giving birth to Purple Hibiscus, and how one novel picked up where the other left off.

Of course I understood that we were to look for parallels between The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway, because obviously you wouldn’t have one without the other. Even with the parental shadow of Mrs. Dalloway casting itself over The Hours I feel it is a separate from its mother. We talk often about the parallels between the two books, but I think that trying to tie The Hours too tightly to Mrs. Dalloway is almost unfair. It is a child respectful of its lineage, in full adoration of its mother, and yet the text is a child that knows itself well enough to have its own voice outside of its mother.

I was taken almost immediately by the Prologue with Virginia Woolf and her suicide, it is shocking and profound. The clear of the novel is to set an outright tone of sadness, of despair. These feelings seem to come slower with Mrs. Dalloway, only after some pages is the reader aware of the shocking feeling of swirling downward in a funnel. Using the direct image of Virginia Woolf putting the pig-head sized rock in her pocket, of walking into the river, is immediately a signal to the reader that this will not be a book like he or she has read before. I stand by the opinion that perhaps we sometimes try too hard to push The Hours into a place in which it will never fit, while it has undeniable traces of the preceding novel we are forgetting how much it is representative of Virginia Woolf. The Hours seems not so much a child of Mrs. Dalloway, rather it is a reminder of Woof, the true mother in this situation.

I am a great supporter of research. It is something I value and relish in, reading accounts of events and about the lives of people is intriguing. After a brief bit of research I found a collection of articles by I.M. Ingram, a psychiatrist in Glasgow who has put his research about Virginia Woolf’s psychiatric illness on the internet. In the article on her suicide he writes of what is now believed to be her bipolar disorder and creates an extensive, intense timeline leading up to her death. What is most interesting in reading this particular article is how her body was discovered. On April 18, 1941 her body was found in the river by children.

The section in the first part of this book that is most fascinating is when the Bell children find the dying thrush. It was compelling to me, the children’s innocence and Virginia’s fixation. I found myself thinking after about two or three pages that it was a gem that I hadn’t appraised properly. No author writes about the funeral of a dead bird for six pages without it having some special meaning. The soft bed of grass and the yellow roses in a oval around the small animal put me in the mind of Catholic medals, somehow I pictured it as some variation of a medal of the Blessed Mother. The children paid such close attention for a time, then sped so quickly onto the next moment. It was Virginia who kept going back, Cunningham shows her kindred spirit with the bird through their moments together.

Ingram’s writing about Woolf’s illness and suicide made the thrush funeral suddenly make sense. The Bells found the basically dead thrush, and I feel that the attention they pay to it is a beautiful juxtapositioning of childhood innocence next to death. Cunningham shows through the Bells the kind of reverence we should have for Virginia Woolf, we should lay her sweetly and gently into the grass bed and surround her with flowers, she deserved that respect if not more. Her writings and records of her death show us that even with her own tortures she was a woman of innocence in her own way, with a keen mind for the rights of everyone, with the curiosity of a child and the mind of a genius. This book is not an homage to Mrs. Dalloway, rather it is an homage to Virginia Woolf, the thrush of a woman lying in the leaves of grass.