The Hours

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The Hours

• Virginia Woolf

• Michael Cunningham

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(No Transcript)
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Michael Cunningham

• 1. Life
• Born in November 6, 1952 in Cincinnati, Ohio,
  growing up in Pasadena California.
• B. A. of English literature at Stanford
  University Master of Fine Arts degree from the
  University of Iowa

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Michael Cunningham

• 2. Awards
• 1989 White Angel, The Best American Short
  Stories
• 1993Guggenheim Fellowship
• 1995 the Whiting Writers Award
• 1998 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship

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Michael Cunningham

• 3. Work teaching at the Fine Arts Work Center in
  Provincetown, Massachusetts and in the creative
  writing MFA program at Brooklyn College a
  producer
• 4. Novel
• 1984 Golden States
• 1990 A Home at the end of the World

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Michael Cunningham

• 4. Novel
• 1995 Flesh and Blood
• 1998 The Hours (establishing Cunningham as a
  major force in American writing awarded Pulitzer
  Prize for Fiction, 1999 PEN/Faulkner Award,
  1999 Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered
  Book Award, 1999)
• 2005 Specimen Days (not well received by
  American critics)

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Michael Cunningham

• Although Cunningham is gay and has been partnered
  for 18 years, he dislikes being referred to as
  only a gay writer, because while being gay
  does greatly influence his work, he feels that it
  is not (and should not be) his defining
  characteristic.

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Virginia Woolf

• 1. Early life
• Raised in an environment filled with the
  influences of Victorian literary society
• Father Sir Leslie Stephen, an editor, critic,
  and biographer connection to William Thackeray
• Mother Julia Stephan, descended from an
  attendant of Marie Antoinette, coming from a
  family of renowned beauties who left their mark
  on Victorian society as models for Pre-Raphaelite
  artists and early photographers

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Virginia Woolf

• Parents association Henry James, George Elliot,
  George Henry Lewes, Julia Margaret Cameron, and
  James Russell Lowell
• 22 Hyde Park Gate classic and English literature
• St Ives in Cornwall childhood memories, a place
  for the Stephan family to spend summer until 1895
  (the Talland House, the Godrevy Lighthouse
  informed the fiction she wrote in later years,
  notably To the lighthouse)

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Virginia Woolf

• Nervous Breakdowns led by
• 1. Family members death
• 1895 mother died of influenza
• 1897 half sister Stella died
• 1904 the death of her father provoking her most
  alarming collapse and her being briefly
  institutionalized

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Virginia Woolf

• Nervous Breakdowns
• 2. the sexual abuse by her half-brothers George
  and Gerald (recalled in her autobiographical
  essays A Sketch of the Past and 22 Hyde Park
  Gate)
• 3. bipolar disorder, a posthumous diagnosis, an
  illness which coloured her work, relationships,
  and life and eventually led to her suicide

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Virginia Woolf

• 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury
• Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner,
  Duncan Grant and Leonard Woolf, forming the
  nucleus of the intellectual circle known as the
  Bloomsbury Group
• The ethos of Bloomsbury discouraged sexual
  exclusivity

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Virginia Woolf

• 2. Personal life
• Marriage married writer Leonard Woolf in 1912 (a
  penniless Jew) a close bond but never fully
  consummated Virginias diary wrote Love-making
  after 25 years cant bear to be separateyou see
  it is enormous pleasure being wanted a wife. And
  our marriage so complete.
• Hogarth Press

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Virginia Woolf

• Sexuality women directed
• A Lesbian relationship with Vita Sackville-West
  through most of the 1920s (In 1928, Woolf
  presented Sackville-West with Orlando, a
  fantastical biography in which the eponymous
  heros life spans three centuries and both
  genders the longest and most charming love
  letter in literature

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Virginia Woolf

• Other intimate friendships Madge Vaughn (the
  daughter of J. A. Symonds, and inspiration for
  the character of Mrs. Dalloway), and Violet
  Dickinson, composer, and Suffragette Ethel Smyth
  sister Vanessa Bell

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Virginia Woolf

• 3. Death
• Events that caused her death
• 1. mental depression
• 2. the ongoing war and the destruction of her
  homes in London during the air raid
• 3. the cool reception of her biography on her
  late friend Roger Fry

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Virginia Woolf

• On 28 March 1941, rather than having another
  nervous breakdown, Woolf drowned herself by
  weighing her pockets with stones and walking into
  the River Ouse near her home. Her body was not
  found until April 18. Her husband buried her
  remains under a tree in the garden of their house
  in Rodmell, Sussex.

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Virginia Woolf

• 4. Contribution
• 1. One of the greatest innovators in the English
  literature
• 2. stream-of-consciousness, the underlying
  psychological as well as emotional motives of
  characters, and the various possibilities of
  fractured narrative and chronology
• 3. E. M. Forster she pushed the English language
  a little further against the dark.

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Virginia Woolf

• 5. Critics against Woolf
• 1. epitomizing the narrow world of the
  upper-middle class English intelligentsia,
  lacking in universality and dept, without the
  power to communicate anything of emotional or
  ethical relevance to the disillusioned common
  reader.

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Virginia Woolf

• 5. Critics against Woolf
• 2. an anti-Semite and a snob
• In her diary I do not like the Jewish voice I
  do not like the Jewish Laugh.
• In her 1930 letter to Ethel Smyth How I hated
  marrying a JewWhat a snob I was, for they have
  immense vitality.

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Virginia Woolf

• 6. Work
• Novels
• The Voyage Out (1915)
• Night and Day (1919)
• Jacob's Room (1922)
• Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
• To the Lighthouse (1927)
• Orlando A Biography (1928)
• The Waves (1931)
• The Years (1937)
• Between the Acts (1941)

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Mrs Dalloway

• Characters
• 1. Clarissa Dalloway based on Woolfs childhood
  friend, Kitty Maxse
• 2. Richard Dalloway
• 3. Elizabeth Dalloway
• 4. Peter Walsh
• 5. Sally Seton/Lady Rosseter
• 6. Miss Kilman
• 7. Septimus Warren Smith

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Mrs Dalloway

• Characters
• 8. Lucrezia Warren Smith
• 9. Dr. Holmes
• 10. Sir William Bradshaw
• 11. Lady Bradshaw

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Mrs Dalloway

• Themes
• 1. The sea as symbolic of life The ebb and flow
  of life. When the image is portrayed as being
  harmonized, the sea represents a great confidence
  and comfort. Yet, when the image is presented as
  disjointed or uncomfortable, it symbolizes
  disassociation, loneliness, and fear
• 2. Doubling Septimus as Clarissas doppleganger,
  the alternate persona, the darker, more internal
  personality compared to Clarissas very social
  and singular outlook.

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Virginia Woolf

• Themes
• 3. The intersection of time and timelessness
  Woolfs prose has blurred the distinction between
  dream and reality, between the past and present.
• 4. Social commentary the flimsy lifestyle of
  Englands upper classes at the time of the novel

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Virginia Woolf

• Themes
• 5. The world of the sane and insane side by side
  Woolf portrays the sane grasping for significant
  and substantial connections to life, living among
  those who have been cut off from such connections
  and who suffer because of the improper treatment
  they, henceforth, receive.

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The Hours (novel)

• 1. The book concerns three generations of women
  affected by Virginia Woolf
• A. Woolf herself writing Mrs. Dalloway in 1923
  and struggling with her own mental illness.
• B. Mrs. Brown (the name from Woolfs short prose
  Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown), wife of a WWII
  veteran, who is reading Mrs. Dalloway in 1949 as
  she plans her husbands birthday party.

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The Hours

• C. Clarissay Vaughn, a lesbian, who plans a party
  in1999 to celebrate a major literary award
  received by her good friend and former lover, the
  poet Richard, who is dying of AIDS.
• 2. Written in the stream-of-consciousness style

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The Hours

• Themes
• 1. LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender)
  issues To some extent the novel examines the
  freedom with which successive generations have
  been able to express their sexuality freely, to
  the public, even to themselves.
• 2. Mental illness Cunninghams novel suggests to
  some extent, perceived mental illness can be a
  legitimate expression of perspective.