The Hours

From the biggest themes to the smallest details, The Hours resounds with echoes of Mrs. Dalloway, which itself resounds with echoes of Woolf’s life. Writing in the postmodern tradition, Cunningham uses this intertextuality to raise questions about the influence of fiction—specifically the novel Mrs. Dalloway—on his characters’ lives.

This intertextuality creates a sense of predetermination that is mirrored in the characters. For example, the reader and Clarissa share the sense that the events unfolding in Richard’s apartment prior to his suicide have already happened because the scene is a patchwork of words and events from Mrs. Dalloway and Woolf’s life. When Clarissa tells Richard of her morning (which of course traced the fictional Mrs. Dalloway’s), Richard repeats a description of the June morning in Mrs. Dalloway: “[f]resh as if issued to children on a beach” (219). Additionally, his final words to Clarissa about being happier together than any other couple are Woolf’s exact words from her suicide note to her husband, which appears as Virginia’s suicide note in the Prologue. The similarities between Richard and Virginia are so extreme—both are renowned writers afflicted by headaches and voices, both seek to realize in their writing an ideal world that life denies them, and both die by suicide—that they create the sense Richard is possessed by Virginia’s spirit.