‘The Hours’ channels Virginia Woolf’s influence

"The Hours” is a must read for anyone who hasn’t yet tackled author Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning retelling of Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway.”\nUltimately, this novel is tragic through its characters and situations. But through this tragedy, just as Woolf herself did in “Mrs. Dalloway,” Cunningham offers hope through the melancholy that stumbles into lives.\nWoolf was just one of the writers of her time who often contemplated the question of living and dying.\nCunningham relives Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” in “The Hours” through three characters. \nClarissa Vaughan is a character in the present day whose actions resemble that of Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway herself. Vaughan is planning a party for a former love, a poet dying of AIDS – a tweak from Woolf’s novel, in which the premise revolves around Mrs. Dalloway planning a party of her own.\nMrs. Brown, the second character, is set in 1949 as a housewife expecting another baby but who can’t seem to stop thinking there must be something more to her life. She also can’t seem to stop reading Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway.”\nThe last character is a recreation of Virginia Woolf herself in 1923 as she struggles to begin writing “Mrs. Dalloway.”\nThrough his three characters, Cunningham not only reconstructs Woolf’s novel with a modern twist, but he maintains Woolf’s thematic ideas in clever and new ways.\nAs gathered from the title, Cunningham examines the hours that make up lives, and how these hours and our choices affect not only our moods, but the people we know as well. Woolf’s novel explores the same notion, as the entire premise takes place in one day as Clarissa Dalloway plans a party in the evening. Throughout the day she encounters a former lover and friends, and begins to remember earlier moments in her life. \nFamiliarity with Woolf’s novel is not required. However, it does make Cunningham’s novel that much more enjoyable. Cunningham writes with great fluidity, and the novel reads quickly. \nWhat I love about “The Hours” is how three ordinary women who lead very different lives during different times all have something in common, and that is simply the art of living. All women struggle with this concept, too.\nAs shown in Woolf’s novel, a story was constructed through an ordinary character living an ordinary day in life. Cunningham recreates this concept, but now in a different world, with different terms. While Cunningham’s novel was written pre-millennium, its concepts still resonate today.\nCunningham’s modernized version of Woolf’s classic novel pays great homage to Woolf and her brilliant breakthrough in the literary scene with “Mrs. Dalloway.” Most importantly, it also shows that the art of the novel breathes on, through ordinary people and their stories, crafted through life.