Women's Literature: The Hours
*Texts/films quoted below are: Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, and Michael Cunningham's adaptation The Hours
Clarissa Dalloway scratches on the wall.
Jasmine Vijh is "a prisoner doing unreal time" (148).
Offred endures "...long parentheses of nothing. Time as white sound"(79).
A woman sits alone, overcome by yellow wallpaper.
In women's literature, the hours tick by terrifyingly. For what ever reason (cultural, historical, or psychological) characters feel trapped, oppressed by passing of time within their respective texts. Frequently at the heart of women's literature is the protagonist's ability to make peace with the passing time.
In Michael Cunningham's adaptation The Hours (inspired by Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway), Richard, a dying AIDS victim, does not want to live. When Clarissa urges him to stay alive, he responds: "But I still have to face the hours, don't I? I mean, the hours after the party, and the hours after that..." Time itself is his torture. The "hours" insinuate unending, units of time waiting to be filled, utilized. The ticking clock, the daily responsibility to fill the hours, is enough to drive him mad.
In Virginia Woolf's original novel, Clarissa is similarly horrified by life's continuity. She reflects, "Then (she had felt it only this morning) there was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one’s parents giving it into one’s hands, this life, to be lived to the end. to be walked with serenity; there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear"(164). Clarissa is also haunted by the ever-present expectation to, hour by hour, make something of her life.
While the "the hours" are highly anticipated and then carefully filled by the individual, the passing of human life is universal and mundane in a larger context. After Jasmine kills a man, she reflects, "What a monstrous thing, what an infinitesimal thing, is the taking of a human life..."(119).
Perhaps this idea itself is what causes Virginia Woolf's characters so much pain: the thought that life is at once meaningful and meaningless. To the individual, one's life is everything, amongst the masses, it is nothing. In a similar fashion, as evidenced by Woolf's writing style, one moment may bring utter joy or unending despair, but seems inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. We infuse intense significance into short-term, personal moments, though they are, rationally, only fleeting in the sequence of "hours". This disparity between what captivates individuals emotionally on a small scale and what really “matters” rationally in the events of life seems to torment Woolf's characters. In the midst of a character's deep, existential exploration, Woolf will begin to describe minute details in nature, elements of a street scene or an abstract object. Inversely, while describing excessive details of the party, Woolf writes that Clarissa is reminded of "how it is certain we must die." This writing style really begs the reader to question what is really more important in Woolf’s narrative: a painstakingly illustrated emotional sensation or a described event.
In moments of reflection, characters ponder what it is that rationalizes death, what makes life meaningful. With the oppressive passing of "the hours," what is to be lived for? As characters develop, they seems to abandon rationality and the filling of the "hours" in favor of a celebration of the extreme emotional fluctuations themselves.
Woolf describes a consolation in the passing of "the hours" is a growing ability to feel. In Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway Peter reflects, "When one was young...one was too much excited to know people. Now that one was old...one could watch, one could understand, and one did not lose the power of feeling, he said. No, that is true, said Sally. She felt more deeply, more passionately, every year" (171). It is the return to these primal instincts - the hunger for emotional sensation - that bring the protagonists back to life, releasing them from the haunting pressure of "the hours."
Similarly, The Handmaid's Tale climaxes with Offred’s eventual indulgence in a real, emotional relationship with Nick. In Jasmine, the protagonist finds peace "greedy with wants and reckless from hope"(241).
As all of these texts draw to a close, it seems that the characters, in pursuit of meaningful lives, reject rationality in favor of emotion, and begin to rejoice in the pure joy of feeling. After seeing Clarissa, Peter Walsh reflects that he "...would think her sentimental. So she was. For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying--what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt"(170). Instead of reasoning out the meaning of his life, Peter recognizes the power in the "sentimental." He later poses the question: "what does the brain matter...compared with the heart?"(172).
The novel ends with an epic acceptance and a rejoicing in extreme emotions - a rejection of rational concern for filling the "hours." Peter Walsh remarks:
What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?
It is Clarissa, he said.
For there she was (172).
Here, Peter recognizes the meaning of his life - the contrast of fear and pleasure. Woolf has laced the novel with countless oppositions of emotional extremes, and here it is realized that life is nothing without them. As Virginia Woolf explains in The Hours that someone must die in the story to provide contrast and a greater appreciation for life, in Mrs Dalloway, one must feel enraptured as well as terrified by life to go on living meaningfully.
In Mrs Dalloway, Woolf makes it clear that once this realization is made, death may come as an “embrace” (163). One may “plunge holding his treasure”(163). After recognizing the goodness of life is about coming to terms with an unbelievable, sensational series of happiness and despair - even if found in the most daily of settings - one may “put death away,” as described by Virginia Woolf in her suicide note in The Hours:
“Dear Leonard. To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard, always the years between us, always the years. Always the love. Always the hours.”
- The Hours, Michael Cunningham
