the hours by michael cunningham sparknotes

It is destined to last.” - David Leavitt, author of The Marble Quilt “The story of Jonathan, Clare, Bobby, and Alice is also the story of the 70's and 80's in America-and vice versa. The writing a constant pleasure, flowing and yet dense with incisive images and psychological nuance.” - Matthew Gilbert, The Boston Globe “Novels don't come more deeply felt than Cunningham's extraordinary four-character study. Memorable and accomplished.” - The New York Times Book Review GradeSaver, 11 September 2019 Web.“Lyrical. Next Section Symbols, Allegory and Motifs Previous Section Quotes How To Cite in MLA Format Anonymous 'The Hours Study Guide: Analysis'.

Will review the submission and either publish your submission or provide feedback. You can help us out by revising, improving and updatingĪfter you claim a section you’ll have 24 hours to send in a draft. The point is that if she had tolerated that despair within her, she might have spread the despair to her reader who may or may not handle it well. This is a minimalistic depiction of mercy, because Virginia Woolf has the authority to drive her characters out of their minds and to die at her hand, but by picking a different path, she executes mercy on herself, on her character and on her reader. The pain of real life needs to be put into the literature, decides Virginia, and so she arranges a minor character's death, but not Mrs.

Dalloway, she doesn't encounter a suicide, but in her real life, she does. The mechanism is complete when Laura reads about Mrs. She contemplates suicide for her character, and in a way, that is a painful way of avoiding a dark question of Woolf's own life. So, having become honest about this, she turns to the book and puts it into a novel, codifying her emotions in the life of the character. As an artist, she longs to be in the hubbub of the vibrant city, but her husband drug her out to these boring outskirts, like a noose around her neck. Being in the suburbs makes her want to blow her brain out and die. The mechanism described is this: Virginia Woolf is honest with herself about her relationship to her environment. Those diaries were then consulted and used to reverse engineer a prose story, The Hours, depicting the difficult dance between the artist and her feelings of despair, her use of literature as an outlet, and the effect her artistic decisions have on the real world. To understand this better, perhaps it would help to know that after her death, Virginia Woolf's private diary was published, giving the artists of the world access to her creative process. This book is a brave use of metafiction, pointing to Virginia Woolf's creative process.

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The hours by michael cunningham sparknotes