Interconnected Life Is Worth Living -- Suicide, Term Paper

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Interconnected Life is worth living -- suicide, art, and the surprises of the Hours

She is going to die. That much is certain -- Virginia Woolf is one of the most famous suicidal authors in all of modern and modernist literature. But even when one knows this terrible fact, one cannot help but ask how, and why as her story unfolds before one's ears and eyes. The structure of The Hours also forces one to ask, what are the connections between Woolf and the other people, past and present, that pay homage to this great artist's literary works over the course of the narrative? For The Hours not only encompasses Woolf's biography and literary works, but other, less famous women who look to Woolf for inspiration and guidance. Long after the author herself is dead, she lives on in her work's themes of the connected nature of all humanity and the importance of the artistic life.

Michael Cunningham's book The Hours is also textual 1998 meditation on the nature of mortality, literature, the artist's life, and the connections between life and one of Virginia Woolf's greatest works, entitled Mrs. Dalloway. But even though the reader thinks that he or she knows how the book, which was later made into a film of the same name, is going to end -- with Woolf's death -- It still manages to take The Hours' literary reader and the cinematic viewer by surprise. By showing that life and art are not always connected in the ways the reader thinks, a surprise ending is created in both book and film.

The author's evident purpose in creating The Hours is to show that the types of fiction used by Virginia Woolf, and the questions raised by Woolf's themes and disconnected modernist style are still just as relevant today as when she wrote during the early part of the 20th century. The film, if anything, makes even more effective use of such apparently disconnected narrative and images, infusing humble street shots and images of the home with great importance through repetition.

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In her work, Woolf focused on the mundane, ordinary events of everyday human life over the course of fictional plots. Her fictional Mrs. Dalloway simply organizes a party in the novel that bears her name, but it becomes significant.

In The Hours, housewife Laura Brown simply and ineffectually bakes a cake. Clarissa Vaughan buys flowers. But these events are imbued with transcendence significance, simply by showing how these characters are interconnected across the ages -- even across the bounds of the fiction/nonfiction divide of literature. When things are connected, everything becomes significant. By highlighting simple events, like buying objects for a party, such events become sympathetic and significant to an apparently disconnected viewer or reader.

The Hours takes the form of several interconnected narratives, whose relationship with one another is not immediately apparent to the gaze. The first narrative takes place in the past, where Virginia Woolf, the author of Mrs. Dalloway, is depressed at the ineffectuality of her art to enact change in the world and end World War II. Then the action shifts to another Clarissa (the first name of Mrs. Dalloway) in the present day New York City. Like Mrs. Dalloway in Woolf's book, Clarissa Vaughan is throwing a party. Like Clarissa Dalloway, the Clarissa Vaughan of the present is filled with a sense of regret for a man she loved but could not have a lasting relationship with.

Unlike Clarissa Dalloway, but like Woolf, the contemporary Clarissa is a lesbian. Her artist friend Richard whose birthday she is celebrating is dying of AIDS. She loved him once, but the relationship failed -- for obvious reasons. Still, the gay man and woman remained friends and connected because of their mutual passion and involvement in the New York artistic community. Clarissa hopes that the art of her party will bring the dying artist….....

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