Answers page 540

In first three chapters of The Hours by Michael Cunningham, the reader is in front of a different setting in time and space. Indeed Mrs Dalloway lives in New York at the end of the twentieth century while Mrs Woolf dwells in a suburb of London in 1923 and Mrs Brown lives in Los Angeles in 1949.

The three texts can be compared with the beginning of Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway: Mrs Dalloway of Cunningham’s novel has to buy the flowers as happens for the main protagonist of Virginia Woolf’s novel. Both the openings describe urban elements in a morning of June. Secondly the first four lines of Mrs Brown’s extract is the same of the beginning of Mrs Dalloway. In addition one of the main characters of Michael Cunningham’s novel is Virginia Woolf: she is presented in the moment in which she is writing her novel Mrs Dalloway. Furthermore the two novels are about ordinary characters and the daily life. It is possible to find some different elements in the texts, for example in Virginia Woolf’s novel the specification of setting in space and time is disclosed towards the end of the chapter because the novelist is more concerned what the main character is thinking and doing. Afterwards in Mrs Dalloway is more evident the stream of consciousness than in The Hours because, for example, the fine morning reminds Clarissa Dalloway when she was eighteen.