Freedom Out Of Constraint A Feminist Study On The Hours

The Hours is one of famous contemporary American writer Michael Cunningham’s most successful novels, which has won him good reputation at home and abroad on studying Virginia Woolf and considerable praises and awards in literature and filmdom. The purpose of this thesis is to reveal Cunningham’s feminist perspectives on the development of feminism through the analysis of the main female characters Virginia Woolf, Laura Brown and Clarissa Vaughan’s life experience, inner heart feelings and their preparations for parties in a single day.In The Hours, the three heroines’lives have a strong connection among them despite the constraint of time and space. Each woman’s experience, choice at the end of the day and ending of her life have a great influence on one another’s life in a direct or indirect way. Although they are from different history and family background and have different life experiences, they all face the same problem:they have lost the female identity in life and their freedom is constrained by the society.The three female characters respectively represent the three development stages of feminism in20th century:Virginia Woolf symbolizes the initial stage, Laura Brown the developmental stage and Clarissa Vaughan the stage of exploration and perfecting. Woolf is constrained in the suburb of London and having limited living space, which makes her life miserable and unbearable. She hopes to escape from the deserted, boring life and this countryside, and desires to move back to the city London, to enjoy the vigorous city life, hold parties and meet friends and new people. However, obsessed with freedom and death, she finally ended her life in1941. In some sense, her death indicates that she broadens her living space, finds peace of mind and gains freedom in the end.Laura Brown symbolizes the developmental stage of feminism in20th century. She has lost herself in the household duties and feels lonely, isolated and exhausted and extremely depressed which makes her almost mad and drives her to the edge of a mental breakdown. In other words, she doesn’t have freedom and is constrained by the marriage and traditional concepts of the patriarchal society. She has to hide anxious feelings and her love towards Kitty secretly in her heart the same as Clarissa Dalloway’s true love towards Sally Seton in Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. She considers death as a possible way to deal with her miserable and oppressed life. Woolf’s suicide and the novel Mrs. Dalloway has a great influence on Laura’s life and her choice for pursuing her true self and freedom. Confronted with death, she chooses to get rid of the traditional family with great courage and broadens her living space both physically and spiritually.Clarissa Vaughan is American modern version of Mrs. Dalloway and she represents the stage of exploration and perfecting for feminist movement. Due to the historical background and the influences of the three feminist movements, she has much more freedom and choices than Virginia Woolf and Laura Brown in life. Ironically, she is nicknamed by her old lover Richard as Mrs. Dalloway when they are at very young. She chooses to be a lesbian to fight against the man controlled world but she still cannot help thinking herself as the role of a wife and mother and being conflicted about the pattern of traditional marriage that the society requires. Richard’s death makes her not only find out her true self and identity, but also realize the importance of cherishing life. She is no longer constrained by the role of traditional wife and the character Mrs. Dalloway. In the end, she finds her true self and identity, and is mentally independent from man and achieves the complete freedom.As in the essay "A Room of One’s Own", Woolf once put forward the advice for woman’s independence in life that a woman should have enough money and a room of her own. Through depicting the three female characters’lives and inner worlds in different times and exhibiting their struggles to achieve the true self and gain freedom, Cunningham not only continues Woolf’s feminist opinion but also develops it and that is, a free woman should not only be independent in economy aspect and her own physical space, but also have her own job and be spiritually independent from man. Through hard struggles and with great efforts, Woolf, Laura and Clarissa have eventually kind of removed the traditional constraint of patriarchal society, gained their true self and achieved the freedom in their own different ways.