Monday 4 May 2009
The Hours by Cunnungham
M. Cunningham, THE HOURS, 1999
Prologue
She hurries from the house, wearing a coat too heavy for the weather. It is 1941. Another war has begun. She has left a note for Leonard, and another for Vanessa. She walks purposefully toward the river, certain of what she'll do, but even now she is almost distracted by the sight of the downs, the church, and a scattering of sheep, incandescent, tinged with a faint hint of sulphur, grazing under a darkening sky. She pauses, watching the sheep and the sky, then walks on. The voices murmur behind her; bombers drone in the sky, though she looks for the planes and can't see them. She walks past one of the farm workers (is his name John?), a robust, small-headed man wearing a potato-coloured vest, cleaning the ditch that runs through the osier bed. He looks up at her, nods, looks down again into the brown water. As she passes him on her way to the river she thinks of how successful he is, how fortunate, to be cleaning a ditch in an osier bed. She herself has failed. She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric. Patches of sky shine in puddles left over from last night's rain. Her shoes sink slightly into the soft earth. She has failed, and now the voices are back, muttering indistinctly just beyond the range of her vision, behind her, here, no, turn and they've gone somewhere else. The voices are back and the headache is approaching as surely as rain, the headache that will crush whatever is she and replace her with itself. The headache is approaching and it seems (is she or is she not conjuring them herself?) that the bombers have appeared again in the sky. She reaches the embankment, climbs over and down again to the river. There's a fisherman upriver, far away, he won't notice her, will he? She begins searching for a stone. She works quickly but methodically, as if she were following a recipe that must be obeyed scrupulously if it's to succeed at all. She selects one roughly the size and shape of a pig's skull. Even as she lifts it and forces it into one of the pockets of her coat (the fur collar tickles her neck), she can't help noticing the stone's cold chalkiness and its colour, a milky brown with spots of green. She stands close to the edge of the river, which laps against the bank, filling the small irregularities in the mud with clear water that might be a different substance altogether from the yellow-brown, dappled stuff, solid-looking as a road, that extends so steadily from bank to bank. She steps forward. She does not remove her shoes. The water is cold, but not unbearably so. She pauses, standing in cold water up to her knees. She thinks of Leonard. She thinks of his hands and his beard, the deep lines around his mouth. She thinks of Vanessa, of the children, of Vita and Ethel: So many. They have all failed, haven't they? She is suddenly, immensely sorry for them. She imagines turning around, taking the stone out of her pocket, going back to the house. She could probably return in time to destroy the notes. She could live on; she could perform that final kindness. Standing knee-deep in the moving water, she decides against it. The voices are here, the headache is coming, and if she restores herself to the care of Leonard and Vanessa they won't let her go again, will they? She decides to insist that they let her go. She wades awkwardly (the bottom is mucky) out until she is up to her waist. She glances upriver at the fisherman, who is wearing a red jacket and who does not see her. The yellow surface of the river (more yellow than brown when seen this close) murkily reflects the sky. Here, then, is the last moment of true perception, a man fishing in a red jacket and a cloudy sky reflected on opaque water. Almost involuntarily (it feels involuntary, to her) she steps or stumbles forward, and the stone pulls her in. For a moment, still, it seems like nothing; it seems like another failure; just chill water she can easily swim back out of; but then the current wraps itself around her and takes her with such sudden, muscular force it feels as if a strong man has risen from the bottom, grabbed her legs and held them to his chest. It feels personal.
More than an hour later, her husband returns from the garden. "Madame went out," the maid says, plumping a shabby pillow that releases a miniature storm of down. "She said she'd be back soon."
Leonard goes upstairs to the sitting room to listen to the news. He finds a blue envelope, addressed to him, on the table. Inside is a letter.
Dearest,
I feel certain that I am going mad again: I feel we can't go through another of these terrible times.
And I shant recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and can’t concentrate.
So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I cant fight it any longer, I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know.
You see I cant even write this properly. I cant read. What I want to say is that I owe all the happiness of my life to you.
You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that-- everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the
certainty of your goodness. I cant go on spoiling your life any longer.
I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.
V.
A Room of One's Own
In it she made her famous statement: "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
The book originated from two expanded and revised lectures the author presented at Cambridge University's Newnham and Girton Colleges in October 1928. Woolf examined the obstacles and prejudices that have hindered women writers. She separated women as objects of representation and women as authors of representation, and argued that a change in the forms of literature was necessary because most literature had been "made by men out of their own needs for their own uses."
Virginia Stephen Woolf
Virginia Woolf was born in London, as the daughter of Julia Jackson Duckworth, a member of the Duckworth publishing family, and Sir Leslie Stephen, a literary critic, a friend of Meredith, Henry James, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and George Eliot, and the founder of the Dictionary of National Biography. Leslie Stephen's first wife had been the daughter of the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray. His daughter Laura from the first marriage was institutionalized because of mental retardation.
Julia Jackson Duckworth died when Virginia was in her early teens. Stella Duckworth, her half sister, took her mother's place, but died a scant two years later. Leslie Stephen suffered a slow death from stomach cancer, he died in 1904. When Virginia's brother Thoby died in 1906, she had a prolonged mental breakdown.
Following the death of her father, Woolf moved with her sister and two brothers to the house in Bloomsbury. Vanessa, a painter, agreed to marry the critic of art and literature Clive Bell. He was the only person, whom she trusted sufficiently to show her unfinished work. Virginia's economic situation improved when she inherited £2,500 from an aunt. Their house became central to activities of the Bloomsbury group.
From 1905 Woolf began to write for the Times Literary Supplement. With Vanessa and Violet Dickinson she traveled in 1906 to Greece, where she carried Homer's Odyssey in her handbag. In 1912 she married the political theorist Leonard (Sidney) Woolf (1880-1969), who had returned from serving as an administrator in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Leonard Woolf was of Jewish descent, the son of a barrister. Woolf had anti-Jewish attitudes, but she loved her husband. Leonard Woolf had studied at Cambridge and from 1923 to 1930 he was a literary editor on the Nation. During WW I he was not called for military service, most likely due to his constantly trembling hands; and most of the Bloomsburies were conscientious objectors. In 1917 he set up a small hand press at Hogarth House, and worked as its director until his death. Leonard Woolf's works include novels, non-fiction, and his five volume memoirs Sowing (1960), Growing (1961), Beginning Again (1964), Downhill All the Way (1967), and The Journey Not the Arrival Matters (1969).
THE VOYAGE OUT (1915) was Virginia Woolf's first book. In 1919 appeared NIGHT AND DAY, a realistic novel about the lifes of two friends, Katherine and Mary. JACOB'S ROOM (1922) was based upon the life and death of her brother Thoby.
With TO THE LIGHTHOUSE (1927) and THE WAVES (1931)Woolf established herself as one of the leading writers of modernism.MRS. DALLOWAY (1925) formed a web of thoughts of several groups of people during the course of a single day. There is little action, but much movement in time from present to past and back again. The central figure, Clarissa Dalloway, married to Richard Dalloway, is a wealthy London hostess. She spends her day in London preparing for her evening party. She recalls her life before World War I, her friendship with the unconventional Sally Seton, and her relationship with Peter Walsh. At her party she never meets the shell-shocked veteran Septimus Smith, one of the first Englishmen to enlist in the war.
During the inter-war period, Woolf was a central character of the literary scene both in London and at her home in Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex. She lived in Richmond from 1915 to 1924, in Bloomsbury from 1924 to 1939, and maintained the house in Rodmell from 1919-41. Their Hogarth Press had operated from the basement room in Tavistock Square.
The Bloomsbury group was initially based at the Gordon Square residence of Virginia and her sister Vanessa (Bell). Its other members were E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, and Leonard Woolf. The consolidation of the group's beliefs in unifying aesthetic concerns occurred under the influence of the philosopher G.E. Moore (1873-1958). By the early 1930s, the group ceased to exist in its original form.
Since 1924, the Hogarth Press had published works by Sigmund Freud. Woolf met him in 1939.
In the event of a Nazi invastion, Woolf and Leonard had made provisions to kill themselves. After the final attack of mental illness, Woolf loaded her pockets full of stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse near her Sussex home on March 28, 1941.