| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中正大學 === 外國文學所 === 94 === Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Hours (1998), which was awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999, deals with three women’s lives in a single day. These three women are: Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), the original writer of Mrs. Dalloway (1925), who is writing the novel in the suburbs of London, 1923; Laura Brown, a housewife in postwar Los Angeles, who is reading the novel in 1949; Clarissa Vaughan, an editor in contemporary New York, who is taking care of a dying AIDS-stricken gay poet. In different times and spaces, Cunningham depicts the significance of human existence and dilemmas toward life and death. And each woman has to face plights and dilemmas in order to search for her existence in the world. This thesis aims to evaluate these three women’s struggles between life and death and their realizations of existence by Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1905-1980) ideas of existentialism, which are stated in his work, Being and Nothingness (1943). And it will evaluate other characters that interweave in The Hours, particularly through representation of Virginia Woolf’s work, Mrs. Dalloway. During the process of analyzing Cunningham’s The Hours, I show how the author created a fictional Virginia Woolf. And I show the other two women’s connections with different ages to explore how they live in their societies.
This thesis is divided into four chapters. Chapter One introduces Michael Cunningham’s life and work, the main ideas of my thesis, as well as the context of these two novels, The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway. And I adopt Sartre’s conceptions of “Freedom and Responsibility” from his Being and Nothingness (1943) to evaluate each woman’s knowledge of existence. Chapter Two discusses the first two parts of The Hours: “Mrs. Dalloway” and “ Mrs. Brown.” With Sartre’s ideas about existentialism, I evaluate the realization of each woman’s existence and inner struggles toward their dilemmas between life and death.
Chapter Three focuses on the significance of life by analyzing Cunningham’s Virginia Woolf. Cunningham creates a fictional character of Woolf by representing her life and the process of how she created her work, Mrs. Dalloway. In The Hours, I evaluate Cunningham’s perception of Woolf’s life and work. In this part, Cunningham not only depicts Woolf’s own failure as a writer and but also her struggles for her own insanity. Woolf’s suicide in “The Prologue” is very significant. Her suicide influences the other two women’s’ stories. Chapter Four is the conclusion. I conclude that Cunningham is not only a new creator of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway but that he also expresses these three women’s lives as a study of human existence. Even though Sartre thought life actually has no meaning at all except that which the individual chooses to give it, he strongly emphasized human freedom, choice, and responsibility in one’s existence. Through each woman’s struggle between life and death, we may perceive each woman’s life as a study of existence in The Hours.
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