The Continuation And Development Of Mrs. Dalloway

Cunningham's The Hours is his masterpiece which won him the Pulitzer Prize of Literature. He wrote The Hours in order to pay his honor to Virginia Woolf and her classic work Mrs. Dalloway. As a gay he has different views towards people and the society. On one hand he pitied those women who were oppressed by the patriarchal society, on the other hand, he sympathized with the men whose families were disintegrated due to the revolts of women oppressed by the patriarchal society.The purpose of the thesis is to find out what Cunningham inherited from Woolf's work and what kind of development he had made in his own work, and to study how Cunningham understood Woolf's views of feminism through analyzing and comparing the feminist views, themes and writing techniques within the two works.Analyzing from the texts the thesis focuses on Cunningham's praise on women's experiences through creating the Woolfian characters. His concern with the homosexuality in The Hours expressed his views on feminism:Women should fight against the patriarchal society through forming leagues of their own. Cunningham also expressed his view of ecofeminism:the industrious cities stand for the domination of patriarchal ideology caused the binary opposition of women/nature and men/culture. Finally, through the reinterpretation of the characters, Cunningham expressed his own views towards the relationship between women and men, which should be harmonious rather than contradictory.