The Hours: A Case Study Of The Gender Theory

The Hours is a contemporary novel written by Michael Cunningham, and it was given the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1999. The movie based on this story released in 2002 was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won Best Actress in a Leading Role. The Hours is homage to Virginia Woolf, a significant British writer of the twentieth century, who is renowned for her contribution to the writing technique of stream of consciousness as well as being the pioneer of feminism. The Hours is inspired by one of Woolf's representative works Mrs. Dalloway whose original title is also The Hours, which indicates that Cunningham intends to probe into the themes of Mrs. Dalloway.The Hours concerns three women of different generations and times whose lives are interconnected by the novel Mrs. Dalloway. The plot takes place within the span of one day in the life of each of the three women, just as Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway takes place within the span of one day in the life of her protagonist. The three major characters in The Hours bear a lot of traits of those heroines in Mrs. Dalloway, and Woolf appears as a major character in The Hours. This thesis tries to research the way of thinking and the motivation of suicide of the main characters in The Hours, and analyze their emptiness of life and the tragic fate. Most researches of this novel are from the angle of feminism, insanity or suicide, and some others pay attention to the bisexuality aspect of the novel. Yet, researchers seldom analyze it from the wider scope of gender theory. The present thesis endeavors to initiate the research from this angle. It adopts the most recent theory in this field, the Queer theory, to illustrate that social gender has performativity, and analyze the inner gender traits of the characters.