Analysis Of The Hours From The Perspective Of Queer Theory

The Hours is a novel written by the contemporary American writer MichaelCunningham, a gay man whose works favor non-heterosexual people or “queers”. Inparody of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, this novel tells of one-day stories of threewomen—Virginia Woolf, Laura Brown and Clarissa Vaughan, who live in differenttimes but are all involved in complicated hetero-or non-heterosexual relationshipsand who are not typical women in the traditional sense. In other words, they are allqueers. Queer theory represents a theoretical vanguard in terms of the issues ofsexuality and identity. Given such a coincidence between the author, the novel and thetheory, this thesis carries out a critical analysis of The Hours from the perspective ofqueer theory.The thesis falls into four chapters. The first chapter introduces the author, thenovel and queer theory. The second chapter makes a queer thinking of sexuality, thealignment of sex, gender and sexuality, the existing categorizations of sexualorientations and how they are presented in the novel. In the light of queer conceptionof identity, Chapter Three examines the characters’“reiterated acting” of gender roleand identity and the identity crisis that confronts every actor. Chapter Four concludesthe whole thesis with a brief review of the whole thesis, the epistemological andmethodological shortcomings of queer theory and suggestions for critical applicationof this theory to literary works.