An Interpretation Of The Hours From The Perspective Of Queer Theory

Contemporary American writer Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours won thePEN/Faulkner Award after being published and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in the nextyear. The movie which was based on this novel was released in2002and was nominatedfor Academy Awards and Oscar Awards. With the thread of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway,Cunningham interweaves the story of Virginia Woolf with that of two modern females.Through the depiction of experiences and choices of the three women who live in differentages and places, Cunningham expresses his support of free choice on sex and gender aswell as the will of creating a harmonious society.As a new theory on sex and gender which rose in the1990s, queer theory questionsconventional heterosexual hegemony and objects to strict binary traditions. Encouragingpeople to live and make a choice allodially, queer theory contributes to removing all theprejudices and bias and constructing a harmonious society.The main characters in The Hours all possess the characteristics of “queer”. Thisthesis attempts to interpret The Hours from the perspective of queer theory through theanalyses of leading characters to reveal some qualities in common between the novel andqueer theory. The thesis is composed of five chapters. The first chapter includes theintroduction of Michael Cunningham, his work The Hours and the organization of thisthesis. The second chapter includes the literature reviews of The Hours from home andabroad as well as the significance of the study. The third chapter provides the theoreticalfoundation of the whole thesis, including the origin of queer theory and its major contentsas well as its development and its application in literary criticism. The forth chapteranalyzes The Hours from the perspective of queer theory’s three contents, which includesthree parts. The first part analyzes the fight against heterosexual hegemony of VirginiaWoolf and Laura Brown based on the first content of queer theory which is opposed to thebinary of heterosexual and homosexual. The second part reveals main characters’androgynous and homosexual tendency in accordance with queer theory’s objection tomale/female gender binary tradition. The third part shows final choices of main charactersand conveys the same target of queer theory and the novel which is to respect personalfreedom and construct a harmonious society. The five chapter draws a conclusion andstresses the connection of The Hours with queer theory as well as the limitation of thethesis.