Seeking A Peace Of Mind

Michael Cunningham(1952-) is a contemporary American writer. The Hours is his most influential work. It is honored for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the 1999 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and was later made into a film, which won the 60 th Golden Award. It is famous for its masterful braiding of the stories concerning one single day in the lives of three women in different times and places to think about women’s value and the essence of life. Many scholars abroad and at home have paid high attention to this novel since it was published. They have studied it form the perspective of feminism, intertextuality, existentialism, postmodernism, queer theory and so on, but few analyze it from the perspective of Henri Lefebvre’s spatial theory. So this thesis analyzes three women’s choices on the perspective of Henri Lefebvre’s spatial theory, discussing the reason and the result of three women’s choices under spatial theory.There are six chapters in this thesis. The first chapter briefly introduces the author Michael Cunningham and his novel The Hours. The second chapter includes the literature reviews of The Hours both at home and abroad as well as the significance of this thesis. The third chapter provides the theoretical foundation---Lefebvre’s spatial theory. This chapter aims to provide the theoretical basis for text analysis. The forth chapter discusses three women’s social spaces and spiritual spaces and shows the indirect reason of three women’s choices. They are constrained by their limited social spaces and at the same time, they all have poetic spiritual spaces. They aspire to live meaningful lives. The fifth chapter analyzes the direct reason and the result of three women’s choices. The contradictions between three women’s social spaces and spiritual spaces can’t make them peaceful in mind, which forces them to make choices. In the process of seeking a peace of mind, they try to struggle in social spaces, but fail. At last, they decide to get rid of the bound and then find a peace of mind. The last chapter draws a conclusion through the previous analysis of the reason and result of these three women’s choices. The choices they make are honest to hearts. They have clear understandings of the meaningful lives they really want in which they can be promoted, and at last, they all find a peace of mind. Therefore, to be truly alive, women need to break the bound of limited spaces and face hearts, which is the key to solve contradictions and find a peace of mind.