A Study On The Postmodern Feminist Themes Of The Hours

As the most celebrated work of the American contemporary writer Michael Cunningham(1952-),The Hours has always been warmly embraced by its readers.It is commonly acknowledged as a highly successful homage to the British writer Virginia Woolf(1882-1941).Nevertheless,the depth of the novel travels way further than that.With a marvelous strategic employment of stream of consciousness,The Hours depicts its three female protagonists’ respective situations in a parallel way,including in its main characters a fictionalized version of Virginia Woolf,who persists on writing while suffering from severe illness.Looking on the surface,the storyline of the novel seems rather uncomplicated,in which the three women characters’ life in one day and their spiritual circumstances are intersected.Yet through the author’s microscopically detailed narration,the living situations of educated western women in the twentieth century are immaculately illuminated.Accordingly,The Hours and its intricate connections with Woolf have drawn keen attention of researchers from both home and abroad,who are interested in interpreting the intertexuality of the novel with the approach of postmodern narrations.Attracted by the characters’ complex sexuality and sophisticate personalities,some readers like to interpret the novel through gender study and psychoanalytic analysis.However,considering the fact that there are many feminine elements interwoven in the text,the critical approaches above appear relatively narrow,in that they all have ignored its profound themes about woman and social realities to some extent.Entirely based on the fictional text itself,this thesis seeks to find the cause for the female characters’ predicaments,and the intricate relations between their personal choices and ultimate destinies in different times and societies.Applying postmodern feminism,a younger criticism that is different from traditional feminism,this thesis combines historical context and the characters’ experiences to explore its pertinent themes.This thesis is consisted of five parts.The first part introduces the author,the novel,its background,and gives a review of the pertinent and representative research literature,along with an exposition of the fundamentals of postmodern feminism that are employed in this thesis.The originality and meaningfulness of this study are also explained in this part.Following closely are the main body parts,in which three core concepts from postmodern feminism are employed to study the pertinent themes of the novel.The first chapter,constructed on the basis of gender,discusses the female characters’ restrained gender role.The second chapter,revolving around women’s limited power of discourse,analyzes the heavyweight the women protagonists carry in the family and their predicaments of being “shackled and voiceless”.The third chapter,emphasizing on the distinctiveness of females’ experiences,explores the diversified meaning reflected by the protagonists and their final choices.In the last part,this thesis concludes the connotation of its postmodern feminist themes,and the rich humane concerns this work of seemingly gloomy keynote contains.With the combination of analyzing postmodern feminist theories and thorough textual reading,this thesis explores various kinds of oppression and constraints that social conventions and dominant power in different times impose on women,excavates women’s unique gender idiosyncrasies,experiences and discourse,and summarizes the realistic enlightenment of this novel.This thesis discovers that the postmodern feminist themes of The Hours emphasize on the pluralization and mobility of females’ sexual identity,the significance of establishing women’s own discourse,and the distinctiveness of females’ experiences.