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Marriage, Relationships, and Personal Fulfillment
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Hours, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The women of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours are all united by the novel Mrs. Dalloway, which Virginia writes, and which Laura and Clarissa later read. For Virginia, writing is both a release and a weight on her. It provides structure to her life, occupying her thoughts even when she can’t actually be writing, but it also haunts her with the feeling that she needs to be doing more. Laura struggles with similar feelings of inadequacy, but her anxieties pertain to reading instead of writing. She relishes the time when she can disappear into a novel like Mrs. Dalloway, but reading the novel in the “right” conditions becomes an obsession for her, to the point where she rents a hotel room for the night, just to read for two solitary, uninterrupted hours. Finally, as a publisher, Clarissa occupies a role somewhere between reading and writing. While a mutual love of Mrs. Dalloway is a key element of Clarissa’s relationship with Richard, a part of Clarissa resents the ways that Richard tries to flatten her into a character, both by calling her “Mrs. Dalloway” and by loosely basing the suicidal main character of his own novel on her.
While literature—particularly Mrs. Dalloway—connects three women from different circumstances and eras, it also ends up meaning something different to each of them. For all three women, fiction represents a necessary form of escapism, but it also has important limits. No amount of reading can fix Laura’s feelings about her marriage, for instance. Meanwhile, Virginia’s successful completion of Mrs. Dalloway doesn’t Virginia’s mental health issues. And helping authors publish “difficult” (meaning literary and unprofitable) novels doesn’t improve Clarissa’s self-esteem. Whereas literature is a way for Virginia to communicate with a future she won’t live to see, for Laura and Clarissa it is a way for them to connect to the past and realize that the challenges they face in their own lives aren’t new. The Hours celebrates the power of reading and writing to connect people across time and to help them escape their ordinary lives, but it also demonstrates the limits of literature, showing how in the end it can’t fully reflect life’s complexities or provide a solution to them.
Related Themes from Other Texts
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Reading and Writing ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Reading and Writing appears in each chapter of The Hours. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Reading and Writing Quotes in The Hours
Below you will find the important quotes in The Hours related to the theme of Reading and Writing.
Prologue
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She hurries from the house, wearing a coat too heavy for the weather. It is 1941. Another war has begun. She has left a note for Leonard, and another for Vanessa.
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Chapter 2: Mrs. Woolf
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Writing in that state is the most profound satisfaction she knows, but her access to it comes and goes without warning. She may pick up her pen and follow it with her hand as it moves across the paper; she may pick up her pen and find that she’s merely herself, a woman in a housecoat holding a pen, afraid and uncertain, only mildly competent, with no idea about where to begin or what to write.
Chapter 5: Mrs. Woolf
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She decides, with misgivings, that she is finished for today. Always, there are these doubts. Should she try another hour? Is she being judicious, or slothful? Judicious, she tells herself, and almost believes it. She has her two hundred and fifty words, more or less. Let it be enough. Have faith that you will be here, recognizable to yourself, again tomorrow.
Chapter 12: Mrs. Brown
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Leaving the desk, she can hardly believe she’s done it. She has gotten the key, passed through the portals.
Chapter 15: Mrs. Woolf
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She is better, she is safer, if she rests in Richmond; if she does not speak too much, write too much, feel too much; if she does not travel impetuously to London and walk through its streets; and yet she is dying this way, she is gently dying on a bed of roses.
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Chapter 18: Mrs. Dalloway
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“But there are still the hours, aren’t there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there’s another. I’m so sick.”
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Richard smiles. He shakes his head. He says, “I don’t think two people could have been happier than we’ve been.”
He inches forward, slides gently off the sill, and falls.
Chapter 20: Mrs. Woolf
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Yes, Clarissa will have loved a woman. Clarissa will have kissed a woman, only once. Clarissa will be bereaved, deeply lonely, but she will not die. She will be too much in love with life, with London.
Chapter 22: Mrs. Dalloway
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They settle into another silence, one that is neither intimate nor particularly uncomfortable. Here she is, then, Clarissa thinks; here is the woman from Richard’s poetry. Here is the lost mother, the thwarted suicide; here is the woman who walked away. It is both shocking and comforting that such a figure could, in fact, prove to be an ordinary-looking old woman seated on a sofa with her hands in her lap.
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And here she is, herself, Clarissa, not Mrs. Dalloway anymore; there is no one now to call her that. Here she is with another hour before her.
“Come in, Mrs. Brown,” she says. “Everything’s ready.”
