Christopher Booker is a scholar who wrote that every story falls into one of seven basic plot structures: Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, the Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy, and Rebirth. Shmoop explores which of these structures fits this story like Cinderella’s slipper.
Plot Type : Overcoming the Monster
Because The Hours is a work of realism that focuses on the ordinary, everyday lives of its protagonists, it may seem strange to think of it in terms of Booker's "Overcoming the Monster" plot. We get it. The Hours ain't no Jessica Jones.
All the same, Clarissa Vaughan, Virginia Woolf, and Laura Brown are all confronted by trials throughout their days. Those trials may seem piddling to some readers, but the novel's characters don't experience them that way. Instead, they experience them as being deeply significant struggles. At times, those struggles are even matters of life or death.
Throughout The Hours, Michael Cunningham attempts to achieve the very same thing that he believes Virginia Woolf accomplished with Mrs. Dalloway. Cunningham's Virginia muses to herself at one point that Clarissa Dalloway, her heroine,
[…] will kill herself over something that seems, on the surface, like very little. Her party will fail, or her husband will once again refuse to notice some effort she's made about her person or their home. The trick will be to render intact the magnitude of Clarissa's miniature but very real desperation; to fully convince the reader that, for her, domestic defeats are every bit as devastating as are lost battles to a general. (7.9)
So, without further ado, let's take a look at how the novel's protagonists overcome their own personal monsters.
Anticipation Stage and "Call"
For Virginia Woolf and Laura Brown especially, "monsters" begin to rear their heads in the early morning. Laura knows as soon as she wakes up that it's going to be a difficult day—one in which she'll need to summon extra willpower just to get out of bed and go downstairs. Virginia wakes up in good spirits, but as she washes her face and gets ready to face the day, she has to repress the constant fear that she might relapse into another terrible period of illness.
Dream Stage
For Laura Brown, things seem to be going well enough as she and her three-year-old son, Richie, bake a cake for her husband's birthday. Laura has high hopes that the cake will turn out beautifully, and, for the time being, she seems perfectly able to perform her role as a "normal" wife and mother.
For Virginia Woolf, the morning feels even more positive and full of promise. When she sits down to work on her latest novel—the one that will eventually become Mrs. Dalloway—the words flow smoothly and beautifully.
For her part, Clarissa Vaughan experiences her entire morning as a "dream stage." As she steps out of her gorgeous townhouse apartment and heads off to buy bucket-loads of flowers for her party, she knows she's got it pretty good.
Frustration Stage
Laura Brown's frustration stage begins when her cake turns out to be less beautiful than she'd hoped. She wanted to create a work of art, and instead she has produced something that seems, to her, to be clumsy, amateurish, and inept. She has failed to realize her artistic ambitions, even in this simple little way.
Virginia Woolf's frustration stage begins when her morning surge of literary energy wears off and she has to call it quits for the day. Now that she's ready to deal with the mundane household matters that require her attention, she has to submit herself to the sour moods of her servants and confront her feelings of inadequacy.
Clarissa Vaughan's frustration stage begins when she realizes that her friend Richard Brown—the person her party is for—is going to be having one of his bad days. How can she give Richard a wonderful party if he doesn't even want to attend?
Nightmare Stage
In Booker's standard blueprint for the "Overcoming the Monster" plot, the "nightmare stage" is when things seem darkest for the hero.
We might say that Laura Brown's nightmare stage begins when she makes the surprising, spur-of-the-moment decision to leave her son with a neighbor and take off for a few hours. When she sets out, she has no idea where she wants to go—she simply knows that she needs to get away.
Likewise, Virginia Woolf's nightmare stage begins when she makes the spontaneous decision to slip out of her house and head for the train station. Like Laura Brown, she's seized with a sudden urge to escape. The suffocating weight of life in the suburbs has finally become too much for her to bear.
For Clarissa Vaughan, of course, the nightmare stage begins with a more obviously cataclysmic event: the suicide of Richard Brown.
The Thrilling Escape from Death, and Death of the Monster
Yeah…no.
Considering the fact that the "monster" in The Hours is time itself, the only character who actually defeats, sort of, it is Richard Brown, who chooses to end his life rather than extend his suffering. For the novel's three protagonists, the end of the day is simply a chance to rest and recuperate so that they'll have enough energy to get up again and face the new day in the morning.