Stylized, Poetic, Woolfish
Throughout The Hours, Michael Cunningham works to capture some of the stylistic elements that make Virginia Woolf's writing so memorable. At the same time, he also makes sure to put his own stamp on things. The end result? A writing style that's about three parts homage, two parts originality, and one-hundred-percent smooth.
Like Woolf, Cunningham sometimes uses very long, meandering sentences that try to capture the rippling, changing streams of conscious human thought. Take a look at this one, for example:
This neighborhood was once the center of something new and wild; something disreputable; a part of the city where the sound of guitars drifted all night out of bars and coffeehouses; where the stores that sold books and clothing smelled the way she imagined Arab bazaars must smell: incense and rich, dung-y dust, some sort of wood (cedar? camphor?), something fruitily, fertilely rotting; and where it had seemed possible, quite possible, that if you passed through the wrong door or down the wrong alley you would meet a fate: not just the familiar threat of robbery and physical harm but something more perverse and transforming, more permanent. (4.10)
Now, compare that passage to this one, which The Hours quotes directly from Woolf's own Mrs. Dalloway:
How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, 'Musing among the vegetables?'—was that it?—'I prefer men to cauliflowers'—was that it? (3.7)
On top of mirroring Woolf's sentence structure, The Hours also swipes some of her metaphors and imagery, too. To see what we mean, compare the opening passages of The Hours to the opening passages of Mrs. Dalloway, respectively:
CUNNINGHAM:
There are still the flowers to buy. Clarissa feigns exasperation (though she loves doing errands like this), leaves Sally cleaning the bathroom, and runs out, promising to be back in half an hour.
It is New York City. It is the end of the twentieth century.
The vestibule door opens onto a June morning so fine and scrubbed Clarissa pauses at the threshold as she would at the edge of a pool, watching the turquoise water lapping at the tiles, the liquid nets of sun wavering in the blue depths. (1.3)
WOOLF:
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would have to be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer's men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach. (3.2)
In both of these passages—so similar, structurally speaking—the freshness and beauty of a bright summer morning is captured through water imagery. Clarissa Dalloway thinks of a beach, and Clarissa Vaughan thinks of a pool, but both images are all about the same vivid images of sunlight shimmering brilliantly over blue.
As they say: imitation is the highest form of flattery.