Finish work on Creative Nonfiction essays.
THE HOURS by Michael Cunningham
THE HOURS/ END OF MARKING PERIOD 3
AGENDA:
Work on, finish and turn in all missing work.
Begin reading The Hours to pg. 48, look over the handout on The Hours, look at links to Michael Cunningham and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.
POST AN ANSWER TO QUESTIONS 1 and 2 (see questions below) for class participation credit today!
Your next assignment will be to write in a genre you are most comfortable with (poetry, fiction or drama). The work needs two historical time periods and needs to weave in motifs in both time periods
.
What are some common motifs? Go to these websites:
http://literaryterms.net/motif/
http://study.com/academy/lesson/motif-in-literature-definition-examples-quiz.html
http://softschools.com/examples/literary_terms/motif_examples/297/
http://literary-devices.com/content/motif
Think about the motifs evident in The Hours. You might want to use some of them.
Here are the discussion questions you will be working with next week:
1. Clarissa Vaughan is described several times as an "ordinary" woman. Do you accept this valuation? If so, what does it imply about the ordinary, about being ordinary? What makes someone, by contrast, extraordinary?
2. Flowers and floral imagery play a significant part in The Hours. When and where are flowers described? What significance do they have, and with what events and moods are they associated? How do flowers affect Virginia? Clarissa?
3. Cunningham plays with the notions of sanity and insanity, recognizing that there might be only a very fine line between the two states. What does the novel imply about the nature of insanity? Might it in fact be a heightened sanity, or at least a heightened sense of awareness? Would you classify Richard as insane? How does his mental state compare with that of Virginia? Of Laura as a young wife? Of Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway? Does insanity (or the received idea of insanity) appear to be connected with creative gifts?
4. Virginia and Laura are both, in a sense, prisoners of their eras and societies, and both long for freedom from this imprisonment. Clarissa Vaughan, on the other hand, apparently enjoys every liberty: freedom to be a lesbian, to come and go and live as she likes. Yet she has ended up, in spite of her unusual way of life, as a fairly conventional wife and mother. What might this fact indicate about the nature of society and the restrictions it imposes? Does the author imply that character, to a certain extent, is destiny?
5. Each of the novel’s three principal women, even the relatively prosaic and down-to-earth Clarissa, occasionally feels a sense of detachment, of playing a role. Laura feels as if she is "about to go onstage and perform in a play for which she is not appropriately dressed, and for which she has not adequately rehearsed" [p. 43]. Clarissa is filled with "a sense of dislocation. This is not her kitchen at all. This is the kitchen of an acquaintance, pretty enough but not her taste, full of foreign smells" [p. 91]. Is this feeling in fact a universal one? Is role-playing an essential part of living in the world, and of behaving "sanely"? Which of the characters refuses to act a role, and what price does he/she pay for this refusal?
6. Who kisses whom in The Hours, and what is the significance of each kiss?
7. The Hours is very much concerned with creativity and the nature of the creative act, and each of its protagonists is absorbed in a particular act of creation. For Virginia and Richard, the object is their writing; for Clarissa Vaughan (and Clarissa Dalloway), it is a party; for Laura Brown, it is another party, or, more generally, "This kitchen, this birthday cake, this conversation. This revived world" [p. 106]. What does the novel tell us about the creative process? How does each character revise and improve his or her creation during the course of the story?
8. How might Richard’s childhood experiences have made him the adult he eventually becomes? In what ways has he been wounded, disturbed?
9. Each of the three principal women is acutely conscious of her inner self or soul, slightly separate from the "self" seen by the world. Clarissa’s "determined, abiding fascination is what she thinks of as her soul" [p. 12]; Virginia "can feel it inside her, an all but indescribable second self, or rather a parallel, purer self. If she were religious, she would call it the soul . . . It is an inner faculty that recognizes the animating mysteries of the world because it is made of the same substance" [pp. 34-35]. Which characters keep these inner selves ruthlessly separate from their outer ones? Why?
10. Each of the novel’s characters sees himself or herself, most of the time, as a failure. Virginia Woolf, as she walks to her death, reflects that "She herself has failed. She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric" [p. 4]. Richard, disgustedly, admits to Clarissa, "I thought I was a genius. I actually used that word, privately, to myself" [p. 65]. Are the novel’s characters unusual, or are such feelings of failure an essential and inevitable part of the human condition?
11. Toward the end of Clarissa’s day, she realizes that kissing Richard beside the pond in Wellfleet was the high point, the culmination, of her life. Richard, apparently, feels the same. Are we meant to think, though, that their lives would have been better, more heightened, had they stayed together? Or does Cunningham imply that as we age we inevitably feel regret for some lost chance, and that what we in fact regret is youth itself?
12. The Hours could on one level be said to be a novel about middle age, the final relinquishment of youth and the youthful self. What does middle age mean to these characters? In what essential ways do these middle-aged people--Clarissa, Richard, Louis, Virginia --differ from their youthful selves? Which of them resists the change most strenuously?
13. What does the possibility of death represent to the various characters? Which of them loves the idea of death, as others love life? What makes some of the characters decide to die, others to live? What personality traits separate the "survivors" from the suicides?
14. If you have read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, would you describe The Hours as a modern version of it? A commentary upon it? A dialogue with it? Which characters in The Hours correspond with those of Woolf’s novel? In what ways are they similar, and at what point do the similarities cease and the characters become freestanding individuals in their own right?
15. For the most part, the characters in The Hours have either a different gender or a different sexual orientation from their prototypes in Mrs. Dalloway. How much has all this gender-bending affected or changed the situations, the relationships, and the people?
16. Why has Cunningham chosen The Hours for the title of his novel (aside from the fact that it was Woolf’s working title for Mrs. Dalloway)? In what ways is the title appropriate, descriptive? What do hours mean to Richard? To Laura? To Clarissa?
Work on, finish and turn in all missing work.
Begin reading The Hours to pg. 48, look over the handout on The Hours, look at links to Michael Cunningham and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.
POST AN ANSWER TO QUESTIONS 1 and 2 (see questions below) for class participation credit today!
Your next assignment will be to write in a genre you are most comfortable with (poetry, fiction or drama). The work needs two historical time periods and needs to weave in motifs in both time periods
.
What are some common motifs? Go to these websites:
http://literaryterms.net/motif/
http://study.com/academy/lesson/motif-in-literature-definition-examples-quiz.html
http://softschools.com/examples/literary_terms/motif_examples/297/
http://literary-devices.com/content/motif
Think about the motifs evident in The Hours. You might want to use some of them.
Here are the discussion questions you will be working with next week:
1. Clarissa Vaughan is described several times as an "ordinary" woman. Do you accept this valuation? If so, what does it imply about the ordinary, about being ordinary? What makes someone, by contrast, extraordinary?
2. Flowers and floral imagery play a significant part in The Hours. When and where are flowers described? What significance do they have, and with what events and moods are they associated? How do flowers affect Virginia? Clarissa?
3. Cunningham plays with the notions of sanity and insanity, recognizing that there might be only a very fine line between the two states. What does the novel imply about the nature of insanity? Might it in fact be a heightened sanity, or at least a heightened sense of awareness? Would you classify Richard as insane? How does his mental state compare with that of Virginia? Of Laura as a young wife? Of Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway? Does insanity (or the received idea of insanity) appear to be connected with creative gifts?
4. Virginia and Laura are both, in a sense, prisoners of their eras and societies, and both long for freedom from this imprisonment. Clarissa Vaughan, on the other hand, apparently enjoys every liberty: freedom to be a lesbian, to come and go and live as she likes. Yet she has ended up, in spite of her unusual way of life, as a fairly conventional wife and mother. What might this fact indicate about the nature of society and the restrictions it imposes? Does the author imply that character, to a certain extent, is destiny?
5. Each of the novel’s three principal women, even the relatively prosaic and down-to-earth Clarissa, occasionally feels a sense of detachment, of playing a role. Laura feels as if she is "about to go onstage and perform in a play for which she is not appropriately dressed, and for which she has not adequately rehearsed" [p. 43]. Clarissa is filled with "a sense of dislocation. This is not her kitchen at all. This is the kitchen of an acquaintance, pretty enough but not her taste, full of foreign smells" [p. 91]. Is this feeling in fact a universal one? Is role-playing an essential part of living in the world, and of behaving "sanely"? Which of the characters refuses to act a role, and what price does he/she pay for this refusal?
6. Who kisses whom in The Hours, and what is the significance of each kiss?
7. The Hours is very much concerned with creativity and the nature of the creative act, and each of its protagonists is absorbed in a particular act of creation. For Virginia and Richard, the object is their writing; for Clarissa Vaughan (and Clarissa Dalloway), it is a party; for Laura Brown, it is another party, or, more generally, "This kitchen, this birthday cake, this conversation. This revived world" [p. 106]. What does the novel tell us about the creative process? How does each character revise and improve his or her creation during the course of the story?
8. How might Richard’s childhood experiences have made him the adult he eventually becomes? In what ways has he been wounded, disturbed?
9. Each of the three principal women is acutely conscious of her inner self or soul, slightly separate from the "self" seen by the world. Clarissa’s "determined, abiding fascination is what she thinks of as her soul" [p. 12]; Virginia "can feel it inside her, an all but indescribable second self, or rather a parallel, purer self. If she were religious, she would call it the soul . . . It is an inner faculty that recognizes the animating mysteries of the world because it is made of the same substance" [pp. 34-35]. Which characters keep these inner selves ruthlessly separate from their outer ones? Why?
10. Each of the novel’s characters sees himself or herself, most of the time, as a failure. Virginia Woolf, as she walks to her death, reflects that "She herself has failed. She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric" [p. 4]. Richard, disgustedly, admits to Clarissa, "I thought I was a genius. I actually used that word, privately, to myself" [p. 65]. Are the novel’s characters unusual, or are such feelings of failure an essential and inevitable part of the human condition?
11. Toward the end of Clarissa’s day, she realizes that kissing Richard beside the pond in Wellfleet was the high point, the culmination, of her life. Richard, apparently, feels the same. Are we meant to think, though, that their lives would have been better, more heightened, had they stayed together? Or does Cunningham imply that as we age we inevitably feel regret for some lost chance, and that what we in fact regret is youth itself?
12. The Hours could on one level be said to be a novel about middle age, the final relinquishment of youth and the youthful self. What does middle age mean to these characters? In what essential ways do these middle-aged people--Clarissa, Richard, Louis, Virginia --differ from their youthful selves? Which of them resists the change most strenuously?
13. What does the possibility of death represent to the various characters? Which of them loves the idea of death, as others love life? What makes some of the characters decide to die, others to live? What personality traits separate the "survivors" from the suicides?
14. If you have read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, would you describe The Hours as a modern version of it? A commentary upon it? A dialogue with it? Which characters in The Hours correspond with those of Woolf’s novel? In what ways are they similar, and at what point do the similarities cease and the characters become freestanding individuals in their own right?
15. For the most part, the characters in The Hours have either a different gender or a different sexual orientation from their prototypes in Mrs. Dalloway. How much has all this gender-bending affected or changed the situations, the relationships, and the people?
16. Why has Cunningham chosen The Hours for the title of his novel (aside from the fact that it was Woolf’s working title for Mrs. Dalloway)? In what ways is the title appropriate, descriptive? What do hours mean to Richard? To Laura? To Clarissa?
1) This valuation is not accurate because Clarissa Vaughan is anything but ordinary. She is in love with absolutely everything and knows this fact about herself. She finds the beauty in everything, even as far as to justify older men seeking little boys for their innocence. That is inherently wrong and should never be put up for debate, so Clarissa must be a strange person in order to reason pedophilia in this roundabout way. She also finds beauty and love for miniscule things such as what she sees walking in streets and strolling through parks. Ordinary people, and regular humans, are miserable and pessimistic at best. They are not whole-hearted, pure, and loving of life in the way that Clarissa is. Ordinary people are selfish at varying levels, and would certainly not ponder over what gift to get someone to the extent that Clarissa does. An extraordinary person is someone who displays traits that are outside what normal people portray. They stand out in comparison, draw the most attention, generate the most conversation, etc. In other words, they are outside of the box and it is very apparent that they are. Clarissa Vaughan is an example of this extraordinary type of person.
ReplyDelete2) Flowers are described in a regular setting during Clarissa, Virginia, and Laura’s chapters. For example, Laura ponders how she wants to surprise and please Dan by “setting a big bouquet of flowers (roses?)... that should compensate, shouldn’t it?” (Cunningham 38). However, flowers are also used to segway between the characters. Virginia ends her chapters by writing “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” (Cunningham 35) which introduces Laura reading Virginia’s book about that in the next chapter. The significance of these flowers is that they are a motif the author utilizes to jump between the girls and make their stories more connected. A feeling of wonder, curiosity, and motivation is associated with the flowers since they are mentioned in Virginia’s writing. The flowers affect Virginia specifically because they are the main symbol in her book about Mrs. Dalloway, and this affects Clarissa because she is actually Mrs. Dalloway.
1. Extraordinary people are people who are unusual and unique. People who do not behave like others around them and have something that sets them apart from ordinary people. Clarissa and her love for Richard as well as her love for life is what makes her an extraordinary person.
ReplyDelete2. The main reason flowers are used in the story is to connect the main characters to each other. The most obvious example is the use of yellow roses, the author uses yellow roses in all three narratives to create a connection. The author also uses flowers as a symbol of life and death Clarissa purchases flowers to give to Richard who is ill and dying his reaction to the flowers exposes their meaning, "have I died?"