8. Laura Brown v. Virginia Woolf

After talking in class last Wednesday about Virginia Woolf's struggle with mental illness, I looked into it a little more, and was not surprised to find that her first struggles with depression and nervous breakdowns began after the death of her mother and sister in her early teenage years. We had looked at Woolf's life a little in my Intro to Lit class, and for the most part I remembered her life being a series of deaths of family members and other similar catastrophes leading Woolf to a number of mental collapses. I find, like I'm sure most others do, her death tragic as I always do when an extremely talented author (Austen, Brontë, etc.) dies before their time. What I find most interesting, in the context of The Hours, however, is the comparison Cunningham draws between Virginia Woolf and his character Laura Brown.

He begins the novel with a brief glimpse into Virginia Woolf's suicide and throughout the novel explores possible reasons for it. However, what he also explores is the unravelling of Laura Brown despite the fact that on the surface, her life as a mother and housewife seems relatively problem free. Nevertheless, Laura suffers from what Betty Friedan calls "the problem that has no name" in her Feminine Mystique.*

The fact that Cunningham chooses to parellel these two woman shows his deep understanding of just how far the "problem that has no name" can unravel and distress a woman. While unlike Virginia Woolf, Laura has no concrete problem, no nameable depression or event in her past that can be pinpointed as the spark for her melancholy and sense of hopelessness. Nevertheless, after finishing the novel one can see that Laura's concerns are no less real than Woolf's (even if they do not manifest themselves in suicide). The first time I read the The Hours, throughout the first half of the novel I was not sure I was entirely convinced of Cunningham's portrayal of the three women; after all, it was quite an undertaking for a male to try to write a book from the perspectives of three troubled women. I am still not always completely sure his portrayal is flawless. However, one of the things that I am noticing most this time through is that Laura paralleled with Virginia Woolf was a great choice in showing the real problems women can face without the ability to name them or even completely understand them.




*Fridan, Betty. "The Feminine Mystique." The Essential Feminist Reader (2007): 269-82. Print.