Foil

Character Role Analysis

Clarissa Vaughan, Virginia Woolf, Laura Brown, Richard Brown

When a novel has three interconnected plotlines and three independent protagonists, there's a good chance that those protagonists are foils. Clarissa Vaughan, Virginia Woolf, and Laura Brown share countless similarities and differences, and by inviting us readers to consider the connections and divergences between them, The Hours offers us deeper insight into each of their situations. Together, the three characters resonate, and strike a perfect chord.

There's another way to look at the foil relationships in this novel, though. Virginia Woolf and Richard Brown are the novel's principal artist-figures. Each of them knows what it's like to suffer a debilitating illness, and the novel uses similar language and imagery to depict each one's illnesses. Both of them also end their lives feeling like failures, as though they had failed to accomplish all that they wished to achieve in their writing.

By drawing such strong parallels between these two characters, Michael Cunningham makes it clear that Richard Brown is not only the literary counterpart of Mrs. Dalloway's Septimus Warren Smith, but is also a foil of Virginia Woolf herself.