Clocks
Hey, it's no surprise that a novel called The Hours contains a symbolic clock or two. The first of these is the clock that sits on Laura Brown's bedside table. It has a green face in a black Bakeli...
Parties, Novels, and Cakes
Have you ever tried to make something that would showcase all of your talent and skill, and be really, truly beautiful? The good folks featured on Regretsy probably know a thing or two about trying...
Celebrity
You've already heard that The Hours is big on "time," and it stands to reason that a novel obsessed with the passage of time might have a thing or two to say about mortality and immortality, too.It...
Passage of Time
You already know that The Hours has some things to say about the toll that time takes on our short human lives, and, throughout the novel, Michael Cunningham occasionally drops an image that draws...
Flowers
Flowers are abundant in The Hours, and they symbolize all of the many things that they tend to represent in our everyday lives: celebration, life, love, friendship, romance, and even death and mour...
Water
Michael Cunningham really takes a page out of Virginia Woolf's book when it comes to water imagery in The Hours.Cunningham's first chapter gives us a direct echo of the beginning of Woolf's 1925 no...
Darkness, Shadow, and Light
Chiaroscuro, anyone?There's a lot of imagery throughout The Hours that combines light, shadow, and darkness in striking ways. Sometimes, those combinations help to characterize physical spaces, as...
Performance
In every one of the novels' three main plotlines, at least one character finds himself or herself feeling as though life is little more than a performance. Whenever this metaphor rears its head, yo...