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 novel Mrs. Dalloway: "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).

Just compare that to the beginning of Mrs. Dalloway: "And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach" (3.2).

In both of these passages, water imagery helps to capture the brightness and vitality of two gorgeous summer mornings. Pretty much from page one, we've got a connection established for us between the worlds of Michael Cunningham and Virginia Woolf.

In other passages throughout The Hours, water imagery does other things. Woolf's historical death by drowning inspires Cunningham to use water imagery to represent freedom and weightlessness—sensations of escape from the weighty sorrows of life. Take a look, for example, at how Laura Brown feels about her decision to stay in bed reading Mrs. Dalloway rather than heading straight downstairs to make breakfast for her husband and son:

She will permit herself another minute here, in bed, before entering the day. She will allow herself just a little more time. She is taken by a wave of feeling, a sea-swell, that rises from under her breast and buoys her, floats her gently, as if she were a sea creature thrown back from the sand where it had beached itself—as if she had been returned from a realm of crushing gravity to her true medium, the suck and swell of saltwater, that weightless brilliance. (3.10)

Then again, water imagery can also be used to represent oppressive, airless atmospheres. Here's Laura Brown again, mustering up the willpower to get out of bed and go downstairs: "Summoning resolve, as if she were about to dive into cold water, Laura closes the book and lays it on the nightstand. She does not dislike her child, does not dislike her husband. She will rise and be cheerful" (3.13).

In a similar vein, Cunningham gives us this watery portrait of Richard Brown's apartment:

The apartment has, more than anything, an underwater aspect. Clarissa walks through it as she would negotiate the hold of a sunken ship. It would not be entirely surprising if a small school of silver fish darted by in the half-light. These rooms do not seem, in any serious way, to be part of the building in which they happen to occur, and when Clarissa enters and closes behind her the big, creaky door with the four locks (two of them broken) she feels, always, as if she has passed through a dimensional warp—through the looking glass, as it were […]. (4.25)

Like the flower symbolism and imagery that appears throughout The Hours, the novel's water imagery is versatile. Sometimes it helps to conjure beauty and brilliance; at other times it's as dark and gloomy as your average submarine. Water is a fickle element, after all—one that can bring death just as easily as it sustains life.