“There Are Still the Hours”

 Time in Mrs Dalloway and The Hours

Marlies de Vos

Doctoraalscriptie aan de Faculteit der Letteren
Opleiding: Engelse taal en cultuur
Vakgebied: Letteren

Academiejaar: 2004-2005

Universiteit Utrecht

1e studiebegeleider: Drs. Rias van den Doel
2e studiebegeleider: Drs. Roselinde Supheert

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own

There’s the weather, there’s the water and the land, there are the animals, and the buildings, and the past and the future, there’s space, there’s history. There’s this thread of something caught between my teeth, there’s the old woman across the way, did you notice she switched the donkey and the squirrel on her windowsill? And, of course, there’s time.

Richard Brown in The Hours

There is a city surrounded by water with watery alleys that do for streets and roads and silted up back ways that only the rats can cross. Miss your way, which is easy to do, and you may find yourself staring at a hundred eyes guarding a filthy palace of sacks and bones. Find your way, which is easy to do, and you may meet an old woman in a doorway. She will tell your fortune, depending on your face.

From The Passion by Jeanette Winterson

Prologue

Introduction

Chapter 1 – The Concept of Psychological Time

Time on the Mind

A Brief History

Psychological Time in Theory

Modernism and Psychological Time

The Manifestations of Psychological Time in Modernism

Chapter 2 – Psychological Time and Mrs Dalloway

Woolf and Psychological Time

Mrs Dalloway – Super Connected

The Liquid Mind

Stream of consciousness in Mrs Dalloway

The Caves of the Mind

Virginia Woolf’s tunnelling technique

Hall of Mirrors

Repetition as a structural device in Mrs Dalloway

The Clock Strikes Six

The representation of time and clocks in Mrs Dalloway

Concluding Mrs Dalloway

Chapter 3 – Psychological Time and The Hours

The Hours

The Liquid Mind

Stream of consciousness in The Hours

The Caves of the Mind

Michael Cunningham and Woolf’s ‘tunnelling technique’

The Clock Strikes Thirteen

The presence or absence of clocks in The Hours

Hall of Mirrors

Repetition within The Hours and in relation to Mrs Dalloway

Mr Brown

Richard Worthington Brown – the author and time

Going to the Movies

On the adaptation of The Hours

Rippling into the Postmodern

Mrs Dalloway extends into the future through The Hours

Conclusion

List of Works Cited