LE3 .A278 2004

2004

Quéma, Anne

Acadia University

Bachelor of Arts

Honours

Sociology and English

Sociology

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998) are the focus of this study, which scrutinizes the multifarious relations between these two heterogeneous textual productions from two theoretical perspectives: intertextuality and feminism. Chapter Two examines the relationship between these two texts from the standpoint of Julia Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality. There is an undeniable intertextual relationship between these two texts. Cunningham includes excerpts from Woolf’s novel, diaries, and letters in his narrative. Furthermore, he acknowledges numerous secondary sources that he consulted to acquire background information on the various people – including Virginia and Leonard Woolf, amongst others – who are historical figures and who appear in his book as fictional characters. His text is a literary montage: his narrative is the product of intertextual relations between Woolf’s novel and his own narrative that spans four twentieth-century generations. Chapter Three analyzes the theme of gender relations within each novel and between the two novels from a radical feminist viewpoint. Gender is a socio-political and cultural construct. Although Mrs. Dalloway upholds the conventional patriarchal correlation between women’s domesticity and their secondary social status, Woolf’s character Clarissa Dalloway redefines her domesticity as art because she is confined to the domestic sphere and redefining her work in a positive way gives her a heightened feeling of personal significance. The Hours is a male writer’s version of the genealogical evolution of twentieth-century Western gender relations.

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https://scholar.acadiau.ca/islandora/object/theses:427