浅析小说《时时刻刻》与《达洛卫夫人》的互文性（论文正文）

学科分类号 0502

本科生毕业论文

题目 析小说《时时刻刻》与《达洛卫夫人》的互文性

An Analysis of the Intertextuality in The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway

学生姓名： 黄 莹 学 号： 0607405007 系 别： 外国语言文学系 专 业： 英 语 指导教师： 唐 姿 副教授 起止日期： 2009.9-2010.3

2010年03月07日

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Contents

摘 要 .................................................................................................................................................I 关键词 ...............................................................................................................................................I Abstract ............................................................................................................................................ II Key Words ........................................................................................................................................ II Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 I. Brief Reviews of the Literary Theory and Literary Text ...................................................... 5

1.1 About Intertextuality ........................................................................................................ 5

1.1.1 Origin of Intertextuality ........................................................................................ 6 1.1.2 The Production of Intertextuality and Kristeva .................................................. 8 1.1.3 Intertextuality in Narrow and Broad sense ........................................................ 10 1.1.4 Different levels of intertextuality ........................................................................ 12 1.2 The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway ........................................................................................ 13

1.2.1 Mrs. Dalloway as Pre-text ................................................................................... 13 1.2.2 The Hours as Post-text ......................................................................................... 14

II. Comparative Reading Wielded Intertextuality .................................................................. 16

2.1 Intertextual Reinterpretations in Symbols.................................................................... 16

2.1.1 Flower .................................................................................................................... 16 2.1.2 Party ...................................................................................................................... 21 2.1.3 Cake and Richmond ............................................................................................. 24 2.1.4 City ........................................................................................................................ 25 2.1.5 Clock ...................................................................................................................... 27 2.2 Intertextual Reinterpretations in Characters ............................................................... 28 2.3 Intertextual Reinterpretations of Themes ..................................................................... 30

2.3.1 Insanity .................................................................................................................. 30 2.3.2 Homosexuality ...................................................................................................... 32 2.3.4 Suicide and Death ................................................................................................. 33 2.4 Other Intertextual Reinterpretations in The Hours ..................................................... 35 III. The Function of Intertextuality in The Hours ................................................................... 36

3.1 The Criticism of Radical Feminism in Intertextual Recreation .................................. 36 3.2 The Reinterpretation of Virginia ................................................................................... 38 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................... 41 Biography....................................................................................................................................... 43 Acknowledgements........................................................................................................................ 44

析小说《时时刻刻》与《达洛卫夫人》的互文性

摘 要

由法国的克里斯蒂娃提出的互文性是当代文学理论和文化研究的核心术语之一，也是后现代小说的重要标签之一。麦克.康宁汉的后现代小说《时时刻刻》与意识流小说《达洛卫夫人》存在着互文性，甚至可以说前者是后者派生出来的文学作品，而在阅读前者时，我们又能对后者进行重新思考，从而更好地了解和把握两部作品中不同时代女性的生存状况和精神状况。本文第一部分将简单梳理互文性概念的学渊系谱并对本文研究的文本进行介绍；第二部分将运用狭义和广义的互文性方法对《时时刻刻》与《达洛卫夫人》进行对比阅读，通过对互文性具体方式结合文本分析，指出两者相互指涉、相互映射的部分；第三部分将讨论互文对于后文本《时时刻刻》的作用。

关键词

互文性；克里斯蒂娃；达洛卫夫人；维吉尼亚伍尔夫；时时刻刻

I

An Analysis of the Intertextuality in The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway

Abstract

Intertextuality is a term first introduced by French semiotician Julia Kristeva in the late sixties. Michael Cunningham’s novel, The Hours, is treated as the contemporary revision of Virginia Wolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. When reading the former novel, we will surely have reconsideration on the later one, so that we can comprehend and understand both the life condition and spiritual status of women in different epochs much better. The thesis is firstly devoted to a mainly discussion about the orientation of and the category in intertextual research. The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway are to be comparative read wielded different forms of intertextuality in the second part. The third part is to argue about the function of intertextuality in The Hours.

Key Words

Intertextuality; Kristeva; Mrs. Dalloway; Virginia Wolf; The Hours

II

Introduction

Intertextuality is a significant sign of Postmodernism fictions. And it was first coined by the French semiotics and feminism critic Julia Kristeva in her work Word, Dialogue and Novel when she was doing research on Bakhtin’s theory of double-voiced nature of language. After the coinage of Kristeva, many critics and theorists put forward their own views and perceptions on Intertextuality and intertextuality has been divided into the narrow sense and the wide sense. In the opinion of Sun Xiuli, who wrote the Brief Research of Kresteva’s Intertextuality in Wide Sense, Kristeva is the reprehensive scholar of intertextuality in wide sense and intertextuality in narrow sense is presented by Genette. Allen G. summarizes the opinions of predecessors in the way of list the followings: intertextuality origins Saussure and Bakhtin and Kristeva raise a production of it; Barthes holds a view of ―text unbound‖ when indentifying intertextuality; Genette and Riffaterre have their structuralist approsches on intertextuality; as situated readers, intertextuality influents Harold Bloom’s conflictual vision of the intertextual process; intertextuality’s influences on Feminism and Postcolonialism, etc.

The researches of intertextuality are very hot in China, and over 1100 pieces of theses can be in www.cnki.net. Most of them are referential to the purified academic researches toward intertextuality, such

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as the introductions, summarizing orientations of intertextuality and the category in intertextual research, the comparison between intertextuality in different systems and genres, etc. In the rest part of the theses, searches on intertextuality in advertisement field, in the www Text in network building, etc. and in other forms take occupied a part, on the contrary, intertextual researches on literary works, contrarily, are kinds of rare.

The Hours is an excellent postmodernism fiction. Michael Cunningham gives a rehearsal on the masterpiece Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours become a hotspot in American modern literature research. However, most researches are focused on the Stream-of –Consciousness technique and Feminism in The Hours, and except of the emphasis of the existence of “footnote” stylish intertextual pastiche to Mrs. Dalloway, rare intertextual researches in other angles have been done.

The intertextual researches in these two fictions become popular in China.

Lauren Shih-Ming Tang’s Virginia Wolf in Intertextuality: An Intertextual Study of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours which published in is a previous research thesis, and she analyzes the intertextual pastiche of Stream-of –Consciousness technique in The Hours.

In 2004, Song Tao and Zhu Jie points out in their thesis: intertextual referential to Mrs. Dalloway exists in The Hours, and the The

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Hours inherits the style and theme of Mrs. Dalloway through a way of intertextuality, and this inheritance contributes to remolding and expounding to the masterpiece. In the same year, the systemic analyses of pastiche intertextuality are rewritten by Wang LiLi in her thesis.

Yuan Suhua points out that the intertextual strategy in The Hours is not only simple pastiche, but also are oversteps and innovations. She also considers The Hours as introspection, criticism, subverting to the radical Feminism in Mrs. Dalloway.

But the above these are simply listing the similarities in these two fictions or listing the system of intertextuality. The realistic combination of theory and text rarely exists.

Two mature theses are the An Intertextual Study of The Hours of Xie Ye and Mrs. Dalloway and An Intertextual Reading of The Hours of Wang Chen. The former one drives the concrete forms of intertextuality in narrow sense to classify the analyses towards similarities between the two fictions; the later one has intertextual readings aspects such as symbol, theme, writing technique, etc.

This thesis synthesizes the predecessors’views, and innovates in that, the analyses are arranged by follows two thread: one is the intertextual study from symbolic, characters’to thematic, and the second is the concrete forms of intertextuality; in this way, the analyses shows the procedural steps of intertextuality. And the function of intertextuality in

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The Hours is also in investigation.

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I. Brief Reviews of the Literary Theory and Literary Text Intertextuality is one of the kernel terms both in modern literature theory and modern civilization research. Postmodern novel The Hours, which was published in 1988, is the third fiction of the American author, Michael Cunningham, and it won the PEN/Faulkner Award the year it was born, and won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The Stream-of-Consciousness novel Mrs. Dalloway is a classic fiction was wrote by the famous British female writer and the precursor of feminism, Virginia Wolf. When reading the two works, we can easily notice the conspicuous intertextual relations in them, and we could even say that The Hours is the derived work of Mrs. Dalloway through an intertextual strategy.

1.1 About Intertextuality

―Works of literature, after all, are built from systems, codes and traditions established by previous works of literature. The systems, codes and traditions of other art forma and of culture in general are also crucial to the meaning of a work of literature. Texts, whether they are literary or non-literary, are viewed by modern theorist as lacking of independent meaning.‖[1] In this way, texts become intertexts. Intertextuality is the intertextual relations of texts and the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts. It can refer to an author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior

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text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another. Employed in structuralist, post-structuralist, semiotic, deconstructive, postcolonial, Marxist, feminist and psychoanalytic theories, the term ―intertextuality‖ has, itself, been borrowed and transformed many times since it was coined by poststructuralist Julia Kristeva in 1966. As critic William Irwin says, the term ―has come to have almost as many meanings as users, from those faithful to Kristeva original vision to those who simply use it as a stylish way of talking about allusion and influence‖ [2].

1.1.1 Origin of Intertextuality

It can be said that intertextuality has its origin in 20th Century linguistic, particular in the seminal work of Ferdinand de Saussure, a great Swiss linguistic. Saussure created a definition in which a sigh can be imagined as two-sided coin combining a signified (concept) and a signifier (sound-image). This notion stresses that its meaning is non-referential: a sign is not a word’s reference to a certain object in the world, but the combination between a signifier and a signified. So no sign has a meaning of its own. Signs only possess meaning on account of their combination and association to other signs. In Saussure’s opinion, signs exit within a system and have meaning through their similarity to and difference from other signs; ―Authors of literary works do not just select word from a language system, they select plots, generic features, aspects of characters, images, ways of narrating, even phrases and sentences from

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previous literary texts and from the literary tradition‖[3] P11.

Mikhail. M. Bakhtin has been styled one of the most important literary theorists of the 20th Century. His work is influential within the fields of literary theory and criticism, in linguistics, philosophy and many other disciplines.

The age 1920s sees the beginning for understanding of Bakhtin and his forerunning ideas about intertextuality though at that time the term ―intertextuality‖ didn’t see the light. As to the attempt by Saussure linguistics to explain languages as a synchronic system, Bakhtin in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language argues that Saussure linguistics remains something describes as ―abstract objectivism‖ for its lack of attention to social specificity. Bakhtin is more concerned with the social contexts within which words are exchanged. For Bakhtin, the relational nature of the word ―stems from the word’s existence within specific social sites, specific social registers and specific moments of utterance and reception‖ [3] P11.It is Bakhtin who invites public attention to focus on the term ―dialogic‖ which refers to the idea that ―all utterances respond to previous utterances and are always addressed to other potential speakers, rather than occurring independently or in isolation. Language always occurs in specific social situations between specific human agents. Words always contain a dialogic quality, embodying a dialogue between different meanings and applications.‖[3]

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P211

. Bakhtin’s emphasis on

dialogism and other concepts and his insistence on the social and double-voiced nature of language are opposite to unitary, authoritarian and hierarchical conceptions of life, society and art. This perception can also be seen as origin of the term intertextuality.

1.1.2 The Production of Intertextuality and Kristeva

The term of Intertextuality was first coined in the late 1960s, by the French semiotics and feminism critic Julia Kristeva in her work Word, Dialogue and Novel. She concluded that ―any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double‖ [3] .

The basic connotation of intertextuality is, “every text is the mirror of other texts, and every text is the assimilation and transformation of other texts. These texts consult, refer, and involve each other, so that they can intertexture an open network with eternal potential. Then this network can on one hand to build a huge and open literary system of the past, the present as well as the future texts, on the other hand to constitute the developing processes of literary semiotics”.[4]

Kristeva’s Intertextuality theory was mainly inspired by the Russian scholar Bakhtin’s views and it is who Bakhtin drew the conception of “Intertextuality—text/culture relationships” into the literary critics theory. In Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetic, he put forward the

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term of “Literary Carnival”, and it, actually, had given the expression of an Intertextual sense. Bakhtin also posted the systematic relationships between literary dialogues an extra-literary dialogue.

Kristeva had once given a special explanation of the differences between herself and Bakhtin. In one 1961 interview, she pointed out that : “Bakhtin did not use the term ‘intertextuality’definitely in his dissertation, but it seems that we could deduce this term from Bakhtin’s view.‖ [5] P189~190 Kristeva’s purpose was not only giving a faithful and exhaustive introduction of Bakhtin, but also deepening and expanding Bakhtin’s views.

She said: “Firstly, I think, the parts, the sentences, the speeches and the passages of texts are not only the direct or indirect crossover of two voices in dialogue. I’d rather say, the passages of texts are the crossing of many voices and many texts’ interventions. And these plenty of voices and texts’ interventions are not only involved in the semiotic field, but also the field of syntax and phonetics in language expressing. Then I conceived the multielement of the participations of the phonetics, the syntax and phonetics. I think, compared with Bakhtin, my innovation is, I treat those outside interventions from different levels as syntax and phonetics levels as well as significance level. I’m more interested in, which is much unique to me，the mental activities areas showed by the intervention of various texts from different sections. Analysis should not

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been simply limited in the final participated texts or just affirmed the Origin of those texts appeared in the work. We should considerer that what we’re referring to is a particular dynamics with a spoken subject. As a result, just because of the existence of intertextuality, the spoken subject does not just turn out be a etymological subject or a identity subject.‖[5]

P160

1.1.3 Intertextuality in Narrow and Broad sense

Intertextuality includes both the concrete and abstract ways of

referring. The concrete referring is the mention of the visible and obvious references between the text itself and another text, or among different texts, while the contents abstract referred are in the outside word: the wider and more metaphysical literature, the social and civilization system, or even the invisible things.

The French literary critics Gérard Genette’s views insists that intertextuality refers to the obvious relationship between one particular literary text and other literary texts. His intertextual views belong to intertextuality in narrow sense. While Kristeva and Roland Barthes as poststructuralists explore intertextuality in a wide sense. Roland Bathes asserts that “meaning derives not from the author but from language intertextuality viewed”10. In Julia Kristeva’s views, quotations are by no means the direct or pure ones, but are transformed, dislocated, condensed, or edited against the original text; a literary work, then is not simply the

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product of a single author, but of its relationship to other texts and to the structures of language itself.

So intertextuality can be differed into the narrow sense and broad sense. The definition of intertextuality in narrow sense lies in the early structuralism and semiotics, while broad sense intertextuality often embodies in the post- structuralism

And Kristeva has her own assertions, for example, assertions about text: “a text, in the narrow sense, cannot exists as a hermetic or self-sufficient whole, and so does not function as a closed system. A text can be a text only through two channels. One is the author, who brings other texts he has read into the particular text he is writing. The other channel is the reader, the addressee, who, while reading the text, realizes his own interpretations based on his previous experience of other texts. The “anterior or synchronic” texts the author or the reader brings into the text in question are termed as ‘pre-texts’, ‘hypotexts’or ‘intertexts’.”[7]

Generally speaking, through what we get from Kristeva’s interview, we can define that, the intertextuality in narrow sense means that intertextual relationships only appear in the situation that the texts can point out the obvious inter-referential connection. Narrow sense intertextuality has its own concrete forms, such as quotation, allusion, pastiche, plagiarism, parody, parallelism, annexation, motif, etc which

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will be the main tools to guide us to do the comparative reading wielded intertextuality in narrow sense.

“intertextuality in a wide sense refers to the inter-referential relations between a text and any knowledge, code, sign, ideographic practice that gives meaning to the text; intertextuality in a wide sense considers non-literary artworks, kinds of knowledge scopes of human beings, ideographic practices, even society, history, culture, etc as texts; intertextuality in a narrow sense, widely employed in analyses of the particular literary works, is a more practical one which delimits itself to the study of relationship between a text and its intertexts.”[8]

1.1.4 Different levels of intertextuality

After viewing the transition of intertextuality from narrow sense to broad sense, we could get the conclusion that there are three levels in intertextual conversation: the conversations of texts, the conversations of subjects and the conversations in cultures.

When being analyzed in the first level, the term of Intertextuality emphasis more on the research of literary form and style, and this stress is in accordance with intertextuality’s Origin of structuralism.

In the level of text, intertextuality emphasize that one text can expound and prove intertextual relationships among the other texts involved in itself. In another word, here is a certain text, and it quotes, absorbs, expands, or even drastically transforms some other texts, and

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only pursuant to these relationships can we understand the meaning of the certain text, then the relationships among the certain text and the later texts are the emphases intertextuality driven at in its fist level.

So the first step of intertextuality theory’s practice and operation is to investigate the relationships called intertextual traces, and words, figures of speech, literary styles and forms of texts are all expressions of intertextual traces. In this way, intertextual criticism finds its tenable preconditions in these textual details.

The second level is focusing on the subject conversation. The relationship between subject and object is always one pivot of literary theory, and what intertextuality overweighs structuralism is the former pays more attentions on the creative subject via a way of researching on plain text.

Thirdly, the study point changing from texts to subject shows that intertextuality research has been gradually giving up the traditional critical method which is only focused on the relationship between the author and its works, and turns to a hypotextual cultural research under a wider and vaster context. Moreover, in its researches of texts and subjects, intertextuality shows great solicitude for how and what influences the ubiquity cultural traditions, through the way of texts and subjects, acts on current literary creation.

1.2 The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway

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1.2.1 Mrs. Dalloway as Pre-text

In her dairy of October 14th, Virginia Wolf described her conceive: “I will do the research of the insanity and the suicide, with a double vision to observe the world through the eyes of both the person in right sense and the person in insanity.”“The person in right sense”in the novel is Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of the and “the person in sanity”is the young man, Septimus Warren Smith, he has just deactivated from the army of World War I. Septimus is a voluntary soldier to entre the war, to fight for guarding his homeland, to protect the Great Britain of Shakespeare, but after the miserable war, he gets involved into the psychosis of delusion. In May, 1925, Virginia Wolf’s Mrs. Dalloway was published by the Hogan’s Press, and the working title of this fiction is The Hours, which is, we find out, used as the formal name the post-text, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (a typical quotation).

1.2.2 The Hours as Post-text

The writer Michael Cunningham was born in 1952, and became famous in American Literatus for his maiden work, A Home at the End of the World, and The Hours is his third fiction. Being different from the prior two, The Hours is an experimental fiction with regards to the famous British Stream-of-Consciousness novelist, Virginia Wolf, and her masterpiece, Mrs. Dalloway.

The book follows one day in the life of three women from different

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decades of the twentieth century. As the stories unfold, we discover that they are paralleled and connected to each other in several ways. Virginia Woolf, a writer in Richmond in 1923, treating her panasthenia and conceiving her works at the same time, putting pen to paper and writing the first lines of her novel, Mrs. Dalloway; but she is too sensitive to endure the anxiety attacks of life. Laura Brown, a housewife in Californian in 1949, avidly reading Mrs. Dalloway with passages quoted verbatim. She has a seeming happy family, a husband who loves her very mush, a son, and another baby in her abdomen, but something anxious still exists in somewhere invisible. The life drives her desperate and in order to escape from the dull life, she attempts to suicide. And Clarissa Vaughan, a New-Yorker whose actions one June morning at the end of the 20th century bear so close a resemblance to those of Clarissa Dalloway herself. She is a mid-aged editor, and preparing a party for her good friend, Richard, but accidently discerning his suicide. By so doing, he offers all readers, whether they have read Mrs. Dalloway or not, the pleasure of recognizing the various allusions. The tree women seem to be strange to each other, but their destinies are twisted tightly by the mean of the fiction, Mrs. Dalloway. What’s more, at the end of the book, the author arranges the appearance of Richard’s mother, and she is Mrs. Brown in the 1920’ story. So the two masterstroke concourse to one and what greets readers is a literal symphony depicting living situations of

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modern women.

II. Comparative Reading Wielded Intertextuality In this part, these two books will be comparative read utilized the intertextuality theory and the intertextual parts will be distinct. The analysis will refer to the images, symbols, plots, speeches, characters and themes. The intertextual reading will also relate to the authors themselves, both Wolf and Cunningham, the behind stories of these two novels. Processes of analyses will firstly focus on intertextuality in narrow sense then in wild sense, which incarnate the steps of intertextual dialogue—from text, subject to culture.

2.1 Intertextual Reinterpretations in Symbols 2.1.1 Flower

Flowers and floral images play an important role in both Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours. They are described for several times, and are associated with different events and moods. Flowers have long been regarded as symbols of vigor and vitality.

[9] P1

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”This is

the first line of Mrs. Dalloway of Virginia Wolf. Clarissa Dalloway starts her day on the journey for buying flowers. Arriving at the Mulberry’s the florists, she finds “There were flowers: delphiniums, sweet peas, bunches of lilac; and carnations, masses of carnations. There were roses;

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there were irises. Ah yes—so she breathed in the earthy garden sweet smell as she stood talking to Miss Pym?”[9] P8 She is brisk and energetic surrounding by flowers. And Sally Seton, the old friend of Clarissa Dalloway, depicts Elizabeth Dalloway, the daughter of Mrs. Dalloway, as “a lily by the side of a pool” [9] P158. Sally Seton also looks for peaceful and harmonious atmosphere in flowers as “she often went into her garden and got from her flowers a peace which men and women never give her.”[9] P158

“There are still the flowers to buy.”[10] P9 And this is the first line in the first episode of The Hours: Mrs. Dalloway who refers to the heroine in this episode—Clarissa Vaughan. She begins her day with setting out to buy flowers, too. When gets the flowers shop, she greets and kisses the woman who works in the florist’s shop. “‘Hello,’ Clarissa says. Her lips touch Barbara’s skin and the moment is, suddenly, unexpectedly perfect. She stands in dim, deliciously cool little shop that is like a temple, solemn in its abundance, its bunches of dried flowers hanging from the ceiling and its rack of ribbons trailing against the back

[10] P24wall.” She cannot help recalling her child hood, the earlier days. She

is , psychologically, transcending the time and space, and “Now she is here, in the flower shop, where poppies drift white and apricot on long, hairy stems”.[10] P25 Here, the flourishing flower has its fragile characteristic, just like the past Golden Days, the youth hood, there are all beautiful

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short, like words written in water.

When Clarissa Vaughan pushes open the florist’s door, “which always sticks slightly, and walks in, a tall woman, broad-shouldered amid the bunches of roses and hyacinths, the mossy flats of paperwhites, the orchids trembling on their stalks”,[10] P24 she is enveloped by a sense of freshness and familiarity. Ross are the flowers that Richard buys for Clarissa in Wolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and hyacinths（风信子） are also repeatedly compared to there daughter Elizabeth in the story. In this way Cunningham creates an intertextual tie with Wolf’s work. Flowers, to some extents, are indication of passions of life and motivation for survival. Even after Richard’s death, Clarissa enters the apartment with Laura, “the flowers, of course, remain—brilliant and innocent, exploding from vases in lavish, random profusion”[10] P214. Despite the death people of some people life for the majority is still continuing. It is also the reason responsible for Virginia Wolf’s frequent attempt to escape from Richmond, which is a peaceful place of flowers and hedges. Peacefulness kills creative artist.

Flowers, when being mentioned today, will easily remind us of something as beautiful as peace, like love. People shy or reserved, then they buy flowers to show their deep and silent love. As Richard Dalloway buys roses for his wife because he is too shy to declare his feelings, so Dan buys flowers for Laura and Sally buys flowers for Clarissa Vaughan.

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Maybe Dan and Sally have some differences with Richard, they are not difficult in telling“I love you” to their spouse, instead, saying is “easy enough” and even become “almost ordinary, being said not on anniversaries and birthdays but spontaneously, in bed or at the kitchen sink or even in cabs within hearing of foreign drivers who believe women should walk three paces behind their husbands”[10] P182 . When Sally, a modern lesbian who is never stingy with her affection, wants to “say something more”, the flower stand bumps into her sights. She quickly buys these roses “just beginning to open”. After entering the apartment Sally hands the flowers to her and for a moment they are both simply and entirely happy. Dan is treated unfairly in his love, but he still feel happy, to love a people who can not cherish his love is such a hard job, and in order to let Laura Brown to see, and feel and to be touched by his love, he buys those flowers.

Besides of those,“flower‖ is an important symbol in Wolf’s work, and its function of decoration reminds readers that, just like flowers, in a society in which men hold the domination, women are the accessory of men and are located in marginalized places. While the heroine says ―she would buy the flowers herself‖, this line embodies the self-awareness of women: they are not satisfied in being marginalized and they are energetically searching their own values. ―Flower‖ in Cunningham’s texts inherits and strengthens the symbolic meaning of it in its pre-text or

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background-text—The Hours.

Briefly speaking, the analysis of the symbol“flower”can utilize the following ways of intertextual reading in narrow sense: quotation (e.g. the quotation of “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” in second episode Mrs. Brown, the quotation of plot “buying flowers”); the pastiche (e.g. the sentence mentioned above turns out being rewritten as “There are still the flowers to buy”). In addition, the parodies, which belongs to a category of intertextuality in wide sense, of symbol “flower” are more shinning than what mentioned above.

Both Clarissa Vaughan and Clarissa Dalloway like flowers, and the former herself is like flowers in full bloom, her association with people, her strong vitality for life shine bright; the later, though weak in physical states and lives a ordinary life, she has great interest in passional life (e.g. her admiration of Lady Bexborough who holds a charity bazaar), just like flowers make great efforts to bloom, though fade and fall in a short time. While Mrs. Wolf in The Hours who is writing Mrs. Dalloway, the flowers is her inspiration, then she writes the sentence “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”; also the rose “deathbed for the thrush”

[10] P118

appears as a symbol of an imprisonment for Mrs. Wolf. The flimsy

flower is the representation of Richard’s frail physical and mental state and also an analogy of death. The same “Sally”, as what mentioned above, Sally Seton searches for peace in flowers and Sally in The Hours

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buy flowers to express her love to Clarissa. As for Laura Brown, similar to Mrs. Dalloway marries not the Peter Walsh who loves adventure but a congressman, she is a well-protected flower in home, though dull, but safe. And Elizabeth also belongs to Mrs. Brown’s troop, Elizabeth “like a hyacinth, sheathed in glossy green, with buds just tinted, a hyacinth which has had no sun.”[9] P100

“Parody?can be extremely negative and extremely positive”[11], A Theory of Parody : The Teachings of Twentieth2Century Art Forms (New York : Methuen , 1985) 32。The list of parodies above show that: every coins has two sides, flower as a symbol in The Hours, echo the positive meaning of peace and love in Mrs. Dalloway in one aspect, but also expose, criticize or even satirize its symbol of poor mental and physical states of middle class, and then put forward the new symbol of feminine independence and arousal of their self-awareness.

2.1.2 Party

Party is such a bright and shining word, but why do people hold parties? Does Clarissa Dalloway hold the party to comfort the wounded hearts of people after the World War I, or to fight against the hollowness, loneliness, or even fear brought by the rich but dull life of middle class? But she said “What she liked was simply life”and“‘That’s what I do it for,’she said, speaking aloud, to life.”[9] P99

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People who enter the party cover from great Prime Minister， “The Prime Minister was coming, Agnes said”[9] P137 to the sorehead poor relatives Ellie Henderson who “not even caring to hold themselves upright”[9] P27, they are in general wear, chat in good manners and still lead elegant lifestyles.

Party helps people to explore their emotions, enlarge their social circles and also make people forget a lot in an orgiastic mood. Loneliness in a bash would at least be diluted. Clarissa Vaughan holds the same opinion, so she wants to gather people to cheer up her ex-lover, lifelong best friend Richard, she holds a vain hope to open the close door of ill Richard’s heart.

The quotation of symbol party, the parallelism of two parties, the motif of party (fighting against loneliness but ends up with heavier hollowness), the two Carissa, the two hostess or subjects, of parties dialog to each other through time and space and a intercultural heckling of value of existence bursts at the same time.

Both Clarissa Dalloway and Clarissa Vaughan occupy themselves with party to be held but in different background. In Mrs. Dalloway, she is a wealthy and leisurely lady of upper class is aware of disaster to society and people by the war, and her effort to hold a party is made to soothe the pain caused to people by offering a chance of reunion and

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connection, and the party serves a bridge of communication. “in her own mind now, what did it mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh, it was very queer. Here was So-and-so in South Kensington; some one up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quite continuously a sense of their existence; and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create?Anyhow, it was her gift”[9] P27, this passage, which is also the aspirations of most people, reveals both the city and Mrs. Dalloway’s omnipresent feeling of hollowness, loneliness and even fear after the war. In the way of holding a party, she proves her love for life, expresses her good wishes for tomorrow, pretends conquering her inferiority of being less accomplished and finds her values of existence. She dosen’t have the “universal love?gasping, trembling, painfully drawing out these profound truths which needed, so deep were they, so difficult, an immense effort to speak out, but the world was entirely changed by them for ever”[9] P54 so she hold a party to combine broken heats to relive the trauma.

In The Hours, party is also an expression of Clarissa’s obligation and treasuring of life and her concerns of Richard. Overweighs Clarissa Dalloway, Clarissa Vaughan is very optimistic and positive, and she attempts to awake people’s attention to her friend Richard who infected with AIDS figured as a sensitive, individual and brilliant poet.. Richard,

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easily been treated as abnormal and morbid for his disease, inwardly doubts whether he can manage attending the party held for him in honor of Carrouthers Prize. Richard ends his life with suicide, and the party becomes an occasion of lament on his death.

Allusion appears here. AIDS is cannot be cured just as the fear caused by war, the eternal loneliness, the hollowness, etc. they are the trauma of original sin of human beings, and only universal love, which is also a particular word in Wolf’s philosophy (an hypo-intertextuality here) , can relieve people. While Babel Tower never built.

Mrs. Brown, unlike Clarissa Vaughan who is a distinct allusion of Clarissa Dalloway in Mrs. Dalloway, connects and summarizes the symbols in a way of annexation, “she is full of what she’s read: Clarissa and insane Septimus, the flowers, the party”[10] P187.

2.1.3 Cake and Richmond

Dealing with the Birthday Cake for Dan, Mrs. Brown almost lost crisp and recuperation in Richmond is killing Wolf, too. These two symbols share an intertextual allusion. A perfect Birthday Cake represents the restriction of home, she fails to perform the conventional role of “a perfect wife and mother”, and Richmond for Wolf is also a restriction of aspirations.

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On the contrary, they have their secret or open shelter of freedom. Room nineteen （which intertext Doris Lessing’s To Room Nineteen） for Mrs. Brown is her private space, in where she can “to escape a cake”[10]

P147

，and London for Mrs. Wolf, “?and all London implies freedom,

about kisses, about the possibilities of art and the sly dark glitter of madness”[10] P172.

2.1.4 City

London is not only the shelter of V. Wolf, but also stands for the city and the charming city life. Through the analyses of literary works, their subjects selections of male writers and male images in different art forms in and abroad, we notice that, compared with female writers, male writers are much closer to country and earth. On the contrary, brilliant female artists mostly draw pictures of city women and the city life. I always believe that good men are peasants in hearts. Song Wen has a elaborate review in his essay, and he points out: “?Huanglin’s analyses on these phenomenon shows that, the reason why male writers don’t consistent with city is that traditional men are masters of agricultural life and civilization, while female writers’ identifying city much better can ascend to women’s liberation of country and traditions, in which they suffering deep oppression and owning no chances of expression. Opposed to men, women have no traditional fetters, so they melt in and get

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harmony with city life much faster. City provides women with possibilities and new spaces for their self development. Wang Anyi ‘firmly believe that city supplies a better chance for women’s liberation’”[12].

In the beginning of Mrs. Dalloway, Wolf shows the heroine’s experiences of living in the modern big city—London: Clarissa Dalloway loves dancing and horse driving; she is fancy of walking in London’s avenues rather than strolling in countryside. London gives her the power and vitality, and Bond Street drives her crazy?Being different from most male writers living in city but deeply concerning of country, Virginia Wolf in Cunningham’s The Hours though far away from city, is sentimentally attached to that flourishing life in city. Virginia despises Richmond and is eagerly hoping returning her dreaming downtown city of London. Though Richmond does well in her disease, her one and only wishing is devoting again to the dangers of city life. “She will go, she thinks, to London; ?the half hour on train, the disembarking at Paddington, the possibility of walking down a street into another street, and another after that. What a lark! What a Plunge! It seems that she can survive, she can prosper, if she has London around her”[10] P107.

Modern women expose nakedly their desires of materials and yearnings for city. Consequently, Virginia would rather die in London buried with abracadabra and sane mental state, than corrupts and withers

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away in cozy Richmond.

The motif of city for women stands for freedom and this intertextual resonance in The Hours helps readers to get a better understanding of women’s living condition, which belongs to the subject under cultural concession between agricultural civilization and industrial civilization.

2.1.5 Clock

All stories begin in morning, which The Big Ben and clock strike in Mrs. Dalloway to remind Clarissa Dalloway of preparing the party in hurry, welcoming old friends, etc. and symbolize the efflux of time. As a way of pastiche, Cunningham borrows “time” as a thread of plots, what’s more, clock motif (the feeling of anxiety and fidget caused by time’s propelling and forcing), can be found in Mrs. Brown’s story. She is supposed to prepare breakfast, Birthday Cake etc., rather than reading her favorite book in bed, because the clock tells her, it is the time to do so. Continuously reminded of her family role and domestic responsibility, Laura has always been subject to time. Similarly, V. Wolf in The Hours is also kidnapped by time. She looks at the clock on the table and finds it has two hours since she stars writing: she fails to return to London because of the clock time; and she is even forced by her husband to get to bed because it is almost eleven. However, as a negative parody, in the story of the end of the fast-food-life-stylized 20th century, when Clarissa Vaughan and Laura Brown meet, “According to the clock, it is ten

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minutes past midnight”[10] P220 and it is the very time for everything to calm down and “Here she is with another hour before her”[10] P226. Time seems not all bad.

2.2 Intertextual Reinterpretations in Characters

Intertextual reinterpretation in Characters firstly lies in the names’ quotations. Clarissa Vaughan borrows her first name from Mrs. Dalloway, and Clarissa Vaughan’s lesbian lover Sally shares the same first name with Clarissa Dalloway’a best friend, Sally Seton. Richard Brown and Richard Wolf who is Virginia Wolf’s husband both in fiction and reality, are same first-named. One of the typical case of allusion in The Hours is Richard’s nicknaming Clarissa Vaughan as “Mrs. Dalloway”. Both of them prepared for party, have daughters who are symbols of beauty though they may drift their mothers sometimes; they are all thought being ordinary and filled with affectation by their male friends and ex-lovers，e.g. “She would marry a Prime Minister and stand at the top of a staircase; the perfect hostess he called her (she had cried over it in her bedroom), she had the makings of the perfect hostess,”[9] P4 and “thirty years ago, that under her private-girl veneer lay all the making of a good suburban wife.”[10] P16

Clarissa Dalloway kisses Sally Seton who gives birth to five children; Virginia Wolf kisses her elder sister Vanessa Wolf who gives birth to three Children, what’s more, ―Years ago, when Julian (her nephew, son of

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Vanessa) was a baby, when Virginia and Vanessa were thinking of names for children and for characters in novels, Virginia had suggested that Vanessa name her future daughter Clarissa”[10] P116.

At the same time, I consider the three women in The Hours are the deconstruction of Mrs. Dalloway in the pre-text. Mrs. Dalloway is a divisive person: she is positive and cherishes life in one way, and then Clarissa Vaughan strengthens this specialty in The Hours; in another way, Mrs. Dalloway’s feeling of hollowness acts upon Mrs. Brown who has a seeming happy life; the appearance of Mrs. Wolf in The Hours echoes

[9] P6

Mrs. Dalloway, the former “had a narrow pea-stick figure”，thin and

elegant, and the later one is “has the austere, parched beauty of Giotto Fresco”[10] P114; and both of them love London.

Allusion and pastiche exist between“insane Septimus” and the Richard: the same brilliance, sentiment and chariness to life, self-communion, and even same “insanity” and the same fashion of suicides. The young Richard and Peter Walsh are both misanthropic and acute to banal and fusty life and society.

Peter Walsh in Mrs. Dalloway and Louis in The Hours illustrate parody intertextual reinterpretation. The former is the old flame of Clarissa Dalloway. When he is 53 years old, he has an uninvited visiting to Clarissa Dalloway after 5 years overseas at just before noon. While Louis in The Hours is much like to Peter Walsh with the same age,

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similar appearances, experiences personality, and the same uninvited visiting to Clarissa Vaughan after 5 years overseas. But unlike the ex-relationship in Peter Walsh and Clarissa Dalloway, Louis and Clarissa Vaughan are rivals and compete for Richard. Louis is a gay and Peter Walsh is passionate in romance, they are all brave people who only bend over their own true feeling. The image of Louis is a successful case of parody of Peter Walsh in that the sentimental and tear-shedding Louis is funny and pitiable at the same time, leaving an effective impression on readers who read The Hours after Mrs. Dalloway. Readers tend to compare the two images and feel funny with the image of Louis.

The parody the plot of “somebody of greatness (in royal carriage goes by)” in Mrs. Dalloway turns out being Clarissa’s coming across Hollywood famous movie star who might be Susan Sarandon, Vanessa Redgrave or Meryl Streep in The Hours is very interesting. More highly entertainingly, the film adaptation is given with Meryl Streep playing Clarissa, which is, in my opinion, a fantastic conception and hypo intertextual expression between text and videos works.

2.3 Intertextual Reinterpretations of Themes 2.3.1 Insanity

Virginia Wolf writes a “sane person” and “ a insane person”and Cunningham plays with the notions of “sanity and insanity”, recognizing that there might be only a very fine line between the two states. The

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nature of insanity is not objective in my opinion, insanity, in another sense, might in fact be a heightened sanity, or at least a heightened sense of awareness.

Richard in The Hours and Virginia Wolf in The Hours are both concerned with creativity and the nature of the creative act, the object is their writing. Artists always are easily perplexed by inspirations crashed in their heads, and they may present as “insanity”. Besides of these, artists are much better as being aware of the society, and when they see the dark sides only but shriveling to changes them, the feelings of guilty and weakness afflict them badly. They have no other way to discharge there gloominess but being insane.

Laura is another insane woman. In this society, women who occupied half of the popularity are considered as useless, and therefore, bending over the social standard, the only creative activity for women is being insane. Trapped in roles of mother and wife, Laura sinks into a total numbness and desperation—a quieter insane way “but at that moment it had seemed clear that there was another way, far quieter, a way that was numb and hopeless, flat, so much so that an emotion as strong as sorrow would have been a relief.”[9] P142

But in fact, Septimus and Laura are not idiots or insanities at all. On the contrary, they are sages in this absurd world. They appear dreadfully and dowdily, but don’t degenerate; they keep clear comprehensions

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towards the absurdness, but usually act as indifference to everything. They reason of these people’s insanities is the absurdness of the world, which alienates and contorts the pure personalities. Then normal people loss their passion of life and become loveless and speechless. Hence they turn into insane (like Septimus) or silently fight against the absurd world with indifferences and numb (like Laura).

2.3.2 Homosexuality

Homosexuality conception as lesbian desire is an obvious trace in Mrs. Dalloway, and The Hours shows even an open attitude towards it in the postmodern period, Cunningham enlargers the extent of homosexuality from lesbian love to gayness and even bisexuality, which is the advancement of sexual culture and human being civilization. It is an intertextual motif and a positive parody to the pre-text.

“Mrs. Dalloway has special feelings for the same sex. In spite of her lack of something central which permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together” [9] P24 “ she could not resist sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman, not a girl, of a woman confessing, as to her they often did, some scrape, some folly.”[9] P24The reason why this feeling come out is duet by Clarissa Dalloway, to pity, appreciation for beauty, her admiration of youths since she is getting old, some outside influence such as a scent, a catchy tune next door, etc. But her lesbian inclination exists

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in her girlhood in which time she meets and admires Sally Seton. The kissing moment between she and Sally becomes an eternal unforgettable memory of Clarissa Dalloway’s whole life and a powerful evidence of her lesbian desire.

Lesbian desire also finds its expressions in the case of Clarissa Dalloway’s daughter, Elizabeth Dalloway, and in the case of Clarissa Vaughan’s daughter, Julia.

Virginia Wolf has a kiss with her elder sister Vanessa Wolf, and this kiss has its conceal allusion of Virginia’s lesbian inclinations; in the same case, Mrs. Brown kisses her neighbor Kitty in her kitchen. Those depressive desire burst into a form of being insanity. As time goes by and development of society, the bisexual Clarissa Vaughan who loved the gay boy Richard when she was a girl, has been living with Sally, a producer of public television, for more than 15 years, and she has a daughter born in a way of artificial fertilization. Clarissa Vaughan apparently enjoys every liberty: freedom to be a lesbian, to come and go as she likes. Yet she has ended up, in spite of her unusual way of life, as a fairly conversational wife and mother as Richard predicts thirty years ago: “under her private-girl veneer lay all the making of a good suburban wife.”[9] P16

2.3.4 Suicide and Death

The main characters in The Hours search for meaning in their lives

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and evaluate suicide as a way of escaping the problems they face. Virginia Wolf and Laura are incredibly sensitive and perceptive to the world of them.

With Clarissa Dalloway’s words, Virginia Wolf, boasting two lives, one in realistic and the other in academic book of literary history, expresses her view about death in Mrs. Dalloway: “Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate, people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded; one was alone. There was an embrace in death”[9] P151. Septimus accepts the death for which Clarissa has been destined. Virginia Wolf sinks herself into the river; Mrs. Brown drives to her Room Nineteen with her hypnotic pills; Richard jumps out of the window in the same fashion of Septimus’; Easy-going Clarissa Vaughan thinks about the sense of insignificance which caused by the an invitation to lunch with Oliver St. Ives, seems like death and she even find herself as “a woman admiring death” trough reading Richards works.

In the scene of Richard’s suicide, there is a quotation of Virginia Wolf’s posthumous letter “He (Richard) sys, ‘I don’t think two people could have been happier than we’ve been’”. [10] P200

In The Hours, how Virginia Wolf decides on the death of one of major characters in her masterpiece Mrs. Dalloway is imagined, which makes readers who read Mrs. Dalloway later than The Hours finds it

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easier to accept and understand the death and suicide in Mrs. Dalloway. Readers who have read Mrs. Dalloway but haven’t read The Hours may feel enlightened on some obscure points of death and suicide in Mrs. Dalloway when they read The Hours. Such a case of being inter-referential is very intertextual.

2.4 Other Intertextual Reinterpretations in The Hours

The use of Stream of Consciousness Technique in The Hours is typical pastiche intertextuality. Remarks that Cunningham has managed to reproduce “gorgeous, Woolfian, shimmering, perfectly-observed prose”[13] P5, or that the author is “eerily fluent in Woolf’s exquisitely orchestrated elucidation of the torrent of thoughts, memories, longings,

[13] P5

and regrets that surges ceaselessly through the mind” rarely give any

detailed analysis of the two writers’ styles. If we are to consider the term pastiche as being in any way appropriate, then it seems essential that we should analysis how Cunningham has adopted or adopted Wolf’s style. The episode of “Mrs. Brown” in The Hours is a parody of the short story To Room Nineteen, which was wrote by British female writer Doris Lessing in 1963, and that story is a critical fiction to the western society male oriented.

The descriptions and plot conceptions of Virginia Wolf are also echoes of The Yellow Wallpaper by American Feminism writer Charlotte P. Gilman, and this fiction is a semi- autobiographic work of Charlotte.

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Conclusion

Michael Cunningham’s The Hours have a intertextual referential relationship with Virginia Wolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. This intertextual relationship, in one aspect, lies in the symbolic, characters’ thematic reinterpretations adopting quotation, allusion, pastiche, modify and other forms of intertextuality; in the other aspect, refers to relations about the authors themselves and the authors as readers’ position in interpreting texts as social texts historical texts. Through this kinds of analyses, The Hours achieves the administrative levels’ going forward from texts, subjects’to cultures dialogs; beside of these, Michael Cunningham also shows the solicitudes for mental and physical conditions of femininity which Wolf has manifest in her masterpiece, and have a remolding on the classical fiction. As Yale Book Review said, Cunningham has completed an impossible mission in The Hours: he reprocesses a masterpiece by adopting a standard literary technology, and creates his own work.

Thus Cunningham uses repetition to create connections not just within his text but also with Woolf’s text or texts. By doing so, Woolf’s writing is given new life. It is here that Michael Cunningham has touched at the very heart of Virginia Woolf’s style. Jacques Raverat’s suggestion to Virginia Woolf that the writer could experiment with words in a fashion similar to contemporary painters, could equally apply to The

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Hours:“There are splashes in the outer air in every direction, and under the surface waves that follow one another into dark and forgotten corners‖

[14]

.The echoes, like waves, ripple outwards creating new

meanings as they do so. By imitating this aspect of Woolf’s style, Cunningham is able both to invite the reader to ―only connect‖, but at the same time to produce a novel that, as it progresses, takes on a life of its own, with its own storyline and impetus, with everything falling into place in the final chapters.

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Biography

[1] Allen G, Intertextuality [M], London. Routledge, 2000.

[2] William Irwin. Against Intertextuality. Philosophy and Literature[C]. v28, Number 2, October 2004: 228.

[3] Julia Kristeva, Word, Dialogue, and Novel. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, [M]. Leon S. Roudiez, ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980) 66.

[4] 赵一凡.欧美新学赏析[M]，中央编译出版社，1996年版，142.

[5] Julia Kristeva Interviews [M]. Ross Mitchell Guberman, ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

[6] Orr M. Intertextuality: debates and contexts [A]. Cambridge: Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003:4

[7] Li Jianbo. An intertextual reading of E.M Forster’s Novels [J]. Beijing: Peking University Press, 2001:5.

[8] 王琛. 《时时刻刻》的互文性研究[D]. 大连理工大学. 2007 (01):1. [9] Virginia Wolf. Mrs. Dalloway [M]. New York: Penguin USA (P), 1996. [10] Michael Cunningham. The Hours [M]. New York: Picador USA, 2000. [11] Linda Hutcheon. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth Century Art Forms. New York: Methuen, 1985: 32.

[12] 宋文. 在现代和后现代之间女性的城市境遇—评迈克尔〃坎宁汉的《时时刻刻》[J], 当代外国文学, 2006（03）：4.

[13] 王家湘. 时时刻刻: 译者的话[J]. 南京：译林出版社, 2008. 8.

[14] Quentin Bell. Virginia Woolf: A Biography II [M]. London: Hogarth, 1972: 106.

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Acknowledgements

Associate Professor Tang Zi, is the person whom I owe most thanks to, for she is my teacher particularly specialized in literature and she draws my great interests in literary works; what’s more, it is she who inspires me to start the search and research for the topic, and also for her eternal tolerance to my dilatory dissertation. My gratitude would also extend to all the other teachers in my four graduates years in Huaihua College. I also appreciate my friends and roommates a lot who supported and motivated me while my disserting. Last but not least, I owe a deep debt to my loving parents, who supported me with selfless love, and without whom this thesis would be a sheer mission impossible. Thank you all.

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