Finding Happiness in Michael Cunningham's The Hours

It strikes me during my second reading of The Hours that there is a distinct definition of happiness laid out for all three women; I could be happy if I accepted myself and my lot, as I am, in the present. Conversely, the farther each woman is from the present, both in their own lives and in chronological time in the story, the closer they are to failure. The litmus test seems to be simple human tasks; The Hours assigns each of its characters errands and then judges them by how well they complete them.

In the Virginia Woolf section, I feel this exercise from the very beginning (perhaps since she is the inevitable character, one whose fate we know, there is no need to hide it). Virginia Woolf ruminates on the farm worker: "As she passes him on the way to the river she thinks of how successful he is, how fortunate, to be cleaning a ditch in an osier bed. She herself has failed. She is not a writer at all, she is merely a gifted eccentric." (page 3) She has "failed" her task; the task of being a writer. Literally walking to her death, she assumes the life of a lower class man would be happier since it would be perhaps more single minded. She has weighed her own, deduced herself a failure, and proceeds to extinguish what is left.

There is still hope for Mrs. Brown when we meet her. She manages to complete her errand, baking a cake, although she destroys her first attempt. Her sole moment of success is also task related; the task of being a good mother; "They pause, motionless, watching each other, and for a moment she is precisely what she appears to be; a pregnant women kneeling in a kitchen with her three-year-old son, who knows the number four." (page 76) This is her chance. We receive the distinct impression that if Laura Brown could be happy with the present of her life: the cakes, the son, the husband, she would be successful, happy. She cannot and therefore, is not.

Clarissa Vaughan, like her nickname sake Mrs. Dalloway, has only to buy some flowers. It is not a coincidence that she, the character that is most closely resolved in the present both literally and figuratively, has the best chance for survival. "What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously privileged, with a simple errand to run. She, Clarissa Vaughan, an ordinary person (at this age, why bother trying to deny it?) has flowers to buy and a party to give." (page 10) Clarissa out of the three women is the only one to consistently catch herself in the act of living, and she is the only one relatively unscarred by the end of the story.

Clarissa herself outlines the terms of happiness: "It isn't failure, she tells herself. It isn't failure to be in these rooms, in your skin cutting the stems of these flowers. It isn't failure but it requires more of you, the whole effort does; just being present and grateful; being happy (terrible word)." (page 94) It is as though the closer the character is to the present, the actual ticking of time, the errands and parties and flowers and all of the great and terrible stuff of the everyday, the happier they are. Those who think about it too much (The poets; Virginia Woolf, Septimus, and Richard) are selected out of the gene pool, those who do not think about it at all (The realists; Walter Hardy, Leonard Woolf, Hugh) survive.