Finding Happiness in Michael Cunningham's The Hours

Finding happiness in Michael Cunnginham'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.