| Summary: | 碩士 === 淡江大學 === 英文學系碩士班 === 95 === Through a contemporary feminist and gender reading, this thesis aims to examine the oppression of patriarchy and heterosexism on the three leading female characters in The Hours. Virginia Woolf (1923), Laura Brown (1949) and Clarissa Vaughan (1999) seem to share similar repression, melancholy and life dilemmas. Michael Cunningham not only presents the domination and hegemony of the two long-lasting ruling ideologies, but also provides his solutions to the three women and conveys his authorial intention. To analyze why and how the three women are oppressed, how they subvert patriarchy and heterosexism and find a way out, I divide my thesis into three stages/ chapters: a time of repression, a time of oppression and a time of identification and subversion.
The first chapter discusses what the three women are encountering and facing in each of their crucial one day, and each one’s deprived life tells her story of abjection. Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection in Powers of Horror helps to analyze the stranger within each of the three women and their dilemmas to face the abject or not.
Chapter Two examines how patriarchy and heterosexism oppress the three women through Louis Althousser’s theory of ideology, Simone de Beauvior’s theory of women as the Other in The Second Sex and Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity in Gender Trouble.
The third chapter indicates how the three women’s identification with one another helps solve their problems and difficulties finally through Adrienne Rich’s concept of “lesbian continuum.” Michael Cunningham, the director Stephen Daldry and the screenplay writer David Hare all hope to hand down Virginia Woolf’s belief—to love one’s own life for what it is. The Hours illustrates that one should not only love one’s own life, but also love and identify with one’s own sex and gender.
The conclusion reveals that the theme and solution Cunningham’s The Hours aims to convey to the readers is multiplicity. Cunningham tries to tell the readers— to forsake dichotomies and fixed unity, to face the difficulties of life and who one is no matter one is straight, queer or bi. Sexual orientations or gender is no longer important; what matters is one’s own subjectivity— to love one’s own self, to love the life one chooses and to choose the life one loves. Such multiplicity and diversity Cunningham advocates no longer restrict and repress the characters, but make them face the difficulties and dilemma, finally bringing them to truly choose the lives they want by their free will.
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