Why 1920s London?
This is the setting of Mrs. Dalloway, where Clarissa, Septimus, and all the other characters live. This is what Cunningham has to capture and imitate in his novel.
- It is alive and full of movement, exemplified when Clarissa waits "for the Durtnell's van to pass" (4) so she can cross the street on her way to buy flowers for her party in the afternoon. The city of London has so much life to it. Woolf chooses London because it is the best place to make her characters feel surrounded, but also so lonely. Clarissa gives parties all the time, but she doesn't even directly know everyone that enters her home. When Lady Rosseter comes (171), Clarissa has no idea who she is until she sees it's Sally.
- London also speaks to the chaos of life itself, with its largeness and chaotically planned streets.
- Woolf may have also chosen it because she was familiar with the city, and wanted other readers to be as well. It may just be a setting of convenience, but while Woolf seems to have liked it, she also seems to have had some disdain for it. Strangers stare at Septimus and judge him, as Peter does in the park (71). They have no idea what Septimus has gone through and yet they still feel entitled to judge him.
- London is a large, lively place, but while it is warm, it can also be cold and misunderstanding. That fact helps Woolf to convey her characters feelings, as well as help them realize what they are feeling.
Why 1990s New york city?
Clarissa Vaughan, Richard Brown and several minor characters all live in this setting of The Hours. Cunningham chooses this to mirror London, but also for several other reasons.
- The hurry of the city is one of the major reasons. Each of the characters expresses a desire to relive the past, none more so than Clarissa and Richard. They feel time is going too fast.
- Richard defends against this somewhat through his disease and feels (because he is cooped up all day) he has "fallen out of time" (62). If he has fallen out of time, then he can avoid the future, and what will inevitably happen to him, as well as go back to when he was happy.
- Clarissa tries to embrace time as it moves on, but she also wants to preserve the past and keep it alive by remembering all the good times she had (12). She constantly remembers Richard as he once was. By doing this, readers can see that she prefers the past because she misses how Richard was.
- New York City is also full of people, but one can still feel all alone. When Clarissa goes up to see Richard she remarks how "she is always afraid of getting trapped between floors in this elevator-she can all too easily imagine the long, long wait; the cries for help to tenants who might or night not speak English and who might or might not care to intervene" (54). Even though in the city she and the other characters are surrounded by other people, it is easy to feel isolated because they don't interact with one another.
- Cunningham chooses NYC to make in comparable to London, but also because of its feeling of loneliness, despite it being full of people. The best example of this is when Richard kills himself, Clarissa races down after him, and they sit there, one dead, and one alive, and no one notices them for a long time. Since NYC is so lonely, Cunningham chooses this city in order to convey how lonely people can be even when surrounded by people because so many different things affect and fill their minds.
Why 1950s Los Angeles?
Laura Brown, her son, and her husband Dan, live here in The Hours. Cunningham places the characters here for several reasons.
- The falseness of the Los Angeles area at this time what with Hollywood and all the actors and actresses. The area surrounds Laura and this makes her feel all the more pressured to be a good housewife. Laura constantly tries to escape reality and "lose herself" but also "keep herself by entering a parallel world" (37) by reading books like Mrs. Dalloway. She feels if she stays in the world she is stuck in, she will lose herself.
- Los Angeles is also a place of perfection, where that ideal is held up and revered. Laura feels she has an imperfection, which she works hard to cover up by doing such things as making the perfect cake for her husband on his birthday (48). She fixates on the cake's imperfections because it is not "all she'd hoped it would be" (99). In doing this, she is fixating on her own imperfections, which she wishes to correct because she is stuck in this seemingly perfect world.
- The pressure of the setting eventually gets to her, and she abandons her family and moves to Canada, a less than perfect place where she can feel safe (225). She has to remove herself from Los Angeles in order to make herself feel better. She doesn't feel like she belongs in the perfect world, so she leaves it.
- Cunningham places Laura here to magnify what the 1950s was like and to give her feelings even more justification. By placing her, an "imperfect" woman for the fifties, in a "perfect" world, where there are fake things- feelings, visuals, actions- everywhere she turns, Cunningham makes Laura's distress even larger than it might have been if she were, say, in an eastern city.