Dee, Cunningham, and Woolf

Jonathan Dee’s review “The Reanimators,” sparked a bug that got me thinking about The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway. Dee claims that part of the literary merit is creating and developing your own characters. He argues that it takes a certain skill to actually write and not copy the work of others. Although he rips on the overall “physco historic” novel and using real characters to basis novels off of, it seems that The Hours receives the most dignified writing for beings somewhat acceptable. Dee claims that Cunningham’s “appropriation of genuine historical figures…as characters in fiction is an act of imaginative boldness that through simple attrition readers of contemporary fiction have come to take entirely for granted”
Dee says that novels help “bridge the gulf between the knowable and the unknowable about human motives” and that it helps “transcend” and bringing closer contact with our natures than real life.” Just as Barnes proves in Flaubert’s Parrot, Cunningham is able to recreate that “books say because.” Cunningham dives into the depths of Woolf’s mind, which is ambitious, and in some opinions wrong, but he also develops his own characters. Although Clarissa Vaughn is based of a “form” of Mrs. Dalloway herself, Laura Brown is seems to be completely new and creative. However, this is where I stuck, does Dee accredited Mrs. Brown who is he critical of her. What is Dee saying in his review when talking about Laura Brown and how “it takes nothing away from greatness of Mrs. Dalloway to say that Cunningham’s depiction of Woolf’s struggles with that novel do not-cannot-transfix us thoroughly as does his depiction of pregnant, fragile Laura’s struggles to bake a simple birthday cake with the help of her son.”

For my essay I want to pick up where Dee leaves off, but explore how Cunningham succeeds in his novel through form and the essence of connectivity. His novel offers a more explicit example of modernism in action, and I think because he chose to emulate Woolf’s mind and reconstruct Mrs. Dalloway’s story that he can pull of the homage and level of intimacy in a unique way that is inventive. I believe that because of Cunningham’s style and form he can pull of a level of intimacy with Woolf and with his other characters. Cunningham brings his story together at the end, and because of his final connection between the characters