Towards a Feminization of Time in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998) and Sahar Al-Mouji’s the Musk of the Hill (2017)

Abstract

The two novels at hand, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Sahar AlMouji’s The Musk of the Hill, address the nature of time in personal experiences through multiple interwoven stories. Cunningham’s The Hours is a reworking of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) in which aspects of Woolf’s life, criticism, and novels are elegantly intermingled. The original title for Mrs. Dalloway was The Hours, a writing enterprise conveying the significance of time to offer a deep insight into the human mind within the framework of the stream-of-consciousness technique. Cunningham’s remaking of the original novel is a rhizomatic exploration of the fragmentation and multiple nature of the self to empower the female identity as a multiplicity. The uniqueness of Cunningham’s The Hours resides in the ability to fictionalize females’ lives outside the orthodox male-centered patterns to foreground “three women of ambivalent sexuality, one of whom is Virginia Woolf” (Wroe 1), and to interrogate hierarchical, fixed, and linear writing. The Musk of the Hill, on the other hand, is a tale of psychotherapy. It dramatizes the moments of transformation of both Catherine Earnshaw, the stubborn protagonist of Emile Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and Amina, the docile wife of Naguib Mahfouz’s Trilogy. The fictional protagonists’ radical transformation takes supremacy over plot construction with complete loss of authorial control through the dual temporality of the past and the present. This zestful aesthetic act manifests an intellectual originality by positioning Cathy and Amina in twenty-first-century Cairo so they can experience contemporary political events within the clock-inner time dichotomy. The Musk of the Hill is a critique of patriarchal ideology and a psychoanalytic study of the female subjectivity.