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megan teigen
in a may 1928 diary entry written around the same time she was
composing “Street Haunting,” Virginia Woolf writes, “London it-
self perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play & a story & a
poem, without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the
streets.”1 In Mrs. Dalloway and “Street Haunting,” Woolf ’s principal
characters follow in her footsteps to explore the streets of a rapidly
modernizing London. As they mingle with the city’s crowds, their
identities merge with those of the Londoners they encounter on the
streets through shared perceptions and echoed thoughts.
At first glance, Woolf ’s London streets are highly aesthetic
and infused with vitality. Woolf ’s representations of the city in both
works celebrate this connectedness, temporarily concealing an am-
bivalence toward the city rooted in ambivalences of modern identity.
This conflicted response to the modern city ultimately reveals itself
in both texts, as it does in another of Woolf ’s diary entries:
Home from tea with Nessa & Angelica. A fine spring day. I walked
along Oxford St. The buses are strung on a chain. People fight &
struggle. Knocking each other off the pavement. Old bareheaded
men; a motor car accident; &c. To walk alone in London is the great-
est rest.2
the violence of the streets and the great rest Woolf feels as she walks
through it is jarring. Yet both extremes exist simultaneously in the
modern city, just as connectedness and isolation collide in Mrs. Dal-
loway and “Street Haunting.”
This essay will examine the ways in which Woolf ’s literary
style in Mrs. Dalloway and “Street Haunting,” guided by the prin-
cipal characters’ street walking, reveals her ambivalence toward the
modern city. While Woolf appears in both works to present a strik-
ingly romanticized London, a closer look at her structure and style
reveals a fragmentation of identity that is a direct effect of the city’s
rapid modernization, and whose only resolution, for Woolf, lies in
her characters’ inevitable isolation.
At first glance, Woolf ’s representations of the street crowds
are wonderfully appealing. Her narrator portrays the street as a space
that encourages explorations and imaginations of identity, where
one is free to briefly become “a nomad wandering the desert, a mys-
tic staring at the sky, a debauchee in the slums of San Francisco, a
soldier heading a revolution, a pariah howling with skepticism and
solitude.”3 This feeling of freedom guides characters’ initial reac-
tions to the city, and Woolf ’s stream-of-consciousness narrative style
merges characters’ identities into both each other and the passing
London crowds. The close bond Clarissa Dalloway feels to the city
as she walks up Bond Street is tied to the romanticized beauty of
Woolf ’s London in Mrs. Dalloway and “Street Haunting” which ap-
pears, on the surface, to inspire near-ecstasy in its street-haunters. In
Mrs. Dalloway’s opening pages, Clarissa, overcome by the vitality of
a summer morning in London, is unable to contain her emotion:
In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and
the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich
men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the tri-
umph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane
overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.4
But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell-like cover-
ing which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for
themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of
all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness,
an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter!5
And they went further and further from her, being attached to her by
a thin thread (since they had lunched with her) which would stretch
and stretch, get thinner and thinner as they walked across London; as
if one’s friends were attached to one’s body, after lunching with them,
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by a thin thread, which (as she dozed there) became hazy with the
sound of bells, striking the hour or ringing to service, as a single spi-
der’s thread is blotted with rain-drops, and, burdened, sags down…
And Richard Dalloway and Hugh Whitbread hesitated at the corner
of Conduit Street at the very moment that Millicent Bruton, lying
on the sofa, let the thread snap; snored.19
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Woolf ’s Modernism
And later, leaving Clarissa’s house, Peter Walsh also physically reacts
to bells’ rhythm as he replays the echo of Big Ben to himself:
In the novel’s final scene Big Ben unites Clarissa and Septi-
mus, who are more closely linked throughout Mrs. Dalloway than
any other pair. Woolf ’s use of the motorcar at the novel’s beginning is
the first moment of many which links the two characters. Although
the two never meet, Clarissa’s connection to Septimus—who, Woolf
wrote in her 1928 introduction to Mrs. Dalloway, is meant to be her
double23—is strongly felt throughout the narrative. From Septimus’
connection to Clarissa through their observations of the motorcar
to his “appearance” at her party, “[h]e is linked to Clarissa through
his anxieties about sexuality and marriage; his anguish about mortal-
ity and immortality; and his acute sensitivities to his surroundings,
which have gone over the line into madness.”24 Septimus’ world is a
tragic illustration of an extreme fragmentation of personality in the
face of modernity. Fresh from the trauma of modern war and recent-
ly re-immersed into urban life, Septimus lacks the defenses against
over-stimulation to which Clarissa clings. As a result, his observation
of the same motorcar which merely startles Clarissa completely dis-
ables Septimus. The vastly different natures of their awareness create
the dichotomy between them: the vitality Clarissa celebrates is felt
equally intensely by Septimus, but his madness creates a terror in
direct opposition to her joy:
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rified him. The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst
into flames.25
The clock began striking. The young man had killed himself; but
she did not pity him; with the clock striking the hour, one, two, three,
she did not pity him, with all this going on… But what an extraor-
dinary night! She felt somehow very like him—the young man who
had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away
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Woolf ’s Modernism
while they went on living. The clock was striking. The leaden circles
dissolved in the air. But she must go back. She must assemble. She
must find Sally and Peter. And she came in from the little room.27
But every one remembered; what she loved was this, here, now,
in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did it matter then, she asked
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journal of undergraduate research
herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must
inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she
resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended
absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb
and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in
each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of
the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part
of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the
people she knew best… but it spread ever so far, her life, herself. But
what was she dreaming as she looked into Hatchards’ shop window?
What was she trying to recover?31
Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to,
some woman in the street, some man behind a counter—even trees,
or barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror
of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her
skepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears,
are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us,
which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered some-
how attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places,
after death. Perhaps—perhaps.33
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Woolf ’s Modernism
beyond the body to become part of “this person or that.” The figure
of the apparition integrates the hope in an enduring connectedness
to other identities with the individual isolation of the crowd, which
must ultimately prevail in the modern city.
Modernity’s rapidly increasing technological advances,
while giving rise to new conceptions of time, space, speed, mobil-
ity and communication, expand the modern city beyond the lim-
its of coherent perception. The city is no longer comprehensible in
its entirety; it has become simply too large and complex. In Mrs.
Dalloway, Woolf recognizes how these new concepts transform per-
ceptions of narrative and subjectivity.
Clarissa, riding on top of an omnibus, The two types of
feels herself “everywhere; not ‘here, “Street Haunting”
here, here’; and she tapped the back of Woolf presents, one
the seat; but everywhere… So that to
know her, or any one, one must seek
a celebration of life,
out the people who completed them; and the other, here,
even the places.”34 Clarissa deeply feels after death, are
the interconnectedness of identities in intimately connected.
the city, but to seek out the people and
places that complete every identity she encounters is impossible, and
modern identities therefore must remain incomplete. At the same
time, then, that those modern identities become intermingled and
in many ways indistinguishable from one another, they also remain
strikingly isolated.
The anonymous vastness of the modern city is lamented as
well in “Street Haunting.” Pausing in a second-hand bookshop, the
narrator expresses regret that “the number of books in the world is
infinite, and one is forced to glimpse and nod and move on after a
moment of talk, a flash of understanding, as, in the street outside,
one catches a word in passing and from a chance phrase fabricates a
lifetime.”35
Just as the infinite number of books regrettably limits the
narrator’s insight to “a flash of understanding,” the vastness of the
crowd outside this small bookshop limits communication among
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42
Woolf ’s Modernism
“And what greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the
straight lines of personality and deviate into those footpaths that lead
beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of the forest
where live those wild beasts, our fellow men?”43
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Woolf ’s Modernism
Like the boot shop and the stationer’s store that the narrator enters,
these withdrawals introduce the narrator to solid characters who
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pull her back from the city’s labyrinth of divergent identities. The
bookseller’s wife, the dwarf in the boot shop and the husband and
wife at the stationer’s shop allow a moment of rest for the self, which
outside on the street “has been blown about at so many street cor-
ners, […] battered like a moth at the flame of so many inaccessible
lanterns.”49 They provide a connecting thread to guide the narrator
as she navigates the street corners and dead ends.
The narrator, however, eventually allows the thread to snap,
disconnecting from her urban acquaintances as she steps indoors to
end her journey:
But what could be more absurd? It is, in fact, on the stroke of six; it is
a winter’s evening; we are walking to the Strand to buy a pencil. How,
then, are we also on a balcony, wearing pearls in June? […] Is the true
self this which stands on the pavement in January, or that which bends
over the balcony in June? Am I here, or am I there? or is the true self
neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied
and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and
let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves?51
She felt somehow very like him – the young man who had killed
himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away while they
went on living. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved
in the air. But she must go back. She must assemble. She must find
Sally and Peter. And she came in from the little room.53
Death, which Clarissa has been conscious of since the novel’s be-
ginning, comes back to haunt her as she identifies with Septimus’
decision to commit suicide. It is notable that modernity, in the form
of Big Ben’s ever-recurring chime, jolts Clarissa from her contempla-
tion of Septimus’ suicide back to the present, to reality. But whether
the interruption is a welcome one remains ambiguous. It interferes
with Clarissa’s identification with “the young man who had killed
himself,” severing the connection between their identities and send-
ing her back indoors and into isolation. Yet even had she remained
on the balcony, their identities could never have merged.
As the following passage from “Street Haunting” makes
clear, identification with these ghosts of identity is alluring:
The usual conflict comes about. Spread out behind the rod of duty
we see the whole breadth of the river Thames – wide, mournful,
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The river is rougher and greyer than we remembered. The tide is run-
ning out to sea… The sights we see and sounds we hear now have
none of the quality of the past; nor have we any share in the serenity
of the person who, six months ago, stood precisely where we stand
now. His is the happiness of death; ours the insecurity of life.55
“Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough
to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind,
but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of
others…”59
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The narrator must eventually shed these illusory identities and re-
compose her solid identity.
Throughout “Street Haunting” and Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf ’s
characters are torn between these two opposing constructions of iden-
tity: the superficial, fragmented interconnectedness that Woolf seems
at first to celebrate and the inevitable isolation of the self within a city
that allows only fleeting identifications with those individuals passing
in its crowds. This ambivalence is conclusively revealed as the narra-
tor in “Street Haunting” mourns an unidentified ghostly male along
the Thames and Clarissa reflects on Septimus’ suicide. In the recogni-
tion of the ambiguity of modern identity lies the inevitable conclu-
sion, “His is the happiness of death; ours the insecurity of life.”60
Endnotes
1
Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. three, 1925-1930, ed. Anne
Olivier Bell (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 186.
2
Woolf, Diary, 298.
3
Virginia Woolf, “Street Haunting: A London Adventure,” in The Virginia Woolf
Reader, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 6.
4
Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 4.
5
Woolf, “Street Haunting,” 248.
6
Simmel blames modernity for the increased emphasis on the eye’s function:
“Here is something… characteristic of the big city. The interpersonal
relationships of people in big cities are characterized by a markedly greater
emphasis on the use of the eyes than on the ears… Before buses, railroads, and
streetcars became fully established during the nineteenth century, people were
never put in a position of having to stare at one another for minutes or even
hours on end.” Quoted in Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,”
in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 191.
Sight is also essential to Benjamin’s concept of “aura,” which is dependent on
the returnable gaze (See Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” 217-52, also in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt.).
7
Benjamin, 191.
8
Woolf, “Street Haunting,” 248.
9
Woolf, “Street Haunting,” 252.
10
Woolf, “Street Haunting,” 249.
11
Ibid.
12
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 149-51.
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13
Woolf, “Street Haunting,” 251.
14
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 152.
15
Peter Childs, Modernism (London: Routledge, 2000), 14-15.
16
Woolf, “Street Haunting,” 247.
17
Rachel Bowlby, “Walking, Women and Writing,” in Feminist Destinations and
Further Essays on Virginia Woolf, 191-219 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1997), 210.
18
See Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Georg Simmel: On
Individuality and Social Forms, Selected Writings, ed. Donald Levine (Chicago,
University of Chicago Press, 1971), 328: “The relationships and concerns of the
typical metropolitan resident are so manifold and complex that, especially as a
result of the agglomeration of so many persons with such differentiated interests,
their relationships and activities intertwine with one another into a many-
membered organism.”
19
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 123.
20
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 125-6.
21
“In view of this fact, the lack of the most exact punctuality in promises and
performances would cause the whole to break down into an inextricable chaos.”
Simmel, 328.
22
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 4.
22
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 52.
23
Susan Dick, “Literary Realism in Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando
and The Waves,” in The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, ed. Sue Roe and
Susan Sellers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 53.
24
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, xxxvi.
25
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 16.
26
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 15-16.
27
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 204.
28
Woolf, “Street Haunting,” 251-2.
29
Woolf, “Street Haunting,” 252.
30
It is worth noting that Benjamin identifies these shocks as essential to
Baudelaire’s conception of the isolation of the modern crowd (See Benjamin, 198.).
31
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 9-10.
32
“Ant-seething city, city full of dreams,/ Where ghosts by daylight tug the
passer’s sleeve.” From Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, quoted in Jean-
Michel Rabate, The Ghosts of Modernity (Gainesville, FL: University Press of
Florida, 1996), 10.
33
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 167.
34
Ibid.
35
Woolf, “Street Haunting,” 255.
36
Woolf, “Street Haunting,” 255-56.
37
Bowlby, 218.
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Woolf ’s Modernism
38
“Indeed, if I am not mistaken, the inner side of this external reserve is not only
indifference but more frequently than we believe, it is a slight aversion, a mutual
strangeness and repulsion which, in a close contact which has arisen any way
whatever, can break out into hatred and conflict.” Simmel, 331.
39
Woolf, “Street Haunting,” 256.
40
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 133-4.
41
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 167.
42
Woolf, “Street Haunting,” 247.
43
Woolf, “Street Haunting,” 258.
44
Baudelaire, 399. Baudelaire’s man of the crowd, like Woolf ’s woman of the
crowd, willingly merges with the streets’ anonymous crowds: “The crowd is his
domain, just as the air is the birds’, and water that of the fish. His passion and
his profession is to merge with the crowd. For the perfect idler, for the passionate
observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling
in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be
away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the
very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the
minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not
lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions.”
45
Benjamin, 167. See also p. 169: “As regards Baudelaire, the masses were
anything but external to him; indeed, it is easy to trace in his works his defensive
reaction to their attraction and allure.” Benjamin cites his sonnet ‘A une
passante’ as an illustration: “What this sonnet communicates is simply this:
Far from experiencing the crowd as an opposed, antagonistic element, this very
crowd brings to the city dweller the figure that fascinates. The delight of the
urban poet is love – not at first sight, but at last sight. It is a farewell forever
which coincides in the poem with the moment of enchantment. Thus the sonnet
supplies the figure of shock, indeed of enchantment.”
46
Woolf, “Street Haunting,” 247.
47
Woolf, “Street Haunting,” 249.
48
Woolf, “Street Haunting,” 254.
49
Woolf, “Street Haunting,” 258.
50
Woolf, “Street Haunting,” 253.
51
Ibid.
52
John Jervis, Exploring the Modern (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), 85.
53
Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 204.
54
Woolf, “Street Haunting,” 256-57.
55
Woolf, “Street Haunting,” 257.
56
Woolf, “Street Haunting,” 258.
57
Ibid.
58
Woolf, “Street Haunting,” 259.
59
Woolf, “Street Haunting,” 258.
60
Woolf, “Street Haunting,” 257.
51