Woolf's Modernism: Ambivalence Of Identity In Mrs. Dalloway And "street Haunting"

Woolf ’s Modernism

Woolf’s Modernism: Ambivalence of Identity in Mrs. Dalloway and “Street Haunting” megan teigen

in a may 1928 diary entry written around the same time she was composing “Street Haunting,” Virginia Woolf writes, “London itself 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 ambivalence 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 greatest rest.2

Walking among the chaotic crowds on London’s Oxford Street, Woolf is caught up in a violent series of events. She reports them, however, with striking detachment, and the contradiction between 31

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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. Dalloway and “Street Haunting.” This essay will examine the ways in which Woolf ’s literary style in Mrs. Dalloway and “Street Haunting,” guided by the principal characters’ street walking, reveals her ambivalence toward the modern city. While Woolf appears in both works to present a strikingly 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 mystic 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 reactions 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 appears, 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 triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.4

At the opposite time of the year, Woolf ’s narrator in “Street Haunting” is similarly carried away by London’s beauty. As she steps out 32

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onto London’s streets, her self-consciousness dissolves into a “central oyster of perceptiveness,” an identity-less eye that takes in the color and light of the streets: But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell-like covering 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

The eye is an important figure in discussions of the city by Georg Simmel, Charles Baudelaire, and Walter Benjamin.6 While Benjamin sees the eye of the city dweller as obviously “overburdened with protective functions,”7 the eye in Woolf ’s narrative is unencumbered; it sheds its self-conscious skin and “floats us smoothly Her structure down a stream.”8 The eye, uninhib- and style reveal ited by any identifiable body, enables a fragmentation Woolf ’s street-walkers to rejoice in of identity that the crowd’s vitality, easily marshaling the ever-shifting sights and impres- is a direct effect sions into a picturesque collection of of the city’s rapid concrete “trophies,” as they are called modernization, in “Street Haunting,” with which and whose only their individual identities merge. resolution, for Woolf, In both “Street Haunting” lies in her characters’ and Mrs. Dalloway, the city’s tangible reality contrasts with Woolf ’s inevitable isolation. disembodied eye, which facilitates the narratives’ flow from one identity to the next. Woolf ’s eye is not attached to any physical body in which a singular identity can be grounded. Instead, the eye assembles for itself an impermanent collection of the most beautiful fragments of passing identities that, like the imaginary house the eye builds and furnishes from a storefront’s offerings, can be dismantled and rebuilt “in the twinkling of an eye.”9 Because the eye protects itself by remaining always at 33

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the surface, it creates a limitation not immediately apparent: “The thing it cannot do… is to compose these trophies in such a way as to bring out the more obscure angles and relationships.”10 The eye is incapable of constructing a permanent identity from the fragmented impressions it collects from passing encounters on the street, and the trophies the eye collects, like the imaginary rooms it furnishes, are never enough to form a whole house. In the same way, the identities Woolf ’s characters assume are unsustainable. At first sight, the modern city streets appear to offer a freedom for Woolf ’s characters, who can lose themselves in the crowds. The narrator in “Street Haunting” finds herself asking, “What, then, is it like to be a dwarf?”;11 Elizabeth Dalloway rides aimlessly on London’s omnibuses and imagines her future as a professional among the “uproar” on Fleet Street.12 Looking deeper, however, this loss of self is the source of Woolf ’s ambiguous attitude toward the city. The narrator’s encounter with the dwarf “had changed the mood; she had called into being an atmosphere which, as we followed her out into the street, seemed actually to create the humped, the twisted, the deformed”;13 as Elizabeth Dalloway recalls the time, she becomes aware of the city’s perpetual instability. Clouds fall over the city, and she notes: Fixed though they seemed at their posts, at rest in perfect unanimity… to change, to go, to dismantle the solemn assemblage was immediately possible; and in spite of the grave fixity, the accumulated robustness and solidity, now they struck light to the earth, now darkness.14

In this repeating pattern of composing and fracturing identities, Woolf subtly reveals the ambivalence toward the city that is more overtly expressed by other modern writers such as T.S. Eliot or D.H. Lawrence. The same repeating pattern exists in Mrs. Dalloway, in which the various elements of modernity, mechanical or human, which compose modern London, contribute to the unstable relations between characters. Peter Childs defines modernity as a series of binary oppositions—“disintegration and reformation, fragmenta34

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tion and rapid change, ephemerality and insecurity”—which are at the center of “certain new understandings of time and space, speed, mobility, communication, travel, dynamism, chaos and cultural revolution.”15 Woolf is clearly aware of the dualities Childs identifies and, experimenting with new representations of his elements of time, space, speed, mobility and travel, Woolf constructs several dichotomies—between Clarissa and Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway; between indoors and outdoors, and between summer balcony and winter pavement in “Street Haunting”—which, aided by Woolf ’s narrative structure, create uncertainties of identity for the characters involved. Throughout “Street Haunting,” Woolf emphasizes this sense of ambiguous identity by referring to herself as “we”: “We shall never know” the context of overheard conversations; they pass too quickly to “let us ask such questions.” From the moment the narrator steps out her door and into the street, she makes clear, “we are no longer quite ourselves.”16 As Rachel Bowlby notes, this move into the city is accompanied by a loss of identity, and a “removal of individuality for anonymity.”17 In Mrs. Dalloway, a different strategy conveys the same dislocating sense of simultaneous absorption in multiple identities, which ends in isolation. The novel’s narrator moves fluidly from one character’s thoughts to another’s, tying together distinct and divergent consciousnesses by a “thin thread” reminiscent of Simmel’s intertwining relationships.18 Unlike Simmel, however, who sees these relationships intertwine “into a many-membered organism,” identities in Mrs. Dalloway become entangled only impermanently before finally splitting apart again and returning to inaccessible anonymity. For example, Hugh Whitbread and Richard Dalloway form a tenuous and temporary bond at Lady Bruton’s short lunch, then leave her to nap as they part company on the street: 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, 35

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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 spider’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

The overlying narration, or thread, in Mrs. Dalloway, like Clarissa’s initial reactions to London, facilitates an illusion of unified identity in the modern city. The thread creates a direct path from one character to the next: after parting ways with Hugh Whitbread, “Richard turned at the corner of Conduit Big Ben chimes Street eager, yes, very eager, to travel that spider’s thread of attachment besimultaneously each tween himself and Clarissa; he would hour with clocks go straight to her, in Westminster.”19 across London to It also allows multiple perspectives on unite diverging the same scene, which are connected narratives. and grounded in a collection of physical representations of modernization: a motor car’s backfire startles Clarissa Dalloway and captivates Septimus Smith; an airplane links them across the city as both spell out its sky-written message; Peter Walsh and Septimus and Rezia Smith converge outside Regent’s Park Tube Station. And time, which for Simmel is essential for holding these urban relationships together,20 constantly serves as a uniting force: Big Ben chimes simultaneously each hour with clocks across London to unite diverging narratives, as it does here between Clarissa and Peter Walsh. As Clarissa walks up Bond Street, she is physically aware of Big Ben’s chime: For having lived in Westminster—how many years now? over twenty,—one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense… before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden cir36

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cles dissolved in the air.21

And later, leaving Clarissa’s house, Peter Walsh also physically reacts to bells’ rhythm as he replays the echo of Big Ben to himself: “Remember my party, remember my party, said Peter Walsh as he stepped down the street, speaking to himself rhythmically, in time with the flow of the sound, the direct downright sound of Big Ben striking the half-hour. (The leaden circles dissolved in the air.)”22

In the novel’s final scene Big Ben unites Clarissa and Septimus, 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 mortality 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 recently 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 disables 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: Everyone looked at the motor car. Septimus looked. Boys on bicycles sprang off. Traffic accumulated… and this gradual drawing together of everything to one centre before his eyes, as if some horror had come almost to the surface and was about to burst into flames, ter37

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rified him. The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.25

Clarissa and Septimus share a heightened awareness of London’s motion and energy which is unmatched in intensity by any of the novel’s other characters. As the novel progresses, Woolf continually links Clarissa and Septimus through scenes like this one that reveal the intensity of urban sensation, so that Clarissa easily visualizes Septimus’ death and readily empathizes with his decision in the novel’s final pages. The link between them makes her reflections seem perfectly natural even though the two never truly met. This close connection between Clarissa and Septimus serves to undermine Clarissa’s expressions of delight in the city. The motorcar engine that both hear, which “sounded like a pulse irregularly drumming through an entire body,”26 acts as a physical connection between the two that also links their reactions to the city. Septimus’ horror becomes linked to Clarissa’s joy in this way, and the fluid, rapidly shifting narrative structure of Mrs, Dalloway further emphasizes the continuities of identity. Instability is expressed not in immediate representations of the city but in a fracturing and merging of perception and personality at this individual level: as the thread interweaves their identities, Septimus’ desperation haunts Clarissa’s liveliness; his suicide undermines her love of London life. Ultimately, though, just as the thread connecting Lady Bruton to Richard Dalloway and Hugh Whitbread eventually breaks, the thread between Clarissa and Septimus also snaps, and the underlying isolation characteristic of the modern city is revealed. At the novel’s close, Big Ben, which throughout the novel facilitated the fusion of divergent consciousnesses, severs the connection between Clarissa and Septimus: 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 extraordinary 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 38

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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

Big Ben grounds Clarissa and untangles her wandering thoughts, which had begun to consciously merge with Septimus’. As she turns to go inside, she forces herself to dismiss this intimate connection, created by the city, to a stranger. To Clarissa and her guests, Septimus must remain the anonymous young man whose story only briefly intrudes on the party’s gaiety. Similar characters haunt the edges of perception in “Street Haunting” to intrude on the brightness of the narrator’s walk. The beauty of the streets, over which the eye glides smoothly, is abruptly disturbed when suddenly, turning the corner, we come upon a bearded Jew, wild, hunger–bitten, glaring out of his misery; or pass the humped body of an old woman flung abandoned on the step of a public building with a cloak over her like the hasty covering thrown over a dead horse or donkey. At such sights the nerves of the spine seem to stand erect; a sudden flare is brandished in our eyes; a question is asked which is never answered.28

The woman’s huddled body evokes an image of death that contrasts starkly with the swirl of “sequined cloaks and bright legs of diners and dancers”29 around her. The narrator is nearly caught up in the spectacle of the crowds emerging from the theatres, but at the last moment is shocked back to herself.30 The narrator’s unanswered question, asked in response to the ghastly—and ghostly—image of the old woman, is asked as well by Clarissa in Mrs. Dalloway. Even while she reflects on her love of the city, of “this moment in June,” her thoughts are haunted by underlying uncertainties about her identity in both life and death: 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 39

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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

For Baudelaire and later, Benjamin, the ghost or specter is an important figure of the modern city.32 As bodies like those of the bearded Jew or the huddled woman begin to invade the streets, it becomes clear that “Street Haunting” is a more fitting title than it originally appears. When both texts are examined more closely, beyond the initial emphasis on life, an underlying preoccupation with death and haunting becomes visible. In the above passage, Clarissa considers whether death is an absolute end, but here, later in the novel, she expresses hope that “the unseen might survive” in a ghostly form: 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 somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places, after death. Perhaps—perhaps.33

The two types of “Street Haunting” Woolf presents, one a celebration of life and the other, here, after death, are intimately connected. In the above passage, living bodies are constructed as “apparitions,” which unite only momentarily with the unseen aspect that extends 40

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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, mobility and communication, expand the modern city beyond the limits 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 perceptions 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 a celebration of life, know her, or any one, one must seek 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 41

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the identities it contains. On her way to the Strand to buy a lead pencil, Woolf ’s narrator catches only fragments of conversation as they float by: It is about a woman called Kate that they are talking… but who Kate is, and to what crisis in their friendship that penny stamp refers, we shall never know… and here, at the street corner, another page of the volume of life is laid open by the sight of two men consulting under the lamp-post. They are spelling out the latest wire from Newmarket in the stop press news. Do they think, then, that fortune will ever convert their rags into fur and broadcloth…? But the main stream of walkers at this hour sweeps past too fast to let us ask such questions.36

From this fleeting exchange, the narrator is able to identify Kate as the subject of the women’s conversation, but is unable to construct her identity. The conversation is intimate, but the narrative must cut off abruptly as it passes by and another comes into view; no investigative effort can be made to assemble Kate’s identity, to truly know her. An element of reserve or “conventional distance”37 prevents a deeper connection with the women speaking about Kate­—and, by extension, Kate herself. Simmel would define this reserve as symptomatic of an underlying aversion, or repulsion.38 For Woolf, though, this is not at all the case. The narrator is drawn to the conversation, but the crowd’s speed – a modern convention – checks the development of a solid identity for Kate; she “sinks under the warmth of their volubility”39 as the women disappear into the crowd. Despite the fact that Kate has been named, she remains inaccessible; the encounter is characterized not by any true identification with Kate but by the anonymity of all the conversation’s participants. This ambivalence of identity reflects ambivalence toward the city; an inability to unite the city into a coherent whole creates the same difficulties when turned inward to individual personalities. Despite her elation during her opening walk up Bond Street, Clarissa is acutely aware throughout Mrs. Dalloway of the inevitable isolation that permeates relationships in the city and she longs to 42

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repair the fractures: But to go deeper, beneath what people said (and these judgements, how superficial, how fragmentary they are!) in her own mind now, what did it mean to her, this thing she called life? ...Here was So-and-so in South Kensington; some one up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quite continuously a sense of their existence; and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom?40

Despite the necessary anonymity of those with whom Clarissa feels a connection, these fleeting encounters are strikingly personal. Clarissa’s parties, which unite her guests indoors, are her attempt to counteract the fracturing of relationships in the city by bringing the disparate and dissipating elements together, if only for an evening. Like Woolf ’s narrator in “Street Haunting,” who realizes that it is not practical to change identities with the changing landscape of the city, Clarissa recognizes that despite her acute sense of connectedness to the city, she can neither create a solid identity on the streets nor solidify her fleeting encounters: “So-and-so in South Kensington; some one up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in Mayfair” remain anonymous, identity-less. In the city, consciousness is continually in flux, dissipating through the passing crowd and resting only briefly on any single individual. As Woolf guides her reader through an ever-shifting sequence of characters’ thoughts, merging the paths and perceptions of each, the narrator makes clear that while each consciousness is interwoven with the others, a seamless narrative is impossible within the city. Back on the omnibus, Clarissa mournfully acknowledges, “How could they know each other? You met every day, then not for six months, or years.”41 As with Clarissa and Septimus; Peter and the Smiths; Hugh Whitbread, Richard Dalloway and Lady Bruton, paths cross—intentionally or unconsciously—for a moment, and then diverge again for an unforeseeable amount of time, so that relationships, like characters’ personal identities and the identities of 43

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those they encounter, can never be fully developed. Despite the connectedness Clarissa feels and the connections of consciousness Woolf creates in Mrs. Dalloway, her characters’ immersion in the modern crowd is always superficial. Woolf draws together diverging narratives through characters’ parallel reactions to the city’s modern elements, from the motorcar to Big Ben. But the connections cannot extend beyond these shared perceptions; the city is too vast, and the crowd moves too quickly. The narrator can only speculate about details of the lives she encounters on her walk, but the flow of Woolf ’s narrative reflects their fragmenting effect on her consciousness. As she leaves home, she sheds the solid identity provided by the objects that “perpetually express the oddity of our own temperaments and enforce the memories of our own experience.”42 Without them, her identity unravels into a “thin thread” as in Mrs. Dalloway, which then becomes entangled with the identities of each person she encounters on her walk: “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

Like Baudelaire’s flâneur, for whom “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,”44 the narrator at first revels in merging her identity with the masses. Despite the narrator’s apparent confidence in her agency within the crowd, however, the narrative hints that it may be dangerous to walk too far down those footpaths. Benjamin’s analysis of Baudelaire sees this merging with the crowds as a move toward anonymity in a “defensive reaction to their attraction and allure.”45 But for Woolf, defense against the crowd lies in continually stepping back from anonymity. The crowd’s composition evolves so rapidly that the fragments of identity which merge with the crowd are soon dispersed widely. Any 44

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merging of identities in one location will diverge and merge again throughout the city until the connections become untraceable or lost altogether, and identities return to isolation within “that vast repub- “Here we find lican army of anonymous tramp- anchorage in these ers”46 that trudges through London thwarting currents in “Street Haunting.” Thus the only of being; here we way the narrator can step back from anonymity in the modern city is by balance ourselves stepping indoors and away from the after the splendours crowded streets whose constant stim- and miseries of the ulation she so loves. streets.” Yet despite its apparent solidifying effect on identity, this step indoors is also a step into isolation. As Clarissa does on the omnibus, the narrator in “Street Haunting” regrets the impracticality of collecting identities from these daily meetings. Clarissa’s belief in the unifying power of her parties and the narrator’s interactions inside the street’s shops provide a brief respite from anonymity. The narrator in “Street Haunting” must repeatedly pause and “make some little excuse, which has nothing to do with the real reason, for folding up the bright paraphernalia of the streets and withdrawing to some duskier chamber,”47 which offers a reprieve from the streets’ constant flux: Here we find anchorage in these thwarting currents of being; here we balance ourselves after the splendours and miseries of the streets. The very sight of the bookseller’s wife with her foot on the fender, sitting beside a good coal fire, screened from the door, is sobering and cheerful. She is never reading, or only the newspaper; her talk, when it leaves bookselling, which it does so gladly, is about hats; she likes a hat to be practical, she says, as well as pretty. O no, they don’t live at the shop; they live in Brixton; she must have a bit of green to look at.48

Like the boot shop and the stationer’s store that the narrator enters, these withdrawals introduce the narrator to solid characters who 45

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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 corners, […] 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: Circumstances compel unity; for convenience sake a man must be whole. The good citizen when he opens his door in the evening must be banker, golfer, husband, father; not a nomad wandering the desert, a mystic staring at the sky… When he opens his door, he must run his fingers through his hair and put his umbrella in the stand like the rest.50

Isolation within the modern city is unavoidable. At different times, Woolf ’s characters alternately feel deeply connected to and isolated from the city’s crowds of individuals. Connectedness and isolation, like the threads that link London’s inhabitants, are entangled and cannot be separated. The difference between the two is as ambiguous as the narrator’s identity as she walks to the Strand: 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

As she walks through London, the narrator is haunted by a former self who stands, at the opposite time of the year, on a balcony outside a Mayfair party. Her two selves are indistinguishable, and destined 46

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to endlessly alternate unless the narrator dismisses both to assume an identity that is “neither this nor that, neither here nor there.” In his discussion of Benjamin and Woolf, John Jervis writes, “The modern city returns endlessly, repeats itself endlessly […] in the city, the ghosts are there in advance; the future exists in the past, gives it momentary meaning, through making it present.”52 The modern city is eternally haunted by the connections and disconnections of identity which haunt the narrator in the passage above. As the narrator is haunted by a phantom self, Clarissa is also haunted in Mrs. Dalloway’s final scene by the phantom of her “double,” Septimus. The above passage from “Street Haunting” eerily shadows that final scene in Mrs. Dalloway, in which Clarissa actually stands, wearing pearls, looking out on a night in June and contemplating Septimus’ death: 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 beginning, 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 contemplation 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 sending 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, 47

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peaceful. And we see it through the eyes of somebody who is leaning over the Embankment on a summer evening, without a care in the world. Let us put off buying the pencil; let us go in search of this person – and soon it becomes apparent that this person is ourselves. For if we could stand there where we stood six months ago, should we not be again as we were then – calm, aloof, content? Let us try then.54

The narrator is tempted to go in search of this person, this ghost of ourselves, to try to regain that moment six months ago. But it is not possible: The river is rougher and greyer than we remembered. The tide is running 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

In the modern city, isolation inevitably prevails. Here, just as Clarissa turned away from Septimus and back indoors to her party, Woolf ’s narrator turns away from her ghostly alternate identity and into the indoor sanctuary of the stationer’s shop. “A ghost has been sought for,”56 but the narrator has chosen not to seek a further connection. Instead, as she leaves the stationer’s shop to reverse her path back toward home, she recalls the individuals she has encountered on her walk, telling herself “the story of the dwarf, of the blind men, of the party in the Mayfair mansion, of the quarrel in the stationer’s shop.”57 But the merging of her identity with theirs, like her encounters with them, is brief and impermanent. “To escape is the greatest of pleasures,”58 Woolf ’s narrator says, but she realizes that it is an escape only: “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 48

Woolf ’s Modernism

The narrator must eventually shed these illusory identities and recompose her solid identity. Throughout “Street Haunting” and Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf ’s characters are torn between these two opposing constructions of identity: 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 narrator in “Street Haunting” mourns an unidentified ghostly male along the Thames and Clarissa reflects on Septimus’ suicide. In the recognition of the ambiguity of modern identity lies the inevitable conclusion, “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. 49

journal of undergraduate research 13

Woolf, “Street Haunting,” 251. 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 manymembered 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 JeanMichel 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. 14

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“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