The Role Of The `modern City` In Virginia Woolf’s Writings

A member of the Bloomsbury group and resident of London for 59 years, Woolf s literature was deeply informed by her interactions with the city that perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives [her] a play and a story and a poem, without any trouble, save that of moving [ ] through the streets. [1] Indeed the centrality of London to works such as Mrs Dalloway and Orlando, as well as more obviously to Street Hauntings: A London Adventure and The London Scene essays, plays a vital role in her broader literary vision. The bustling metropolis enables her to deftly glide from consciousness to consciousness through the medium of physical interactions and spatial collisions, and thus engenders a striking image of the fragmentary city in all of its modes and aspects. Her manoeuvring between the internal and external landscapes (the characters minds and their physical settings) is furthered by her use of free indirect discourse, a technique favoured by many Modernists for its ability to express mental states with unparalleled authenticity.[2] Branching away from Victorian literary realism, Woolf s work places primacy on character and narrative as opposed to plot, and thus the diverse city of London is an ideal setting for her texts. Often adopting the role of the flaneuse , her works move through the urban streets, taking a disinterested survey in both the high and low culture that surround her. Unlike some of her literary contemporaries, notably Eliot, her approach to the heterogeneous city is (arguably) characterised by a lack of judgement, as the role of urban observer serves as a democratising position, placing her on a level plane with all that she observes. Moreover, the urban historicity that is expressed most clearly in Orlando allows Woolf to experiment with unorthodox temporal literary depictions, as the monuments of the past are placed within the modernity of the twentieth century city.

The role of the Symbolist fl neur, or in Woolf s case the fl neuse, inextricably links the urban atmosphere to literary meditations, and was adopted by other Modernists (such as Eliot) as a means of exploring the vast cityscape whilst being at the same time somewhat removed from it. In Woolf s own life, she enjoyed street sauntering and square haunting, [3] observing the life around her with little judgement in her diary, she describes how she drove on top of a Bus from Oxford St. to Victoria station, observed how the passengers were watching the spectacle, [4] and indeed her omnibus exploration is later echoed in Mrs Dalloway by Elizabeth, who adopts this mode of fl nerie to explore the Strand.[5] The early 20^th century metropolis was a hotbed of vitality, consumerism and sexuality, and in her work Woolf seems to be intrigued by every aspect of street life ranging from prostitution to parades and protests from high society gatherings to the peregrinations and performances of vagrants from the pleasures of window-shopping to the pleasures of voyeurism. [6] As a fl neuse, then, she was able to roam the streets of London, the connective tissue of the metropolis, ^[7] and observe every aspect of urban life. This can be seen most obviously in Street Hauntings: A London Adventure, whereby the narrator [rambles] the streets of London on the premise of buying a pencil. The enormous eye glides smoothly on the surface of the city, and focuses on the aesthetic beauty of the scenes with vivid descri ption: the glossy brilliance of the motor omnibuses the carnal splendour of the butchers` shops with their yellow flanks and purple steaks the blue and red bunches of flowers burning so bravely through the plate glass of the florists` windows. Yet the descri ption takes on a symbolic meaning too, as Woolf talks of breaking the shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, possibly alluding to the assumed female sphere of domestic life, and uncovering the duskier chamber of the being that one sees through the windows of people s homes. In fact, the process of female street-haunting is in itself symbolic: by wandering the streets of London alone, Woolf was able to shed the restrictive harness of her gender and the handicap of her class in exactly the same way as Clarissa does when she steps outside her imposing house at the beginning of Mrs Dalloway to buy the party flowers herself. [8] Indeed as an early feminist, Woolf s decision to explore the city alone was a clear sign of female autonomy, seeing as women s entry into the public spaces of the city was used to mark their liberation from enclosure in the private, domestic sphere. [9] This central oyster of perceptiveness was not limited to the city streets Woolf also used the setting of London parks in some of her narratives, such as Regent s Park in Mrs Dalloway as well as in her essay Kew Gardens. The space of the rus in urbe ^[10] (country in the city) is important in both establishing and transgressing the dichotomy between urban and rural life. The natural spaces located within the city are unable to escape from the confusion and chaos of everyday life in Mrs Dalloway, the park is the setting wherein Peter Walsh reflects on his social isolation and Lucrezia meditates on her unhappy marriage to Septimus. In Kew Gardens the assumed tranquillity of the natural world is compromised by those who enter it, as the visitors are described as being at one with their surroundings and yet still possessing a disruptive, disharmonious influence: the figures of these men and women straggled past the flower-bed with a curiously irregular movement not unlike that of the white and blue butterflies who crossed the turf in zig-zag flights from bed to bed. The gardens, which initially appear to offer a peaceful space for communication, are ironically caught in a stasis created by humanity s actions and the urban world. Thus Woolf s observations of London, be they through the autonomous role of the fl neuse in Street Hauntings: A London Adventure or the unorthodox perspective of the snail in Kew Gardens, provide insight into all that the metropolis has to offer, from the distinctly urban images found whilst walking through the streets or taking an omnibus, to the more natural spaces of the parks that are still unable to escape the social effects of quotidian city life.

Woolf s all-seeing eye serves a greater social function than merely providing a literary presentation of bustling city-life it operates as a kind of democratising force, viewing the various social strata of society with minimal judgement and providing an extensive insight into all aspects of the urban world. In A London Adventure, Woolf explains how in order to observe the city for what it is we must shed the self our friends know us by and becomes part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers. This temporary discarding of societal hierarchy allows for greater physical and social mobility, enabling the deliberate introduction of grotesque figures such as the dwarf and her maimed company of the halt and the blind. The sudden introduction of these destitute figures both shock[s] the eye out of its complacency and allow[s] it to continue on its adventure. [11] They are vital in Woolf s portrayal of the splendours and miseries of the streets, as they reveal how the extremes of the city become part of its identity, not composed of one thing only but instead streaked, variegated all of a mixture. However whilst Woolf s essays adopt a more democratising stance towards urban observation (though critics like Nord argue that she never fully relinquish[es] her middleclass, male-identified stance )[12], her fiction takes on a different role. The frequent stroll[s] through London found in works such as Mrs Dalloway also act as an allegory on human relations and politics, [13] providing socio-political commentary on the treatment of the lower class and ensuring that they never [become] an undifferentiated mass. ^[14] In Mrs Dalloway particularly, Woolf attmpts to criticise the social system, to show it at work, at its most intense [15] this can be seen most clearly in Richard Dalloway s stroll through London. As a Tory politician who has supposedly championed the downtrodden and followed his instincts in the House of Commons, he aestheticizes the plight of the poor, smiling good-humouredly whilst watching how in the shade of the trees whole families, poor families, were sprawling children kicking up their legs sucking milk paper bags thrown about. The female vagrant who laughed at the sight of him does not bother him, for he knows that they would [never] speak to each other. This biting social commentary reveals the condescension of the higher classes to those who they deemed inferior, and marks a direct contrast to the inclusive attitude espoused by Woolf in her essays. The figure of the other is also explored in Orlando, whereby the protagonist (who is more sympathetic to the marginalised members of society) cross-dresses and befriends prostitutes on the streets of London - Nell, Prue, Kitty and Rose, who apparently have a society of their own of which they now elected her a member. This view of all aspects of the metropolis, from the wealthy to the poor and the cultured to the licentious, aligns with Woolf s belief that the city s streets are great obliterators of difference, great conduits of diversity, where the poor and the outcast [ ] live cheek by jowl with their better off fellow citizens. London s diversity, far from being shunned, is held up as one of the foundations of city life.

Indeed, the urban descri ptions that pervade Woolf s work seem to suggest that the variety and richness of the city is in part what leads to its underlying sense of harmony the aesthetic of the modern city in fact lies in its surreal and shocking contrasts, and its own nervous motion, in which extremes of wealth and poverty, beauty and ugliness, lie, quite literally [ ] side by side. [16] Her narrators do not dwell on sordidness, and they present beauty not as something existing in spite of urban life, but as emerging from its energy and motion [17] this can be seen clearly in the London Scene essays, where the harmonic nature and unique musicality of the city is emphasised. The parcels slap and hit motor omnibuses graze the kerb the blare of a whole brass band in full tongue dwindles to a thin reed of sound in Oxford Street Tide , and the roar and resonance of London itself can be heard in The Docks of London , providing a rough city song. Woolf appears to find aesthetic delight in the movement of the cranes at the docks, in the forms of rhythmical order that seem to emerge from the chaos itself. [18] The rhythms of urban existence ^[19] that permeate the descri ptions evoke a sense of unintended artfulness, which is furthered by the use of cinematic moments and montaging techniques in Mrs Dalloway. The novel s narrative technique makes use of such devices as montage, close-ups, flashbacks, tracking-shots, and rapid cuts in order to construct a three-dimensional story. [20] Indeed the cinematic technique is an ideal method of expressing the disparate and transient urban reality, and can be seen most clearly in the skywriting plane which is seen by the crowd around Buckingham Palace, and also by Septimus and Rezia in Regent s Park. [21] This cinematic linking device [22] works as a method of interconnection, emphasising the plurality of experience within the individualised urban environment, as well as being a neat means of narrative switching on Woolf s part.

The interconnection of lives is not limited to specifically cinematic events every aspect of the cityscape serves as a means of focalisation of these relationships. [23] Shared experiences, for example, provide an opportunity to delve into the individual responses (and internal worlds of) the various city-dwellers. Such experiences are found in Mrs Dalloway, in an explosion in Bond Street as a car backfires, an aeroplane sky-writing, an old woman singing in Regent s Park, the striking of clocks, the heat of the day, the excitement of the London season. [24] Woolf was fascinated by the relationship between consciousness or states of mind and the city, [25] and thus the physical landscape of London is significant primarily for the way it triggers and releases the inner life. [26] The constant fluctuation between the internal and external lives of characters is most clearly presented in the narrative of Mrs Dalloway, which utilises free indirect discourse to move between characters minds as they move through the city and encounter one another. A clear example of this is the reader s introduction to Septimus at the same moment that Clarissa is buying flowers for her party:

Mrs. Dalloway, coming to the window with her arms full of sweet peas, looked out with her little pink face pursed in enquiry. Every one looked at the motor car. Septimus looked [ ] And there the motor car stood, with drawn blinds, and upon them a curious pattern like a tree, Septimus thought, 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, terrified him [ ] It is I who am blocking the way, he thought. Was he not being looked at and pointed at was he not weighted there, rooted to the pavement, for a purpose? But for what purpose?

This spatial intersection allows Woolf to [knit] together the lives and interior monologues of disparate characters, and by lingering a moment as Septimus consciousness unfolds ^[27] she explores his character in depth without disrupting the trajectory of the narrative. This mode of characterisation can be describes as a kind of city consciousness, wherein the urban environment and its inhabitants are connected through the processes of walking, thinking, and daydreaming, linking the circulation of traffic and people through the city with the relationships of its central characters. [28] However the method not only applies to the main characters it allows for the internal worlds of fringe characters to be explored, as in the case of the grey nurse in Regent s Park who [resumes] her knitting as Peter Wash, on the hot seat beside her, [begins] snoring. Her narrative and inner monologue are given an authenticity and authority that they would not normally command, and thus Woolf is able to explore the beautiful caves that she digs out behind her characters, revealing their individual humanity, humour [and] depth as well as their interconnection.[29] Thus the lack of firm or definite boundaries between the internal and external landscapes allows for a more panoptic vision of urban life, expressing the richness and diversity of early 20^th century London.

The narrative technique in Mrs Dalloway also experiments with the presentation of time, and indeed much of Woolf s wider work dwells on the historicity of the city as well as the transience of modernity. In Orlando, the key focus is placed upon the layered history of London, and the way in which the monuments of the past interact with their modern settings. In the novel she creates a palimpsest of medieval, Renaissance and contemporary London, describing the layered urban silhouette in rich detail. [30] The historical significance of London can clearly be seen in the passage:

The sun sank, all the domes, spires, turrets, and pinnacles of London rose in inky blackness against the furious red sunset clouds. Here was the fretted cross at Charing there the dome of St Paul s there the massy square of the Tower buildings there [ ] were the heads on the pikes at Temple Bar.

The image of a rich, collaged history that is built up in the passage could not be more in contrast with the descri ptions of modernity that can be found in the London Scene essays. Unlike the solidity and permanence of these older buildings, Woolf argues in Oxford Street Tide that the charm of modern London is that it is not built to last it is built to pass. It`s glassiness, its transparency, its surging waves of coloured plaster give a different pleasure and achieve a different end from that which was desired and attempted by the old builders and their patrons, the nobility of England. This image of Oxford Street, the national hub of consumerism, emphasises the ephemerality of modernity, which unlike some of her literary contemporaries (e.g. Eliot) she seems to revel in. Indeed this appreciation of the modern city in all of its disparate and transient glory comes through in Mrs Dalloway, when she describes sifting the ruins of time, when London is a grass-grown path and all those hurrying along the pavement this Wednesday morning are but bones with a few wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of innumerable decayed teeth. Here, the transitory nature of the present is expressed through a stark and humbling contrast with the future, in which one feels the insignificance of their individual life within the wider scope of reality. Yet this awareness of overall historic unimportance is undercut by a profound realisation of the First World War s impact, which frequently seeps into the narrative and is embodied by the character of Septimus. An ex-soldier whose mental health has been deeply affected by wartime experiences, Septimus reveals both the striking impact of the war upon soldiers wellbeing, as well as the general mood of society that neglects its veterans and disregards their plight. Clarissa s positive assertion that the War was over but it was over thank Heaven, over is juxtaposed by Septimus traumatised behaviour, which can be catagorised as schizophrenic or manic depressive [31] coincedentally the same mental illness that Woolf herself suffered with. This dismissal of the effects of war is condemned by the narrative voice, which stresses how prying and insidious [ ] the fingers of the European War were. Alienated from city life through their experience as outsiders, Septimus the ex-soldier and Rezia his disillusioned foreign wife reveal how war permeates every social stratum of urban society. Thus, the rich historical context of London sets the backdrop for all that exists within the modern city, and whilst the transience of modernity is stressed, certain events such as war have the power to shake society to its core.

In conclusion, Woolf s work is heavily informed by its London setting the city functions as a metaphor for the trajectories of narrative itself, [32] enabling the narrative to glide in and out of characters minds and histories through the spatial collisions that are sustained by the city. The varied environment provides her with plenty of opportunities to experimentation in form and style, in true Modernist fashion, and allows her to undergo a (specifically female) process of urban exploration, moving out of the domestic sphere and into the metropolis. She uses this freedom of movement to explore every aspect of society, mixing high and low brow culture constantly, in order to express the multifaceted nature of urban life as well as to provide a fierce commentary on social hierarchy. Woolf is very conscious of the porous membranes between exteriors and interiors, the public and the private spheres, the modern and the historical, as well as the ever-shifting prismatics of perception, [33] and this sense of individual and group consciousness, historicity and diversity permeates her descri ptions of post-war London.

Bibliography

Bowlby, Rachel. Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997.

Julia Briggs. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. London: Penguin/Allen Lane, 2005.

Goldman, Jane. The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Marcus, Laura. Virginia Woolf. Tavistock, Devon, U.K: Northcote House, 2004.

Neverow, Vara S., (ed.) Humm, Maggie. Virginia Woolf and City Aesthetics in The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010.

Nord, Deborah Epstein. Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City. New York: Cornell University Press, 1995.

Pawlowski, Merry M. Introduction to Mrs Dalloway. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2003.

Penda, Petar. Politicising Cityscape: London in Virginia Woolf s Mrs Dalloway from The Literary London Journal, Volume 10 Number 1 (Spring 2013).

Showalter, Elaine, (ed.) Briggs, Julia. Mrs Dalloway in Virginia Woolf: Introductions to the Major Works. London: Virago Press, 1994.

Whitworth, Michael, (ed.) Roe, Sue Sellers, Susan. Virginia Woolf and Modernism in The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Woolf, Virginia, (ed.) Bell, Anne Olivier. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. New York: Harvest Books, 1980.

Woolf, Virginia, (ed.) Bradshaw, David. Selected Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Woolf, Virginia, (ed.) Leonard Woolf. A Writer`s Diary. Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf. London: Hogarth Press, 1972.

[1] Virginia Woolf, (ed.) Anne Olivier Bell. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3. New York: Harvest Books, 1980.

[2] See Joyce s Ulysses for another Modernist example of free indirect discourse.

[3] Woolf, (ed.) Bell, op. cit., Vol. 3.

[4] Ibid., Vol. 1.

[5] Rachel Bowlby. Walking, Women and Writing in Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf, pp. 204 219. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997.

[6] Vara S. Neverow, (ed.) Maggie Humm. Virginia Woolf and City Aesthetics in The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, p. 99. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010.

[7] Ibid., p. 90.[8] Virginia Woolf, (ed.) Bradshaw, David. Selected Essays, p. xix. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

[9] Laura Marcus. Virginia Woolf, p. 61. Tavistock, Devon, U.K: Northcote House, 2004.

[10] Ibid., p. 69.

[11] Ibid., p. 65.

[12] Deborah Epstein Nord. Neither Pairs Nor Odd : Women, Urban Community, and Writing in the 1880s in Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City, pp. 181 206. New York: Cornell University Press, 1995.

[13] Jane Goldman. The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf, p. 115. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

[14] Marcus, op. cit., p. 69.

[15] Virginia Woolf, (ed.) Leonard Woolf. A Writer`s Diary. Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf, p. 57. London: Hogarth Press, 1972.

[16] Marcus, op. cit., p. 65.

[17] Michael Whitworth, (ed.) Sue Roe Susan Sellers. Virginia Woolf and Modernism in The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, p. 154. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

[18] Ibid., p. 154.

[19] Marcus. p.69.

[20] Ibid., p. 68.

[21] Elaine Showalter, (ed.) Julia Briggs. Mrs Dalloway in Virginia Woolf: Introductions to the Major Works, p. 135. London: Virago Press, 1994.

[22] Ibid., p. 135.

[23] Petar Penda. Politicising Cityscape: London in Virginia Woolf s Mrs Dalloway from The Literary London Journal, Volume 10 Number 1 (Spring 2013).

[24] Julia Briggs. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life, p. 134. London: Penguin/Allen Lane, 2005.

[25] Marcus, op. cit., p. 62.

Mrs Dalloway, p. xv. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2003.