Flâneuse

by Lauren Elkin

  And so, to the Memoir Club, years later, she asked, ‘where does Bloomsbury end? What is Bloomsbury?’ For Woolf, Bloomsbury was not only a geographical neighbourhood but an abstract entity, an idea about creativity and bohemianism and an idea about freedom. Where did it end, where did it begin? What can be made of so much freedom: is it more than simply not using cloth napkins?

  In the winter of 1905, tracing Bloomsbury’s geographical outline, she gave that freedom a form.

  * * *

  When she was much older, she would create her heroine Mrs Dalloway (who ‘dallies along the way’, Rachel Bowlby points out), who is perhaps the greatest flâneuse of twentieth-century literature.29 These are the very first words Mrs Dalloway speaks in the novel: ‘“I love walking in London,” said Mrs Dalloway. “Really, it’s better than walking in the country.”’ For Woolf to be able to walk in the city by herself was a hitherto unimaginable kind of freedom, and while the move helped her become a professional writer, it was her walks that gave her something to write about. The streets gave her everything she needed. As she walked through the city, she would rewrite scenes in her mind; the life she saw around her seemed ‘an immense opaque block of material to be conveyed by me into its equivalent of language’.30 Wondering about the people she saw pushed her forward in her literary project – how to represent ‘life itself’ on the page. And to do this, she turned again and again to the city that was the ‘passion of [her] life’. The noise of the streets was a kind of language, she thought, one she would stop occasionally and listen to, and try to capture.31 In The Waves, this becomes: ‘I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement.’32 The jangle and shuffle of London is the heartbeat of life itself.

  In her diaries, novels, essays and letters alike, Woolf engages with the city, noticing, especially, women in the street. She admits this in A Room of One’s Own:

  All these infinitely obscure lives remain to be recorded, I said, addressing Mary Carmichael as if she were present; and went on in thought through the streets of London feeling in imagination the pressure of dumbness, the accumulation of unrecorded life, whether from the women at the street corners with their arms akimbo, and the rings embedded in their fat swollen fingers, talking with a gesticulation like the swing of Shakespeare’s words; or from the violet-sellers and match-sellers and old crones stationed under doorways; or from drifting girls whose faces, like waves in sun and cloud, signal the coming of men and women and the flickering lights of shop windows. All that you will have to explore, I said to Mary Carmichael, holding your torch firm in your hand.33

  Woolf mined the streets for drama, filling her books with the people she observed, walking, shopping, working, pausing. Especially the women: in a character sketch of a woman she sat across from on a train, she famously declared that ‘all novels begin with an old lady in the corner opposite’.34 Of a girl in a shop, she noted: ‘I would as soon have her true history as the hundred and fiftieth life of Napoleon or seventieth study of Keats and his use of Miltonic inversion which old Professor Z and his life are now indicting.’35

  One of her first activities was to ‘prowl […] round book shops in the Charing X road, all the afternoon & saw many things, which, were my purse obliging, I would get. Paston Letters, Rabelais, & James Thomson. If I am taken on by the Times I shall think myself justified –, & I use my books.’ She could ‘wander about the dusky streets in Holborn & Bloomsbury for hours’, she wrote over a decade later. ‘The things one sees – & guesses at – the tumult & riot & busyness of it all – Crowded streets are the only places, too, that ever make me what-in-the-case of another-one-might-call think.’36 Woolf began to walk everywhere, often taking Vanessa’s dog, who initially seemed homesick as well. On foot and on paw, they both eventually came around. ‘I think the variety of street smells make up almost for the Gardens,’ she notes on 26 January, and she might be talking about herself or the dog.37 Gurth the dog begins to follow his new partner in explorations around the house, and sits by her knee as she writes, hoping she’ll take him out.

  Soon she was very social, and went jaunting around town and beyond. She settled into habits, like taking a daily ‘dash’ before or after lunch, and what she called by late March her ‘weekly concert’. It’s endearing to see a young Virginia Woolf setting up this new life, with its customs and traditions, as if she will always have a weekly concert. This is independence-building. ‘I like looking at things,’ she admits in her diary on 22 February, and what she sees on Tottenham Court Road is far more interesting ‘than the same space of Kensington High Street’, with its furniture shops, and the bookshops in Oxford Street.38 That first time I was in Bloomsbury – it was all a haze – I remember finding my way into a million used-book shops all up and down this one street which I was convinced was Tottenham Court Road, but on more recent visits turned out to be Charing Cross Road – not in Bloomsbury at all. I had unknowingly crossed over the Oxford Street border into Soho. These are the kinds of borders you’re not aware of when you’re a stranger to a place.

  She didn’t only travel around the city on foot; one of her favourite activities was to ride the bus to Hampstead, sometimes with Vanessa, always on the top deck. It takes an hour, in 1905, and is, in her words, a ‘really good expedition’, a bit of the country right there in London.39 May 7 brings ‘A holiday morning expedition to Hampstead, which, like the Cockney I am, still manages to delight me – There is something fantastic – I mean phantom like – about this little vision of country in the heart of London.’40 Her earlier journals, from before her father’s death, record other trips which excited her, like the time they went to Hampton Court and she tried to picture the ghosts. ‘They were no cockney trippers making the whole place hideous with their noise & Cockney faces; no, these Ladies are part of the palace.’ But as she makes these expeditions on her own, or with her sister, two independent women around town, we see Woolf grow into herself. This was adult life; this was independence, pushing the city to its very limits, to see what it includes, being inspired, finding the cockney in the Kensington girl. I try to picture the Misses Stephen on the bus, side by side in those little seats on top, looking out. Did they read? Did they talk? What did they talk about? Did they ever annoy each other? Were they ever silent, resentful? Did they giggle or did they laugh respectably?

  Thoby died of typhus in 1906. Vanessa married in 1908. Things change and we have to change with them. If there’s one thing Woolf’s work teaches us, it’s that.

  Time passes.

  * * *

  There is a sense of the city you can’t plot on a map or a phone. It is an intense, embodied relationship to its atmosphere, and Woolf gives it to Clarissa Dalloway: ‘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 (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so.’41 That pause, before the bell rings, that charged awareness of its inevitability, indicates the bounds placed around each of our lives, which help make them meaningful, though we are doomed to extinction. As we progress through the city, there comes a point when we are no longer just reacting: we are interacting, created anew by this ongoing encounter. Woolf reminds us that there is something physically absorbing that keys us into the throb of the city, transformed by the quality of the light, of the air, of the road. One day, I skinned my knuckle on Southwark Bridge trying to cross the street. Why were my arms flailing? I don’t know. But flail your arms in a city, and you will come in contact with it, or, equally likely, with its inhabitants. We flail. We hit up against its limitations, against our own limitations. The city surroun
ds us and seeps in. Are we touching it or is it touching us?

  A point of contact, yielding that nebulous affective content we refer to, in shorthand, as ‘feelings’. All the most interesting ones are hard to put words to; we diminish their mystery as we hang official terms on them, like christening a byway with official nomenclature; we try to find words that won’t deflate them. This, anyway, was the task Woolf set herself as a writer.

  The city, she wrote in her diary in 1928, was forever ‘attract[ing], stimulat[ing]’ her, giving her ‘a play & a story & a poem’.42 In Mrs Dalloway Woolf turns this into a song of the city, sung in a language she could not understand by a woman who would haunt her novels and diaries. Peter Walsh, walking by Regent’s Park Tube Station, passes a blind old woman begging for money, ‘with one hand exposed for coppers’, singing:

  A sound interrupted him; a frail, quivering song, a voice bubbling up without direction, vigour, beginning or end, running weakly and shrilly and with an absence of all human meaning into

  ee um fah so

  foo swee too eem oo—

  the voice of no age or sex, the voice of an ancient spring spouting from the earth.43

  The description of this woman echoes one Woolf made in her diary twenty years earlier; soon after moving to Bloomsbury, she noticed an old woman on Oxford Street, whom she describes in almost exactly the same terms.44 She appears in the diary again on 8 June 1920; in this longer passage she stops to reflect on why she finds the woman so striking.

  An old beggar woman, blind, sat against a stone wall in Kingsway holding a brown mongrel in her arms & sang aloud. There was a recklessness about her; much in the spirit of London. Defiant – almost gay, clasping her dog as if for warmth. How many Junes has she sat there, in the heart of London? How came she to be there, what scenes she can go through, I can’t imagine. O damn it all, I say, why cant I know all that too? Perhaps it was the song at night that seemed strange; she was singing shrilly, but for her own amusement, not begging. Then the fire engines came by – shrill too; with their helmets pale yellow in the moonlight. Sometimes every thing gets into the same mood; how to define this one I don’t know – 45

  Is it possible it’s the same woman, in Kingsway, in Oxford Street, singing her incomprehensible song? Or perhaps her ghost? The woman, with her song, blends in, however discordantly, with the song of the city, with that feeling the city gives her that Woolf can’t describe:

  Nowadays I’m often overcome by London; even think of the dead who have walked in the city … The view of the grey white spires from Hungerford Bridge brings it to me: & yet I can’t say what ‘it’ is.

  Shape-shifting, sense-shifting, this unsayable thing wreathes around and through the city walker, binding her in a pact whose terms she doesn’t understand. For Woolf, it will be a lifetime’s work trying to articulate it, trying to find a form to fit an always unknowable feeling.

  * * *

  Woolf thought deeply about the relationship between women and the city. In 1927, she wrote her great essay on flâneuse-ing, which she called ‘street haunting’. Two words, no hyphen. In search of a pencil, her narrator crosses London on foot, noticing. Her urban observer is ‘a central oyster of perceptiveness’; not a miner nor a diver nor anything with a brain, even – just ‘an enormous eye’, carried downstream by the city. Woolf was very much aware of the ways that women’s experience of the city was different from a man’s, and the essay is informed by the great anonymity which Woolf believes is possible (even for a woman) during a ramble through London. Sailing out into a winter evening, surrounded by the ‘champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets’, the observer feels blessed with the ‘irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow’. In the street we are no longer ‘quite ourselves’ – instead we become ‘functions of the urban landscape’. Whereas once we were the objects of the gaze, as street haunters we become observing entities, de-sexed, un-gendered. We cloak ourselves in anonymity, and become as incomprehensible to the city as it often is to us. (Think, for instance, what a chaos a map of pedestrians would look like.)

  But just as important as what she sees is what the walk does to her sense of self. Within our houses, Woolf writes, we are surrounded by the objects that make us who we are: things we have chosen and arranged, which ‘express’ and ‘enforce’ our identities. But the moment we leave that setting, that ‘shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves’, we ‘shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers’.46

  This androgyny is one of the values Woolf prizes most in A Room of One’s Own, which recognises that, for some women, writing is a way of stepping out of bounds. ‘What idea it had been that had sent me so audaciously trespassing I could not now remember,’ Virginia Woolf writes, describing a trip to ‘Oxbridge’ when she walked on the grass and was shooed off by a beadle: only (male) faculty and students could walk upon the grass or enter the library alone. A Room of One’s Own is not purely about the need for a closed-off private quiet space. It is also about the boundaries women bump up against in the world outside the room; it is about intellectual trespassing, daring to ask questions about women and fiction and women and history that have not been addressed before. What if Shakespeare had a sister, Woolf asks, a girl who was as brilliant a writer as he? She would not have been educated, like him; she would not have been allowed to go where she pleased, like him. She would have been betrothed to some perhaps unwanted husband. So Woolf imagines Judith Shakespeare sneaking off to London in the middle of the night. She wants to act, but is laughed at by the stage managers. ‘He bellowed something about poodles dancing and women acting – no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress. He hinted – you can imagine what. She could get no training in her craft.’ Finally she becomes pregnant and kills herself, and ‘lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle’.47

  Reading this I realise how far I’ve come from the day in June 2004 when I stood in Tavistock Square and wondered which house was Woolf’s. Then, I couldn’t have pointed to Elephant & Castle on the map. Now I have an intimate knowledge of and great fondness for southeast London, which includes an awareness of the absolute awfulness of Elephant & Castle as it is today; in Woolf’s day there were the omnibuses; now it is a decaying late-capitalist dump where they are tearing down the decrepit public housing to make room for shiny new luxury flats, the public be damned. Perhaps one day soon the Elephant’s chequered past will be a bit of trivia known mainly to psychogeographers, but for now it is a blight. Let its laideur stand for the ugliness of a society that lends no hand to the marginalised.

  And so an Elizabethan woman could not have written the works of Shakespeare, because she simply would not have had the education or the leisure to create. But, Woolf asks, if she had, what would a woman’s epic or a woman’s poetic tragedy in five acts look like? ‘[T]hese are difficult questions which lie in the twilight of the future,’ she writes. ‘I must leave them, if only because they stimulate me to wander from my subject into trackless forests where I shall be lost.’ For the sake of her argument – for the sake of convincing those who are determined not to be persuaded – Woolf recognises that she must stick to the clear open path of fact and reason, and not pursue hypotheticals. For Woolf, getting lost in thought is filled with creative potential, and her reference to the ‘trackless forest’ of specious reasoning is an ironic invocation of the mythical feminine as dark and irrational, the castrating darkness of the feminine a place from which travellers may not emerge. The mysteries and dark places of ‘Mother Earth’ are a common rhetorical figure in cultural commentary on who we are and how we got here: think of Marcel Duchamp’s painting Étant donnés, which echoes Courbet’s The Origin of the World and Darwin’s tangled-bank hypothesis in his Origin of Species. All of us originate in the dark wilds of the female body, are born into the light, where we must remain if our arguments are to be taken seriou
sly.

  Our culture needs the unfathomable to exist; it provides refuge from logic and scrutiny, and we have been content to project it onto women, who struggle to find their way in a world that for centuries denied them full citizenship, and today denies them the right to be different from men. Louisa Gradgrind spends much of Hard Times staring into the fireplace; her brother finally asks her what she sees in it. ‘“You seem to find more to look at in it that ever I could find,” said Tom. “Another of the advantages, I suppose, of being a girl.”’48 But if we find more to look at in the fire, we also have much to lose by pursuing what we see there. We may keep the home fire burning, or we may burn the house down; we may stay home, burning inwardly, or we may take off in a conflagration of self-assertion. We watch the fires of destruction, of desire, and of ambition, and wonder what we can risk and what we might gain.

  * * *

  Even years after the move, Woolf was thinking about where she had grown up, and the way that Victorian world tried to constrain women to the interior. In her 1937 novel The Years, Woolf invented a family much like her own, the Pargiters. The novel begins in their sitting room in 1880, while the Angel in the House – the Victorian matriarch – lies dying in the bedroom upstairs. The Years began life as a novel-essay, The Pargiters, which was intended to alternate chapters with essays reflecting on those chapters, as if addressed in a talk to an imaginary live audience. But eventually, Woolf’s tone as an essayist proved impossible to reconcile with her aesthetic as a novelist, and she would excise the essayistic material in order to concentrate her energies on writing about the lives of these family members, mainly the women, as they age. Each chapter advances forward eleven years, then sixteen years, before the clock begins to slow down, and we visit 1907, 1910, 1911, 1913, 1914, and so on, finally ending in the present day, that is, the mid-1930s. This gambol through the decades allows Woolf to pause and briefly analyse sexual relations in each period, from the conquering, paternalistic male sexuality of Abel Pargiter, the family’s patriarch, to the independent woman living in a ‘dirty … sordid … low-down street’, from the gay man who goes by so many names no one knows what he’s really called, to young Peggy, who has entered the professions and become a doctor, and who listens to a young man stammer ‘“I, I, I”’ and predicts that the moment she speaks, he will walk away: ‘He can’t be “you”.’49