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 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

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
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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. 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

At the opposite time of the year, Woolf ’s narrator in “Street Haunt-

ing” is similarly carried away by London’s beauty. As she steps out
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 Woolf ’s Modernism

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 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

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 “overbur-
dened with protective functions,”7 the eye in Woolf ’s narrative is
unencumbered; it sheds its self-con-
scious 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
the crowd’s vitality, easily marshaling
of identity that
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”
and Mrs. Dalloway, the city’s tan-
lies in her characters’
gible 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 store-
front’s offerings, can be dismantled and rebuilt “in the twinkling
of an eye.”9 Because the eye protects itself by remaining always at
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journal of undergraduate research

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 ask-
ing, “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 atti-
tude 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 re-
calls 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 unanim-

ity… to change, to go, to dismantle the solemn assemblage was im-
mediately possible; and in spite of the grave fixity, the accumulated
robustness and solidity, now they struck light to the earth, now dark-
ness.14

In this repeating pattern of composing and fracturing iden-

tities, 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 rela-
tions between characters. Peter Childs defines modernity as a series
of binary oppositions—“disintegration and reformation, fragmenta-
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 Woolf ’s Modernism

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 identi-
fies 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 diver-
gent consciousnesses by a “thin thread” reminiscent of Simmel’s in-
tertwining relationships.18 Unlike Simmel, however, who sees these
relationships intertwine “into a many-membered organism,” identi-
ties 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 tenu-
ous 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,

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 journal of undergraduate research

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

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 char-
acter to the next: after parting ways with Hugh Whitbread, “Rich-
ard turned at the corner of Conduit
Big Ben chimes Street eager, yes, very eager, to travel
simultaneously each that spider’s thread of attachment be-
hour with clocks tween himself and Clarissa; he would
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 physi-
cal representations of modernization:
a motor car’s backfire startles Clarissa Dalloway and captivates Sep-
timus 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 twen-

ty,—one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Cla-
rissa 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 cir-

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 Woolf ’s Modernism

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 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:

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, ter-

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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 Sep-
timus’ death and readily empathizes with his decision in the novel’s
final pages. The link between them makes her reflections seem per-
fectly 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 mo-
torcar 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 empha-
sizes the continuities of identity. Instability is expressed not in im-
mediate 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 Bru-
ton to Richard Dalloway and Hugh Whitbread eventually breaks,
the thread between Clarissa and Septimus also snaps, and the un-
derlying 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 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

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, Sep-
timus 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 underly-
ing 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

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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

For Baudelaire and later, Benjamin, the ghost or specter is an im-

portant 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, Cla-
rissa 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 some-
how 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 celebra-

tion 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

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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, 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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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 con-
sulting 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 investiga-
tive 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 exten-
sion, 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 volu-
bility”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 personali-
ties. 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

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repair the fractures:

But to go deeper, beneath what people said (and these judge-

ments, 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. Cla-
rissa’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 connected-
ness to the city, she can neither create a solid identity on the streets
nor solidify her fleeting encounters: “So-and-so in South Kensing-
ton; some one up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in Mayfair”
remain anonymous, identity-less. In the city, consciousness is con-
tinually in flux, dissipating through the passing crowd and resting
only briefly on any single individual.
As Woolf guides her reader through an ever-shifting se-
quence 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 re-
lationships, like characters’ personal identities and the identities of
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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’ im-
mersion in the modern crowd is always superficial. Woolf draws to-
gether 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 “perpetu-
ally express the oddity of our own temperaments and enforce the
memories of our own experience.”42 Without them, her identity un-
ravels 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 narra-
tor 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 “defen-
sive 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

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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 solid-
ifying 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 re-
peatedly 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 of-
fers 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 so-
bering 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

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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:

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 des-
ert, 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
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 Woolf ’s Modernism

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 disconnec-
tions 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” ee-
rily 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 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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journal of undergraduate research

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 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

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 con-
nection. 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 encoun-
ters 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

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 Woolf ’s Modernism

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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journal of undergraduate research

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