Virginia Woolf's 'Street Haunting'

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I am a true believer in the benefits of walking. In addition to the mental and physical health benefits, nothing clears my mind quicker or brings more clarity to a project I’m stuck on than a good walk.

I often research the Writing Rituals of literary women for my series, and one of the things that many of them espouse is the need for a walk to break up the writing day. Virginia Woolf famously liked to walk and plot out her novels, and she gave this habit to one of her most enduring characters, Clarissa Dalloway.

Walking in the beautiful countryside or beside the ocean is clearly inspiring, but what also interests me about many of the writers I admire, including Woolf, is their habit of walking in the city. In fact, I wrote a full essay about ‘Women and the City.’ As a city dweller myself, I love to pound the streets of my neighbourhood, as well as venturing out into the local woodlands. I am blessed by living in a city on the edge of the Peak District National Park, meaning I get the best of both worlds.

In her essay ‘Street Haunting,’ Virginia Woolf interestingly shows the particular appeal of walking the streets of London on a winter’s evening.

Woolf opens by discussing the need to buy a pencil. We quickly realise this is a ruse for going out for a solitary walk in the London streets:

‘No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner.’

Why Woolf feels compelled to ‘invent’ a reason for her evening ramble around the city can partly be explained by the history of women walking the streets.

The term ‘flâneur,’ indicating a male who walks the streets of the city, originates from the Old Norse verb ‘flana’ from around the sixteenth or seventeenth century and literally means ‘to wander with no purpose’. It was popularised in early nineteenth-century Paris, where the earliest known representation in writing is an anonymous pamphlet of 1806.

The term was originally used to denote strolling or idling; essentially wasting time. Sometime in the nineteenth century, however, more meaning was attached to the term which came to represent male writers such as Baudelaire, who wandered the city and used the intense images he encountered within his writing. This term became synonymous with the modern idea of the writer and artist, at once immersed in, yet apart from, the busy urbanised environment of the city.

Within her wonderful book Flâneuse, Lauren Elkin introduces the idea that the female equivalent to the flâneur, the ‘flâneuse’, was often dismissed as a non-existent entity. Women on the streets of a city in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were viewed with distrust, open only to female prostitutes or homelessness, and it was considered that a woman seen in the streets to be of questionable morals. This resulted in whole public spaces from which women were excluded or invisible.

As Elkin points out however, the more you look, the more evidence you find of such women writers and artists, who subverted respectable behaviour to take to the streets of the city in order to wander, wonder, and write about what they saw.

Unlike the flâneur, who could wander aimlessly as he pleased, the flâneuse wandered where she wasn’t supposed to wander. She transgressed, observed, and recorded the things she saw. She got to know the city streets intimately, often stealing back to her rooms to write down what she discovered there.

Virginia Woolf was one of the original flâneuse, penning the essay entitled ‘Street Haunting’ in which she claims that, as a woman enters the urban streets alone, she disposes for a while of the things that define her at home. Within the domestic sphere, the woman of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would have represented the centre of the family, drowned in the demands of a household, children and domestic duties. Out on the streets of the city, however, she became an invisible enquirer, slipping between the shadows of the bustle and buildings of the metropolis.

By engaging with the world beyond her doorstep, Woolf was able to tap into her surroundings and the people she encountered, inspiring her to create her famous title character Mrs Dalloway. The very first page of Woolf’s novel in fact has the title character informing us:

‘I love walking in London. Really, it’s better than walking in the country.’

In this respect, not only is Woolf one of the original flâneuse, but she gives this quality to her central character, Clarissa Dalloway.

In ‘Street Haunting,’ Woolf informs us:

‘…so when the desire comes upon us to go street rambling the pencil does for a pretext, and getting up we say: “Really I must buy a pencil,” as if under cover of this excuse we could indulge safely in the greatest pleasure of town life in winter—rambling the streets of London.’

Unusually, Woolf discusses her preference for winter over the warmer summer months for her evening rambles around the city:

‘…for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful. We are not then taunted as in the summer by the longing for shade and solitude and sweet airs from the hayfields.’

Having a country home in East Sussex, Woolf had the best of both worlds. The beautiful Sussex downs were on her doorstep, and she was likely thinking of this countryside solitude when she referenced the ‘longing for shade and solitude and sweet airs from the hayfields.’

Woolf also states her preference to the cover of evening over daytime, indicating the need for darkness and lamplight, something which provides her with further cover that may not be afforded to a solitary female walker during lighter daytime hours:

‘The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow.’

I love how she references the cover of darkness giving us ‘the irresponsibility’ she seeks. She is referencing the anonymity to which Elkin alludes to in Flâneuse, that unfettered identity of a woman out alone, away from domesticity and the life of the home:

‘…we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room.’

Despite Woolf’s infamous essay ‘A Room of One’s Own,’ in which she claims the necessity for a woman to require a room of her own, undisturbed, in which to write fiction, she shows us here the need for the outside world. Not so much in a social way, but to be an observer of the life of the city.

Considering this discrepancy between the domestic sphere and the streets, Woolf suggests that the street offers escape from her place in the home. Speaking of a bowl on the mantelpiece, which sets in motion a whole memory of a holiday in Italy, this is broken when she steps out into the street:

‘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.’

Now part of the general milieu, Woolf observes her fellow men and women in the lamplight of the darkened city streets as those who have similarly slipped their shackles and escaped into the night. There is an overwhelming sense of freedom in their choice to leave the house in the evening, as she has done:

‘…bright men and women, who, for all their poverty and shabbiness, wear a certain look of unreality, an air of triumph, as if they had given life the slip,...’

The street becomes the background of this freedom, with Woolf finding delight in the vibrancy of the early evening in London:

‘How beautiful a London street is then, with its islands of light, and its long groves of darkness, and on one side of it perhaps some tree-sprinkled, grass-grown space where night is folding herself to sleep naturally and, as one passes the iron railing, one hears those little cracklings and stirrings of leaf and twig which seem to suppose the silence of fields all round them, an owl hooting, and far away the rattle of a train in the valley.’

Her writerly tendencies make the everyday experiences of hearing the sound of trains nearby into melodious scenes such as appear in her novels.

This pastoral use of city life reminded me of Amy Levy, the late nineteenth century poet and author of novels such as The Romance of a Shop. In her pastoral poems included in A London Plane Tree and Other Verse, Levy juxtaposed the beauty and violence in late nineteenth-century London.

The title poem highlights the beauty and strength of the plane trees, planted in newly formed industrial cities to combat the high levels of pollution. Whilst her poem ‘Confinement’ speaks of the country of her homeland as she compares herself to a caged bird, wondering whether if she were to return to her homeland now that she had assimilated into the urbanised culture of London, whether she would wish to be re-incarcerated back into her ‘cage’.

Levy, who was the first Jewish woman to attend Newnham College, Cambridge, is often regarded as creating early ‘New Woman’ novels popularised at the end of the nineteenth century. She covered topics in her work such as the difficulties for women of running a business at the time. Her second novel Reuben Sachs allowed for a deeper literary dive into the issue of Jewish life and character which she had formerly discussed in essay form.

The city at the turn of the century is central to both of these novels and much of her poetry, and clearly informed her ideas around feminism, Jewishness, and life in the city. I wrote a more in-depth portrait of Levy’s work and life in my essay ‘The Urban Poets', as I studied the pastoral writing of cities as part of my Masters degree and it continues to fascinate me.

The flâneuse as discussed by Lauren Elkin raises the idea of observing the city under a female gaze. As the first women to explore the city and all it had to offer, late nineteenth and early twentieth century women writers represented the growing urbanisation of our cities and the people who inhabited them. By making themselves and their characters visible, and by showing the world through an uninhibited female gaze, they allowed for a female representation of the urbanity of the time, as well as how all kinds of women were seen and portrayed in these environments.

But the city also offered a kind of freedom from the male gaze for women writers, who found a way to slip between the cracks and report on the colourful lives of the inhabitants.

As Woolf continues with her own walk through the evening streets, she considers the square surrounding her London home:

‘...this empty ground, which holds the country in it and its peace, is only a London square, set about by offices and houses where at this hour fierce lights burn over maps, over documents, over desks where clerks sit turning with wetted forefinger the files of endless correspondences;’

helping to paint a picture of the industrious use of the city.

What then unfolds in Woolf’s narrative is something rather unexpected.

Entering a shoe shop, she reports on the arrival of a young woman and her attendants. The woman, who would now be known as that of short stature, is referenced as a ‘dwarf’ by Woolf. This is an area of Woolf’s writing which I find difficulty in. Critical towards people with disabilities, including her own half-sister, who had learning difficulties and was eventually placed in an institution, her continued references throughout the next body of the essay refer to the multitudes of ‘deformed’ folk living on the streets of London.

Though attitudes of people with mental or physical disabilities would certainly be different to those of today, her use of language in this part of the essay is problematic.

However, as she continues through the less savory district of London, where the homeless and poor dwell, she appears to be using such disparate ‘characters’ to accentuate the differences between the life of the London elite, living directly aside those less fortunate, in grand homes and dining in restaurants and theatres.

‘In what crevices and crannies, one might ask, did they lodge, this maimed company of the halt and the blind? Here, perhaps, in the top rooms of these narrow old houses between Holborn and Soho, where people have such queer names, and pursue so many curious trades,...’

After encountering these other lost souls, Woolf finds herself ‘prosaically upon the shores of Oxford Street’ where shop fronts provide miraculous beauty, picturing herself purchasing such treasures to furnish an imaginary house. She conjures an image of women in pearls and the abundant jewels in the windows of Oxford Street. Of couples behind thick green curtains. The juxtaposition with the earlier unfortunate residents of the previous streets is stark.

In her return to her real mission of purchasing a pencil, at the hour of six on a London winter’s night, Woolf wonders at why we may be imagining ourselves in pearls and in the presence of the Prime Minister at two or three in the morning.

‘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? What could be more absurd?’

She begins to question the very nature of life itself; that the creation of humans allows for this discrepancy between what we are - our reality at this moment, out on the cold pavements of London - and the ideas we foresee of an evening in pearls, standing on the balcony of a grand home.

‘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?’

This feels like Woolf at her most philosophical self. She compares that mankind must conform if they are to be respectable:

‘When he opens his door, he must run his fingers through his hair and put his umbrella in the stand like the rest.’

Her essay shows the discrepancies of the city streets. On the one hand, we have the misery of the slums and the disabled patrons that inhabit them. On the other, the majesty and grandeur of the ladies in pearls and the husband who runs the country. Gladly, she anchors herself back in the inbetween, finding herself amidst second-hand bookshops, where:

‘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.’

We are on surer footing now, alongside Woolf as she trawls the bookshop for a sniff of adventure between the pages of books:

‘Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.’

Woolf embodies the very essence of the pleasures of the bookshop as relief from the realities of the streets outside. The warmth and nostalgia for such a place emanates from this section of her essay, as she wonders at the adventurers who have set forth their tales for us to discover on the dusty shelves:

‘...an unknown traveller, who stayed at inns, drank his pint, noted pretty girls and serious customs, wrote it all down stiffly, laboriously for sheer love of it (the book was published at his own expense);’

Woolf considers the worth of such generous sharing of experience on the page, contemplating:

‘One may buy him for eighteen pence now. He is marked three and sixpence, but the bookseller’s wife, seeing how shabby the covers are and how long the book has stood there since it was bought at some sale of a gentleman’s library in Suffolk, will let it go at that.’

She references Victorian literature and poetry and the life espoused between the dusty pages of these old books, set in time on the shelves of the bookshop. She goes on to suggest the infinite lives lived in the pages of such books, glimpsed only briefly, conversation exchanged, and returning to the talk on the streets. These stories are revealed as pages in the ‘volume of life’ as assuredly as the volumes of books in the bookshop left behind.

As Woolf approaches the Strand, she hesitates; one must always dance to another’s tune, or to return home after the original excuse of the walk on the evening streets has expired:

‘Without investigating the demand, the mind cringes to the accustomed tyrant. One must, one always must, do something or other; it is not allowed one simply to enjoy oneself. Was it not for this reason that, some time ago, we fabricated the excuse, and invented the necessity of buying something? But what was it? Ah, we remember, it was a pencil. Let us go then and buy this pencil.’

It is not acceptable to simply be wandering alone at night, drinking in the sights and sounds of the city life surrounding us, she thus indicates. But the pull of the Thames laid out in front of her distracts her. She contemplates disobeying the need to fulfil the purpose of her walk; the pencil-buying fades from view. She imagines the person who might lean out over the Thames this very evening, without a care, without obligation. She attempts to discover the identity of the person she imagines, finding that in fact, perhaps, the person is herself:

‘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.’

This appears to indicate the flux of Woolf’s mind and her changing moods. Her walk becomes more than just an escape from the house to walk the streets in search of the imagined need of a pencil. It becomes a glimpse into the mind of a woman, a writer, who struggled to harness the swirling thoughts and dark moods which life often bestowed upon her.

‘The sights we see and the 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. He has no future; the future is even now invading our peace. It is only when we look at the past and take from it the element of uncertainty that we can enjoy perfect peace. As it is, we must turn, we must cross the Strand again, we must find a shop where, even at this hour, they will be ready to sell us a pencil.’

Woolf concludes her journey on foot by returning to the original task; the purchase of the pencil, and the inevitable return home, to the life and identity she has merely, temporarily, shaken loose.

‘Street Haunting’ is Published in Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942), ed. Leonard Woolf. Also available on Project Gutenberg.