In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway Peter Walsh is the most obvious flâneur character; he is able to wander the streets of London with an abandon even the patrician Clarissa Dalloway cannot manage. In an encounter which in its imagery reminds one of Baudelaire’s idea of the passante, Peter Walsh notices an attractive young woman as he walks through Trafalgar Square:
But she’s extraordinarily attractive, he thought, as, walking across Trafalgar Square in the direction of the Haymarket, came a young woman who, as she passed Gordon’s statue, seemed, Peter Walsh thought (susceptible as he was), to shed veil after veil, until she became the very woman he had always had in mind; young, but stately; merry, but discreet; black, but enchanting.
But Woolf subverts the conventional norms and, in this encounter, transforms Baudelaire’s objectified passante into an assertive flâneuse. Although Peter Walsh is presented as being able to wander the streets of London with freedom and detachment, Woolf’s depiction of his attempts to pick up the young woman he encounters in Trafalgar Square in a way that subverts his confident desires with an eventual realisation that he will never possess her. He follows her, imagining himself as ‘a romantic buccaneer, careless of all these damned proprieties’. But, as she reaches her house and puts her key to the door, she quickly turns and snubs him with ‘one look in his direction, but not at him’. Elsewhere, we read of Clarissa’s daughter, Elizabeth, being described as a ‘pirate’ when she boards a bus on the Strand. This echoes Peter’s ‘buccaneer’ self-description, but is applied to Elizabeth without any irony.
Mrs Dalloway opens with Clarissa standing poised at the roadside in Victoria Street waiting to cross over towards Bond Street and finish the errands she needs to complete before her party. Both Victoria and Bond Streets are busy, modern city streets. But at the same time they simultaneously evoke and serve as symbols of wealth, power and tradition; qualities that embody the Empire they represent. Clarissa is able to wander freely; her freedom of movement intimately tied to her class position, rather than her gender. The sense of underlying power and privilege is symbolized by a passing car in which:
there could be no doubt greatness was seated within; greatness was passing, hidden, down Bond Street, removed only by a hand’s-breadth from ordinary people who might now, for the first and last time, be within speaking distance of the majesty of England, of the enduring symbol of the state…
Clarissa’s immediate motivation for walking through the streets of central London in the opening pages of Mrs Dalloway is undoubtedly more to do with her need to prepare for that evening’s party than any wish to map out a spiritual or psychological journey. In that sense, it would be difficult to apply the epithet flâneuse to her. However, the very act of walking provides her with the opportunity and impetus to reminisce and to analyse the key relationships in her life. She thinks about her father, her husband and her daughter and, as she walks, her thoughts drift on into an existential reverie that belies her calm exterior:
Did it matter then, she asked 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.
It is a fine June morning and Clarissa’s consciousness immediately conjures up reminiscences of such mornings at Bourton when she was young and of when, at eighteen, she chose to marry Richard and not Peter. Peter had called her ‘cold, heartless, a prude.’ She stills feels the indignation of that moment when she reminds herself:
She would not say of anyone in the world now that they were this or they were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on . . . she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, or I am that.
Woolf surveys the human topography of London in Mrs Dalloway; she depicts landscapes that reinforce boundaries of class and gender; rich and poor, men and women, each of them lives in a different London. She also creates dichotomies of public and private, internal and external and past and present. The London through which Woolf’s characters move is dominated by the symbols of authority: Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, St Paul’s Cathedral; and the life of each character is punctuated by the omnipresent sound of Big Ben. But Woolf also hints at a creeping Americanisation of British life; perhaps giving away something of her own position in a somewhat negative suggestion of tradition being usurped by vulgar commerce. She highlights shopkeepers ‘fidgeting in their windows with their paste and diamonds’, arranging their displays of jewellery ‘to tempt Americans’, and the aeroplane writing advertising slogans in the sky as symbols of rampant commercialism.
Clarissa Dalloway is ostensibly part of the established order Bond Street represents. As she perambulates through the streets of London, her thoughts wander between memories of her landed gentry upbringing and plans for her elaborate party that evening. She wanders the streets glowing with excitement:
In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.
And it is London that she loves: ‘I love walking in London’ and ‘really its better than walking in the country.’ Rachel Bowlby sees significance in the very surname that Woolf gives to her protagonist; Clarissa Dalloway is a woman who likes to dally along the way; in other words, she is a flâneuse. Power, wealth and history are all evoked in these opening pages. But this is a London still recovering from war, from the devastation and grief, and cracks in the edifice of kingdom and empire quickly percolate to the surface of Clarissa’s thoughts:
The war was over, except for Mrs. Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House must go to a cousin; or Lady Bexborough who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed.
Mrs Dalloway owes much to James Joyce’s Ulysses, which Woolf was reading at the time she wrote her book. In the way she describes her characters, what they are doing while they think and the way she creates their inner life, one can see the influence of Joyce:
In her story, as in the opening episodes of Ulysses, a character leaves home in the morning and while she walks, thoughts prompted by the immediate scene are mixed with memories and reflections. In both works close attention is paid to place and time: the routes of the characters can be followed on a map and both Bloom and Clarissa hear the chimes of a clock.
(Susan Dick, Virginia Woolf)
Memory, in both, is mixed with anticipation: Clarissa must prepare for her party and Bloom plans to attend a funeral. Woolf also shares with Joyce the employment of fragmentary thoughts and memories and, like him, she is able to move from the consciousness of one character to that of another. Woolf’s aim is for the audible narrator, whom the reader ‘knows’ to be there, to disappear and for the story to be told by the consciousness of the characters. The two centres of consciousness in Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa and Septimus, each weighed down by memory, criss-cross London on that June day, but never meet. The exploration of consciousness is without doubt a unifying factor of Mrs Dalloway and Pilgrimage.
In one of her short stories, Street Haunting, Woolf suggests that the city streets provide the female flâneur with a cloak of anonymity; the opportunity to merge into the crowd:
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…
Indeed it is in this short story that Woolf most closely observes the pleasures of the flâneuse; as she walks, the narrator constantly creates stories about what she sees around her; the act of walking transmutes into the act of writing. A quest to buy a pencil takes the narrator through the streets of London; and in those streets, alone and silent, she absorbs and possesses all the tantalising sights that catch her eye:
Passing, glimpsing, everything seems accidentally but miraculously sprinkled with beauty, as if the tide of trade which deposits its burden so punctually and prosaically upon the shores of Oxford Street had this night cast up nothing but treasure. With no thought of buying, the eye is sportive and generous; it creates; it adorns; it enhances. Standing out in the street, one may build up all the chambers of an imaginary house and furnish them at one’s will …
Woolf’s protagonist in Street Hauntingremarks on the beauty of London’s streets ‘with its islands of light, and its long groves of darkness’. The streets are washed with yellow lamplight from numerous offices and the narrator speculates on the work of lowly clerks in dingy chambers poring over documents with ‘wetted forefinger’. Her pencil bought, she returns home, leaving behind the tide of trade washed up on ‘the shores of Oxford Street’.
Similar themes are explored in another essay in the same collection, The Cinema. In both essays Woolf is particularly interested in the relationship between the eye, which glides effortlessly over the surface and ‘licks it all up instantly’ and the brain, which ‘resting, pausing, perhaps sleeps as the eye looks.’ Yet, when the eye ‘wants help’ and calls, ‘you are needed,’ the brain is ready: and the eye and the brain are those of the flâneuse. A Room of One’s Own suggests elements of flânerie too. Though its title indicates that its focus is set indoors, its form takes that of a ramble from Oxbridge, to London and the British Museum before the narrator sits down to write about her journey. The narrator speaks of ‘the fascination of the London street’ and urges her readers to ‘loiter at street corners’ in order to find the inspiration ‘to write all kinds of books.’
Image of The Strand courtesy of the George Reid Collection
