Who would have imagined that a simple walk through the streets of London could celebrate both the liberation of women and the beauty of the city? Street Haunting, the last essay published by Virginia Woolf, a profound writer and Kings college alumni, certainly did. Known for her captivating novels that critiqued societal norms, pioneering essays on feminist thought, and her unique stream-of-consciousness writing method, Woolf is a prominent figure in modernist literature. In the aforementioned text, she reimagines the grammatically masculine flâneur – a term developed in 19th century Paris to describe a leisurely observer of people and society – as a feminine flâneuse, challenging gendered dominance of public spaces and critiquing the role of capitalism in urban spaces.
The essay unfolds as the flâneuse – Woolf herself – uses her desire for a lead pencil as an excuse to ‘indulge safely in the greatest pleasure of town life in winter– rambling the streets of London’. Strolling through the ‘islands of light’ and ‘long groves of darkness’, she observes the people and spaces of the city, while reclaiming the urban landscape as a liberating space for women. The title of the essay, Street Haunting, comes into play, since it is not the streets that haunt a woman, but rather, the empowered flâneuse that haunts the male privilege of the flâneur, subverting traditional power dynamics in public spheres. Furthermore, she considers the male-dominated streets ‘haunted’ by the unheard voices and struggles of women that echo throughout history. Thus, her exclamation of ‘how beautiful a London street is then’ is ironic, since the city seems open but confines the women inhabiting it.
Woolf introduces a ‘politics of space’ that breaks the gendered participation in urban spaces by emphasising the fluidity of identity as a form of liberation. She writes, ‘…we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers…’ suggesting anonymity in the streets is a way for the flâneuse to reject social constraints imposed on her as a woman. This allows her to transcend gendered boundaries that historically restricted women to domestic spaces and recognise the hypocrisy of patriarchal empire.
Her key to liberation and ‘supremely desirable [object] to possess’, the lead pencil, gives her an ‘excuse for walking half across London’, which represents society’s derogatory assumptions of women who roamed the streets without an excuse, including being a ‘public woman’. This aligns with Woolf’s description of her room covered with ‘objects which perpetually express the oddity of our own temperaments’, reflecting the suffocating domestic spaces that most women were confined to. The empowered flâneuse, however, confidently explores the city and puts off her shopping to ‘go in search of this person’ whom Woolf poetically frames as ‘ourselves’, reaffirming her vision of the city as a space of personal freedom and transformation for women.
Moving beyond her identity as a flâneuse, the lead pencil also serves as a symbol of the ephemeral nature of life, due to its temporal form. It can be erased, reshaped, or broken, similarly to a person’s identity, which can change with the fluid nature of the urban experience. Woolf’s argument regarding the fluidity of human identity stems from the opportunity to not be ‘tethered to a single mind’ and put on ‘the bodies and minds of others’ in a public space. For example, her observation of the couple fighting in the shop show’s how transient human identity and feelings can be, since they resolved their heated argument almost instantly after getting into it.
Another habit of the flâneuse in the essay is window shopping, which can be interpreted as a form of engagement with the urban environment and consumerism. Though the objects fascinate her, Woolf’s refusal to buy them represents her rejection of society’s socio-economic and capitalist culture. Her tone when she asks, ‘..is not allowed one simply to enjoy oneself…’ and ‘…was it not for this reason that, some time ago, we fabricated the excuse and invented the necessity of buying something…’ conveys the negative light in which she views consumerism. Apart from women needing an excuse (shopping) to venture out, Woolf’s monologue suggests the commodification of the city’s streets and shops by selling images and experiences to passersby and reducing life to transactional conversations. This part of the essay aligns with the Marxist critique of capitalism and its dehumanizing effects on society.
The consumerist culture combined with Woolf’s identity as a woman alienates her existence from city life. Woolf’s essay focuses on individual experiences, sensory feelings and introspection of the collective urban space, which mirrors renowned psychologist Geert Hofstede’s theory of Cultural Dimensions, particularly the Individualism v/s Collectivism strand, since Woolf’s essay accentuates the loneliness experienced by the flâneuse in urban society. Her observations of the people around her, including the little person or the two homeless men, symbolise her desire to transform the individualised culture of London to one that is more collectivist. Furthermore, the essay accentuates the act of understanding one’s individual identity in a domestic space while acknowledging the existence of the ‘collective other’ in a public space.
Through beautiful descriptions of London’s beloved second-hand bookshops, elongated streets and alluring shops, Woolf effectively uses the flâneuse as a catalyst in reclaiming the urban space for women. Moreover, through the gendered argument of urban spaces, she exposes the rising consumerist culture. Thus, the essay transcends the boundaries of a narrative and turns into a critique of societal issues that are relevant even today. Although this was her last published essay, it is a prominent piece of feminist writing that broke gendered boundaries in literature. Similar to how the flâneuse ventures into the empty and ‘haunted’ streets of London at the end of the essay, readers are forced to reflect on the essay as one that haunts the patriarchal canon.