Haunting the London Streets: Virginia Woolf's Urban Travelogues Re-appraised

Woolf s preoccupation with the interplay between gender, commercialism, and the modern city is exposed in higher relief by her feminist remapping of the city through a discourse of fl nerie, which is epitomized in her singular urban travelogues such as Street Haunting and The London Scene essays. A fanatical London-adventurer herself, she assumes the persona of the fl neuse in exploring the street of modern London and especially the public sphere of the marketplace, as represented in Oxford Street Tide. Living and working in the quarter of Bloomsbury, in close proximity to the capital s famous sites of tourism, entertainment, and mass consumption, Woolf was placed at the heart of urban spectacle. In spite of the lack of critical analysis of this high-profile writer s interest in such quotidian matters as shopping, fashion and appearance, which would be informed by a hierarchy of value within literary criticism, it seems that they are inextricably intertwined with her quest into more serious-minded topics that revolve around the twin pillars of her literary project: feminism and modernism. Her essays, in particular, suggest this point in one way or another, mirroring her extraordinary susceptibility to such concerns. For Woolf, street sauntering is synonymous with an act of creative mobility, by which she plays with the notion of shifting identities, rediscovers the urban rarities and splendors, and ultimately pins them down in her literary output. By adopting the identity of a masterly rambler/observer/explorer with an omnipotent gaze, she firmly anchors herself as an active interpreter of urban modernity and viewer of its spectacle. She thus challenges the idea of public space as a male domain, which is central to the classic androcentric discourse of loitering, spectatorship and urban modernity.