Street Haunting - Essay Example

Virginia Woolf’s essay “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” (1927) conveys the adventures undertaken by the narrator whose fundamental purpose of exploring the city of London is to buy a pencil but ends up being enchanted and, at the same time, haunted by the disturbing realities of the modern society. In the essay, the narrator is brought to the streets of London which are extremely aesthetic and filled with vivacity. However, this exploration has also brought the narrator into a haunting realization of identity that is rapidly being fragmented as a result of the city’s hasty modernization (Deepwell 44).

In the beginning, the streets of London are represented by Woolf as amazingly pleasing and interesting to people. Walking around the city of London arouses the imaginations and discoveries of identity where people are unbound to shortly become “a nomad wandering the desert, a mystic staring at the sky, a debauchee in the slums of San Francisco, a soldier heading a revolution, a pariah howling with skepticism and solitude” (Woolf 3). This sense of liberty and independence while walking the streets of London somehow manages to merge the individual identity of the narrator with those of the passing crowd. The narrator is simply carried away by the exquisiteness and magnificence of the city that dissolves any form of her hang-up into a “central oyster of perceptiveness” (Woolf 1). Her character then becomes identity-less as she absorbs the color and light of the city roads.

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 roughness a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter. (Woolf 1)

In addition, the freedom that the modern city of London offers to the narrator allows her to lose herself in the crowd and thus discovers herself inquiring about the everyday life of a dwarf (reference). This event of losing oneself while exploring the streets of modern London is the fundamental reason that haunts the narrator. As she walks around the city, she witnesses different disturbing realities: a dwarf woman, two blind men, a retard, and the limping ludicrous dance of “the humped, the twisted, and the deformed” (Woolf 2). These realities have brought deep thinking to the narrator which makes her feel so lost in the modern world. The monstrosities that the narrator has witnessed and the beauty that she has experienced shake her identity and left her unstable.

All the way through the narration of Wolf in her essay “Street Haunting” this feeling of uncertain identity is stressed out by referring to her narrator as “we” instead of “I”: “We shall never know” (Woolf 4) and “We are no long quite ourselves” (Woolf 1). The very instance of the narrator stepping out her door and into the modern city of London immediately strips off her individuality for anonymity. She can no longer identify herself with the different oddities and, at the same time, the beauty that she is witnessing around the streets of modern London. The narrator becomes estranged from herself because she cannot connect anymore to the outside world which is entirely different from her inside world.            

Indeed, the various technological advances and behavioral changes brought by the rapid modernization of London’s society highly contribute to the new definition and understanding of mobility, communication, time, and speed. Contrastingly, these advances and changes have also expanded modern London outside the limits of coherent perception making the city unfathomable and too intricate for people to figure out. The enormity of modern society and how it has become incomprehensible is repeatedly expressed in the essay. The narrator’s encounter at the second-hand bookstore conveys how she finds it difficult to understand today’s society: “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” (Woolf 4).

In conclusion, the ambivalence of identity presented in Woolf’s “Street Haunting” echoes uncertainty towards modern London. Modern London is certainly more than the enchanting and beautiful streets of the city. It also has its dark side which is quite disturbing and alarming for the narrator. Walking around the city of modern London provides a feeling of independence and freedom but, at the same time, this sense of freedom is the very reason for losing one’s identity. In this essay, the modern city of London—the advance, changes, and transformations—haunts its people by making the identities of people indistinguishable from what they truly are.