The Haunting Presence of the Feminine: Virginia Woolf in the Streets of London

Abstract

Beginning with the theme of the location of haunting in Gothic interiors and the confusion of life and death and the “sub-central” positioning of the feminine as the hidden source of fearfulness, the paper analyzes Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” as an example of a narrative written from the position of the haunting in which the figure of fearful feminine is transformed into a “hauntess” participating in the public world on equal rights with others. Woolf’s text, though seemingly positing the protagonist in the position of flâneuse, in fact implicitly criticizes flâneuring as a masculine kind of looking and participating in the public space. Taking place away from home, Woolf’s strolling in the streets of London carnivalizes (in the Bakhtinian sense) the activity by way of a joyful blurring of the split between the home and the market. Transgressing what Kathryn Simpson calls “the male privilege of the flâneur” (2010: 47) and rendering the transgression as haunting, Woolf evades participation in the masculine world of traffic and exchange by way of bringing the space of the Gothic confinement, and also of entombment, to the public.