The city also presents itself as a site of ruins, where the past and the present merge. As urban archeologist, Woolf evokes the past not a world she longs to return but as a world symptomatic of aristocratic, individualist splendors that the modern
democratic system finds increasingly repellent. In “Abbeys and Cathedrals,” the churches in London are represented by Woolf as burying grounds evoking contrasts of the past and the present, the former registering a space of resourcefulness and luxury enjoyed especially by the noble whose deaths are prior to the processes of
modernization and democratization, whereas the later an obscure yet generally egalitarian cityscape occupied by the masses. As Woolf indicates, the space that the dead enjoy is especially brought home to us when we step into St. Mary-le-Bow, a city church where even a man of obscurity enjoys “a whole wall covered with the list of his virtues”121 and occupies space that might in our day “serve almost for an office and demand a rent of many hundreds a year” (44). Thus one leaves the church
marveling at “the spacious days” when even the unknown citizen “could occupy so much room with their bones and confidently request so much attention for their virtues,” while nowadays a man of equal obscurity “would be allotted one slice of white stone of the regulation size among a thousand others and his great and godlike virtues would have to go unnoticed” (44-45).
If these tombs in the church of St. Mary-le-Bow mark the resourcefulness that even the common people were entitled to in securing their resting places, Woolf then pinpoints that even more luxury of space is enjoyed by the privileged classes who find in St. Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey their reposing room. The majesty of St.
Paul’s perceived from outside, which “swells like a great grey bubble,” and “looms
121 As Woolf reveals, in the year 1737 a man called Howard died and was buried in St. Mary-le-Bow. A whole wall is covered with the list of his virtues: “He was blessed with a sound and intelligent mind which shone forth conspicuously in the habitual exercise of great and godlike virtues. . . . In the midst of a profligate age he was inviolably attached to justice, sincerity and truth.” See Woolf “Abbeys and Cathedrals” 44.
mountainous and immense,” (43; 45) finds its expression in the interior where the tombs heaped like “majestic beds” lying between the pillars (46). These tombs are the dignified reposing room to which “great statesmen and men of action retire, robbed in all their splendor, to accept the thanks and applause of their fellow-citizens” (46).
Westminster Abbey is another resting place for those of the highest ranks, where their greatness and virtues have been kept intact for hundreds of years. Like St Paul’s, Westminster Abbey with all its grandeur evokes a contrast of the privileged classes and the democratized masses, who are separated in terms of the time, space, and social position they have occupied.
Everyone in this brilliant assembly has a mind and a will of his own. The Abbey is shot with high-pitched voices; its peace is broken by emphatic gestures and characteristic attitudes. Not an inch of its walls but speaks and claims and illustrates. Kings and Queens, poets and statesmen still act their parts and are not suffered to turn quietly to dust. (49)
While these cathedrals and abbeys as historical sites mark the privilege entitled to those of highest social ranks, there are places registering the privilege enjoyed by the dominant sex. In “Great Men’s House” Woolf shows us around a largely
male-dominated space. Woolf begins this essay with a resounding outcry: “London, happily, is becoming full of great men’s houses, bought for the nation and preserved entirely with the chairs they sat on and the cups they drank from, their umbrellas and their chests of drawers” (31). The narrator then proceeds to name places like
Dickens’s, Johnson’s, and Carlyle’s houses as sites commemorating these “great men”
who found London their lodging places. As with many other tourist sites of London
Woolf marks as male-dominated, these residences of “great men” map out a gendered cartography of the city. Taking a tour around Number 5 of Cheyne Row where the Carlyles inhabited decades ago, Woolf first introduces us to the kitchen, whose importance to the couple is particularly rendered in details:
Go down into the kitchen. There, in two seconds, one is made acquainted with a fact of incalculable importance—they had no water laid on. Every drop that the Carlyles used had to be pumped by hand from a well in the kitchen. All through the mid-Victorian age the house was necessarily a battlefield where daily, summer and winter, mistress and maid fought against dirt and cold for cleanness and warmth. (32-33)
Such is the effect of a pump in the basement that Mrs. Carlyle’s cheeks turn “hollow,”
and bitterness and suffering “mingle in the half-tendered, half-tortured expression of the eyes” (35). This mentioning of the chores done in the kitchen by Jane Carlyle and her maid contrasts with Woolf’s rendering of the daily work performed by Mr. Carlyle.
The historian is portrayed as occupying himself with the production of his works:
Up in the attic under a skylight Carlyle groaned, as he wrestled with his history, on a horsehair chair, while a yellow shaft of London light fell upon his papers and the rattle of a barrel organ and the raucous shouts of street hawkers came through walls whose double thickness distorted but by no means excluded the sound. (33)
While the attic-study is presented as a male-dominated space where Carlyle commits himself to works of history, an act marking male involvement in public sphere and matter, the drawing-room, as well as the kitchen, is depicted as the very place the
mistress occupies herself with tedious domestic works: “The horsehair couch needed recovering; the drawing-room paper with its small, dark pattern needed cleaning; the yellow varnish on the panels was cracked and peeling—all must be stitched, cleansed, scoured with her own hands” (33-34).
The suffocating domesticity characterizing the life of Jane Carlyle has been addressed earlier by Woolf in her 1923 article “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” Mrs.
Carlyle is depicted as a victim to her married life and a domestic tradition that insists on female confinement to the private sphere and prevents a woman of genius like her from making any literary pursuits.122 The reconstruction or re-imagination of Mrs.
Carlyle as housekeeper could be thus interpreted as Woolf’s indictment of the infamous Victorian ideology of separate spheres discouraging women’s involvement in public spaces and affairs.
In “This is the House of Commons,” Woolf introduces us to still another site registering a male history of power politics, whose development is nevertheless interpreted by her not through the lens of gender but of the political regime. Entering the House of Commons, Woolf reminds her reader what it signifies through its commonness:
Vague though our history may be, we somehow feel that we common people won this right centuries ago, and have held it for centuries past, and the mace is our mace and the Speaker is our speaker and we have no need of trumpeters and gold and scarlet to usher our representative into our own House of Commons. (56)
122 See Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” A Woman’s Essays: Selected Essays, Volume One (London: Penguine, 1992) 69-87.
This parliament hall thus heralds the rule by the people practiced centuries ago, a democracy contrasted by the ancient regime of oligarchy for which trumpeters, gold and scarlet were employed to boost an individualist, ceremonious aura to aristocratic rulers. Unmistakably Woolf as narrator identifies with those common people who fought for democracy before. Marking the origin of British democracy, this hall of parliament is revealed a plebian space, since from inside it is “not in the least noble or majestic or even dignified,” as palaces or cathedrals might evoke a past of individual splendors (56). Rather, there is nothing venerable or ceremonious and it is “as shiny and as ugly as any other moderate-sized public hall,” where an untidy,
informal-looking assembly meets to dispute the issues of national importance (56-57).
These representatives holding sessions in the House of Commons are thus presented as disrupting authority and dictatorship characterizing those who previously governed with their scepters:
It is an untidy, informal-looking assembly. Sheets of white paper seem to be always fluttering to the floor. Even the central island of control and dignity where the Speaker sits under his canopy is a perching ground for casual members who seem to be taking a pee at the proceedings at their ease. Dipping and rising, moving and settling, the Commons remind one of a flock of birds settling on a stretch of ploughed land. (57)
The Commons are mockingly compared to “a flock of birds” feeding on sheets of white paper. Despite the untidiness and informality manifested by the Commons, as Woolf has noted, their presence in the hall of democracy nevertheless heralds the end of “single men and power”:
Now no single human being can withstand the pressure of human affairs.
They sweep over him and obliterate him; they leave him featureless, anonymous, their instrument merely. The conduct of affairs has passed from the hands of individuals to the hands of committees. Even
committees can only guide them and sweep them on to other committees.
The supreme need is dispatch. A thousand ships come to anchor in the docks every week; how many thousand causes do not come daily to be decided in the House of Commons? Thus if statues are to be raised, they will become more and more monolithic, plain and featureless. The days of single men and personal power are over. Wit, invective, passion, are no longer called for. Mr. MacDonald is addressing not the small separate ears of his audience in the House of Commons, but men and women in factories, in shops, in farms on the veldt, in Indian villages. (62-63) While the statues of individual heroes might signify the reign of aristocracy centuries ago, these modern halls of the parliament are not built to worship these heroic figures but to shine out the anonymity of the increasingly democratized crowd. As Woolf observes, Westminster Hall raises its immense dignity when one passes out as “little men and women moving soundlessly about the floor” and appears “minute, perhaps pitiable, but also venerable and beautiful under the curve of the vast dome, under the perspective of the huge columns” (64). Democracy and aristocracy thus find their emblems in the halls and statues respectively, the former signifying an embracement of the undistinguishable urban crowd by the democratic institution taking shape in the very age Woolf writes her London essays, whereas the latter memorizing the glories
of individual powers characterizing the British before democracy dawns.
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This study has examined the numerous roles played by women entering the public spaces of London in the half century from the 1880s to the 1930s as workers, shoppers, diners, clubbers, cinema-goers, philanthropists, and tourists, a wide spectrum of active female social actors that until recently have not attracted enough attention from scholars of late-Victorian and Edwardian literature. The neglect of these newly pubic women in the fin de siècle period, who are distinct from their home-bound Victorian predecessors, is largely ascribed to an uncritical acceptance of or surrender to the long-held, dominant assumption of separate spheres in the
nineteenth century. Through examining the writings of Amy Levy, Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia Woolf, who portray the multifarious pictures of women rambling the streets of modern London, this study has demonstrated that female public visibility and mobility have at least since the fin de siècle period been commonly practiced by a conglomerate of middle-class women.
The city of the fin de siècle plays a significant role in shaping the emerging public subjectivity of these middle-class women, who have long been confined to the private, domestic sphere throughout most of the nineteenth century and have been represented as the “angel in the house,” an image marking not only female chastity and moral excellence but also the stark spatial demarcation of separate spheres imposed on the female sex. Along with the development of commercialism, mass consumption, and public transportation, the city emerging in the late nineteenth century has transformed into a spatiality actively interacting with the swarms of these newly public middle-class women, whose presences in the fin de siècle city’s public
spaces signify the very fact that the disruption of conventional bourgeois gendered order and spatial hierarchy is taking place in this period.