The Modern Metropolis - the Flaneur, the Flaneuse
Publié le 18/03/2020
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However, Virginia Woolf challenges all these aspects, in her novel, Mrs Dalloway .
As the
characters ( Clari ssa, her old friend Peter Wa lsh and the wa r veteran Septimus Warren Smith) cross
each other’s paths, the novel becomes a map of patterns and associations .
Woolf examines the human topography of London in Mrs Dalloway as she depicts
landscapes that reinforce boundaries of class and gender, rich and poor, men and women, who
perceive London in a different manner .
She also present s dichotomies of public and private,
internal and external, past and present.
The London through which Woolf’s cha racters move is
dominated by symbols of authority: Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, St Paul’s
Cathedral ; and the life of each character is stressed by the omnipresent sound of Big Ben.
Woolf presents the city as an emancipation machine .
In the dynamic, motorized London
of the 1920s, where omnibuses storm like pirate ships up the avenues, a limousine with bl ind
windows blocks the traffic and an airplane spells out an adve rtising message in the sky , all in the
aftermath of the First World War.
S4 : PETER WA LSH
In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway Peter Walsh is without doubt a flâneur ; he is able to
wande r freely the streets of London .
The most interesting moment of his flânerie is the one when Peter notices an attractive
young woman as he walks through Trafalgar Square:
But she’s extraordinarily attractive, he thought, as, walking across Trafalgar Square in
the direction of the Haymarket, came a young woman who, as she passed Gordon’s statue,
seemed, […] to shed veil after veil, until she became the very woman he had alwa ys had in
mind; young, but stately; merry, but discreet; black, but enchanting. (Woolf 41)
Although Peter is presented as being able to wander the streets of London with freedom
and detachment, Woolf’s depiction of his attempts to pick up the young woman demolish his
confident desires with an eventual realization that he will never possess her.
He fol lows her,
imagining himself as “a romantic buccaneer, careless of all these damned proprieties” .
But, as
she reaches her house and puts her key to the door, she turns and disregard him with “one look i n
his direction, but not at him” .
(Woolf 42 -43) Thus, Woolf undermines the conventional norms.
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