Representations of Female Urban Space London in the Novels of Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf

Masterarbeit

zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades Master of Arts (MA) an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz

vorgelegt von Veronika Dornhofer

am Institut für Anglistik Begutachterin: Ao.Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr.phil. Maria Löschnigg

Graz, im September 2013 For each of you, who had to endure me talking endlessly about London. Table of Contents

1. Introduction! 4

2. Theoretical Background! 6

3. Analysis! 20

3.1. The Novels! 20

3.2. London! 24 3.2.1. Areas and the Semantics of Space! 32 3.2.2. Acoustic Space! 40

3.3. Interior Space! 44

3.4. Movement! 54

3.5. Gendered Space! 60

4. Conclusion! 67

5. Appendix! 70

6. Bibliography! 74

6.1. Primary Sources! 74

6.2. Secondary Sources! 74 1 Introduction

Up until very late in the nineteenth century, the public sphere was firmly in the hands of male upper-class citizens. Ensuing from this, early twentieth-century Modernism marked a turning point for society. With a slight loosening of social restrictions arose possibilities for previously marginalised or excluded groups to claim their place in public spaces for the first time. All of this makes it an important era in the history of women’s strife for equality. A very similar paradigmatic change happened in literature. As Virginia Woolf puts it in her essay A Room of One’s Own, “it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare” (AROO, 60), not because of a lack in literary genius but due to the restricted social environment. As women start to become part of the public sphere, they, at the same time, become more visible as writers. This development is crucial in the light of an ongoing social change because it provides the marginalised group, with a public voice for self-representation. This is also reflected in Susan Squire’s demand that a woman writer’s goal should be to give a voice to “[t]he women whose unspoken, unrecorded presence swells the […] streets” (1985: 6). Especially the nature of metropolitan areas provides a very fertile ground for such changes as the high level of diversity of their inhabitants makes cities more open and they can, therefore, also offer more possibilities for individual development. Accordingly, this thesis intends to map female urban space at the turn of the twentieth century on the basis of a literary analysis of both the exterior and interior spaces in two modernist novels by female authors.

One might ask in how far it is relevant to look at the portrayal of female urban space in Modernism in a thesis in 2013. But in a time when aspiring female writers are still advised to disguise their gender in order for their books to be successful (as it happened in the case of J. K. Rowling), it seems even more important to remind oneself about those who stood at the beginning of this long progress of women being recognised as legitimate authors. Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf lend themselves well as examples of female authors of Modernist Literature because both writers struggled with getting a place in this emerging public space. I have chosen to focus on Richardson’s The Tunnel and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway for the analysis in this thesis because these novels are, on the one hand, centred in and around London, as the prime example for a metropolitan city space in the early twentieth century, and, on the other hand, portray and give a voice to women in their individual attempts to deal with society’s norms and ﬁnd a space of their own. The observations and experiences of Miriam Henderson, the protagonist in The Tunnel, and Clarissa and Elizabeth 4 Dalloway, the protagonist and her daughter in Mrs Dalloway, are the main points of reference for the literary analysis of female urban space in this thesis. I have also included Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own for comparative purposes, especially in Chapter 3.5, “Gendered Space”. Although this text is not part of the main analysis due to its nature as an essay, its relevance for the topic makes it interesting for a comparison of the situation of the women in the two novels.

After providing a brief theoretical background and a short introduction to the two novels and their narrative styles, the main analysis focuses on public and private spaces that are central to the novels’ plots and the main characters. I examine the significance of the city space of London as a whole, its importance for the characters and how it differs from spaces outside of London. In addition, I take a closer look at the most important areas featured in the novels and draw a comparison between how they are generally perceived and how they are described and experienced by Richardson’s and Woolf’s female characters. The second part of the analysis deals with private and public interior spaces. For easier orientation in these chapters, I have included maps (taken from Piper 1968) of the relevant parts of London, namely Bloomsbury, St James’s and Marylebone South. Reference numbers for the most important places, such as Miriam’s lodgings or the Dalloways’ house, were added on the maps and in the text.1 These maps can be found in the appendix. In Chapter 3.4, “Movement”, I examine the connection between specific modes of transport (namely walking, cycling and public transportations) and women’s newly discovered freedom of movement. The last point of the analysis is concerned with the broad topic of gendered space and explores how the characters in the novels react to a direct confrontation with clearly defined gendered spaces and what means they employ to bend and break the established boundaries.

1 Reference numbers are given in braces; e.g.: {Fig. 1, 1} would be reference number 1 in the map of Bloomsbury. 5 2 Theoretical Background

First it will be necessary to define the theoretical background for the (literary) analysis of urban space in Dorothy Richardson’s and Virginia Woolf’s novels. In my definition of the basic terminology underlying this thesis I shall focus on five spatial concepts: the general concept of space, urban space, the city and modernity, movement and mobility, and gendered space.2

According to the various theoretical deﬁnitions and discussions, space is today widely seen as a product. Martina Löw (cf. 2001: 182-3), for example, deﬁnes it as the product of the simultaneous processes of spacing and Syntheseleistung (performance of synthesis3). While the latter means that social goods and (human) beings are combined through processes of perception, imagination and memory, spacing describes the positioning of those goods and beings within the constituted space. The sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre (1991: 260-1) further adds that, “[i]f space is a product, our knowledge of it must be expected to reproduce and expound the process of production.” Although what we perceive is a “present space”, it always includes all its (past) associations and connections and, therefore, the production process itself.

It is important in this context to introduce Lefebvre’s trialectics of space. He defines these concepts as spatial practice, representation of space and representational space specifying them as the perceived, the conceived and the lived realm respectively (cf. 1991: 261-2). When relating it to the body, Lefebvre (1991: 262) defines the spatial practice, or the perceived, as “the practical basis of the perception of the outside world”. In terms of the human body, this basis would be the way in which we use different body parts as well as specific gestures in various life situations. Spatial practice produces and at the same time “masters and appropriates” a society’s space (Lefebvre 1991: 261). Although spatial practice has to be cohesive to some extent, it is not necessarily coherent with an underlying intellectual or logical concept. The notion of the representations of space, or the conceived, includes both knowledge and ideology, and results in conceptualised spaces largely based on “a system of verbal (and therefore intellectually worked out) signs” (Lefebvre 1991: 261). This is the realm of the city planners, architects and politicians “all of whom identify what is lived and what is perceived with what is conceived” (1991: 261). As opposed to that, the

2 Speciﬁc theoretical terms will be written in italics wherever there is a need for emphasis.

3 My own translation for Löw’s German term Syntheseleistung. 6 representational space is “directly lived through its associated images and symbols” and is therefore the space of those who live in and use it (1991: 261-2). However, at the same time it is the space that is dominated by the others and is therefore the one that is “passively experienced”. Being the ones that are actually lived in, representational spaces include and evoke both the history of the society and that of each individual member. The same aspect also makes them ﬂuid and dynamic because they also “[embrace] the loci of passion, of action and of lived situations” (1991: 263). Lefebvre (cf. 1991: 261-2) argues that, without necessarily presenting a coherent whole, all three realms are interconnected in some way or other to allow the members of a space to switch between them with ease. Additionally, he (cf. 1991: 263) makes one important differentiation between representations of space and representational space which should be noted here. While the latter produces symbolic works that often belong to the imaginary realm, representations of space intervene on the level of spatial textures represented by the construction of architecture.

Considering both Löw’s and Lefebvre’s arguments on space and its production, some conclusions can be drawn about the members of those spaces. It has been said that the production of space goes hand in hand with a positioning of goods and beings within it and that some part of the space (at least in the case of representational spaces) is constituted by the history of each individual member. Thus, this process is equally connected with the construction of identity in the sense that your position in a certain space (or different spaces) makes up at least part of who you are and/or who you are expected to be. Similarly, if the characteristics of a space allow assumptions about its members, a close assessment of those members might shed some light on aspects of the space that are not immediately visible otherwise.

After looking at the production of space, it is now important to consider how those spaces are preserved or changed. To this end, Michel de Certeau (cf. 1984: 1247-57) deﬁnes the two opposing concepts of strategy and tactic. According to his deﬁnition (1984: 1252), a strategy is “the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships” used by a powerful entity to fence out and to guard its space from “the invisible powers of the Other”. As opposed to and as a result of this, the space of the Other4 becomes the space of the tactic. De Certeau (1984: 1253) also calls it the “art of the weak”. However, it does not have a place of its own as such but “must play on and with a terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power” (1984: 1253). This lack of space of one’s own must inevitably result in a high

4 For a deﬁnition of the terms Other and Othering see Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge (1980) and Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949). 7 degree of mobility. In its struggle to undermine the (dominant) space of the strategy, the tactic has to make use of this mobility and attack wherever it might be presented with an opportunity. An important means of undermining the spaces of strategy are operational schemas – certain ‘ways of operating’ like walking, reading, producing and speaking (cf. 1984: 1248). While strategies can produce spaces through those operations, tactics can use, manipulate and divert space with their help. Although they are controlled by the rules of the dominant space, they can to a certain degree initiate creativity and multitude from within and therefore beneﬁt from the status of being in-between (cf. 1984: 1248). In connection with this, De Certeau (1984: 1250) emphasises the importance of the context of use: “between the person (who uses them) and these products (indexes of the ‘order’ which is imposed on him), there is a gap of varying proportions opened by the use that he makes of them.”

All the aspects of space discussed above also hold true for a definition of textual space. What might be added with regard to the literary analysis in this thesis are Elisabeth Bronfen’s notes (cf. 1999: 28-30) on actual material spaces and their functions within a text. Firstly, she sees them as “the site in which […] events occur [and] as that in or through which people pass” (1999: 29) as opposed to a mere background for the action. Secondly, these specific spaces can also, at times, themselves become the subject of an incident or even of a whole narrative. Within literary texts actual material spaces can, on the one hand, provide abstract concepts such as loneliness or creativity with a “spatial configuration” (1999: 28). On the other hand, they have the power to increase the value of a literary space so that its “meaning […] moves beyond its physical and mathematical attributes” (1999: 29).

Moving from the general characteristics and aspects of space to those specific to textual space, one must also make a transition from a distanced and theoretical view of the matter to an inclusion of how space is experienced by an individual. Based on her analysis of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, Bronfen establishes four sub-spaces of London, which she divides into three interior spaces (private sites of ‘solitude and nowhere’, islands and neutral and free spaces) and the exterior spaces/places (cf. 1999: 18). As their characteristics draw heavily from the impressions they make on the experiencing subject, the four spaces are defined by varying degrees of privacy, sense of belonging and comfort. The private sites of ‘solitude and nowhere’ (1999: 19) are spaces which separate and in a way protect the character from the outside world. Although it is a secluding space, it is also a “shrine for lived experience” and is at times “penetrated [and] animated by the outside world” (1999: 19). It functions as a peaceful counterpart and safe haven to whatever the individual experiences outside of it. These private sites also offer a freedom other places might not grant the 8 characters. What Bronfen (cf. 1999: 20) describes as islands are spaces outside of this private space, as for example apartments of friends, the workplace or public spaces such as theatres. All those places are always one with those who use them and the lives they lead. But, however closely they might be connected with those inside of them, islands are “ultimately experienced as fascinating foreign places and not anti-spaces” (1999: 20). As opposed to that, neutral and free spaces are “those rooms which cannot be assigned to any people or ideas” (1999: 20) as well as such thoroughly public spaces as trains, taxis or cafés. The fourth sub-space includes all exterior spaces/places which are “generally and consistently perceived as an open, free, exciting and mysterious space of movement and discoveries” (1999: 20). They are additionally connotated either positively or negatively depending on whoever holds the point of view. In the case of Richardson’s Pilgrimage, the protagonist Miriam’s view leads to Bronfen’s assessment that the definition of the exterior space as “protective and separated from the rest of the world” (1999: 20) is solely true for city spaces and should not be applied to exterior places outside of it. For Miriam, the exterior spaces of London are a parallel to the private sites as they also offer both freedom and protection at the same time. In chapter 3.2 (“London”) I shall illustrate in how far this is a consequence of Miriam’s individual experience and if it is possible to apply it to other literary texts.

Bronfen (cf. 1999: 28) also draws attention to the opposition of a limited and an unlimited site. She argues that, although the “conventional semantic encoding” of certain places has an impact on whether a place is one or the other, it again largely depends on the experiencing subjects and their impressions. The ﬁrst one is mainly limited because of self- enclosure and not because of boundaries set up by society. This inﬂuence of the subjective view becomes especially important in connection with the discussion of city space. Deborah Parsons (2000: 1) argues that the urban landscape needs to be considered as a combination of the psychological as well as the material “to interrelate the observed with the observer, and to assess how the identity of one affects the other.” This means that, as with space in general, city space is actively produced by its ‘members’ and cannot be disconnected from them.

When discussing city space, first of all one has to consider its specific spatial organisation. Miles et al. (2004: 8) answer the question of what a city is by employing Peter Marcuse’s socio-cultural concept of a “multi-layered city of quarters”. Instead of strictly organised and defined zones it comprises a “palimpsest of constantly over-written and changing patterns”. Miles at al. (cf. 2004: 9) declare this to be the most fitting concept to 9 describe the postmodern city, which corresponds with Parsons’ differentiation of city aesthetics into the “modernist, geometrically ordered city of Le Corbusier” and “the postmodern, informal and flexible city” (2000: 8). However, I would say that these are descriptions of representations of space rather than representational spaces, i.e. the city as the respective contemporary scientists and theorists perceived it to be rather than the city lived in by its individual inhabitants.

All in all, Lefebvre’s distinction between the perceived and the lived runs through most theoretical descriptions of city space. Parsons (cf. 2000: 11-2), for example, quotes Jane Jacobs’ schema of the two ways of observing: the planner’s remote long-view who aims for “repetition and inﬁnity” rather than diversity, versus the more intimate foreground-view of those observing it from the street. Similarly, Miles et al. (2004: 257) describe two perspectives of the city in their introduction to the chapter “Everyday Lives”: “The city exists on paper, in plans and drawings, in the minds of architects, planners and the state. […] But it is also mundane, everyday. The city of people […] as it provides the backdrop and the context within which most of us shape our everyday lives.”

But what sets city life (and space) apart from other spaces – what are the specific aspects of this backdrop that shapes lives? The modernist sociologist E. W. Burgess (cf. 1925: 21), for one, argues that the high level of diversity in the city’s social structure (i.e. more women, youth and middle-aged, as well as immigrants and a greater range of occupations) stands in direct correlation with a general change in the organisation of a society. This assessment is particularly interesting with regard to the literary analysis undertaken in this thesis because Burgess here, writing in 1925, describes the exact same time and (social) situations that serve as a background to Richardson’s and Woolf’s novels. However, the city is not only an indicator of social change, it is also one of its key factors. Elisabeth Wilson attests to this in her discussion of “World Cities”. Although the gap between ‘the rich’ and ‘the poor’ may be nowhere as visible and present as in large cities, this coexistence and the ensuing struggle can ultimately lead to change: “The existence of the benefits of urban life […] justifies [people’s] demands for inclusion. […] the city both raises aspirations and gives more chance of their realisation” (1993: 47). In the same vein, Parsons (cf. 2000: 9) sees the city as “open and migrational”. To illustrate this, she uses Richard Sennett’s idea of the urban which goes slightly against traditional views. For him city space is a “positive site for the ‘other’ and the ‘exile’” (Parsons 2000: 9) in which, quote Sennett, “people come alive, where they expose, acknowledge and address the discordant parts of

10 themselves and one another”. Although slightly altered in deﬁnition, this is still reminiscent of De Certeau’s concepts of strategy and tactic.

This acknowledging of the Other leads us back to (city) space as a crucial factor in the formation of identity. According to what has been said about city space up to this point, it is mostly seen as an, albeit layered, entity which differentiates itself from the ‘outside’ – either through a process of Othering or as ‘the Other’ itself. It, at the same time, constructs borders and border zones that Miles et al. (2004: 349) characterise as “edges of mutual distrust” and suspicion. This results in both an exclusion of those who are seen as the Other as well as an active withdrawal from the main group by those who do not wish to participate in the conventions of life in the established community. With regard to the subsequent analysis of city space, I also want to point to Löw’s argument (cf. 2001: 181-2) that not only separate goods and beings can constitute a space but that several spaces together can again be subsumed to a bigger one. In the case of city space, this means that it is not only one homogeneous entity but that it also consists of various areas (boroughs or districts) that can be looked at as separate and more or less independent spaces themselves. In the same way, the area, and therefore space, one lives in can be a deﬁning characteristic of a person’s identity. Whether this characteristic is actually part of the person or something ascribed from outside is not always as clear as in the following example given by Wilson. She comments on the striking similarities between the assumptions made about present-day barrios in Calcutta or Djakarta and those made about nineteenth-century slums: “[…] people living in such conditions must somehow themselves be inadequate, just as the Victorian reformers assumed […] that the poor were locked into the slums because they were lacking of moral ﬁbre” (1993: 44-5).

The last aspect of city space that needs to be acknowledged is how it is made visible to those which De Certeau (2000: 102) calls “the city’s common practitioners” who live “on the threshold where visibility ends” and who Lefebvre would probably count as actors in a representational space. Without help, they are not able to see or read the urban ‘text’ in whose writing they participate: The paths that interconnect in this network, strange poems of which each body is an element down by and among many others, elude being read. […] The networks of these forward-moving, intercrossed writings form a multiple history, are without creator or spectator, made up of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces. (De Certeau 2000: 102-3)

For De Certeau (cf. 2000: 102), one of the things that make a city’s complex structure readable is an important urban landmark (e.g. a high tower) which “continues the 11 construction of a ﬁction that creates its readers.” By standing high above and looking down on it, one can in a way see the space as a whole, instead of the usual limitation to details. The urban writer might also heighten the degree of visibility because, as a producer of the city, he/she is simultaneously part of the space and detached from it in his or her function as an observer. As such he/she is in a position to disclose the relations between the identity of the individual and the city to their readers who are otherwise unable to see it (cf. Parsons 2000: 1). The writer makes the city space more visible to its subjects by incorporating “maps […] of social interaction [and] myth, memory, fantasy, and desire” to the “city atlas” (2000: 1). The writer’s role in making city visible is also one of the reasons why it is important to examine the differences between a male and a female point of view because the (gender) identity of the urban writer inevitably has an impact on the (textual) space he or she produces. Parsons (cf. 2000: 14-5), for example, stresses the “non-ﬁxed, but also located city experience” depicted by the women writers in her study (including Richardson and Woolf).

It has been said before in this chapter that city space offers an exceptionally high possibility for (social) change due to its openness and diversity. Both Richardson’s and Woolf’s novels depict a world in the process of a change, happening at the very core of society, which challenges long-established hierarchies, ideologies and beliefs. Raymond Williams (cf. 1989: 62-3) traces back many achievements of what we now call Modernism to those special characteristics of the metropolis and calls it the “key cultural factor of the modernist shift” (1989: 63). The city presented a mixture of intricacy, a “sophistication of social relations” and “exceptional liberties of expression” (1989: 63) which were still strongly opposed in the more traditional setting in rural areas. Especially at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century the cultural situation changed through the formation of “new social and economic and cultural relations, beyond both city and nation in their older senses” (1989: 62-3). Burgess (1925: 23) also draws connections between the general growth of a city and the subsequent changes. He does, however, raise the question whether and at what rate this growth is “matched by a natural but adequate readjustment in the social organization.”

Along the same lines, Williams (cf. 1989: 63) highlights the migration into the major cities as a factor that greatly influenced, and still influences, the form and themes of city life and, as a result, of urban writing. In Williams’ opinion, it, on the surface, produces the obvious elements of strangeness, distance and alienation. On a deeper, aesthetic level this change becomes a practical example for De Certeau’s strategies and tactics: immigrating into an existing (and dominating) space regulated by a standard set of rules, the new-comers 12 – though they will probably in time adhere to some or even most of these rules – always also bring their own practices (or tactics) into this space. Although this might not be followed conclusively by a wide-spread social change, Williams (1989: 63) argues that the immigrants at the time of Modernism met with an already “novel and dynamic common environment” that was in the process of distancing itself from older and traditional practices making it easier for them to exert their influence on society as a whole. According to him, all those artists, writers and thinkers that came to the city then concentrated their efforts on the “community of the medium” (i.e. that of literature, language and writing in general), which was in a way the only one they had access to. In this sense, Williams’ initial statement on the relation between Modernism and the city (1989: 59), i.e. its “persistent intellectual hegemony” as the main site of the media and intellectual institutions, becomes an even more important factor. The interplay between this dominance and the migrants’ use of the ‘community of the medium’ further heightens the city’s significance for social and cultural change.

Williams’ five themes of the metropolitan development in Modernism (cf. 1989: 60-2) can be seen in connection with this ‘intellectual hegemony’ of the city as they also found their way into the literature of the time. The first three themes are directly linked to the city as a crowded space and the factor of its fast growth. First of all, there is the portrayal of this city crowd as a large group of strangers living next to one another without getting in contact. The second theme of the isolated individual within this crowd is then directly derived from the first one. Williams (1989: 60) here points out the Romantic background of those two aspects which are illustrated by “the intensity of a paradoxical self-realization in isolation”. The city plays a crucial role in the literary depiction of isolation and alienation in as far as it provides psychological effects of loneliness, such as nightmares, drug abuse or insanity, with a “persuasive and ultimately conventional social location” (1989: 61), as has also been noted by Bronfen (cf. 1999: 28-30) in connection with the actual material spaces in texts. Modern literature from the turn to the twentieth century originated another product of those dark and ‘impenetrable’ sides of city life – the urban detective as personified by Sherlock Holmes (cf. Williams 1989: 61). Despite this, this third theme of the crime ridden city also produced literary accounts of its social effects. Albeit relatively late in the period, we even get stories directly from within those areas telling us about poor and shabby living conditions. Yet those gruesome reports also cast some light on a “neighbourliness and community” which, for Williams (1989: 61-2), forms the fourth theme of the metropolitan development in Modernism. He sees the characterisation of the city crowd as a “mass” (or “masses”), instead of a “mob”, as crucial for this theme: “[They] were also to become the heroic, organizing words of working-class and revolutionary solidarity. The factual development of new kinds of radical 13 organization […] sustained this positive urban emphasis” (1989: 62). On the same note but even more specifically, Wilson (cf. 1993: 45) highlights the significance of the family within an urban environment. Although one might think that city life for the most part means independence and self-reliance – in both a positive and negative sense – family connections and obligations are an essential factor when it comes to the integration of newcomers into the cities. What has been named as one of the characteristics of city space earlier, now becomes the fifth and last point on Williams’ list of themes. According to him (cf. 1989: 62), the vast range of possibilities offered by a city, which nowadays we consider as an integral aspect of urban life, developed rapidly in modern times with the improvement of the city’s physical conditions. Before it turned into the dark space of industrialisation and the metropolis, the city was described as “a place of light and learning, as well as of power and magnificence” (1989: 62). This was reintegrated in the Modernist depictions by emphasising the “new illuminations of the city” by actual, physical light (cf. 1989: 62). As pointed out by Miles et al. (cf. 2004: 199), there is a great interdependence between technology and society. Technical innovations often arise from a cultural and ideological change. Moreover, those new technologies also influence the society and eventually the city (life).

Lights were not the only technological developments of the time which changed the appearance of the city. One other aspect that changed drastically was (public) transportation. In London, motor buses slowly but surely started to replace omnibuses driven by horses at the beginning of the twentieth century. Within only five years the number of motor-driven taxis was already higher than that of hansoms and four-wheelers (cf. Daiches and Flower 1979: 75). In the same years, the London underground system (first opened in 1863) was being equipped with an electric traction further heightening its popularity. Easier access to a quicker public transport system also heightened the possibility to commute, and soon transportation defined the city and life in it. On the one hand, it changed, and continues to change, the atmosphere of the city due to the necessary additions of bus stops, new tube stations and better roads (see also Miles et al. 2004: 199). On the other hand, these changes caused an impact on the city’s society. It was, for example, suddenly possible for wealthier families to live on the outskirts of the metropolis while still working in the city centre. Those who were mostly limited to an area within their walking distance because they could not afford carriages or hansoms now profited from the much cheaper public transport. Mimi Shelley and John Urry (2000: 203) argue that such characteristics of modernism as for example “the contraction of social space, the density of transactions and the compression of ‘social distance’” were amplified by the introduction of the automobile. Although Shelley and

14 Urry here talk about the car, it is safe to say that their evaluations hold true for motorised transportation as a whole.

In connection with transportation, Burgess (cf. 1925: 25) makes a notable differentiation between movement and mobility within the city. According to him, movement is a constant and ﬁxed routine and mostly associated with work. As opposed to this, mobility may be illustrated by the examples given above – with the help of a timesaving, and affordable, bus system spatial limitations are lifted and a higher degree of exchange between different areas of the city becomes possible. Even though this change brings many advantages with it, Burgess (cf. 1925: 26) also warns of the negative consequences of too much stimulus through mobility. If mobility is thought of as the pulse of the community it is easy to see how too much of it could lead to a (serious) crash.

Yet, although greatly inﬂuenced by it, movement in the city is not solely linked to technology and motorisation. Especially when it comes to the (literary) depiction of city life, walking is an important ‘mode of transport’ because it allows a much closer encounter with details and the speciﬁcs of the space. Parsons (cf. 2000: 10) points out that by walking one can at the same time experience the present and the past, new and unknown things, and “haunting ghosts”. Even more so, although one might need the outside perspective from high above to be able to see it as a whole and to take all its aspects into account, the act of walking through the city and the way in which it is done is in itself an act of creating space (see De Certeau 2000). It embodies the same semantic connection as language and the act of speaking. There is a present space that comes to life through each person’s individual spatial practice. While every one of us participates in this form of the production of space – mostly unconsciously –, it becomes visible through the earlier mentioned literary descriptions given by urban walkers.

With this we have arrived at the concept of the flâneur which is a major theme in literature in general and exists in various forms. In the history of the novel, examples of ‘city walkers’ can be found almost from its very beginning. In Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (first published in 1722) the protagonist of the same name wanders through London on her raids and provides the reader with descriptions of the areas and the people she encounters. It is, of course, debatable if Moll Flanders really is a flâneuse as her main goal is the pickpocketing and not the sole act of walking. However, she, just like the ‘true’ flâneur or flâneuse, gives an account of the representational space, i.e. the everyday space, instead of reporting on important historic events (see Parsons 2000: 10). According to Parsons (2000: 15 13), this person experiencing the city from the street “belongs on the asphalt and is aesthetically stimulated by the very confusion and clash of the different elements of urban life.”

It has been said before that there is a rough distinction between the (modern) ordered and the (postmodern) flexible city aesthetic (cf. Parsons 2000: 8). In the same way, we can differentiate between two types of the flâneur (cf. 2000: 10): while both take in and describe the impressions the city makes on them, one is on a straight route to a specific destination and the other one simply wanders around without any specific aim. Parsons (2000: 3) also takes up Walter Benjamin’s definitions of the bourgeois flâneur walking “idly through the city, listening to its narrative” and the rag-picker who “moves across the urban landscape […] as a scavenger, collecting, rereading, and rewriting its history”. On the whole, especially up to and during modern times, being a flâneur required certain opportunities and privileges (e.g. time to walk around) that were almost exclusive to the bourgeois male (cf. 2000: 4). So the question in view of the following analysis of Richardson’s and Woolf’s novels is whether a female variation, a flâneuse, is even possible. Parsons (cf. 2000: 3) attests to the mystic and elusive nature of the figure of the flâneur which, in her opinion, makes it hard to determine his true identity in any way. She even sees the character as rather androgynous, making the assumption of a female counterpart plausible.

I have already brought up Moll Flanders earlier but, although she is a good example of a character walking around the city, I think one should be careful to use her as a proof for the existence of the ﬂâneuse. Firstly, as I have said before, she does not walk for the sake of walking itself but because it is her only means of getting around to pickpocket and, therefore, a means to earn her living. Secondly, the fact that Moll Flanders was written by a male author should be taken into consideration as well. Just as the general atmosphere and character of city space in literary texts is in a way dependent on whether it is depicted by a male or a female author, we can in the same sense assume that the author behind the female or male walker leaves a mark on his or her characters. Therefore, I will use the following literary analysis in parts to answer the questions as stated by Parsons (2000: 2): “What is the status of the women who trespass upon [the] pavement and [the] page?”, “Can there be a ﬂâneuse, and what forms might she take?” and “How are women writers situated, and how do they situate themselves, in the maps of urban location and literature?”

These questions also lead to the last point of discussion in this theoretical chapter – the aspect of gendered space. When talking about (city) space, it has already been mentioned 16 that the installing of borders and the process of Othering are central points in its production. Similar practices are used in connection with a gendering of space. Although it would be too generalising to say that the male inhabitants are always and in every respect the dominant group, especially in respect to the time of Richardson and Woolf it is safe to say that the separation between the two sexes and the limitations put on women were ever-present and hard to ‘shake’. Miles et al. attest that, […] structural sexism denies women access to public space in conventional arrangements of the city, in which the street is a space of masculine gazing and women, particularly if not accompanied by men, are objects of the gaze and its possessive tendency. This patriarchy is reinforced by limits […] to women’s access to professions from medicine and law to architecture and planning, but operates, too […] in terms of what is included within academic disciplines. (2004: 304)

Here we are again at the differentiation of De Certeau’s strategies and tactics: rules and regulations set down by the dominating group (i.e. male citizens) which make it difficult for members of the ‘dominated’ group (i.e. female citizens) to enforce change. This is further aggravated by the fact that the latter are not only expected to follow the laws of the space, as everyone else, but that they are purposefully excluded from all possibilities to actively participate by the very forms that space takes. Doreen Massey (cf. 1992: 186), taking up a much used example, recounts a visit to a European art gallery as a young student with two male friends. Not only did the majority of the paintings depict naked women (painted by men) but by solely presenting a male view of the female body, the museum space itself becomes a place of the objectification of women – it becomes a gendered space: “a ‘space’ that clearly let me know something, and something ignominious, about what High Culture thought was my place in Society” (1992: 186). So not only does the space represent the specific roles of its members but it also reminds them of their position. In addition, Massey (cf. 1992: 186) notes that how one reads and experiences such spaces depends on this very position, saying that the effect on her was quite different from the one the gallery had on her two male friends. All in all, Massey’s experience in the museum is reminiscent of what the female protagonist in Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own encounters in the library of the British Museum: a shelf full of books and articles about the nature of women written solely by men most of which “have no apparent qualification save that they are not women” (AROO, 46). However, these were the assessments that formed the public’s opinion on women – the only view that had been available for hundreds of years.

The Modernist shift in society as discussed above of course also had an impact on gendered spaces. While Parsons (2000: 6) argues that the “deterritorialisation” at the turn of the century resulted in “gendered models of modern urban vision”, I rather think that those

17 gendered models existed long before Modernism but where at that time made more visible by an increasing effort to break up the boundaries and with them those traditional models. If we before had a strict separation between the public and the private space and a confinement of women to the latter, this historical phase with its World Wars and financial crisis brought along a necessary opening of the public (working) space; at least in some sectors. By gaining, albeit limited, access to the public sphere women now assume a better position to observe instead of being the observed – they now have the possibility to become a subject instead of remaining an object. In other words, they suddenly hold the power of the gaze5. Nevertheless, one should not make the mistake of believing that this all of a sudden made them equally powerful in society as men. In connection with De Certeau’s tactics one could say that Modernism was the time when in became possible for women to ‘undermine’ the established spaces and to make a stand in them little by little. Parsons (cf. 2000: 4-5) quotes both Janet Woolf and Griselda Pollock who argue that the separation of the sexes, and with that the limitations set for women, renders the character of the flâneuse, a female wanderer and observer of the city, impossible. However, considering that walking is such an important aspect in the construction of urban space (see De Certeau 2000), especially the figure of a female wanderer could play a vital role in the re-construction of (gendered) spaces. This can be compared with the situation of indigenous peoples in colonised countries (cf. De Certeau 1984: 1249). While they abided by the laws imposed on them, they used the new practices to their own means. So if women are allowed to enter the public space of work, for example during wartime, they can at the same time use this to ‘walk their own ways’. Similarly, Parsons (cf. 2000: 6) adds that, far from simply being a female version of the authoritative flâneur, the flâneuse is rather more related to the “marginalized urban familiarity of the rag-picker” again making her an active figure of tactics instead of someone who reinforces existing spaces through strategies. To illustrate this shift, Wilson (cf. 1993: 42) quotes Leonie Sandercock’s recount of an interesting – if somehow absurd – view on the gender implications of urban space in early-twentieth century (Australian) cities. Because they felt that the city offered too many “ladylike refinements” and presented them with “women’s challenge to (male) supremacy”, more and more men spent time in the bush which was considered masculine and “a place of healing away from the diseased life of the city” (1993: 42).

As with the other aspects touched upon so far, the theory concerned with gendered space can be applied to literature and textual space. Simultaneously with a gradual opening

5 For a definition of the term gaze see Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho- Analysis (1978) and Griselda Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity” (1988). 18 of public space, women started to discover new literary spaces and ways of expression for themselves. Again one might question the importance of discussing possible differences in the representation of city space depending on the gender of the writer. In Parsons’ opinion, the cities represented by female urban writers proved to be more organic and following “natural, temporal, and social rhythms” missing from the depictions in their male colleagues’ works: […] within their writing they frequently resist [the cities] act of direction, wandering away from planned pathways to back streets, where they find the myths and memories of both the city and themselves. […] They created an urban consciousness modelled on alternative values […]. (Parsons 2000: 15-6) Another central point in this respect is that literature as an indicator for social conditions and practices has always been a means for marginalised groups to voice their concerns. Thus, in an attempt to find out about the situation of women in modern urban environments, who better to look at than narrations by women writers?

19 3 Analysis

3.1 The Novels

Taking only a first cursory glance at the two novels in question, they do not seem to have much in common. On the one hand, we have one of the most well-known novels of Modern Literature: Mrs Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf, the roughly 140-page-long account of a London day in early June of 1923. The reader follows various characters, both central and marginal figures, through this day and on their ventures in the British capital. In the centre of the story is Clarissa Dalloway, the title character, whose preparations for a party and the party itself provide the main story line. All the other principal characters and their stories are, more or less, linked to her: her daughter Elizabeth, her husband Richard, her old friend Peter Walsh and Septimus Warren Smith, a young war-veteran who commits suicide that day and to whom Clarissa, on hearing his story at her party, feels emotionally connected. On the other hand, there is Dorothy Richardson’s The Tunnel (1919), which is the fourth part in her twelve-volume series entitled Pilgrimage. As the title of the series suggests, it focuses on Miriam Henderson’s progress through life from growing up as the daughter of a wealthy business man through the downfall of her family to becoming a self-sufficient writer. It is also important to note that Pilgrimage is semi-autobiographical and that, in addition to the main events, some of the characters in the series show a close resemblance to the people in Richardson’s life they are based on.6 When we join her story in the first chapter of The Tunnel, she is about to move into her first own lodgings in central London and start her job as a secretary in a dentist’s surgery. As opposed to Mrs Dalloway, it is much harder to pinpoint a single story line or theme running through Richardson’s novel. In her review of The Tunnel, Woolf notes: The reader is not provided with a story; he is invited to embed himself in Miriam Henderson’s consciousness, to register one after another, and one on top of another, words, cries, shouts, notes of a violin, fragments of lectures, to follow these impressions as they flicker through Miriam’s mind, waking incongruously other thoughts, and plaiting incessantly the many-coloured and innumerable threads of life. (1992: 16) All the other characters are only important in their connection to Miriam. Some of the reoccurring figures in her life that are meaningful for this particular novel in the series are her sisters Harriett and Eve, her best friends Mag and Jan, who she visits frequently, her

6 One example is the husband of Miriam’s school friend Alma, Hypo Wilson, whom she first meets in Chapter VI of The Tunnel (see T, 110). Mr Wilson is a fictionalised version of the writer H. G. Wells. He, too, was the husband of one of Richardson’s school friends and their brief affair has found its way into the story; the beginnings of it being first suggested in Revolving Lights. For notes on Richardson’s/Miriam’s connection with Wells/Wilson also see Carol Watts (1995: viii, 9 and 69). 20 employers Mr Orly, Mr Leyton and Mr Hancock, and Miss Dear, an acquaintance she knows through one of her sisters. Although there are many different stories and story lines, all of them are directly linked to the protagonist – a fact that comes with Richardson’s special narrative style, which will be discussed a little later in this chapter.

In view of the aim of this thesis to analyse how female urban space is represented in these two novels, it is important to stress the differences in their female protagonists, for example considering their social class and status, lodgings, occupations and expectations others have in them or they have for themselves. All these aspects influence Miriam’s and Clarissa’s perception of the outside world and with that the way the spaces they move in are represented in their thoughts. But even though Miriam and Clarissa lead very different lives, what they stand for on a broader scale is very similar; especially if one also takes Elizabeth into account. Rachel Bowlby, the editor of a collection of Woolf’s essays, notes that the writer “felt a degree of unease in reviewing Richardson’s work since they had comparable aims” and that Woolf, therefore, deliberately searched and hoped for faults when reading and reviewing her contemporary’s novels (Bowlby 1992: 180). In terms of content, it is not so much the plots or the protagonists’ characters that make them interesting for comparison but the fact that all three of them, i.e. Miriam, Clarissa and Elizabeth, are women in the Modernist era of social change trying to find their stand in it. Both novels also fit into the literary discussion of the ongoing social change: The Tunnel in its clear outlining of Richardson’s feminist believes, which she formed while writing Pilgrimage, and the depiction of the fast growing group of working women, and Mrs Dalloway in the way it discusses the aftermath of the First World War and the devastating effects it had on society.

Being such typical representatives of Modernist Literature also connects the two novels on a stylistic and narrative level. Most of the central aspects of Modernist literature and art that Morag Shiach lists in her introduction to the Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel can be found in both The Tunnel and Mrs Dalloway: “innovations in the representation of time; complex explorations of the nature of consciousness; formal experiments in narrative structure; and an intense use of the imaginative power of the image” (2007: 5) as well as “the urban setting, the emphasis on the power and the complexity of the momentary and evanescent experience” (2007: 7). It is the time when time becomes relative – one of the side effects of the experience of war. Everything becomes surreal and linearity is suspended, while the strife to accurately depict the subjects’ experiences necessitates a certain degree of realism. This, in turn, means that the subjective perception of time and duration gains importance over the actual time as measured by clocks. Richardson seems to follow this 21 principle in the way the narration jumps on the time line (leaving unexplained gaps or including ﬂashbacks that do not become immediately apparent as such) and the varying correlation between discourse and story time, slowing the narration down or speeding it up depending on the intensity of Miriam’s experiences. Even though Woolf also makes use of some of these narrative techniques (e.g. jumping in time and location), there are stylistic and plot devices that build a basic structure in Mrs Dalloway and thus pull the separate strings together. The most notable of these devices is the sound of Big Ben, which not only indicates the passage of time and the metaphorical meanings that come with it but, in addition, functions as a connection of story lines, as the following example illustrates: It was precisely twelve o’clock; twelve by Big Ben; whose stroke was wafted over the northern part of London; blent with that of other clocks, mixed in a thin ethereal way with the clouds and wisps of smoke and died up there among the seagulls – twelve o’clock struck as Clarissa Dalloway laid her green dress on her bed, and the Warren Smiths walked down Harley Street. Twelve was the hour of their appointment. (MD, 69)

These stylistic differences between the two novels are not only congruent with their respective length but also indicate Richardson’s and Woolf’s contrasting approaches to writing. In much the same way, they both make use of the ‘stream of consciousness’ while slightly adapting it to their needs. Virginia Woolf, and in particular Mrs Dalloway, is often employed as one of the prime examples of this narrative technique. Large parts of the novel are rendered in free indirect speech, providing the reader with an insight into the characters’ thoughts and feelings. Almost anyone can function as a focalizer, from the protagonist Clarissa and the large number of other central characters to any of the people these characters walk past on the street. From time to time this perspective can change so quickly that only the content of what is ‘said’ gives clues as to whose mind we share as a reader. The famous opening sequence of Mrs Dalloway already illustrates many of these aspects. While the very ﬁrst sentence, “Mrs Dalloway said she would by the ﬂowers herself” (MD, 3), implies the voice of a narrator relaying what is said in indirect speech, we then get gradually closer to Clarissa’s consciousness. Her exclamations of “What a lark! What a plunge!” (MD, 3) mark the beginning of a passage rendered in free indirect speech that give us glimpses of Clarissa’s memories of the past triggered by stepping out of her front door. Her mind, and with it the reader, is drawn back to the present when she stops to let a van pass before crossing the street. While she stands there waiting, the narration suddenly jumps perspectives and provides us with observations about Clarissa by one of her neighbours who sees her standing there: She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall’s van to pass. A charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her (knowing her as one does know people who live next door to one in Westminster); a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious,

22 though she was over ﬁfty, and grown very white since her illness. There she perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, very upright. (MD, 3) The last sentence of this sequence is already a mixture somewhere between Scrope Purvis’ mind and a narrator’s voice, still using the metaphor of the bird that is “perched” on the kerb while also letting us know that Clarissa does not see him. Despite these frequent jumps between perspectives and focalizers as well as between the present and the past, the speech seems, in general, more orderly and planned than in The Tunnel, which is congruent with the overall impression of the construction of Mrs Dalloway.

All of The Tunnel’s events are rendered with Miriam as the sole focalizer. In a way, the narration is even closer to her consciousness than the one in Mrs Dalloway. The reader gets a very direct account of her thoughts, including the search for words (“They only saw the jokes . . . the – the – higher facetiousness . . . good phrase, that was the Chianti” (T, 124)) and a certain lack of information wherever Miriam does not know it (“My Reminiscences by Count de Something” (T, 66)) or does not see the need to relate the details as, for example, who exactly is speaking (see e.g. her discussions with Mag and Jan as on page 165). It is a narration in constant free indirect discourse whose effect is sometimes further heightened by a switch from third to first person pronouns, loosing even the last traces of a mediating narrator. Woolf notes the importance of Richardson’s specific way of writing in her review on Revolving Lights, the seventh part in the Pilgrimage series: She has invented, or, if she has not invented, developed and applied to her own uses, a sentence which we might call the psychological sentence of the feminine gender. It is of a more elastic fibre than the old, capable of stretching to the extreme, of suspending the frailest particles, of enveloping the vaguest shapes. […] Miss Richardson has fashioned her sentence consciously, in order that it may descend to the depths and investigate the crannies of Miriam Henderson’s consciousness. It is a woman’s sentence, but only in the sense that it is used to describe a woman’s mind by a writer who is neither proud nor afraid of anything that she may discover in the psychology of her sex. (Woolf 1992: 51) Even though she is now seldom included in the discourse on Modernism and its specific narrative techniques, Dorothy Richardson’s presentation of Miriam’s thoughts in Pilgrimage was actually the first to be called a ‘stream of consciousness’, when Mary Sinclair coined the term in her review of Richardson’s series (cf. Fernihough: 2007: 68).7

7 However, Anne Fernihough (cf. 2007: 68) also notes that Dorothy Richardson resented the term and did not like her writing to be associated with it. 23 3.2 London

Always now, away from London, there was this dreadful realization of fatigue, dreadful empty sense of worry and hurry … feeling so strong riding down through London, everything dropping away, nothing to think of […] nothing but lovely, lonely freedom all round one. (T, 224)

In the theoretical opening chapter I have included Bronfen’s definition of exterior spaces/places which she describes as “open, free, exiting and mysterious space[s] of movement and discoveries” (1999: 20). It is not hard to see how Bronfen derives this definition from Miriam’s perception of the city. Sitting in an A.B.C. somewhere off the Strand after a long and stressful workday she stares into the fire and lets her thoughts roam freely, feeling “untouched […], free, unseen, and strong” with the “strong world of London all round her, strong free untouched people, in a dark lit wilderness, happy and miserable in their own way […] being in London […] were in the secret of London and looked free” (T, 76). She quite clearly connects her new-found strength and self-confidence to the city and its spirit: “No one who had never been alone in London was quite alive. . . . I’m free – I’ve got free – nothing can ever alter that, she thought, gazing wide-eyed into the fire, between fear and joy” (T, 76). It could be argued that Miriam’s overall situation and her decision to live on her own and to work speaks of a strong and independent character to begin with and leaves her with hardly any other option than to stay so. Nevertheless, she repeatedly stresses that it is the city that offers support and welcomes her with its “vast open” space (T, 91).

I have already raised the question of whether Bronfen’s definition of exterior spaces can be applied to other literary texts. In this respect, a quote from Virginia Woolf’s diary entry from May 26, 1924 becomes highly significant. Woolf is already in the process of writing what was then called The Hours and expresses her joy of being back in London and writing: London is enchanting. I step out upon a tawny coloured magic carpet, it seems, and get carried into beauty without raising a finger. […] And people pop in and out, lightly, divertingly like rabbits […]. One of these days I will write about London, and how it takes up the private life and carries it on, without any effort. (Woolf, L. 1975: 62) So she does not only comment on the beauty of London but also on how it simply ‘carries’ life – for her as well as for other inhabitants of this city. The quote speaks of the same openness that Miriam holds so dear. Looking at Clarissa’s thoughts and feelings in this respect, we see that she never specifically comments on these aspects of freedom and openness but she indirectly connects them to her love of life in general: “[…] in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; 24 life; London; this moment of June” (MD, 4). Considering this, it is difficult to agree with Susan Squier’s opinion that “Clarissa confuses internal (individual) events with external (general) occurrences […]. In fact, she seems unable to separate the beloved city around her from her love of life itself” (1985: 65-6). It is not so much a confusion of the two spheres or the inability to separate them but rather the impossibility to do so. Both the external occurrences and the city are closely interrelated with the protagonist’s thoughts and feelings – a literary devise used by Woolf which will be discussed later – and in this sense her ‘love of life’ is indeed inseparable from the city she loves to live and walk around in.

The next point in Bronfen’s definition describes exterior places as exciting and mysterious spaces that are full of possible adventures and discoveries. This specific definition certainly holds true in connection with the city space of London in The Tunnel and is one of the aspects that makes it all the more attractive for Miriam: “A strength was piling up within her. She would go out unregretfully […] and up through wonderful unknown streets, not her own streets, till she found Holborn and then up and round through the squares” (T, 76-7). It is the same effect that Bronfen describes in connection with Honeycomb, the novel preceding The Tunnel in the Pilgrimage series: “London’s streets appear refreshingly open since they allow for movement; they contain a cheerful lightness since she may encounter the unfamiliar there. As in Hanover, Miriam attempts to appropriate and gain access to foreign localities by traversing them” (1999: 17).

The difference between the worlds Miriam and Clarissa live in respectively seem to have an impact on this aspect of exploration and the new. While Miriam, in her early twenties, is in a general situation of change and (social) insecurity, Clarissa is well established in her social circle and her life follows seemingly ﬁxed patterns established over time both in her marriage and within the social class she belongs to. So instead of seeing her encounters with London’s exterior spaces as adventures and chances for exploration, they are walks through entirely familiar territory. However, the sentiment of excitement is not completely absent from the novel. It is taken up by the next generation, so to speak, when Elizabeth gets on that omnibus and decides, on a whim, to go a little further to the Strand. With this decision she goes where “no Dalloways came […] daily” which makes her feel like “a pioneer, a stray, venturing, trusting” (MD, 100). On a smaller scale, this goes along with Parson’s deﬁnition of the city as open and migrational and a space for the Other in oneself and other people (cf. 2000: 9). What Elizabeth does here goes against the values and (gender) roles that have come with her upbringing and social class. Yet within her she feels

25 the need to go to a different part of the city – ‘migrating’ there for a while to dream of her innermost wish to get a profession.

Elizabeth’s act goes hand in hand with another aspect of city space. Her example shows that London has more to offer than just openness, freedom and excitement. The city presents itself as a highly diverse environment that provides a vast variety of possibilities and through this contributes to social change as it occurred in Modernism (see Wilson 1993: 47 and Burgess 1925: 21). As Miriam’s friends Jan and Mag put it: “London, my dear Miriam, is full of ideas” (T, 86). Especially Richardson’s young protagonist beneﬁts from this fertile atmosphere. She manages to build up a new life for herself – on her own and, even more notably, self-sufﬁciently. In Mrs Dalloway it is Septimus who alludes to this promising pull the city can have on someone searching for a new life. As opposed to Miriam’s story, however, Septimus’ has a more pessimistic ending: [He] had left home, a mere boy […] because he could see no future for a poet in Stroud; and so […] had gone to London leaving an absurd note behind him, such as great men have written, and the world has read later when the story of their struggles has become famous. London has swallowed many millions of young men called Smith; thought nothing of fantastic Christian names like Septimus with which their parents have thought to distinguish them. (MD, 63)

There is yet another character in Mrs Dalloway who has dreamt of a new life in London and is now even quicker than Septimus to realise that not everything is better in the big city. When we meet Maisie Johnson she has only just arrived in London and, walking through Regent’s Park, has had an encounter with Rezia and Septimus Warren Smith who “had given her quite a turn” and, it seems, greatly discouraged her: “Horror! horror! she wanted to cry. (She had left her people; they had warned her what would happen.) Why hadn’t she stayed at home? she cried, twisting the knob of the iron railing” (MD, 20).

It has been noted that urban writers (and in a way their characters) are responsible for making the vast picture of city space visible to others. This, however, can never be an all- encompassing representation because being part of the space the observers cannot help to have a relatively limited view. It also means that there is an inevitable connection between the descriptions of the city space and the observers’ character, experiences, feelings and moods. Even more so, it is impossible to consider one without the other, as these observers are at the same time the producers of space (see Parsons 2000: 1). To take this one step further, it is not only the writers and characters that serve to depict the city but this very depiction (and therefore the city itself) can be seen as a representation of the observer. This is actually what Bronfen suggests in her general notes on actual material spaces (cf. 1999: 28-30) which allow the conclusion that these spaces take an active part in the narratives in 26 one way or another and should not be seen as a mere background. Both novels discussed in this thesis show a close relationship between the physical outside spaces of London and the protagonists’ mindsets, although mediated by different techniques. Miriam’s impressions of a space (be it the city as a whole or specific areas) can vary strongly depending on her overall mood and the experiences she makes there. An example is the strong hate she expresses towards North London shortly after a humiliating cycling lesson she receives in Chalk Farm Road (cf. T, 144-5). In the case of Woolf’s writings it is almost the other way round: the surroundings serve the plot. Woolf chooses the streets Clarissa walks through according to their meaning so that they can underline and stress what she wants to express. This is also what leads to a ‘shifting’ of actual locations – a street or shop is there because she needs it to be there and not because it is ‘next’ on the map: “Virginia Woolf’s sense of London helps her to define the characters and her sense of the characters helps her to define London” (Daiches and Flower 1979: 89). Along the same lines, Squier argues that the city mirrors the ‘mindsets’ of the characters in Mrs Dalloway, in the sense that Peter, for example, sees young soldiers parading and follows young women on his way from Clarissa’s house to Regent’s Park, or Septimus encounters “lines of lunatics humiliatingly on public display” (Squier 1985: 112). In connection with this the example of Maisie Johnson offers another aspect of this relationship. While Miriam’s (descriptions of her) surroundings are inseparable from her moods, the sequence of Maisie Johnson portrays the complete opposite. Although the reader is given an insight into her mind after she had just been startled and slightly frightened by her encounter with Rezia and Septimus, the descriptions of the happenings around her appear a lot calmer than she feels, in turn making her horror even more palpable: And Maisie Johnson, as she joined that gently trudging, vaguely gazing, breeze-kissed company – squirrels perching and preening, sparrow fountains fluttering for crumbs, dogs busy with the railings, busy with each other, while the soft warm air washed over them and lent to the fixed unsurprised gaze with which they received life something whimsical and mollified – Maisie Johnson positively felt she must cry Oh! […] Horror! horror! (MD, 20)

All in all, it can be said that, while both novels use the city space as an indicator for the characters’ thoughts and feelings, Woolf’s London acts as a mirror while Richardson’s is more like a canvas or like rough outlines that Miriam then ﬁlls with colours according to her mood. Despite these differences in the speciﬁc descriptions of the city, Parsons observes a crucial similarity: both Woolf and Richardson depict a “tangible and walkable metropolis rather than a conceptual and […] unlocatable cosmopolis” which sets their writings apart from those of their male colleagues (cf. 2000: 14). It is, with some restrictions, possible to follow the characters around on their wanderings through London because they are

27 topographical novels, as David Daiches and John Flower (cf. 1979: 82-3) put it in connection with Mrs Dalloway. As Parsons’ argues, both novels show the city closer to the everyday lives of their inhabitants rather than as a strictly planned space. The difference is that Richardson is more general in naming streets or buildings, while Woolf is very precise in describing the characters’ surroundings, despite the aforementioned ‘shifting’ of locations, which can cause some initial confusion.

Coming back to the Modernist aspect in the depiction of city space, three of Williams’ themes of metropolitan development of the time (see 1989: 60-2) are signiﬁcant for an analysis of The Tunnel and Mrs Dalloway. On the one end of the spectrum there is the ﬁrst theme of the city crowd as a large group of strangers and the second, related, theme of the isolated individual. The best example for these are Septimus and Rezia. She strongly feels that she is, and must be, utterly alone with the misery of her and her husband’s existence: “People must notice; people must see. […] She looked at the crowd. Help, help! she wanted to cry out to butchers’ boys and women. Help! […] But failure one conceals. She must take him away into some park” (MD, 12). Her feeling of isolation is further heightened by her situation as an immigrant. The people around her seem different and distant to her: “People, she thought, […] the English people, with their children and their horses and their clothes, which she admired in a way; but they were ‘people’ now, because Septimus had said, ‘I will kill myself’; an awful thing to say” (MD, 12). As opposed to these two rather negatively connoted aspects, the novels in question also show numerous examples of Williams’ theme of the sentiment of community and ‘neighbourliness’. Especially Miriam constantly alludes to the community of ‘Londoners’: […] their consciousness of being Londoners, living in London, was going about happy, the minute they were outside their houses, looking at nothing and feeling everything, like people wandering happily from room to room in a well-known house at some time when everybody’s attention was turned away by a festival or catastrophe.” (T, 156)

For Miriam community is not so much important as a group that provides help and support, in Williams’ sense, but rather as an indicator for ‘belonging’. Nevertheless, it also functions as a source of strength for her. It is above all the feeling of being a part of the city space and its community that helps her in achieving her self-sufﬁciency. In the early morning after a long night of caring for Miss Dear, who had fallen ill, Miriam feels her spirit coming back together with the awakening city around her: Everybody was getting up. ‘London was getting up.’ […] that feeling when you live right in London, of being a Londoner, the thing that made it enough to be a Londoner, getting up, in London; the thing that made real Londoners different from every one else, going about with a sense that made them alive. The very idea of living anywhere but in London […] produced a blank sensation in the heart. […] ‘London’s got me. It’s taking my health, and 28 eating up my youth. It may as well have what remains. . . .’ […] Now, once she was free again, to be just a Londoner, who would ask nothing more of life? It would be the answer to all questions; the perfect unfailing thing, guiding all one’s decisions. And an ill-paid clerkship was its best possible protection; keeping one at a quiet centre, alone in a little room, untouched by human relationships, undisturbed by the necessity of being anything. […] She would be again, soon . . . not a woman . . . a Londoner. (T, 265-6)

Clarissa, just like Miriam and Virginia Woolf herself, feels a genuine “kinship with all citydwellers”, as Squier (1985: 96) puts it. Even more so, Clarissa comments on her becoming a part of the city after her death, forming a connection to all its past and future inhabitants and consoling herself to some extend “that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and ﬂow of things, here, there, she survived, […] she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home” (MD, 7). This is a sentiment that is, in a way, later conﬁrmed by Peter who, remembering a bus ride with Clarissa, takes it even further by saying that “[s]he was all that. So that to know her, or anyone, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places” (MD, 111).

Yet Woolf also shows examples of the negative sides of such a city community. When the car breaks down in Bond Street where Clarissa is shopping for ﬂowers, the instant rumours about the car’s passenger create a sense of community and order “falling indeed with something of a cloud’s sudden sobriety and stillness upon faces which a second before had been utterly disorderly” (MD, 11). However, beneath this display of ‘unity’ lies a critique of the grip that gossip and a possible encounter with royalty has on society, uniting people from all classes who would never be seen as ‘one’ under normal circumstances. The irony of Peter Walsh’s comments on the “communal spirit of London” (MD, 110), when he sees the ambulance that takes Septimus’ body away after his suicide, is a further instance in the novel that conveys this kind of a ‘false’ sense of community. Peter, after all, basically praises and is part of the society that kills Septimus instead of supporting him (see also Squier 1985: 113-4).

Being such London-centred novels, spaces outside the city only make a few minor appearances in The Tunnel and Mrs Dalloway. While Miriam leaves London only to visit friends and family and for short periods of time during the summer holidays (e.g. her cycling trip), Clarissa does not leave the city at all throughout the entire novel. It is also important to note that all places outside of London are put in relation to the city in one way or another; this is most prominent in Miriam’s visits to the ‘outside world’. Bronfen sums this up best in her assertion that the exterior space within London is “protective and separate from the rest of the world” (1999: 20) providing Miriam with both freedom and protection:

29 What a good thing she had not written promising to go [to Alma]. She would be in London, safe in Kenneth Street for Sunday. Mag was quite right; going away unsettled you for the week […]; the London week-end could begin […] I’ll never stir out of London again. The girls are right. It isn’t worth it. (T, 146)

In opposition to this, most places outside of London are collectively viewed as anti- spaces (cf. Bronfen 1999: 18). It almost seems as if this ‘inside’ space needs to be protected from the rest because “the London life was sacred and secret, away from everything else in the world. It would disappear if one had ties outside” (T, 89). Although Miriam might even enjoy some of those trips, she never fails to declare her delight in getting or being back. Just like with London spaces themselves, this joy in turn is reflected by these ‘foreign’ places she visits making them more colourful and attractive in hindsight. The best example for all these different sentiments is Chapter VI (T, 109-35) in which we follow Miriam on a train ride back to London after she has spent her first weekend at her friend Alma’s house. After shivering in the cold waiting for the train, commenting that “[t]hey are not my sort of people” (T, 109) and that she “need not go down again” (T, 110), she finally sees “the black engine, the brown, white-panelled carriages, warm and alive” (T, 109). She gets into one of these carriages and suddenly her whole demeanour changes: “She breathed deeply, safe, shut in and moving on. With an unnecessarily vigorous swing of her arms, she hoisted her pilgrim basket on to the rack. Of course, she murmured smiling, of course I shall go down again” (T, 110). During the train ride she revisits her memories of the weekend’s encounters and experiences, remembering them in great detail with all the emotions she went through. The arrival at her destination pulls her back into her present and this time it is London that makes her change her mind: “The train stopped. Better not go down again. There was something all wrong in it. […] Here in London it seemed wrong” (T, 132). In this sequence we first have the distraught feeling of being away from London, followed by the promise of return rendering the outside space less frightening and even attractive. Yet in the end the pleasure of actually being back in the city lets her dismiss all thoughts of ever again going away from its safety. In the theory chapter (see page 9) I have raised the question whether Bronfen’s general assessment of outside-London spaces as anti-spaces can be applied to other literary texts. In the case of Clarissa’s descriptions of and associations with Bourton we are certainly not presented with an anti-space. Even taking into account that she is in a melancholic mood and longs for what now only exists in her memories, it is safe to say that this country home represents a place of freedom and protection for her. Her daughter, Elizabeth, even states a preference for the country over the city. Although she takes pleasure in the opportunities the city has to offer (see Chapter 3.2.1, “Areas and the Semantics of Space”), she would rather flee from it

30 because in the closely knit society of London the expectations of her as a young woman are ever present: People were beginning to compare her to poplar trees, early dawn, hyacinths, fawns, running water, and garden lilies; and it made her life a burden to her, for she so much preferred being left alone to do what she liked in the country, but they would compare her to lilies, and she had to go to parties, and London was so dreary compared with being alone in the country with her father and the dogs. (MD, 98) But The Tunnel also offers one single but significant exception to those ‘anti-spaces’ outside of London: the village and hotel Miriam stays at during her cycling trip. Although she is at first opposed to the idea of being held up for a whole night, a certain sense of excitement suddenly fills her. Once again it is her innate desire for adventure awakened by an unfamiliar experience (“How did you stay in hotels . . .” (T, 235)) that makes this place so much more attractive than any of the others she visits and almost equal to London. Later at night she begins to fully relish her situation: The throbbing of her heart shook the room. Something was telling the room that she was the happiest thing in existence. […] The more she relinquished the idea of harm and danger, the nearer and more intimate the room became. . . . No one can prevent my being alone in a strange place, near to things and loving them. (T, 235 and 237)

It has already been said that Clarissa only leaves London in her thoughts and memories of the past. Just like in The Tunnel, Clarissa’s ‘outside spaces’ are interconnected with the city space with the difference that there is a direct, almost material link between them – London’s landmarks act as triggers for her memories, transporting her, for example, from her walk in St James’s Park to Peter’s marriage proposal at Bourton (see MD, 6). Often these ‘walks in the past’ run parallel with her present and it becomes almost impossible to make a clear distinction between the two at times as, for example, right at the novel’s beginning. Stepping out of her front door in Dean’s Yard, Clarissa thinks, […] what a morning – fresh as if issued to children on a beach. What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could here now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early mornings […]. (MD, 3)

Such moments of triggered memories of outside-London spaces also happen to Miriam, although the connection between the ‘real world’ and the remembered past seems to be much looser than in Mrs Dalloway. When she sits in her room on the bed looking at the “awful, faded and worn” carpet shortly after moving in she decides that it is, nevertheless, “right, in this room. . . . This is the furnished room, one room. I have come to it” (T, 17). All this leads her thoughts to the past events that brought her there – recounts of all the other places she has stayed at – until we once more ‘arrive’ back in her present room in Tansley Street “[w]hen she turned out the gas” to go to sleep (T, 21). 31 3.2.1 Areas and the Semantics of Space

After the general discussion of London as a city space, the following subchapter is a more detailed analysis of the four parts of London which play the most important role for the characters and the plots of the novels: Bloomsbury, Westminster and St James’s, the West End and the area around the Strand, and North London. The discussion of these four city spaces will again be used to draw conclusions about the identities of those characters commenting on them. The first two are important because they are the areas where Miriam and Clarissa live and mostly move in respectively. The West End and Strand areas are of interest for this chapter because they are a ‘place of daring’ for both Mariam and Elizabeth, and a point in discussion will be whether this overlap has any specific meaning. For Miriam, North London is a strong example of an anti-space and, as such, it allows for an interesting analysis as an exception within the city. In addition to the areas’ descriptions and to the connotations attached to them by the characters, I will include general remarks on them from David Piper’s Companion Guide to London. Being first published in 1964, it contains thorough descriptions of all central city districts and is a lot closer to the time the novels are set in than present-day travel and city guides.

Of all districts of London, Bloomsbury seems to be the one most associated with literature, especially when it comes to the specific phase of Modernism that occurred around the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. In most people’s minds this area is inevitably linked to Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group she was part of. There are various Blue Plaques all around the area of Tavistock Square and Gordon Square commemorating the group’s members which included artists, writers, philosophers and economists. In addition to housing the British Museum and the University of London, it was to a great extent these individuals who contributed to giving Bloomsbury a reputation of “letters and learning”, as Piper (1968: 205) puts it. The area’s history began some time around 1660, “when the Earl of Southampton decided to lay out a square south of his house” (1968: 205) and squares are still its most defining feature; carrying the family names of its former residents such as Russell, Tavistock, Bedford or Woburn. The fact that this “fashionable fringe north of the west end” (1968: 207) lost much of its attractiveness and, according to Daiches and Flower (cf. 1979: 74), its respectability in the second half of the nineteenth century, did not keep Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson from moving there. Daiches and Flower (cf. 1979: 70) claim that Woolf’s decision might have been based on her positive judgment of Bloomsbury as a ‘highbrow district’ of scholarship and knowledge. As opposed to this, one might assume that it was the financial aspect that drew Richardson there in the 32 first place. She, just like her protagonist Miriam, moved there while working in a dental practice (cf. Watts 1995: viii), having no financial support apart from her own salary.

Although both writers are strongly connected to Bloomsbury, it plays a much greater part in The Tunnel than in Mrs Dalloway, being the place where Miriam and her friends Mag and Jan live. It is, however, particularly noteworthy that those two locations of all the places featured in the novel have fake street names (Tansley Street and Kenneth/Kennett Street8), while, for example, the address of the dentist’s practice Miriam works at (Wimpole Street, Marylebone) seems to be a genuine one.9 Any comment on this can only be a speculation. Considering that Dorothy Richardson did no longer live in that area when she started writing the Pilgrimage series, privacy could not really have been an issue, and the fact that she uses Wimpole Street speaks against the theory that Richardson changes names in order to further ‘ﬁctionalise’ her biography. Maybe the explanation is more psychological than practical – maybe it ‘hits too close to home’. At this point it becomes important to look at Miriam’s perception of Bloomsbury. Rejoicing in her decision to stay in London for the weekend instead of visiting her sisters or friends, she puts special emphasis on mentioning this area: “she safe in Bloomsbury, in the big house, in the kind streets, Kenneth Street; places they none of them knew” (T, 146). Could it be that the reader is one of those ‘outside’ who are not supposed to know this safe haven? She tells us about it but by changing the street names she keeps back a last part of the secret that she can only know herself. Here she “live[s], in freedom, hidden” (T, 29).

Whatever Richardson’s real reasons for this change of street names might have been, there is no mistaking the strong feeling of ‘home’ Bloomsbury provides for Miriam. She once takes a rather desperate ﬂight from North London, after a, for her, very embarrassing cycling lesson and both Miriam and her narration seem to slow down as soon as she is in her beloved surroundings once more: When the bus stopped at Gower Street, the tower of St Pancras church came into sight soaring majestically up, screened by trees. […] Her feet trampled happily across the square of polished roadway patterned with shadows, and along the quiet clean sunlit pavement behind the gardens. It was always bright and clean and happy there, like the pavement of a road behind a sea-front. The sound of a mail van, rattling heavily along Woburn Place, changed to a soft rumble as she turned in between the great houses of

8 Both spellings are used in the novel for the same street – Kennett Street on pages 30 and 77, and Kenneth Street on pages 146, 152 and 164. From here on, I will use the spelling of Kenneth Street because it is the more common one.

9 The references for Tansley and Kenneth Street on the maps (i.e. {Fig. 1, 1} and {Fig. 1, 3} respectively) show approximate locations according to clues given in The Tunnel. 33 Tansley Street and walked along its silent corridor of afternoon light. Sparrows were cheeping in the stillness.” (T, 145)

Miriam is always careful to draw a protective boundary between her beloved Bloomsbury and everything north of it – she actively builds these “edges of mutual distrust” and suspicion that Miles et al. (2004: 349) mention in connection with the production of space and its border zones that distinguish it from the Other. For her this “borderland” (T, 29) is Euston Road {Fig. 1, 4}, “by day and by night, her unsleeping guardian, the rim of the world beyond which lay the northern suburbs, banished” (T, 15). She even greets it, treating it as a friend, after she comes back from visiting Miss Dear at the hospital for the second time, an encounter and surroundings she did not particularly enjoy: “Hallo, old Euston Road, beloved of my soul, my own country, my native heath” (T, 256). This might seem like a rather strong and overly emotional reaction but, in fact, all these examples of Miriam describing her love for Bloomsbury show the same fusion of her perception of space and her present mood as it occurs in connection with London space as a whole. Of all the London areas she visits, Bloomsbury is ‘hers’ the most. Coming back to what was said about its reputation at the end of the nineteenth century, it seems to perfectly ﬁt Miriam’s character and story: fallen slightly out of favour, the area’s reputation is somewhere between this loss of respectability and the scholarly background of museums and the university. Much the same goes for Miriam herself: after her father’s bankruptcy she is no longer considered a part of the society she grew up in while still cherishing the higher education she received and participating in lectures, literature and theatre.

Although this district of “letters and learning” (Piper 1968: 205) was as central for Woolf as it was for Richardson, it only plays a marginal role in Mrs Dalloway. Septimus Warren Smith lived in “a room off the Euston Road” (MD, 63) when he first came to London and he and Rezia move into lodgings in one of “[t]hese old Bloomsbury houses” (MD, 67) when they come back from Italy as a married couple. But the same place that is a safe haven and a fertile area to start a new life in for Miriam, is the place of downfall for Septimus. This fall already begins with his initial move to London. It has been said before that it is the city and its scale that “has swallowed up many millions of young men called Smith” (MD, 63) but it is in particular Euston Road that points to the direct influence of the area on Septimus’ demise as the following passage illustrates: Lodging off the Euston Road, there were experiences, again experiences, such as change a face in two years from a pink innocent oval to a face lean, contracted, hostile. […] flowered from vanity, ambition, idealism, passion, loneliness, courage, laziness, the usual seeds, which all muddled up (in a room off the Euston Road), made him shy, and stammering, made him anxious to improve himself […]. (MD, 63)

34 Even more telling is the fact that Bloomsbury is the place of Septimus’ suicide. When all his other ‘options’ for killing himself fail, one of his last thoughts is that “[t]here remained only the window, the large Bloomsbury lodging-house window” (MD, 108). In addition, Daiches and Flower (1979: 83) draw the, in my opinion somewhat far-fetched, conclusion that Clarissa’s identiﬁcation with Septimus and his death also symbolises an afﬁliation of Westminster with Bloomsbury.

Clarissa, incidentally, claims to love every aspect of London (see e.g. MD, 4). But does she really? At least judging from her life included in the novel, she hardly ever wanders too far from Westminster and the inner city. Elizabeth, who is in a way a development of Clarissa, is the one who starts exploring the other parts by going to the Strand; she is, in fact, the only character in Mrs Dalloway to walk east instead of north. This is also exemplary for the difference between Clarissa and Miriam and the connection between the latter and Elizabeth. Miriam moves in various areas (and social circles) of London whereas Clarissa never leaves familiar ground. Walking through St James’s Park, this “immemorially and inescapably royal” (lunch time) location for all the civil servants from the surrounding administrative buildings (cf. Piper 1968: 137), it is this very air of a higher society and purpose that translates to the beauty Clarissa sees in this place: June had drawn out every leaf on the trees. The mothers of Pimlico gave suck to their young. Messages were passing from the Fleet to the Admiralty. Arlington Street and Piccadilly seemed to chafe the very air in the Park and lift its leaves hotly, brilliantly, on waves of that divine vitality which Clarissa loved. To dance, to ride, she had adored all that. (MD, 5)

It is a strong statement in terms of Clarissa’s character that the task of “anatomizing the flawed bourgeois civilization” (Squire 1985: 94) mostly falls to other focalizers – as opposed to Miriam who herself constantly evaluates the areas she moves in. In the same way that the narration sometimes zooms further away from the consciousness of the characters in Mrs Dalloway, some of these rare instances are used to present a broader picture of the discussed space, providing some of the sharpest criticism. As a continuation of Woolf’s comment on the community formed by gossip, we follow the car with the mysterious passenger all the way from Bond Street to Buckingham Palace and hear the reactions of various characters to the encounter along the way. “Shawled Molly Pratt with her flowers on the pavement” is one of those characters “and [she] would have tossed the price of a pot of beer” in the form of roses “into St James’s Street out of sheer light-heartedness and contempt of poverty” but the stern eye of the constable is immediately “upon her, discouraging an old Irishwoman’s loyalty” (MD, 14). Yet, while her offering for the supposed royal in the car is not welcome, “Queen Alexandra’s policeman approved” when “[t]he 35 sentries at St James’s saluted” (MD, 14). Richard Dalloway’s thoughts while passing Buckingham Palace, amongst other examples, function as a critique along the same lines. Walking past it, he sees a small crowd of people, which we have encountered before in the novel, waiting “[l]istlessly, yet confidently, poor people all of them” (MD, 14). As opposed to them, Richard, as a member of the House of Commons, is a part of this society the crowd can only watch from afar through iron fences. Thus, his thoughts and musings do not only judge the building itself but in a way also the people standing in front of it: […] (like an old prima donna facing the audience all in white) you can’t deny it a certain dignity, he considered, nor despise what it does, after all, stand to millions of people […] for a symbol, absurd though it is; a child with a box of bricks could have done better […]. (MD, 86)

On her way through this “essentially […] male district” of St James’s and Westminster, “laid out for the service, well-being and pleasure of the English gentleman” (Piper 1968: 56), Clarissa’s ultimate destination is Bond Street, where she wants to buy the flowers for her party {Fig. 2, 5}. In these surroundings that are an epitome of the society that she is part of but that keeps real power at a distance from her, as she is a woman after all, she walks to the shopping street in the area, “the fashion centre of London [that] reiterates the lesson of Clarissa’s female heritage” (Squier 1985: 101). Obviously, this is an area of comfort for her – a familiar and fixed point in her life: “Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in the morning in the season; its flags flying; its shops; no splash; no glitter; one roll of tweed in the shop where her father had bought his suits for fifty years; a few pearls; salmon on an ice- block” (MD, 8). As this example shows, even this ‘womanly’ place of shopping and fashion stands in connection with the men in her life. In addition to an allusion to her father’s habit of buying his suits there, she also remembers her Uncle William telling her that “a lady is known by her shoes and her gloves” (MD, 8) upon looking at the window display of the glove shop. What might, at first glance, seem like a passing comment, becomes an indirect foreshadowing of the new direction that the generation of women after Clarissa will take: “Gloves and shoes; she had a passion for gloves; but her own daughter, her Elizabeth, cared not a straw for either of then [sic]” (MD, 8).

For Miriam, Bond Street and the area around it is everything but a place of comfort. Mr Hancock asks her to buy “some powder and a puff” (T, 54) for a dressing room at Wimpole Street, clearly believing this to be a perfect task for a woman. However, as we can read her thoughts, we ﬁnd out that quite the opposite is the case:

36 Miriam shrank. Once in a chemist’s shop, in a strong Burlington Arcade10 west-end mood, buying some scent, she had seized and bought a little box […] but that was different to asking openly for powder and a puff . . . la Dorine de Dorin, Paris was secret and wonderful. . . . ‘I’ll try,’ she said bravely and heard the familiar little sympathetic laugh. (T, 54) This in a way shows her as a character somewhat between Clarissa’s unquestioning love for Bond Street and its offerings and Elizabeth’s disinterest in any of them. It is hard to say what exactly prompts Miriam’s unease. She calls her impulse to buy something considered as decidedly feminine “a strong Burlington Arcade west-end mood” (T, 54), thus giving an insight into her perception of this area as well as supporting those of Squier (see 1985: 101) and Piper (see 1968: 76). However, this is not Miriam’s only association with the Bond Street area. For her it is also part of the scientific world. She visits the Royal Institution11 in Albemarle Street {Fig. 2, 4} with Mr Hancock and, at least at first, expresses both admiration and respect for this community she wants to be part of: “She must find out whether one had to dress and exactly how one got in. Albemarle Street. . . . It all went on in Albemarle Street. […] To sit hearing the very best in the intellectual life of London, the very best science there was; the inner circle suddenly open […]” (T, 100).

After discussing Miriam’s and Clarissa’s respective ‘home areas’ and their implications for the characters, we now move on to Miriam’s and Elizabeth’s place of “daring” (T, 184) – Fleet Street and the Strand. Walking home from work early on in the novel, Miriam provides the reader with an impression of the area that wakes her from a daydream: When she came to herself she was in the Strand. She walked on a little and turned aside to look at a jeweller’s window and consider being in the Strand at night. Most of the shops were still open. The trafﬁc was still in full tide. […] There was a sort of commonness about the Strand, not like the cheerful commonness of Oxford Street, more like the City with its many sudden restaurants. She walked on. But there were theatres also, linking it up with the West End […]. (T, 75)

Apart from giving a ﬁrst impression of Miriam’s perception, this sequence also shows the Strand area as a middle ground between St James’s (and Westminster) and Bloomsbury. There are still shops, even jeweller’s, here but it is characterised by “a sort of commonness” (T, 75) which clearly distinguishes it from the riches of Bond Street, for example. It is also the connection to the West End, which Miriam holds so dear for its

10 “Farther along Burlington Gardens […] is another enclave more feminine perhaps than masculine: the opening into Burlington Arcade, that runs through into Piccadilly.” (Piper 1968: 76)

11 The Royal Institution “[…] was founded in 1799 for the ‘promotion, diffusion and extension of scientiﬁc knowledge’; here Humphrey Davy lectured, and later that great, good and most modest of geniuses Michael Faraday, demonstrated the dangerous wonders of electricity.” (Piper 1968: 85) 37 theatres and the new experiences she makes there.12 Piper (1968: 283) speaks of a “transition” from Westminster into City which “is not immediately apparent” and yet, as opposed to the administrative function of most of St James’s buildings, “the two major products for which Fleet Street was and is famous are lawyers and the printed word” (1968: 277). This is exactly what draws Elizabeth in its direction, away from her home in Westminster. Almost carelessly, it seems, she decides to stay on the bus: “Oh, she would like to go a little farther. Another penny to the Strand? Here was another penny, then. She would go up the Strand” (MD, 99). As opposed to Piper, she does note the change around her (“It was quite different here from Westminster […]. It was so serious; it was so busy.” (MD, 99)) and it is this difference that inspires her: “In short, she would like to have a profession. She would become a doctor, a farmer, possibly go into Parliament if she found it necessary, all because of the Strand” (MD, 99). Note how she does not even consider that she, as a woman of her time, might not be able to “go into Parliament”. What matters is that she might see a necessity to do so. To her, this area of London stands for a place where her gender is no longer an issue or even point of discussion. Here “minds [are] eternally occupied not with trivial chatterings (comparing women to poplars – which was rather exciting, of course, but very silly), but with thoughts of ships, of business, of law, of administration” (MD, 99-100). Her surroundings make her bold – at least in her thoughts and ambitions because she, at the same time, admits that it would probably be better not to say anything to her parents about them, after all “[i]t seemed so silly” (MD, 100). Elizabeth feels that she wants to be part of this particular space and what it can potentially offer her. Yet, she also feels like an intruder, an explorer in “a strange house by night with a candle, on edge lest the owner should suddenly ﬂing wide his bedroom door and ask her business” (MD, 100). Despite her ambivalent feelings and slight insecurity, her role in the novel is one of going forward and can be seen as the, albeit tender, embodiment of the ongoing social change and change of gender roles at the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. She realises that “no Dalloways came down the Strand daily” and that “she was a pioneer, a stray, venturing, trusting” (MD, 100) but even more importantly, she does this as a young woman who choses to walk a different path than her mother – a mindset that is very similar to Miriam’s.

It has already been said in connection with the London city space that Miriam sees most outside-London spaces as anti-spaces. In her deﬁnition of the city’s exterior spaces, Bronfen (1999: 20) claims that these are always “protective and separated from the rest of the world” and as a consequence counts North London as one of those outside-London

12 The area and importance of the West End and its theatres will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 3.3, “Interior Space”. 38 spaces (cf. 1999: 21) which, in my opinion, is a rather controversial decision. There is no doubt that Miriam does not enjoy being in northern London and only goes there when forced to do so, the question is whether this justifies not counting it as a city space. We get the first taste of Miriam’s hatred for what she calls “the north” (e.g. T, 144) when she comes back from her first cycling lesson organised by Miss Szigmondy. It has to be stressed, however, that this “north” is around Chalk Farm Road, one of the main roads in the Borough of Camden – the very same borough that includes her beloved Bloomsbury. It is safe to assume, therefore, that most of her bad feelings towards this part of the city stem from her embarrassing experiences during the cycling lessons. For her this space, with everything and everyone that belongs to it, becomes paramount for what she had to ‘suffer’: How could any one think it was a place, like other places? It was a torture even to be in it, going through it. […] What an awful road, going on and on with nothing in it. I am shamed and helpless; helpless. […] It’s this part of London. […] The people are absolutely awful. They take cycling lessons quite coolly. They are not afraid of anybody. To them this part is the best bit of north London. They are that sort of people. They are all alike. All of them dislike me. I should die of being with them. Why is it that no one seems to know what north London is? They say it is healthy and open. Perhaps I shall meet someone who feels like I do about it, and would get ill and die there. It is not imagination. It is a real feeling that comes upon me. (T, 144) In addition to showing the influence of Miriam’s feeling on her perception of a space as a whole, this episode is an example of the role Euston Road plays as a ‘protector’ and as a marker for her process of Othering to form clearer borders for her space as the following passage demonstrates: The north London omnibus reached the tide of the Euston Road and pulled up at Portland Road station. Miriam got out, weak and ill. The first breath of the central air revived her. Standing there, the omnibus looked like any other omnibus. She crossed the road, averting her eyes from the north-going roads on either side of the church, and got into the inmost corner of another bus. She wanted to ride about, getting from bus to bus, inside London until her misery had passed. (T, 144-5)

As if for comic effect, Miriam is not spared another visit there on an outing with Miss Szigmondy. Having relished the idea of a hansom ride with her new friend of sorts, she is shocked to discover that the vehicle “had turned into the main road and was going north” (T, 156-7). Again she cannot help but translate her mood onto what she sees and she certainly does not hold back her sarcasm: “[…] suburban houses with gardens that tried to look pretty . . . an open silly prettiness like suburban ladies coming up to town for matinées . . . if there were artists living up here, it would not be worth while to go and see them” (T, 157).

39 3.2.2 Acoustic Space

Most descriptions of London and its areas up to this point have been examples drawn from the visual representation of space. However, both Mrs Dalloway and The Tunnel also include acoustic representations, adding another dimension to the visual descriptions discussed previously. Moving into her new room in Tansley Street {Fig. 1, 1} right at the beginning of the storyline in The Tunnel, we first follow Miriam into the house and up the stairs, always accompanied by her perceptions with the strong sense of comfort she feels there.13 The first indication as to what her own room means to her comes from her description of the sounds she hears: “The little brass knob [of the door to her room] rattled loosely in her hand and the hinge ran up the scale to a high squeak as she pushed open the door, and down again as it closed behind her neatly with a light wooden sound” (T, 12-3). It is especially striking how close to Miriam’s consciousness, i.e. slowed down and detailed, the narration is here – the discourse time even becomes slightly longer than the story time. This is not the first occasion on which she enters this room but it is a very important step to take as it is the place where she hopes to start building her new life. At this important moment her senses are clearly heightened and in those few seconds of opening this door to her own life, the sound of it is much more telling than any visual representation would be. What is more, the way the sounds are described reveals some of the space’s meaning for Miriam. When the door “closed behind her neatly”, it also effectively shuts out the rest of the world for the time she is in the room. The fact that it closes with a “light wooden sound” at the same time suggests that it does not shut her in but provides her with this combination of freedom and protection she cherishes in the spaces she loves (as e.g. the city space of London). There is another sequence in which Miriam directly links her happiness to the sounds of ‘home’: Now, I never felt so strong and happy. […] the Sunday morning sound of the kettle, with the air full of coming bells and the doors opening […] and shutting up and down the streets is perfect, again, and again; at seven o’clock in the silence, with the air coming in from the squares smelling like the country, is bliss. (T, 211) Here these ‘sounds of home’ include all those that belong to her space, those in her room and those out in the streets of Bloomsbury. This inclusion of the sounds of the exterior space are also a way to link the two spaces since it is the easiest way in which the outside is carried to the inside and, furthermore, here the sounds are not just representations they become the space and everything it encompasses.

13 This sequence of Miriam moving into Tansely Street will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 3.3, “Interior Space”. 40 As opposed to this ‘bringing in’, not hearing or not being heard is a very effective way of shutting someone out of a space. This is best illustrated by the end of Peter’s afternoon visit to Clarissa. She runs after him, to invite and remind him of her party in the evening, but he is eager to get away after their encounter did not go as he had wished. Following him, she has to “raise her voice against the roar of the open air” and is immediately “overwhelmed by the trafﬁc and the sound of all the clocks striking”, sounding “frail and thin and very far away” to Peter who simply shuts the door on her (cf. MD, 35). Outside of her house, Clarissa has no voice; the sounds of the city surrounding her are too loud and overrule her.

One of these sounds is “all the clocks striking” (MD, 35) which, in this case, is a reference to Big Ben and possibly also St Margaret’s {Fig. 2, 2}. Generally, both novels show clocks as voices of authority. In connection with Septimus and Rezia they, like Septimus’ doctor, “pointed out in chorus the supreme advantages of a sense of proportion” and “counselled submission” (MD, 75). After his suicide they take over the lead once more, the sound of them indicating the hour providing a lifeline Rezia can hold on to while she succumbs to the effects of the sedative: “The clock was striking – one, two, three: how sensible the sound was; compared with all this thumping and whispering; like Septimus himself. She was falling asleep. But the clock went on striking, four, ﬁve, six […]” (MD, 109). For Miriam, it is the hall clock at Wimpole Street that “gonged softly twice” reminding her to go back to work after her lunch break (cf. T, 61).

Apart from these smaller ‘time pieces’, there are three examples of larger ones, namely (church) bells, that play an important role in the novels: Big Ben, St Margaret’s and St Pancras. As discussed earlier in this thesis, the sound of Big Ben is a defining feature of Mrs Dalloway and its structure, functioning both on the level of plot as well as on the level of discourse. The sound of Big Ben punctuates the whole novel and reminds the characters (above all the protagonist) as well as the readers of the passing of time and thus of mortality and death. It is ever present and as much part of Clarissa’s London as the noise of the traffic. It is part of what makes her home her home: For having lived in Westminster – how many years now? over twenty – one feels even in the midst of traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa felt positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense […] before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. (MD, 3-4)

It provides a sort of order and familiar repetition to both the narration and the characters. Clarissa even draws parallels to the old lady living in a house opposite from her, whom she

41 has a habit of watching from her window. For a moment the clock and the old woman seem to become one: Big Ben struck the half-hour. How extraordinary it was, strange, yes touching to see the old lady (they had been neighbours ever so many years) move away from the window, as if she were attached to that sound, that string. Gigantic as it was, it had something to do with her. (MD, 93) There is also a parallel between these two passages: Clarissa stresses how long she has been living in this area and therefore in the neighbourhood of both Big Ben and the old lady. In fact, Clarissa herself is compared to St Margaret’s bells; the church that is situated across from Parliament Square on the north side of Westminster Abbey {Fig. 2, 2}. It became the parish church for the House of Commons in 1614 and is largely associated with high status weddings; e.g. that of Winston Churchill in 1908 (see Piper 1968: 105-8). The first one to make the connection between this little church and Clarissa is Peter, comparing the building to “a hostess who comes into her drawing-room on the very stroke of the hour and finds her guests there already” (MD, 37) summoned by its louder and bigger colleague Big Ben (also see MD, 93). Peter’s comparison between the two might even provide the best characterisation of Clarissa, as well as of their relationship to each other, in the whole novel: […] her voice, being the voice of the hostess, is reluctant to inflict its individuality. Some grief for the past holds it back; some concern for the present. […] the sound of St Margaret’s glides into the recesses of the heart and buries itself in ring after ring of sound, like something alive which wants to confide itself, to disperse itself, to be, with a tremor of delight, at rest […] (MD, 37)

Even Clarissa herself seems to be aware of this connection in a passage rendered mostly in free indirect discourse: […] but there the other clock, the clock which always struck two minutes after Big Ben, came shuffling in with its lap full of odds and ends, which it dumped down as if Big Ben were all very well with his majesty laying down the law, so solemn, so just, but she must remember all sorts of little things besides – Mrs Marsham, Ellie Henderson, glasses for ices – all sorts of little things came flooding and lapping and dancing in on the wake of that solemn stroke which lay flat like a bar of gold on the sea. […] Volubly, troublously, the late clock sounded, coming in on the wake of Big Ben, with its lap full of trifles. Beaten up, broken up by the assault of carriages, the brutality of vans, the eager advance of myriads of angular men, of flaunting women, the domes and spires of offices and hospitals, the last relics of this lap full of odds and ends seemed to break, like the spray of an exhausted wave, upon the body of Miss Kilman standing still in the street for a moment to mutter ‘It is the flesh.’ (MD, 93)

Although it is not explicitly mentioned that the “clock” is that of St Margaret’s, it can be assumed from the recurring comparison to Big Ben and the way the sound ‘breaks’ on Miss Kilman. This example also shows rather well the difference between Clarissa’s self- perception and the one that others have of her. While Peter focuses on the voice ‘the hostess’ cannot raise and the effect it has on him, the passage quoted above illustrates the hard work of keeping it all together but never being able to ‘catch up’ with its more prominent counterpart. In this respect, the use of personal pronouns is quite telling: Big Ben taking over 42 the male, the “other clock” taking up the female part. One could even argue that the lack of a name for this “other clock” is not unintentional either – representing a female presence which is nameless albeit not voiceless.

Despite being featured not as prominently as Big Ben, St Pancras {Fig. 1, 2} seems to be its equivalent for Miriam as it represents a constant presence in her living space. Interestingly, Piper assigns New St Pancras the role that Miriam gives Euston Road, namely “to mark the northern border of Bloomsbury”, having been built between 1819 and 1822 as a representation of “the new respectability and dignity of the area” (1968: 211-2). By waking Miriam up after her first night in her room in Tansley Street {Fig. 1, 1}, the bells of St Pancras become a wake up call of sorts for the novel’s events. They are the first sounds she hears that day, defining her new environment just like the squeaking of her door the evening before defined the room she moved into. The description of the bells’ sound is characterised by the same focus on detail and an illusion to musical scales: […] rapid scales, beginning at the top, coming with a loud full thump on the fourth note and finishing with a rush to the lowest which was hardly touched before the top note hung again in the air, sounding outdoors clean and clear while all the other notes still jangled together in her room. (T, 21) It is again the medium of sound that brings the outside space into the room, ‘clamouring’ there and filling it up. Miriam sits at her table, listening the way she listened to someone playing the violin in the neighbourhood the previous evening. But the chiming bells evoke a sudden happiness and excitement in her that can be compared to her relief of getting ‘behind’ Euston Road after her trip to north London: St Pancras bells began playing a hymn tune […] Miriam set hunched against the table listening for the ascending stages of the last line. The bells climbed gently up, made a faint flat dab at the last top note, left it in the air askew above the decorous little tune and rushed away down their scale as if to cover the impropriety. They clamoured recklessly mingling with Miriam’s shout of joy as they banged against the wooden walls of the window space. (T, 23)

In addition to the sounds that have already been discussed, the city – that is to say its inhabitants – has another sound to offer that greatly deﬁnes the production of this space: its inhabitants’ accents. In general, both novels offer examples in which minor characters or passing ﬁgures use an accent typical for Londoners, conveyed by alternative spelling that is used by Richardson as well as by Woolf. There is, for example, the man or boy that Miriam hears delivering newspapers in Tansley Street shouting “pypa” (T, 22), Edgar J. Watkiss in Bond Street “with his role of lead piping round his arm” who jokingly calls the mystery vehicle “[t]he Proime Minister’s kyar” (MD, 11) or Carrie Dampster who uses shortenings such as “m’dear” and “out ‘o sight” (MD, 20). There are no main characters in Mrs Dalloway, however,

43 who speak in any pronounced accent. Considering the high social class they belong to, this is not particularly surprising. Elizabeth, greeting Peter with “How d’y do?” (MD, 35), is the only exception, but this mostly points towards her belonging to a different generation.

The accents used in The Tunnel are a rather different matter. While the general tone is more or less the same as in Mrs Dalloway, there are a few characters that have very pronounced accents in addition to the novel’s overall theme of languages and their use. Mr and Mrs Orly’s and their son Mr Leyton’s speech is by far the most striking of all the characters’ idioms and will be used here exemplarily for all of them. Running a dentist’s practice in a respected medical district such as Wimpole Street, the family is certainly part of a social class not so different from the Dalloways’. Nevertheless, their strong London accent is apparent in everything they say; even Miriam’s name is no exception, getting shortened from Henderson to “Miss Hends” (e.g. T, 32), “Miss Hens’n” (e.g. T, 55) or “Miss Hens’” (e.g. T, 55). Other such shortenings include “will ya” (e.g. T, 32), “‘em” [them] (e.g. T, 38), “‘v’” [have] (e.g. T, 39), “sawl right” [it is all right] (T, 44), “givya” (e.g. T, 45), “‘ze” [has he] (e.g. T, 55), “s’aafnoon” [this afternoon] (T, 57) and “lit’ry” [literary] (e.g. T, 64). The transcription of their accents is not limited to those shortenings but also brings some of the typical London pronunciations to paper: “a bit of chicking or somethin’” (T, 55), “tahsome” [tiresome] (T, 62), “You haven’t answd fathez queshun” (T, 170) or “si’y” [silly] (e.g. T, 170). Their speech naturally also features typical expressions and phrasings that clearly belong to the vernacular: “I shan’t want those things – just pop ‘em out of sight” (T, 38), “my blooming head” or “blasted head” (T, 57). Not knowing much about their background and how much inﬂuence Dorothy Richardson’s employers might have had on these characters, it is hard to judge the full implication of this extensive use of the vernacular. As an intrinsic aspect of these three ﬁctional characters it certainly serves to heighten the overall atmosphere of a relaxed and cordial working environment and a space for Miriam that feels like home.

3.3 Interior Space

This chapter’s outline is based on Bronfen’s concept of the three interior spaces (see 1999: 18-20), the first of which are the private sites of ‘solitude and nowhere’ – Miriam’s room in Tansley Street {Fig. 1, 1} and the Dalloways’ home in Dean’s Yard {Fig. 2, 1}. The analysis of these spaces should determine what meaning their respective homes have for the characters and whether there is a connection between these homes and their locations. I also aim to verify the differences in ‘ownership’ and its importance for the two women. 44 An important aspect of these private sites is that they offer both freedom and protection; a characteristic they share with London’s exterior spaces. In Miriam’s case, the comparison between Bloomsbury and the house and her room in Tansley Street makes this shared trait quite apparent. First of all, there is a very strong sense of being at home that she already has when she moves into the house at the beginning of The Tunnel as “the welcome of the place fell upon her” (T, 11). The use of bright colours and light in her descriptions of the house and her room are equally revealing of her feelings as the sounds when she opens and closes the door to this room for the first time: the skylight above the staircase is “blue and gold with light, its cracks threads of bright gold” (T, 12), her own little room “half dark shadow and half brilliant sunlight” (T, 13). The staircase leading to her room is “beckoning” her to come further inside and the outside world starts to blur and almost fades away once she ascends the stairs (see T, 12). When she finally stands in her room, the feeling of familiarity and belonging overwhelms Miriam: It was smaller then her memory of it. When she had stood in the middle of the floor with Mrs Bailey, she had looked at nothing but Mrs Bailey, waiting for the moment to ask about the rent. Coming upstairs she had felt that the room was hers and barely glanced at it when Mrs Bailey opened the door. […] She was surprised now at her familiarity with the detail of the room […] You know in advance when you are really following your life. These things are familiar because reality is here. […] However far you go out, you come back. . . . I am back now where I was before I began trying to do things like other people. I left home to get here. None of those things can touch me here. (T, 13)

This ‘being at home’ goes hand in hand with the already mentioned sense of security the house offers to Miriam: On the hall table lay a letter . . . from Alma […] Miriam gathered it up swiftly. No one knew her here . . . no past and no future . . . coming in and out unknown, in the present secret wonder. Pausing for a moment […], the letter out of sight, she held this consciousness. There was no sound in the house . . . its huge high thick walls held all the lodgers secure and apart, ﬁxed in richly enclosed rooms in the heart of London; secure from all the world that was not London […]. (T, 77)

This sequence in the hallway of the house in Tansley Street emphasises two aspects of security: it offers a safe haven from the outside world (including friends like Alma or outside- London spaces) and separates her from all other residents of the house, making her anonymous. However, this does not make her lodgings at Tansley Street a space that is altogether closed off from outside inﬂuences. Bronfen (cf. 1999: 19) argues that it is again and again “penetrated […] by the outside world” by both material ‘reminders’ of the outside space(s) and the sounds of the surrounding area, as it has been mentioned in the previous chapter. Miriam even actively encourages the city to come into her private space: “No need to trouble about the blind. London could come freely in day and night through the unscreened happy little panes; light and darkness and darkness and light. London, just outside all the time, […] always present in the depths of the air in the room“ (T, 16). It is essential to note

45 how she again mentions the dichotomy of light and darkness, which seem to be combined in her room. Although this private space is essentially a happy place for her, the darkness does prevail at times – especially when her mood changes. There is one sequence in which Miriam tries to write a letter, possibly to her sister, about her theatre evening with the Orlys. As soon as she writes the last sentence, she becomes unhappy and the warm feeling of the room around her disappears (see T, 177). The more she thinks about it, the worse it gets until she finally rips the letter apart and all her bad feelings come crashing in with the weight of the whole room: The garret was stifling. Away from the brilliant window, the room was just as hot; the close thick smell of dust sickened her. She came back to the table, sitting as near as possible to the open. […] Her heart beat heavily in the stifling room. Her head ached and her eyes were tired. She was too tired to walk; and there was no money; barely enough for next week’s A.B.C. suppers. There was no comfort. It was May . . . in a stuffy dusty room. May. Her face quivered and her head sank upon the hot table. (T, 180)

Despite short intervals of this sort of tiredness and misery, the feeling of content and peace prevails: “To toss all the joys and happiness away and know that you are happy and free without anything. That you cannot escape being happy and free” (T, 98). Being anonymous plays a very important role in that and, in addition, has a strong impact on the freedom which Miriam’s very own interior space embodies – here she is free from her past and can marvel at the “present secret wonder” (T, 77) undisturbed. Having a room of her own gives her the freedom to be herself and do as she pleases: “I am up here alone, frantically happy. […] The only thing to do is either to be silent or make cheerful noises. Bellow. If you do that too much, people don’t like it. You can only keep on making cheerful noises if you are quite alone” (T, 211). Here Miriam is free from all the restraints society puts on her – bellowing in joy if she feels like it. Coming home from work one evening she comments that she feels “that her day was beginning” and that “[n]ights and days were all one day; all hers, unlimited” (T, 30). She is so overwhelmed by this new freedom that it almost seems as if she does not know what to do with it at ﬁrst: She left her things half unpacked about the ﬂoor and settled herself on the bed under the gas jet with The Voyage of the Beagle. Unpacking had been a distraction from the glory [of the room], very nice, getting things straight. But there was no need to do anything or think about anything . . . ever, here. No interruption, no one watching or speculating or treating one in some particular way that had to be met. […] Every evening here would have a glory, but not the same kind of glory. Reading would be more of a distraction than unpacking. She read a few lines. They had a fresh attractive meaning. Reading would be real. The dull adventures of the Beagle looking real, coming along through reality. She put the book on her knee and once more met the clear brown shock of her room. (T, 17)

Similar to the St Pancras’ bells, this space sets something in motion. It gives Miriam a secure basis from which she can go outside to gather new experiences while knowing that she has a place to come back to where she can either rejoice in the new things she has learned or lick

46 her wounds and recover. This is best illustrated by Miriam’s own thoughts before she makes her trip to North London with Miss Szigmondy: “In half an hour the adventure would begin and go on and be over. The room would not be in it. Something nice, or horrible, would come back. But the room would not be changed” (T, 154).

When it comes to living spaces, Clarissa’s situation and her perception of her private space is quite different from Miriam’s. As most women of Clarissa’s status, the family home in Dean’s Yard {Fig. 2, 1} does not belong to her but it is her role to reside over its affairs – a role that she seemingly takes much pride in: She would take her silks […] down into the drawing-room, for she must also write, and see that things generally were more of less in order. Strange, she thought, pausing on the landing, and assembling that diamond shape, that single person, strange how a mistress knows the very moment, the very temper of the house! (MD, 28)

Even though she theoretically has more right to call this house her own than Miriam, Clarissa’s private space of ‘solitude and nowhere’ is restricted to her bedroom at the very top of the house – “an attic room” (e.g. MD, 23) which has been assigned to her by her husband Richard to give her more rest.14 Although he most likely has her best interests in mind, this, nevertheless, comes very close to a social downgrading, especially considering the fact that the upper part of the houses of the higher social classes in England were traditionally only used as servant quarters and for nurseries. She never openly challenges this situation but from her passing comments and her recitation of ‘rules for women’ when we ﬁrst follow her up those stairs to her room, we can read a slight cynicism and a feeling of unhappiness for being banned to this place: There was an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room. Women must put off their rich apparel. At midday they must disrobe. […] The sheets were clean, tight stretched in a broad white band from side to side. Narrower and narrower would her bed be. […] For the House sat so long that Richard insisted, after her illness, that she must sleep undisturbed. […] So the room was an attic, the bed narrow; and lying there reading, for she slept badly, she could not dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth which clung to her like a sheet. (MD, 23)

A bit later on in the novel, the horror of being narrowed down and conﬁned to this attic room grips her harder and she almost seems to scream out: “It was all over for her. The sheet was stretched and the bed narrow. She had gone up into the tower alone and left them blackberrying in the sun. The door had shut” (MD, 34). So for her, this ‘room of her own’ is more like a ‘dungeon’ than the starting point for a new life that it is for Miriam.

14 There is, of course, also her drawing room but the significance of that room will be discussed later on in chapter 3.5, “Gendered Space”. 47 Even though Clarissa’s private site might lack the freedom of Miriam’s, the house at Dean’s Yard still provides her with the same sense of security and home. Twice she compares herself to a nun “withdrawing” (MD, 23), “who has left the world and feels fold round her the familiar veils and the response to old devotions” (MD, 22): It was her life, and, bending her head over the hall table, she bowed beneath the influence, felt blessed and purified, saying to herself […] how moments like this are buds on the tree of life, flowers of darkness they are, she thought (as if some lovely rose had blossomed for her eyes only) […]. (MD, 22)

Next on Bronfen’s list of interior spaces are the islands – those places and spaces, apart from one’s own, that stand in close relation to the people ‘using’ them. Above all, these are Miriam’s work space and her friends’ ﬂats and rooms. The following analysis will help to determine if there are any such island spaces in Mrs Dalloway.

The most featured island space in The Tunnel is Miriam’s work place – the dentist’s practice in Wimpole Street {Fig. 3, 1}. Being a work environment, the atmosphere created by the three dentists, Miriam’s bosses, has a strong influence on the place’s importance for and impression on her. In a conversation with her friends, Mag and Jan, she discusses the differences between their offices: what they are allowed to do, which rules they have to follow (e.g. required clothes) and the people they work with. Although she envies the other women’s freedom, she also admits that “no restrictions were too high a price to pay for the privileges of her environment; the association with gentlemen, her quiet room, the house, the perpetual interest of the patients, the curious exciting streaks of social life, linking up with the past and carrying it forward on a more generous level” (T, 162-3). Especially Mr and Mrs Orly treat her like family and she could very well be a sister to Mr Leyton, considering their conversational tone. They include her in all the meals as an equal and, even more importantly, she is served as an equal at those meals. In comparison to the house’s servants, Miriam has a curious in- between status. There is one incident one day after tea time when Mr Orly asks her to stay a bit longer to play a new song with him. Miriam “basked in the friendly tones” while she is, at the same time, “[p]oised between the competing interests of many worlds” (T, 71). But when she reminds her boss that she should actually do her work at the practice, he waves it off and tells her to stay. This warmth that her employers show towards her is best illustrated by the room Miriam uses as an office. Throughout the day, she complains about it being “cold and stuffy”, the warmth of the radiator “not reach[ing] her” (T, 59). Especially shortly before tea time it becomes full of a “strange confused sadness” (T, 66). After her tea time with the Orlys, she comes back refreshed and happy and her room is completely transformed: “Her mind was alight with the sense of her many beckoning interests, aglow with fullness of life.

48 The thin piercing light cast upon her table by the single five-candle-power bulb, drawn low and screened by a green glass shade, was warm and friendly” (T, 72). She even goes as far as to see the house at Wimpole Street as her own, almost perceiving the others as “intruders” in their own space (cf. T, 68). One morning, being there earlier and having breakfast with the family, she envisions herself moving in: Life would be simplified if she could throw in her lot with them. Coming in to breakfast after the lesson had been a sort of home-coming. There were pleasant noises about the house; the family shouted carelessly to each other on the stairs, the schoolboy slid down the banisters; the usual subdued manner of the servants was modified by an air of being a possession of the house and liking it. They rushed quietly and happily about. […] It was home. (T, 172)

But even though the Orlys treat her like family, the social implications of the space and her position in it still deﬁne how she is perceived by others – attributions dictated by society which she cannot defeat. While Miriam is deﬁnitely not content with being put in a category so easily (see e.g. T, 196), she also takes pride in this dichotomy between her self- perception and the perception of others: How surprised the four friendly wealthy patients, especially the white-haired old aristocrat who was always pressing invitations upon [Mr Hancock], would have been, ignoring or treating her with the kindly consideration due to people of her station, if they could have seen inside [Mr Hancock’s] house yesterday and beheld her ensconced in the most comfortable chair in his drawing-room . . . talking to Miss Szigmondy. (T, 139)

Miriam’s relation to Mr Hancock himself is equally ambiguous. At first, they seem to form a bond and tender friendship; Miriam commenting that “[a]s long as he was there, the day lingered” and that “[s]he could go on, indefinitely, in this confident silence, preparing for the next day” (T, 73). This “quiet continuous companionship” (T, 73) changes abruptly after Mr Hancock’s cousins consider them too close and he, as a result, starts using a “brusque casual tone” with her, “a tone he sometimes used to the boys downstairs, or to cabman” (T, 204). This triggers an internal turmoil for Miriam that shows both her outrage and her recognition of her privileged status at the surgery: How did he dare to use it to her? It must cease instantly. It was not to be suffered for a moment. Not for a moment could she hold a position which would entitle any one, particularly any man, to speak to her in that – outrageous – official tone. Why not? It was the way of business people and officials all the world over. . . . Then he should have begun as he meant to go on. . . . I won’t endure it now. No one has ever spoken to me in that way – and no one shall, with impunity. I have been fortunate. They have spoilt me. . . . I should never have come, if I had found they had that sort of tone. It was his difference that made me come. […] The wonder of the Wimpole Street life was that it had not been so. (T, 204-5) This section again illustrates how important the members of a space are for the meaning it has for the experiencing subject. The workplace she usually calls a home suddenly seems to become insufferable for Miriam: “She found herself going upstairs breathing air thick with

49 pain. […] the room was stripped, a West End surgery, among scores of other West End surgeries, a prison claiming her by the bonds of the loathsome duties she had learned” (T, 206-7).

A second important island space for Miriam is the flat of her friends Mag and Jan. When she first goes to visit them in Kenneth Street {Fig. 1, 3}, she is hesitant to enter the house and goes “tremulously up the dark stairs” but as soon as she hears Mag’s voice the anxiousness disappears and “her happy feet stumbled on” (T, 79). Apart from her room at Tansley Street, this is clearly the place she feels most comfortable in. There are seemingly no limitations here and she can be as much herself as in her own home. It is the intimate familiarity with Mag and Jan that makes this space welcoming and ‘warm’: The powerful rounded square figure was in the leather armchair opposite the blaze, strongly moulded brown-knickered, black-stockinged legs comfortably crossed, struck firmly out between the heavy soft folds of a grey flannel dressing gown. The shoes had gone, grey woollen bedroom slippers blurred all but the shapely small ankles. Mag was lighting another cigarette, [Jan] von Bohlen was not doing needlework, the room settled suddenly to its best rich exciting blur. (T, 83-4)

As much as she cherishes the freedom of her own lodgings, Mag and Jan’s rooms are almost as important to her and create a similar feeling in her. This space poses no threats to her and is nearly as unlimited as her own room. She even ﬁnds something here that is missing from her home: she envies the women’s companionship and, therefore, joins them as often and for as long as she can, dreading the necessary departure: “‘Lord, it’s midnight –––’ The chill of the outside night, solitude and her cold empty room” (T, 95).

The only other ‘friend’ Miriam visits in London in The Tunnel is Miss Dear, a nurse she knows through her sister Eve. Miriam’s unwillingness to make those visits becomes most apparent in her descriptions of their meeting places – a hospital and Miss Dear’s room in Marylebone Road (“in that strip between Madame Tussaud’s and the turning into Baker Street” (T, 257)) {Fig. 3, 2}. The alcove in the hospital is a dark and “dreadful little enclosure in the dreadful dark hive of women, collected together only by poverty” (T, 245) and her descriptions of Miss Dear’s lodgings paint an even more frightful picture. Objectively speaking, the house’s desolate state that Miriam finds so repulsive is most likely not much worse than that of the lodgings Mag and Jan live in. When she first enters the house in Kenneth Street she talks of a “thick stale odour of rancid fried grease” (T, 79) but all that is forgotten once she hears Mag’s voice. But the house near Baker Street lacks a ‘friend’s voice’ she actually wants to hear and thus, for her, it stays as grim as her first descriptions of it:

50 Perhaps it had been Madame Tussaud’s that had made this row of houses generally invisible; perhaps their own awfulness. […] It had never occurred to her that the houses could be occupied. […] There was nothing in that strip between Madame Tussaud’s and the turning into Baker Street but the sense of exposure to grime. (T, 257)

As opposed to the two very open and (mostly) unlimited spaces of Wimpole Street and Kenneth Street that, at times, function almost like a second home for Miriam, there are also some limited island spaces. Bronfen (cf. 1999: 28) attests that whether a space is one or the other is a combination of “conventional semantic encoding” and the experiencing subject’s perception of it. The best example for such limited sites are the suburban homes of friends and of her sisters that Miriam visits. Even though she sometimes enjoys being there, in the end she is always happy to leave them behind. According to Bronfen (cf. 1999: 21) she perceives them as “stiﬂing” because they “fail to offer the excitement and unfamiliarity of the London island spaces”. I would argue that in addition to this, those island spaces that Miriam experiences as limited are those that most follow and reinforce the established social patterns and roles.15 On the whole, these particular spaces are limited but cannot be counted as anti-spaces because, as opposed to, for example, North London, she is not altogether opposed to going there.

In the same way as outside-London spaces only feature in Clarissa’s memory of them, it is hard to pinpoint any island spaces in Mrs Dalloway. Apart from the shops she goes to, Lady Bruton’s house is the only other London interior space that becomes a topic for Clarissa – and she is quite effectively excluded from it. The realisation that Richard is invited to the Lady’s lunch without her is one of the many blows she receives in the course of the novel. Keeping in mind that the plot is limited to one day, one should be careful not to over-interpret this lack of island spaces for Clarissa’s character. Nevertheless, not being invited is a crucial factor in her theme of exclusion and being left behind and pushed to the margins as in her own home: ‘Fear no more,’ said Clarissa. Fear no more the heat o’ the sun; for the shock of Lady Bruton asking Richard to lunch without her made the moment in which she had stood shiver, as a plant on the river-bed feels the shock of a passing oar and shivers; so she rocked; so she shivered. (MD, 22)

While all of the sites mentioned so far in this section clearly hold true to Bronfen’s deﬁnition of island spaces, her decision to put spaces such as theatres in this category is more debatable, in my opinion. They cannot be neutral spaces because, as opposed to the deﬁnition of those, theatres can be “assigned to […] people or ideas” (1999: 20). But then

15 A more detailed discussion of this speciﬁc aspect of limited (suburban) homes will follow in Chapter 3.5, “Gendered Space”. 51 again, also cafés and public transport, which Bronfen counts as neutral, are not absolutely free of connotations. I will, nevertheless, adhere to Bronfen’s categorisation. The reason for this is that her basic deﬁnitions of the three forms of interior space were built on her analysis of Richardson’s texts and, therefore, still hold true in general. Additionally, as I have mentioned in the theoretical background chapter, these categories are an intrinsic tool of my comparative analysis of The Tunnel and Mrs Dalloway.

Coming back to the category of island spaces, we now move to the the Strand/West End area which is a part of London Mariam, just like Elizabeth, has to ‘conquer’. Venturing there and into the theatre is definitely an adventure for her, which is interesting, because it is not the first time she goes there. After her night out with the Orlys, a theatre performance and dinner (see T, 177-80), she compares it with a week that she had spent with her sister Harriett prior to the events featured in The Tunnel, going to the theatre every single evening, enjoying “the great motionless curtain [that] shut them in in a life where everything else in the world faded away and was forgotten” (T, 178). We do not follow her on the first trip she makes to the theatre on her own. We only hear of it when she goes back a week later: As soon as she felt herself flying towards her bourne, the fears that last week’s magic would have disappeared left her altogether. Last week had been wonderful, an adventure, her first deliberate piece of daring in London. Inside the theatre the scruples and the daring had been forgotten. To-day, again, everything would be forgotten, everything; today’s happiness was more secure; […] there was no anticipation of disapproving eyes in the theatre this week; the sense of the impropriety of going alone had gone; it would never return; the feeling of selfishness in spending money on a theatre alone was still there, but a voice within answered that – saying that there was no one at hand to go, and no one she knew who would find at the Lyceum performance just what she found, no one to whom it would mean much more than a theatre […]. (T, 184) In terms of Miriam’s self-determined life, this episode of going to the theatre is essential – it is a metaphor for her “deliberate piece of daring” (T, 184) of living alone and leading an independent life. It proves that, although it is not an easy step to take and that she has her doubts, this is what will make her happy. She is anxious of the looks she could get for being on her own – and it is not too hard to imagine that some people would deem it inappropriate – but in the end the joy of the theatre experience surpasses her fear and any disapproving eyes.

A space that causes much of the same initial excitement and respect is the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street {Fig. 2, 4}. As I have mentioned in the chapter on the areas of London, Miriam ﬁrst visits this famous scientiﬁc institution in the company of Mr Hancock. The Royal Institution is particularly interesting in connection with the question of limited and unlimited sites (see Bronfen 1999: 28) as it is a good example for a place with a somewhat

52 ambiguous state. It ‘opens up’ to Miriam due to her tentative friendship with Mr Hancock. The fact that she so carefully considers what to wear and how to behave there proves her will to make this an unlimited site for herself – she really wants to become a part of it. She is intrigued by this “quite new kind of people” (T, 101) she encounters there. However, the longer she is there the more the fascination gives way to a more sober observation: If the room caught ﬁre there would be no panic. They were gentle, shyly gentle or pompously gentle, but all the same and in agreement because they all knew everything, the real important difﬁcult things. […] There was something they were not. They were not . . . jolly. They could not be. […] One could imagine them all washing, very carefully, in an abstracted way, still looking and thinking, and always with the advancement of science on their minds; never really aware of anything behind or around them because of the wonders of science. Seeing these people changed science a little. They were almost something tremendous; but not quite. (T, 102)

With these observations Miriam also begins to distance herself from this new crowd of people she so wanted to be part of, actively ‘closing’ the space up again. As such, this sequence is a perfect illustration of Bronfen’s argument that the individual’s perception of a space is what makes it limited (cf. 1999: 28).

Bronfen’s last category of interior space is that of all the neutral and free spaces. As I have mentioned in connection with the theatres, this category includes all the “rooms which cannot be assigned to any people or ideas” (1999: 20). Considering that there is a separate chapter in which I will talk about movement and mobility, I now want to concentrate on the “motionless cafés” Bronfen mentions in her definition (cf. 1999: 20). In The Tunnel, Miriam more than once talks about getting her dinner at an A.B.C., one of the “inexpensive restaurants” that serve “[w]hat the average Londoner likes” (Piper 1968: 428). Having to survive on the salary she gets from her job at the surgery, Miriam often reflects on how much, or indeed how little, she can spend on her meals. But she does not only frequent those A.B.C.s because they are cheap. In a conversation with Mag and Jan she explains that, “I love them. […] Chiefly, I think, their dowdiness. The food is honest; not showy, and they are so blissfully dowdy” (T, 150). There is one evening when she, walking home from work, enters an A.B.C. that is “not one of her own” (T, 76). This seemingly unimportant event becomes another act of daring – an illustration of Miriam’s constant challenging of boundaries: She went confidently in. It seemed nearly full of men. Never mind, City men; with a wisdom of their own which kept them going and did not affect anything, all alike and thinking the same thoughts; far away from anything she thought or knew. She walked confidently down the centre […] She felt as she sat down as if she were the guest of the City men, and ate her boiled egg and roll and butter and drank her small coffee in that spirit, gazing into the fire and thinking her own thoughts unresentful of the uncongenial scraps of talk that now and again penetrated her thoughts; the complacent laughter of the man amazed her; their amazing unconsciousness of the things that were written all over them. (T, 75-6) 53 I have mentioned earlier that Bronfen’s categorisation and her distinction between island spaces and neutral and free spaces is somewhat problematic. An example for this is the sequence of Elizabeth and Miss Kilman in the café of the Army and Navy Stores in Victoria Street. While Bronfen (cf. 1999: 20) counts cafés as neutral sites, this particular scene in Mrs Dalloway becomes paramount for the rift between the young girl and her teacher – a rift that marks their different social status and upbringing. All this is illustrated by the space they move in and how they behave in it. Elizabeth, for example, wonders about Miss Kilman’s hunger and her jealousy when a mother and her child take the cake she so wanted (cf. MD, 95). Just a few paragraphs later this theme appears again: Miss Kilman takes another cup of tea and it is again emphasised that Elizabeth “did not want anything more” (MD, 96). Feeling increasingly uncomfortable in the presence of the other woman, Elizabeth gets up as soon as she can, pays for the tea and the cakes they both had and leaves. Miss Kilman has to make her way out on her own: She got up, blundered off among the little tables, rocking slightly from side to side, and somebody came after her with her petticoat and she lost her way, and was hemmed in by trunks specially prepared for taking to India; next got among the accouchement sets and baby linen; through all the commodities of the world, perishable and permanent, hams, drugs, flowers, stationery, variously smelling, now sweet, now sour, she lurched; saw herself thus lurching with her hat askew, very red in the face, full length in a looking-glass; and at last came out into the street. (MD, 97) Nothing makes it more apparent that she does not belong in this place than her exit from the shop. Her way to the door seems like an almost never-ending horrid endeavour, which is made even more palpable for the reader by Woolf’s decision to tell it in one single sentence. Miss Kilman practically flees into Westminster Abbey for safety. So all in all, while cafés in general are rather neutral spaces due to their public nature, the two examples of the A.B.C.s and the café in the Army and Navy Stores clearly show that they are not completely free of connotations and “ideas” and are as fit to give clues about the characters as the other three categories of interior space.

3.4 Movement

After describing the spaces the characters move in, we should now examine how they move in and between them: walking, public transport (especially buses), cycling, and hansoms and cars. According to De Certeau, the ﬁrst ‘mode of transport’ on that list, walking, is a very important aspect in the act of producing space (see De Certeau 2000) because it can be seen as a spatial practice. The urban walker, the ﬂâneur, has the advantage of being right in the middle of city life all the time, which is especially important when it comes to the

54 perception and description of everyday life. As such, walking through the streets of a city is not just an act of creating space but a way to make it your own. Taking this into consideration, one might go one step further and count this ‘mode of transport’ as a tactic, providing marginalised members of a group with the means to claim space and change the rules within it. Thus, it becomes a crucial point in this discussion about a speciﬁcally female urban space. In this chapter, I will determine if and in how far walking, and movement/ mobility in general, can be a means for women to conquer (public) space they have been excluded from. Based on the questions raised by Parsons (cf. 2000: 2; also see Chapter 2, “Theoretical Background”), I will also investigate whether a ﬂâneuse is possible and how they are positioned in connection with city space. For this, it is important to keep in mind the power of the gaze because a female voice – both as an author and as a focalizer – can only provide the reader with a new perspective if she herself is able and allowed to observe.

It is beyond a doubt that Virginia Woolf was a writer in possession of such a strong female voice. Squier points out that Woolf used “strolls through the city streets to stimulate her creative imagination, to untangle a difficult passage in a work in progress, and to find fresh material for essays and fiction alike” and that her fictional and “personal writings reflect her interest in the city as both tangible and symbolic entity” (1985: 11). On account of this, Woolf herself becomes a flâneuse because she clearly uses her city experiences to create (fictional) space and thus also makes it her own. The fact that this fictional space that results from her walks has such a close likeness to the real London city space further stresses this point. All in all, characters walking through the city are a crucial feature in Mrs Dalloway, the most important being the title character Clarissa Dalloway. We accompany her on her way from Dean’s Yard {Fig. 2, 1} to the crossing between Bond Street and Brook Street {Fig. 2, 5}, where she buys flowers for her party that evening. It is relatively easy to follow her path due to the frequent mentioning of street names, shops and landmarks apart from one or two discrepancies (e.g. looking at Piccadilly from St James’s Park gates; MD, 6). Squier (cf. 1985: 95) argues that Clarissa sees herself more as the background of things she encounters and “merging with her environment”, whereas her male counterparts, that is Peter Walsh, Richard Dalloway and even Septimus Smith, are more active and see themselves as the central figure. Despite that, or even because of that, Clarissa is a very observant chronicler of city space and consequently fulfils the purpose of a flâneuse by providing an insight into everyday lives in a certain area. Another result of keeping herself in the background is that her ‘act of walking’ cannot be as easily identified as a tactic as, for example, in Miriam’s case. Clarissa’s are smaller and more subtle steps towards a claiming of space, so to speak. She does not openly challenge the rules of that male-dominated 55 space she moves in (i.e. Westminster and St. James’s) and does not venture out to ‘conquer’ new ones. Even so, one should not forget that for a female author to write about a woman walking alone through the city and to record this woman’s observations is already a way of claiming space in itself – however small and inconsequential this claim might seem.

Although The Tunnel is not as centred on the act of walking as Mrs Dalloway, it is nevertheless an integral part of Miriam’s city experience. Even when she is on her way home from work, the reader gets the impression that she does it for pleasure without having much of an agenda. She almost constantly observes and describes her surroundings. Once she even gets annoyed with Mag and Jan because they go too fast, while she wants to “stroll, and stop at every turn of the road” (T, 152) just to get a better look. By walking through the public space, she makes it, and in turn the whole city, her own: Strolling home towards midnight along the narrow pavement of Endsleigh Gardens, Miriam felt as fresh and untroubled as if it were early morning. When she had got out of her Hammersmith omnibus into the Tottenham Court Road, she had found that the street had lost its ﬁrst terrifying impression and had become part of her home. (T, 29)

In the same way, Miriam is not afraid to stray from familiar paths to see and experience something new: “She would go out unregretfully at closing time [of the A.B.C. she is at] and up through wonderful unknown streets, not her own streets, till she found Holborn and then up and round through the squares” (T, 76-7). In addition to claiming public space as her own by way of walking through it, she actually defends this right to it vehemently when it is ‘threatened’: She wandered slowly on humming a tune […]. The figure of a man in an overcoat and a bowler hat loomed towards her on the narrow pathway and stopped. […] Miriam had a moment’s fear; but the man’s attitude was deprecating and there was her song; it was partly her own fault. But why, why . . . fierce anger at the recurrence of this kind of occurrence seized her. She wanted him out of the way and wanted him to know how angry she was at the interruption. ‘Well,’ she snapped angrily, coming to a standstill in the moonlit gap. ‘Oh,’ said the man a little breathlessly in a lame broken tone, ‘I thought you were going this way.’ ‘So I am,’ retorted Miriam in a loud angry shaking tone, ‘obviously.’ The man stepped quickly into the gutter and walked quickly away across the road. […] the night had become suddenly cold; bitter and penetrating […] it was the way they got in the way . . . figures of men, dark, in dark clothes, presenting themselves, calling attention to themselves and the way they saw things, mean and suggestive, always just when things were loveliest. Couldn’t the man see the look of the square and the moonlight? (T, 96)

Even though it is very clear that Miriam is a lot more active in challenging roles and rules than Clarissa, she here proves that as a walker of the city she has something in common with the other woman apart from their love of London: the preference to experience and take in their surroundings instead of pulling focus and “presenting themselves” (T, 96). As her comments in the sequence quoted above show, Miriam sees this habit of putting oneself in

56 the centre as inherently male – not dissimilar from Squire who connects it with the male characters in Mrs Dalloway (cf. 1985: 95). Miriam defends her rightful place in the city space but makes it clear that, ultimately, observing the surroundings is more desirable than drawing attention to oneself. Her ‘second walk’ in The Tunnel, from Wimpole Street to Tansley Street (T, 74-5), is also very telling in this respect: she gets so lost in the act of walking and the mood it puts her in, that she drifts off completely. We follow her for a while on her way until she describes the ‘elasticity’ of her surroundings. At this point, Miriam, as well as the reader, loses the grip on her consciousness and thoughts and the chapter ends. The next one starts off with Miriam waking from her daydream: “When she came to herself she was at the Strand. […] She wondered what she had been thinking since she left Wimpole Street, and whether she had come across Trafalgar Square without seeing it or round by some other way” (T, 75).

So in answer to Parsons’ question whether and in what form a flâneuse could exist, it can be said that, at least for the two novels discussed in this thesis, there is indeed a very specific way of ‘female wanderer’. In terms of their character, Miriam belongs more to the second group of flâneurs defined by Benjamin, the rag-picker (see Parsons 2000: 3), because her wanderings around London are definitely in part a rereading and rewriting of city space as it is shown by her way of claiming the space and making it her own.

In the character of Elizabeth we see a different, albeit related, form of claiming new public space – the public transport. Although she is by far not the only one in the two novels taking the bus – Miriam does it frequently and Peter mentions a bus ride with Clarissa –, her drive up the Strand is the most significant in this respect. In comparison to her mother, Elizabeth does not only move in another direction but she also makes use of a different, and new, mode of transport – it is a change of movement that is exemplary for her time. The young Miss Dalloway and her bus ride are an illustration of the social change achieved via new technology at the turn of the century that is mentioned by Williams (cf. 1989: 62), Miles at al. (cf. 2004: 199) or Shelley and Urry (cf. 2000: 203). The latter (2000: 203) talk about a “contraction of social space” which at first sight mainly means that the lower classes have more chance of participating in the city life due to an easier and cheaper access to, for example, public transport. In Elizabeth’s case it stands for the possibility to leave her familiar surroundings and venture where “no Dalloways came […] daily” (MD, 100). With the help of this new mode of transport, she takes part in this higher degree of exchange between different areas of the city that Burgess (cf. 1925: 25) describes as mobility. The very nature in which she begins this adventure of sorts is rather significant. While waiting for the bus she 57 seems to remember her behavioural lessons, thinking that “[o]f course, she would not push her way” and is “inclined to be passive” but then the bus arrives and “[s]uddenly Elizabeth stepped forward and most competently boarded the omnibus, in front of everyone” (MD, 98-9). As it has been mentioned earlier, her decision to go all the way to the Strand instead of getting out of the bus at home seems to be made on a whim. During this journey her thoughts keep coming back to Miss Kilman and her words of encouragement that “every profession is open to the women of your generation” (MD, 99). Squire sums up the importance of Elizabeth’s act in connection with the new area and the social change it indicates: Clarissa walks through Westminster and up Bond Street, traditionally haunts of male political and female social power, while her daughter takes an omnibus up the Strand, a newly booming centre of male and female commercial and professional life. (1985: 102)

Not unlike Elizabeth’s change of movement, for Miriam the bus is a sign of freedom. It has the power to take her to places she would not be able to see if it were not for public transport: “A bus somewhere just out there beyond the morning stillness of the street. What an adventure to go out and take a bus without having to face anybody” (T, 22).

I have already stated in respect to the connotations of what Bronfen (cf. 1999: 20) calls neutral spaces that I find it problematic to count public transportation (such as buses, trains and taxis) as part of this category. One counterargument to this definition is the aforementioned social change it implied. Another one can be found in Mrs Dalloway when Clarissa observes the scene around the broken-down car. While she is convinced that the Queen, or at least some other member of the Royal Family, is in the car, she assigns other modes of transport to various classes: Boys on bicycles sprang off. […] The crush was terrific for the time of day. Lords, Ascot, Hurlingham, what was it? she wondered, for the street was blocked. The British middle class sitting sideways on the tops of omnibuses with parcels and umbrellas […] and the Queen herself held up […]. (MD, 11 and 13)

It is especially the car that triggers excitement and promises something grand: “[…] there could be no doubt that greatness was seated within; greatness was passing, hidden, down Bond Street, removed only by a hand’s breadth from ordinary people” (MD, 12). It evokes a fascination that leads to the false community that I have already talked about in Chapter 3.2 on London city space. Keeping Clarissa’s fascination in mind, Miriam’s loathing for cars becomes almost comical: A horseless brougham went by, moving smoothly and silently amongst the noisy traffic – the driver looked as though he were fastened to the front of the vehicle, a little tin driver on a clockwork toy […]. He looked as if he were falling off. If anything ran into him there was nothing to protect him. It left an uncomfortable memory . . . it would only be for carriages; the well-loved horse omnibuses would go on . . . (T, 185) 58 She is, however, not immune to the charm of hansoms, which, in a way, are the equivalent to today’s taxis and in her time were even more a sign of wealth and a higher class. As much as she enjoys the freedom the London bus gives her, with the promise of a hansom ride in mind she cannot wait to get out of it; it illustrates her longing for a better life: [She] jumped hurriedly in with the polite half-irritated resignation […] and steered herself carefully, against the swaying of the vehicle, along between the rows of seated forms, keeping her eyes carefully averted and fixed upon distant splendours. […] Miss Szigmondy had mentioned hansoms . . . supposing she should have to pay her share? […] She would not be able even to offer. […] Hansoms were a necessary part of the worldly life. […] It made you part of a wonderful exclusive difficult triumphant life, a streak of it, going in and out. It cut you off from all personal difficulties, made you drop your personality and lifted you right out into the freedom of a throng of happy people […]. (T, 154-5)

The bicycle has quite a similar meaning for her. In The Tunnel cycling becomes a metaphor for and expression of freedom and self-reliance. A conversation with Mag and Jan reveals an additional liberating factor: ‘Have you been out alone yet?’ […] They leaned across the table and spoke low, one after the other. ‘We went out – last night – after dark – and rode – round Russell Square – twice – in our knickers –––’ ‘No! Did you really? How simply heavenly.’ ‘It was. We came home nearly crying with rage at not being able to go about, permanently, in nothing but knickers. It would make life an absolutely different thing.’ ‘The freedom of movement.’ (T, 148) Even more importantly, the bicycle takes Miriam out of London. After a difﬁcult start and embarrassing lessons, she feels the greatest joy that she now swings “triumphantly up” (T, 230) and is “able to control it” (T, 231) – when on her bicycle she herself is in charge and chooses the direction. But her bicycle trip makes people frown at her and she becomes as defensive as when she walks home alone at night. At the end of a long day’s ride she comes to a village where a man opens the gates for her: ‘Good Lord – it’s a woman.’ She passed through the open gate into the glimmer of a descending road. Yes. Why not? Why that amazed stupefaction? Trying to rob her of the darkness and the wonderful coming out into the light. The man’s voice went on with her down the dull safe road. A young lady, taking a bicycle ride in a daylit suburb. That was what she was. That was all he would allow. It’s something in men. (T, 234)

In terms of the ongoing claim of public space by women at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, all the modes of transport discussed in this chapter are an important means to achieve this goal. It is the complete independence from others that differentiates walking and the bicycle from the bus or the taxi and the latter two seem to be more of a sign of the era’s social change in general than being speciﬁcally connected to women’s position in public spaces.

59 3.5 Gendered Space

Throughout the analysis of The Tunnel and Mrs Dalloway up to this point, the topic of gendered space has come up again and again, for example in connection with the conquering of space by the ﬂâneuses. In this chapter, I will examine the aspects and the meaning of these particular spaces in greater detail, looking into the differences between London as a female city and actual female space in it, the feelings and experiences of the protagonists, how they are denied a space and a voice of their own, and which tactics, in addition to walking, they employ to claim new spaces.

The two novels discussed in this thesis repeatedly depict spaces that are inherently male or female depending on, for example, their purposes, ascriptions made from outside or what the members of these spaces make them out to be. It is interesting to observe that, although women were excluded from public space for so long, the city is often presented as a female presence in literature.16 Woolf herself provides one such example in her novel The Waves. In a sequence rendered from the point of view of Bernhard, one of the three male characters, while he is sitting on a train to London, the city takes on the role of a maternal figure welcoming him back: “How fair, how strange,” said Bernhard, “glittering, many-pointed and many-domed London lies before me under mist. Guarded by gasometers, by factory chimneys, she lies sleeping as we approach. She folds the ant-heap to her breast. All cries, all clamour, are softly enveloped in silence. Not Rome herself looks more majestic. But we are aimed at her. Already her maternal somnolence is uneasy. Ridges fledged with houses rise from the mist. Factories, cathedrals, glass domes, institutions and theatres erect themselves. The early train from the north is hurled at her like a missile. […] we roar on. We are about to explode in the flank of the city like a shell in the side of some ponderous, maternal, majestic animal. She hums and murmurs; she awaits us.’ (Woolf 2000: 62)

In Peter Walsh’s thoughts in Mrs Dalloway, London and “the day” form a sort of relationship – partners in crime so to speak – and are both referred to with female pronouns: One might fancy that day, the London day, was just beginning. Like a woman who had slipped off her print dress and white apron to array herself in blue and pearls, the day changed, put off stuff, took gauze, changed to evening, and with the same sigh of exhilaration that a woman breathes, tumbling petticoats on the floor, it too shed dust, heat, colour; the traffic thinned; motor cars, tinkling, darting, succeeded the lumber of vans; and here and there among the thick foliage of the squares an intense light hung. I resign, the evening seemed to say, as it paled and faded above the battlements and prominences, moulded, pointed, of hotel, flat, and block of shops, I fade, she was beginning, I disappear, but London would have none of it, and rushed her bayonets into the sky, pinioned her, constrained her to partnership in her revelry. (MD, 117)

16 See for example William Wordsworth’s poem “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802”. 60 Despite all this, one should keep in mind that Woolf only lets her male characters think of London as a female presence, which in turn makes it impossible to make a statement that concerns the gender of the city for the whole novel. When it comes to Miriam and The Tunnel we can certainly detect this sense of ‘coming home’ to the city that is so often seen as a parallel to returning to a mother ﬁgure. However, there are two aspects that speak against this interpretation. Firstly, Miriam never directly states this sentiment, rather calling London a “mighty lover” in Revolving Lights (Richardson (2002): Pilgrimage 3, 272), and secondly, it is hard to imagine that Miriam would associate ‘coming home’ with a maternal ﬁgure since she had to witness her mother’s mental illness and subsequent suicide.17

The reality of the city’s public space in most Woolf’s and Richardson’s time is almost the opposite of this literary theme of a female city. Women are restricted to the private sphere and the responsibilities and roles that come with it: being a wife, a mother and residing over the affairs of the household. Again, the three women that stand in the centre of this thesis are good representatives of the stages of a woman’s life as early twentieth-century society expected it to be. Clarissa is in her fifties and seems to see herself close to the end of her life – having been moved to the top of the house and being left out at dinner parties. She married and she became a mother, which means that, as society sees it, there is nothing more for her to expect of life. Elizabeth somehow stands on the other side of the spectrum. She is a young woman that others have started to “compare […] to poplar trees” (MD, 98), an attention she finds both amusing and wearisome. She is no longer a child and she feels the first signs of the pressure Miriam tries so hard to evade. Richardson’s protagonist is again somewhat in the middle of mother and daughter Dalloway. She is at an age when people expect her to already be married and has to endure countless hints from people around her. The topic also comes up in one of Miriam’s conversations with Mag and Jan, when one of her friends laments the loss of the things she enjoyed while growing up. But the other two women are very quick in expressing their preference for their current situations over a ‘sheltered life’: “If we were in the sheltered life we should either have done with that sort of thing and be married – or still keeping it up and anxious about not being married. Besides anyhow; think of the awful people. […] And look here. Heaps of those women envy us. They envy us our freedom. What we’re having is wanderyahre; the next best thing to wanderyahre.” […] “I think the child’s quite right there. Freedom is life. We may be slaves all day and guttersnipes all the rest of the time but, ach Gott, we are free.” (T, 92)

17 The story of the suicide of Miriam’s mother is never directly related in Pilgrimage but comparing the last events featured in Honeycomb (the third novel in the series and the one before The Tunnel) with Dorothy Richardson’s biography, I strongly suspect that the end of that novel also marks the end of the mother’s life. 61 Miriam feels uncomfortable in those island spaces inhabited by married women and experiences them as restrictive. At the same time, she also feels excluded from them because her status is very different from that of other women that are present. As the next sequence shows, her thoughts during her ﬁrst stay at her friend Alma’s house are very telling in this respect: Alma, sitting behind the tea-tray in a green Alma dress with small muslin cuffs and collars, had betrayed her into this. Alma had been got by this and had brought her to the test of it. […] If she could say clever things they would like her; but she would be like Alma and Mrs Binkley; pretending; and without any man to point to as giving her the right to be about here. It was a false position. It was as if she were here as a candidate to become an Alma or a Mrs Binkley; imitating the clever saying of men, or ﬂattering them. (T, 112 and 117)

Miriam does sometimes play with becoming part of such spaces; for example, starting up a conversation with the young man sitting next to her at Alma’s house or playing a certain piece by Mendelssohn to one of her sister’s male acquaintances, Mr Tremayne, knowing that he sees her as a potential wife (see T, 27-8). In these rare moments she very consciously fulﬁls people’s expectations of her, following the rules of society. However, it has to be stressed that she only plays this ‘compliance’ rendering them rather feigned attempts to ﬁt in. While this makes others accept Miriam into ‘their’ space, it only leads to her distancing herself from it even more: Speech and action had launched her, for good or ill, into the strange tide running in this house. […] She was no longer quite herself. There was something in it that quickened all her faculties, challenged all the strength she possessed. By speech and action she had accepted something she neither liked, nor approved nor understood; […] perhaps I am selling my soul to the devil. (T, 120)

But the rules of an established society are not the only strategy that keeps women from participating in a certain space. Especially The Tunnel points out examples of how this social space is ‘preserved’. One such strategy is the publication of so-called ‘scientific facts’ that are designed to keep women in their domestic and subordinated position. During the last month before the summer holidays at the dentist’s surgery, Miriam reads in “a liberal education in twelve volumes” (T, 219) that Mr Leyton suggested to her. As “[h]er miserable hand reopened the last page of the index” where she finds “five or six more entries under ‘Woman’” (T, 219) she becomes increasingly angry and frustrated: If one could only burn all the volumes; stop the publication of them. But it was all books, all the literature in the world, right back to Juvenal . . . whatever happened, if it could all be avenged by somebody in some way, there was all that . . . the classics, the finest literature – ‘unsurpassed.’ Education would always mean coming in contact with all that. (T, 219) In her musings on the things she reads in this encyclopaedia, Miriam makes an important point on how this particular strategy succeeds. By reading and repeating those ‘facts’, she,

62 and every other reader, becomes an integral part in the construction of this particular space and the reinforcement of its rules: There was no getting away from the scientific facts . . . inferior; mentally, morally, intellectually, and physically . . . her development arrested in the interest of her special functions . . . reverting later towards the male type . . . old women with deep voices and hair on their faces . . . leaving off where boys of eighteen began. If that is true everything is as clear as daylight. ‘Woman is not undeveloped man but diverse’ falls to pieces. Woman is undeveloped man . . . if one could die of the loathsome visions . . . I must die. I can’t go on living in it . . . the whole world full of creatures; half-human. And I am one of the half-human ones, or shall be, if I don’t stop now. (T, 220) Woolf’s protagonist in A Room of One’s Own has a very similar experience standing before the shelves at the British Museum’s library: “Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?” (AROO, 46). The most important aspect in these examples from Woolf’s and Richardson’s writings is the realisation that women are objects of discussion, rather than subjects discussing. By being written about they become the Other – they become those outside of the (academic) space or, at the very least, those members of the space too powerless to have a voice. All those books written about women, those in the library of the British Museum as well as the encyclopaedia in Wimpole Street, are examples of a broad and very public form of this strategy of denying the Other a voice. There is also a sequence in The Tunnel that illustrates it in a ‘real life’ situation. The fact that Mr Hancock takes Miriam to the Royal Institution, which would generally be connotated as a male space, delights her at first and it seems like an important sign that he sees her as a thinking and knowledgable person. What fazes her is his reaction when she tries to express her own thoughts and opinions on the talk they attend: Mr Hancock laughed, a little final crushing laugh, and turned away sceptical of further enlightenment. […] And he would not have the patience to hear her try to explain; and by that he robbed her of the power of trying to explain. He was not interested in what she thought. Not interested. His own thoughts were statements, things that had been agreed upon and disputed and that people bandied about, competing with each other to put them cleverly. […] He liked women who thought in these statements. They always succeeded with men. They had a reputation for wit. […] Perhaps there was something in it. Something worth cultivating; a fine talent. But it would mean hiding so much, letting so much go; all the real things. (T, 107-8) Just like in her fake attempts to adhere to society’s rules, she glimpses the merits in belonging to those established spaces for a second before she remembers that she would also have to give up parts of herself she values over everything else: her freedom of movement and speech. When the protagonist in A Room of One’s Own is disrupted in her musings about women and literature by a beadle that sends her off the turf where only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed to walk, she affirms that “though turf is better walking than

63 gravel, no very great harm was done” (AROO, 31). What she really resents is that “they had sent my little ﬁsh into hiding” (AROO, 31), referring to the beginnings of a great idea she had wanted to remember. In other words, it is not the denial of physical space but rather the hindrance to forming an intellectual voice that angers both her and Miriam.

In addition to these restrictions on women’s participation in spatial practices, Mrs Dalloway shows examples in which even the spaces that are assigned to women get invaded and challenged by men. In the following case this has dire consequences. While Rezia is the only person who really understands her husband’s actions in the end, the two doctors that should bring help only take away her right to care for him. When Dr Holmes comes for a visit and Rezia, blocking the entrance, tells him that her husband refused to let him in, he “[smiled] agreeably. Really he had to give that charming little lady, Mrs Smith, a friendly push before he could get past her into her husband’s bedroom” (MD, 68). He does the same thing again when he comes to take Septimus away to one of Dr Bradshaw’s homes in the country, ultimately signing the young man’s fate: “‘No, I will not allow you to see my husband,’ she said. [Septimus] could see her, like a little hen, with her wings spread barring his passage. But Holmes persevered. ‘My dear lady, allow me . . . ‘ Holmes said, putting her aside” (MD, 108). Another example of this invasion of the private space is Peter Walsh’s morning visit to Clarissa. He practically storms into the house, past Lucy, the housemaid, and “running upstairs ever so quickly” he assures no one in particular that “Mrs Dalloway will see me […] Oh yes, she will see me […] She will see me. After ﬁve years in India, Clarissa will see me” (MD, 29). Clarissa, sitting in her drawing room, “thinking it was outrageous to be interrupted at eleven o’clock on the morning of the day she was giving a party”, hastily “made to hide her dress, like a virgin protecting chastity, respecting privacy” (MD, 30). Later on during Peter’s visit, when he picks up his habit of playing with his pocket knife, Clarissa more and more feels the urge to ‘protect’ herself and strike back – reassuring herself of her place in the house and in life: But I too, she thought, and, taking up her needle, summoned, like a Queen whose guards have fallen asleep and left her unprotected (she had been quite taken aback by this visit – it had upset her) so that anyone can stroll in and have a look at her where she lies with the brambles curving over her, summoned to her help the things she did; the things she liked; her husband; Elizabeth; her self, in short, which Peter hardly knew now, all to come about her and beat off the enemy. (MD, 32)

In short, when Peter takes her space away from her, Clarissa goes in search for something else of ‘hers’ that he cannot possibly invade or claim for himself – hence the “Here is my Elizabeth” (MD, 35) when Clarissa introduces her daughter to him, which he finds so utterly ridiculous and annoying. His actions make Peter a ‘coloniser’ in a double sense: as an administrator in India as well as in connection with the women in his life, especially Clarissa. 64 She rejected him once (that is to say she fended off his attempt to ‘conquer’ her) which made him move to India. But now he has come back to try it a second time by talking about the mistake she made by marrying Richard instead of him. He cannot live with the knowledge that he did not succeed. Squier’s notes on Peter’s visit that day sum up his desire to ‘conquer’ Clarissa and the space she inhabits: In her Westminster drawing room he has enacted a domestic drama of male dominance, taking upon himself the role of Prince Charming to rescue the unwilling Sleeping Beauty from her secluded city bower. Yet Peter’s ‘rescue’ was anything but altruistic. Rather, it fulfilled (if only briefly) his desire to act the hero by intruding upon Clarissa’s privacy, to define the woman he ‘rescues’ in ways which satisfy his need for dominance, impact, and prominence. (Squier 1985: 104-5)

All that has been said up to this point about the topic of gendered space in connection with The Tunnel and Mrs Dalloway has shown that most of the women featured in these novels are ﬁghting to be recognised and to gain a place in the (public) space that had been dominated by men for so long. We have already discussed the tactics of walking and movement but the novels in question offer some additional ways of conquering space. Clarissa, being more integrated into a particular society, makes use of a more understated way of demanding a place in the light of the public: her parties. Here she is the one in charge, and she can prove her talents and ‘her worth’, so to speak. In view of her obsession with the only thing that seems to give her a sense of purpose, it is also not surprising that it is a source for unhappiness whenever something does not go as planned. The fact that both Peter Walsh and Richard Dalloway ﬁnd this rather amusing puts Clarissa in a defensive mood: They thought, or Peter at any rate thought, that she enjoyed imposing herself; liked to have famous people about her; great names; was simply a snob in short. Well, Peter might think so. Richard merely thought it foolish of her to like excitement when she knew it was bad for her heart. It was childish, he thought. And both were quite wrong. What she liked was simply life. ‘That’s what I do it for,’ she said, speaking aloud, to life. […] And it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom? An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think, write, even play the piano. (MD, 89) But even if Peter mocks Clarissa’s obsession with her parties, he, if only indirectly, recognises that it makes her visible and important. When he observes the guests arriving for the party that evening, the space outside of the Dalloways’ house suddenly becomes ‘hers’: “But it was her street, this, Clarissa’s; cabs were rushing round the corner, like water round the piers of a bridge drawn together, it seemed to him, because they bore people going to her party, Clarissa’s party” (MD, 119). With this, he serves in proving that Clarissa’s personal, if unconscious, tactic to claim public space is successful.

65 Miriam’s strife for this part in public space is a lot closer linked to the ongoing social change that has been mentioned before in this thesis. It is the “novel and dynamic common environment” (Williams 1989: 63) of the city and being a working woman that changes not only her social status but also her status as a woman. Even though this brings some drawbacks with it (for example having to endure the hostility of Mr Hancock’s cousins), it also opens up new perspectives and freedom. Considering Peter Walsh’s overall character traits and actions in Mrs Dalloway, it is interesting that Woolf gives him, of all people, the task of observing these social changes that are responsible for Miriam’s, and other women’s, newfound opportunities: […] and more than suspecting from the words of a girl […] that shift in the whole pyramidal accumulation which in his youth had seemed immovable. On top of them it had pressed; weighed them down, the women especially, like those ﬂowers Clarissa’s Aunt Helena used to press between sheets of grey blotting-paper with Littré’s dictionary on top, sitting under the lamp after dinner. (MD, 118)

The protagonist in A Room of One’s Own also comments on this change and indirectly links it to the city of London. After she has been chased away from walking on the turf and has been denied access to the university’s library on the grounds of being a woman, she watches some “rare types” (AROO, 33), presumably Fellows of the fictional Oxbridge of Woolf’s essay, entering a chapel and reflects that they, despite their power in this place, “would soon be obsolete if left to fight for existence on the pavement of the Strand” (AROO, 33). She, as a woman, is denied access here but in London, where she lives and writes and survives, they, in turn, would have a hard time – and she revels and finds satisfaction in that knowledge. For the fictional female writer in A Room of One’s Own as well as for Miriam Henderson it all amounts to the possession of money and a space just for themselves because “[i]ntellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time” (AROO, 104). But those two women are able to escape this poverty – the protagonist of Woolf’s famous essay by inheriting money from an aunt, and Miriam by earning it at her job in the surgery. Moreover, this life of earning money for oneself is exactly what Elizabeth Dalloway is aiming for. Seeing her as the character in Mrs Dalloway that represents a future outlook, this might as well prove that Woolf had high hopes in things to come because “here begins the freedom of the mind, or rather the possibility that in the course of time the mind will be free to write what it likes” (AROO, 73).

66 4 Conclusion

In an attempt to map female urban space at the beginning of the twentieth century with the help of Dorothy Richardson’s The Tunnel and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, I have focused on the characters of Miriam Henderson, and Clarissa and Elizabeth Dalloway as well as their respective perceptions of the spaces, both private and public, they inhabit and move in. On the whole, both novels show similarities in the way the (city) space is portrayed through the personal visual and acoustic perceptions of the primary characters. With regard to the three characters the thesis focused on, the analysis has shown that they are all aware of their social positions and, albeit to varying degrees, are trying to make a stand in the newly opened up public space. They are engaged in both an endeavour to arrange themselves with the new situation and opportunities they are presented with as well as a ﬁght to take it a little further.

One could say that those aspects are least visible in the case of Clarissa Dalloway. She seemingly feels comfortable with being in the background and with fulﬁlling society’s expectations of her. She loves London’s city space for its familiarity and beauty, not because of the opportunities or freedom it has to offer. It is without a doubt that ‘her’ space is generally more constricted as, for example, Miriam’s. Where Richardson’s protagonist has her own lodgings, a work place and the various friends she visits, Clarissa’s life as a wife and mother, as presented in the novel, is mostly centred on the Dalloways’ family home in Dean’s Yard. Even though this impression of restrictiveness might arise partially due to the novel’s focus on one single day, Clarissa’s feeling of exclusion (e.g. in her attic room) could point to a general lack of other reference points in her life. Additionally, it is important to note that Clarissa does not ‘limit’ space itself, like Miriam sometimes does. Another point that separates her from the other two women is that she does not seem to actively employ any tactics to claim new space. Clarissa does walk and there is a reverence to her riding the bus, but although she is always ‘spiritually’ part of the city, this does not mean that these acts also make her an active participant of the public sphere. The closest she gets to requesting this sort of recognition is through her parties. They are, on the one hand, part of her responsibility as the wife of a member of the House of Commons but, on the other hand, these social gatherings are also her means of staying visible for the ‘public’ without betraying her ascribed position in the private sphere of the household. Finally, the analysis of her character in the chapter on gendered space has strengthened the previous observations of Clarissa as a rather passive character. She reacts in defence of her personal space when it comes under attack (as for example by Peter Walsh) but she never openly challenges the status quo. 67 As I have stated repeatedly in the course of the analysis, Clarissa’s daughter Elizabeth is in many ways a representative of the generation following her mother’s. She, too, is aware of the obligations her sex, in connection with her social status, brings with it. However, she actively strives to achieve more (i.e. having a profession or going into parliament), taking up every single opportunity the metropolis has to offer. Elizabeth literally goes into a new and different direction. Although she prefers the freedom from social expectations the countryside provides, she rightly feels that she needs the city’s relative openness to reach her goals.

Miriam, for her part, is somewhat in between the mother and daughter of the Dalloway family both in terms of age as well as outlook on life. In spite of the fact that her break with the higher social class is mostly involuntary (mainly resulting from her father’s bankruptcy), she also seems to have actively freed herself from its restraints. She decides to move into her own lodgings and to work in a dentist’s surgery instead of getting married – which, considering the time she lives in, would probably have been the easier option. Consequently, Miriam appears to have more freedom than the other two women but, at the same time, her pursuit of recognition becomes harder because she has a greater and more urgent need to find her place. While Elizabeth almost naïvely, but with the enthusiasm of a young person, states her aim for a public office “if she found it necessary” (MD, 99), Miriam knows that she will have to defend every claim for space she makes. Her love for London is definitely connected to the city’s offers of freedom and opportunities. Even more so, she starts to feel uncomfortable everywhere else; for example associating outside-London spaces with the married couples she visits there and their lives she finds so restrictive. Only in the relative anonymity of the vast city does she feel in control. This liberty that lets her take charge is also a reason for her love of walking and riding her bicycle. All in all, out of the three female characters discussed in this thesis, Miriam gives the impression to be the one most keen on claiming space and becoming part of the public sphere.

On the level of the two novels themselves, The Tunnel is generally more direct and eager to highlight gendered spaces, the strategies by which they are upheld and the tactics that women resort to in order to break up established social and spatial boundaries. But even though Mrs Dalloway, like its protagonist, seems more subtle where this topic is concerned, the comparison of Clarissa and Elizabeth brings to light an underlying development towards a new generation of women that demand what they deem to be their rightful place. In this struggle to claim public space, all three are in large parts defined by the interior spaces they inhabit; especially Miriam takes from them her perseverance and strength to lead a self- determined life. At first glance, this combination of being centred in the private while fighting 68 for recognition in the public sphere might seem contradictory but in fact it is an illustration of Woolf’s main statement in A Room of One’s Own that a personal private place is essential for every woman to be able to claim and gain public space.

69 5 Appendix

List of Abbreviations:

AROO !...... Virginia Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own” MD!...... Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway T!...... Dorothy Richardson, The Tunnel, In: Pilgrimage 2

List of novels in the Pilgrimage series:

Volume 1: Pointed Roofs, Backwater, Honeycomb

Volume 2: The Tunnel, Interim

Volume 3: Deadlock, Revolving Lights, The Trap

Volume 4: Oberland, Dawn’s Left Hand, Clear Horizon, Dimple Hill, March Moonlight

List of Maps:

Fig. 1 – Miriam: Piper, David (1968/1964). “Bloomsbury”. In: The Companion Guide to London. 2nd ed. London: Collins. 206.

Fig. 2 – Clarissa: Piper, David (1968/1964). “St. James’s”. In: The Companion Guide to London. 2nd ed. London: Collins. 52.

Fig. 3 – Marylebone South: Piper, David (1968/1964). “St. Marylebone South”. In: The Companion Guide to London. 2nd ed. London: Collins. 224.

Miriam

1 2

Fig. 1

1 – Tansley Street (Miriam’s room) 2 – St Pancras Church 3 – Kenneth Street (Mag and Jan’s rooms) 4 – Euston Road 71

Clarissa

Fig. 2

1 – Dean’s Yard (Dalloways’ house) 2 – St Margaret’s chuch 3 – Hatchard’s (book shop) 4 – Royal Institution (21 Albemarle Street) 5 – Mulberry’s (ﬂorists)

Marylebone South

Fig. 3

1 – Wimpole Street (dentist’s surgery) 2 – Marylebone Road (Miss Dean’s room) 3 – Mulberry’s (ﬂorists)

6 Bibliography

6.1 Primary Sources

Defoe, Daniel (2001/1722). Moll Flanders. Ware: Wordsworth Editions. Wordsworth Classics 5.

Richardson, Dorothy (2002). Pilgrimage 1. London: Virago. Virago Modern Classics 18.

Richardson, Dorothy (2002). Pilgrimage 2. London: Virago. Virago Modern Classics 18.

Richardson, Dorothy (2002). Pilgrimage 3. London: Virago. Virago Modern Classics 18.

Richardson, Dorothy (2002). Pilgrimage 4. London: Virago. Virago Modern Classics 18.

Woolf, Leonard, ed. (1975). A Writer’s Diary. Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf. London: Hogarth Press.

Woolf, Virginia (1929). “A Room of One's Own”. In: A Room of One's Own & The Voyage Out (2012). Ware: Wordsworth Editions. Wordsworth Classics. 27-108.

Woolf, Virginia (1992). A Woman’s Essays. Selected Essays: Volume One. London: Penguin Books.

Woolf, Virginia (2000/1931). The Waves. Ware: Wordsworth Editions. Wordsworth Classics 10.

Woolf, Virginia (2003/1925). Mrs Dalloway. Ware: Wordsworth Editions. Wordsworth Classics 16.

6.2 Secondary Sources

Bronfen, Elisabeth (1999). Dorothy Richardson's Art of Memory. Space, Identity, Text. Manchester: Manchester UP.

Bowlby, Rachel (1992). “Notes”. In: Woolf, Virginia (1992). A Woman’s Essays. Selected Essays: Volume One. London: Penguin Books. 179-204.

Burgess, Ernest W. (1925). “The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project”. In: Miles, Malcolm and Tim Hall with Iain Borden, eds. (2004). The City Cultures Reader. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. The Routledge Urban Reader Series 3. 20-7.

Daiches, David and John Flower (1979). Literary Landscapes of the British Isles. A Narrative Atlas. New York and London: Paddington Press.

De Certeau, Michel (1984). “The Practice of Everyday Life”. In: Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan, eds. (2004). Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell. 1247-57.

De Certeau, Michel (2000). “Walking in the City”. In: Ward, Graham, ed. (2000). The Certeau Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Blackwell Reader. 101-18.

Fernihough, Anne (2007). “Consciousness as a stream”. In: Shiach, Morag, ed. (2007). The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel. Cambridge: CUP. 65-81.

Lefebvre, Henri (1991). “Plan of the Present Work”. In: Miles, Malcolm and Tim Hall with Iain Borden, eds. (2004). The City Cultures Reader. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. The Routledge Urban Reader Series 3. 260-5.

Löw, Martina (2001). “Die Konstitution von Raum”. In: Kreutziger-Herr, Annette und Karin Losleben, eds. (2009). History/Herstory. Alternative Musikgeschichten. Köln et al: Böhlau. Musik – Kultur – Gender 5. 177-85.

Massey, Doreen (1992). “Space, Place and Gender”. In: Massey, Doreen, ed. (1994). Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press. 185-90.

Miles, Malcolm and Tim Hall with Iain Borden, eds. (2004). The City Cultures Reader. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. The Routledge Urban Reader Series 3.

Parsons, Deborah L. (2000). Streetwalking the Metropolis. Women, the City, and Modernity. Oxford: OUP.

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Shelly, Mimi and John Urry (2000). “The City and the Car”. In: Miles, Malcolm and Tim Hall with Iain Borden, eds. (2004). The City Cultures Reader. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. The Routledge Urban Reader Series 3. 202-19.

Shiach, Morag, ed. (2007). The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel. Cambridge: CUP.

Squier, Susan M. (1985). Virginia Woolf and London. The Sexual Politics of the City. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina P.

Watts, Carol (1995). Dorothy Richardson. Plymouth: Northcote House. Writers and Their Work.

Williams, Raymond (1989). “Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism”. In: Miles, Malcolm and Tim Hall with Iain Borden, eds. (2004). The City Cultures Reader. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. The Routledge Urban Reader Series 3. 58-65.

Wilson, Elisabeth (1993). “World Cities”. In: Miles, Malcolm and Tim Hall with Iain Borden, eds. (2004). The City Cultures Reader. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. The Routledge Urban Reader Series 3. 40-8.