Student Question
How does Woolf represent urban life in London in A Room of One's Own?
Quick answer:
In A Room of One's Own, although she initially comes across as critical of London, a city she loved, Woolf ends up celebrating the variety and energy of urban life. Loving in a large, modern city for Woolf means embracing its expansive life and vitality, including the experience of women in an urban environment.
Woolf, who grew up and spent much of her life in London, loved the city. She loved to take long walks through it, drinking in the vast array of life it offered. She loved to write about it, as she did most powerfully in Mrs. Dalloway.
She initially comes across in A Room of One's Own, however, as critical of London. She describes it as a "machine" or "factory." She seems to be beginning to describe it in loving terms as evening falls, writing that the
great machine after labouring all day had made with our help a few yards of something very exciting and beautiful .
But then this beauty morphs into a more threatening image of the urban experience:
Flashing with red eyes, a tawny monster roaring with hot breath.
She shows the sixteenth-century city as a threatening place for Shakespeare's imagined twin sister, Judith, who...
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is unable to find the kind of creative nurture there that allowed her brother to flourish.
Yet for all the danger and threat the modern (and Renaissance) city, run by men, poses to a woman, Woolf does end up celebrating it for its endless variety and activity, its hum of life. She writes,
The fascination of the London street is that no two people are ever alike.
She points out to her imaginary companion and alter ego, Mary Carmichael, all the potential for a woman writer bursting from the vital life of London:
The accumulation of unrecorded life, whether from the women at the street corners with their arms akimbo, and the rings embedded in their fat swollen fingers ... from the violet-sellers and match-sellers and old crones stationed under doorways; or from drifting girls whose faces, like waves in sun and cloud, signal the coming of men and women and the flickering lights of shop windows. All that you will have to explore, I said to Mary Carmichael.
The passage goes on at some length and becomes a love song to the city, the women in it, and the potential for recording their lives through women's eyes, rather than as men have seen them. Woolf writes that the scene of a beautiful array of ribbons in a London shop
would lend itself to the pen as fittingly as any snowy peak or rocky gorge in the Andes.
Woolf longs for women to have a place and voice in London. Her experience of "loving" in London is of seeing the expansiveness of its energy, along with its flaws, and encompasses a desire to tell the true story of its people, centrally including women.