Emily Fox Gordon is the author of two memoirs, two novels, and a collection of essays, Book of Days. Her second novel, Madeleine and Jane, was published last September.
I’m a devoted fan of Virginia Woolf ’s essay “Street Haunting.” For many years, I’ve taught it in my personal essay workshops, not only because it’s a marvelous piece of writing but also because it demonstrates nearly everything the form can do. It creates an immediate connection between author and reader, one that grows deeper as the essay goes on. It encourages students to disregard the hoary prescription that the writer should show, not tell: Woolf spells out her themes explicitly, and shows us everything, too. But its most striking feature, and the one I make the most of in my presentation to my students, is its inflatability. It starts out small—charmingly and insistently local—but toward the end, it surprises the reader by ballooning into universality. Let me teach it now.
As “Street Haunting” opens, the reader finds the author at home, alone and feeling restless, surrounded by objects whose provenance she knows almost too well. She cherishes the memories these familiar belongings call up, but just now she wants to escape them. If only for a few hours, she longs to cast off her identity and join the “republican army of anonymous trampers” who walk the streets of London. But before she can embark on her expedition, she must invent an errand: the purchase of a pencil will do. Why does she need this pretext? The question is allowed to hang, to be addressed only near the end of the essay.
Out on the street at last, the reader feels a thrill of effortless momentum. Woolf ’s mind carries us: she’s a Virgil to our Dante, and we gladly let her lead the way. At first, it’s the loveliness of the London street at dusk, with its “islands of light, and its long groves of darkness” that she commends to our attention, but we won’t linger long in the realm of pure beauty. Our nature, she observes, does not allow us to subsist on the “simple, sugary fare” of the visual. As our walk continues, she charges us to go deeper, to enter and explore the regions of human meaning. We need, Woolf tells us, an excuse “for folding up the bright paraphernalia of the streets,” to seek out “some duskier chamber of the being.” And so we duck into a store where we watch as a dwarf tries on a pair of shoes.
The dwarf wears the “peevish yet apologetic expression usual on the faces of the deformed.” (The baldness of this description unsettles a present-day reader. is a word we no longer use. And has fallen out of favor in many quarters, as well.) She’s accompanied by two full-size companions toward whom she seems to feel a certain resentment. She needs these chaperones,
