Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- KEYNOTES
- NAVIGATING LONDON
- SPATIAL PERCEPTIONS AND THE CITYSCAPE
- REGARDING OTHERS
- Woolf and the Falling Man
- “How Strange”: Affective and Evaluative Uncertainty in Mrs. Dalloway
- Cosmopolitanism From Below in Mrs. Dalloway and “Street Haunting”
- THE LITERARY PUBLIC SPHERE
- BORDER CROSSINGS AND LIMINAL LANDSCAPES
- TEACHING WOOLF, WOOLF TEACHING
- INSPIRED BY WOOLF: A CONVERSATION
- Notes on Contributors
- Conference Program
“How Strange”: Affective and Evaluative Uncertainty in Mrs. Dalloway
from REGARDING OTHERS
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- KEYNOTES
- NAVIGATING LONDON
- SPATIAL PERCEPTIONS AND THE CITYSCAPE
- REGARDING OTHERS
- Woolf and the Falling Man
- “How Strange”: Affective and Evaluative Uncertainty in Mrs. Dalloway
- Cosmopolitanism From Below in Mrs. Dalloway and “Street Haunting”
- THE LITERARY PUBLIC SPHERE
- BORDER CROSSINGS AND LIMINAL LANDSCAPES
- TEACHING WOOLF, WOOLF TEACHING
- INSPIRED BY WOOLF: A CONVERSATION
- Notes on Contributors
- Conference Program
Summary
When the returned Great War soldier Septimus Smith and his wife Rezia appear on Portland Place, we encounter one of the passages in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) that both thematizes strangeness and is itself strange:
Perhaps they walked more slowly than other people, and there was something hesitating, trailing, in the man's walk, but what more natural for a clerk, who has not been in the West End on a weekday at this hour for years, than to keep looking at the sky, looking at this, that and the other, as if Portland Place were a room he had come into when the family are away, the chandeliers being hung in holland bags, and the caretaker, as she lets in long shafts of dusty light upon deserted, queer-looking armchairs, lifting one corner of the long blinds, explains to the visitors what a wonderful place it is; how wonderful, but at the same time, he thinks, as he looks at chairs and tables, how strange. (81–82)
The concluding comment, “how strange,” here indicates alienation and defamilarization— although not entirely the alienation and defamiliarization of Septimus and Rezia Smith. This description places especially Septimus at a “strange” series of narratorial removes from Portland Place, the initial location of his uncanny exploration—an exploration not only of London's West End but of dimensions of figurative language. In this paragraph of description, point of view shifts from a gestured-at observer to a stand-in for Septimus; from a locus in Portland Place to the interior of a weirdly extended simile: “as if Portland were a room” that is uninhabited, although Portland Place is a public square full of people; as if a caretaker, not in evidence in Portland Place itself, were showing the visitor through vacated rooms, and so on.
The strangeness of this passage makes it unclear whether the concluding “how strange” ought to be applied to Portland Place, and by extension all of postwar London with its myriad voices and points of view; or whether the strangeness is in the eye of the beholder. Literally, that beholder is the generic figure “a clerk,” not specifically Septimus.
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- Woolf and the City , pp. 95 - 103Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2010