Response to Verginia Woolf's "Street Haunting: A London Adventure" (1930)
This essay is free-to-access at the website link below:
What the narrator seeks through the essay is the self-realization of her existence. Through this work, the narrator dramatizes the multiple faces of the city: symmetry and contradiction. Her expression of juxtaposition, "shade and solitude and sweet airs", "islands of light, and its long groves of darkness", and her use of oxymoron, "a punctual, everlasting tide" highlight the two different aspects of the city, and represent the opposite force towards outside of her world.
She describes London as if it is the outside of the world which is opposed to the real world. It might represent an unidentified domain and future possibility.
A pencil doesn't contain lead, but the narrator dares to use the word "lead pencil" to identify the type of pencil. Lead is widely used as one of the products of civilization and is also a symbol of the writer. On the other hand, though the narrator maintains the narrative form in the second person "we", the identity of the person with whom she accompanies is uncertain.
Being unidentified its existence, we can see its presence is conversely emphasized more; as a result, we can deduce that the person is another self. Considering the fact that the narrator postponed buying a pencil to go in search of the person, we will discover the person is very important for it has to be searched before buying a pencil. Without the person, the narrator wouldn't complete the purpose to buy a pencil.
The narrator sees the Thames through somebody's eyes who is leaning over the Embankment without a care in the world, and says, "soon it becomes apparent that this person is ourselves". Then we will find that the person is a product of the narrator's imagination, the narrator's spirit parts, and self-projection.
The pencil is the symbol of the world common sense and her real life. On the other hand, the person, another self, is the existence of the image of her ideal world, that transcends the secular world. I assume that Woolf always had tension between those two.
