Commerce, Politics and the City in A Room of Ones Own and Mrs. Dallowa

Commerce, Politics and the City in A Room of Ones witness and Mrs. Dalloway ...At this moment, as so often happens in London, there was a sail through lull and suspension of traffic. Nothing came down the street nobody passed. A single leaf detached itself from the plane tree at the block off of the street, and in that pause and suspension fell. Somehow it was like a sign up falling, a signal pointing to a force in things which one had lose ... Now it was bringing from one side of the street to the other diagonally a missy in patent leather boots and then a young objet dart in a maroon overcoat it was to a fault bringing a taxi-cab and it brought all three together at a point directly beneath my window where the taxi stopped and the girl and the young man stopped and they got into the taxi and the cab glided off as if it were swept on by the current elsewhere. (A Room of Ones Own 100) Virginia Woolf - the meter reading of her that narrates the events o f A Room of Ones Own - observes the above urban scene from her window. In a pattern that she had perfected in Mrs. Dalloway four years earlier, the rhythms of urban existence are closely articulated with those of the natural world - and that jazzy coordination in turn serves as a kind of authorization of that urban existence, a guarantee of the transcendent meaning of the evidently constructed human world. hence the quietly definitive dropping of a leaf from its branch not only seems a sort of rhythmic blueprint for the ballet-like convergence of girl, man and taxi-cab, nevertheless also in fact the mystical cause of that convergence, a signal bringing this ... ...fied royal, the skywriting of an advertisers airplane) are analogues of the narrations own confident focalizing sweep - directly airborne, now moving down city streets, now fanning out across parks, always able to join disparate characters in a glutinous narrative line. But they are uneasy an alogues, for they are patently the reaping not of some transcendent or natural meaning but of powerful modern interests the nation, entertainment, commerce. Clarissas intimations of timeless spiritual connectivity, and the narrations own performance of that connectivity, social movement in the grooves set down by these very modern institutions. whole kit and caboodle cited Virginia Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway. London Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1925. ____________. A Room of Ones Own. London Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1929.