‘Reflections in a Motor Car’: Virginia Woolf’s Phenomenological Relations of Time and Space

Abstract

Modes of transport feature regularly in the work of Virginia Woolf. Aeroplanes, as Gillian Beer has noted, are central images in Mrs Dalloway, Orlando, The Years, and Between the Acts (Beer, Common Ground 149–50). Urban traffic is also a familiar feature, and provides Woolf with key metaphors through which to consider larger issues of identity and narrative, such as the London omnibuses in sketches like ‘Monday or Tuesday’ or ‘Kew Gardens’, or in Mrs Dalloway where they offer both Elizabeth and Clarissa Dalloway an exhilarating escape from what Woolf elsewhere terms the ‘damned egotistical self’ (D 2: 14). Taxis are also locations in which the possibilities for a plural and communal self can be explored: ‘Where does she begin, and where do I end?’ Peggy asks herself in The Years as she drives across London in a cab with Eleanor (317), while in A Room of One’s Own the sight of a man and woman driving off in a taxi triggers a more general speculation on such destructive polarities as male and female, mind and body, self and other (126). The Tube, too, is a familiar trope by which the narrow confines of self are capable of extension, as in the essay ‘Craftsmanship’, where the Underground becomes a working metaphor for the vagaries of language itself (DM 125–32), or in ‘The Mark on the Wall’, where ‘being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour’ conveys the real fluidity and fleetingness of individual experience (MW 4).