Mind, Body, and Perceptual Modernity in Virginia Woolf’s “Kew Gardens” and “Street Haunting”

Abstract

The objective of the article is to analyse the relationship between body and mind in Virginia Woolf's essay, “Kew Gardens” (1919) and short story, “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” (1927). In these works, subjectivity is viewed as something formed through both the environment, and bodily experience, as opposed to merely a free-floating concept of pure mental activity. This essay will use phenomenology and modernist narrative theory to examine the idea that consciousness arises out of sensory experience, moving through space with the body, and being part of the surrounding environment. Whereas “Kew Gardens” shows the diffuse nature of individual identity becoming indistinguishable from colour, light, and atmosphere through perception, “Street Haunting” points to how moving through the city manifests the constantly shifting, fluidly multiple quality of the embodied self. This work reviews Woolf's texts alongside other modernist authors who were attempting through their works to reconsider subjectivity in a manner suggesting it is transitory, permeable, and materially grounded - authors such as Erich Auerbach; Hermione Lee; Suzanne Raitt; and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Ultimately, Woolf's representations of urban and garden spaces represent sites of exploration in which mind and body do not operate as distinct forces; rather, they intersect in the actual lived experience of being a human being.