Title: A Tale of Two Cities: Virginia Woolf's Imagined Jewish Spaces and London's East End Jewish Culture
Abstract: [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] 'But I don't need a ... 'The whole world is my country!' Simon Blumenfeld, Jew Boy (1935) In Street Haunting Virginia Woolf's flaneuse narrator wanders streets of Holborn and Soho on a winter's eve on pretext of hunting down a lead pencil. is London, speaker thinks to herself as she passes shops, houses, army of human beings, and oddities, sufferings and sordidities of city at dusk (156). Woolf captures world of Other--the twisted and deformed, disabled and poor who live in abject conditions of urban Similar to an ethnographer encountering hobbling grotesque dance (156) of foreign street, speaker characterizes this mysterious, haunted encounter in ethnographic and racialized terms. (1) This is evident in language and tone when both speaker and reader come upon a bearded Jew, wild, hunger-bitten, glaring out of his misery. It is sight of Jew, more than any other character, which makes the nerves of spine seem to stand erect; [...] a question is asked which is never answered (159). As language and tone of quote suggest, through this self-reflexive moment narrator uncovers what for her is most eerie, dangerous aspect of writing: peril of becoming immersed in retrograde foreign spaces of self, city, and degenerate aspects of modern English civilization as a whole. It is an engagement with urban squalor that encapsulates Woolf's critique of modern English society evident in many of her portrayals of London. It is also an engagement that is often linked with and imagined spaces in city. This essay uncovers how intersections among Woolf's spatial politics, her critique of modern English society, and her role as a social and political writer are complicated by problematic terms in which she portrays Jewish in her work. We define Woolf's Jewish as her construction of imagined environments that occupy as opposed to mappable places that identify places where lived, worked, and produced culture in London. (2) By highlighting social and cultural contributions that Woolf's depiction of spaces obfuscates, this distinction will add important cultural and historical contexts to current discussions of Woolf's narrative constructions of city. After all, if Woolf uses spaces in London thematically, as a tool to negotiate borders of Englishness and political and economic oppression, how do scholars undo erasure of historical reality and experience in London in 1930s? For this reality is not only missing from Woolf's works, but also from various critical interpretations that underscore negative portraiture and that emphasize alterity and difference. Such emphasis omits experiences of a multifarious community that identified as and individuals who affiliated themselves with groups in London.3 The extant discourse circulating around Woolf's imagined Jews and urban space they occupy positions social place of interwar Anglo-Jewry in a void that virtually obliterates self-determination and individual histories and experiences. In effect, marginalization of British cultural history within modernist literary discourses obscures variations and vibrancy of traditions, as well as social, political, and cultural activities that characterized London's neighborhoods. While important work on writers and artists proliferates, there is little integration of cultural traditions and production into modernist literary history and theory despite expansion and inclusiveness of field. To explore what implications such inclusion might have, one might ask, what difference does Kafka's, Benjamin's, or Modigliani's experience as make to parameters and issues with which Modernist Studies is concerned? …
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 15
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