Queering London: Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Perception

Summary

On October 16, 1939, in a letter to her niece Angelica Bell, Virginia Woolf writes: “You don't know what a queer place London is—Here we are running in and out of each other's houses with torches and gas masks. Black night descends. Rain pours… Ambulances abound” (L6 364). Prior to the war's onset in September of 1939, Woolf had spent fifteen years happily and productively moving between Monk's House and 52 Tavistock Square, the house which had placed her at the heart of what she calls the “passion of my life—the City of London” (431). However, in only the first few months of the war, Woolf's life in and relationship to London finds itself turned upside down. German bombs destroy two houses to the East of 52 Tavistock Square, and the Woolfs’ home, once quiet and secure despite its close location to the city's center, is suddenly exposed to traffic and incessant noise, making intellectual work almost impossible. Leonard and Virginia then move further east to 37 Mecklenburgh Square, which offers only a temporary reprieve, for as the war closes in, Woolf finds herself unable to settle in and work there as well. In 1940, bombs damage 37 Mecklenburgh Square; later that same year, 52 Tavistock Square is completely destroyed.

The letters Woolf writes during the months leading up to her final severance with the city, and what becomes a permanent retreat to Monk's House, vividly chronicle what a queer and disorienting time and place wartime London had become. “You can't think,” she writes Angelica in the same letter, “how difficult it is to write a letter in this doomed and devastated but at the same time morbidly fascinating town…. Oh and the books: all over the floor: oh and the pictures: all on their heads. Oh oh oh ….” (363). Despite her efforts “to let down a fire proof curtain and go on reading, writing, cooking,” Woolf finds herself inexorably drawn in the letters and diary entries from this period to “dramatiz[ing] London perpetually” (433, 434). Wandering through London's ruins, she witnesses, and then recounts, the complete obliteration of both social and personal boundaries.