The Flaneur, the Flaneuse, and the Hostess: Virginia Woolf’s (Un)Domesticating Flanerie in ＂Mrs. Dalloway＂

This paper argues that Virginia Woolf's ”Mrs. Dalloway” challenges modernism's traditional disengagement with the domestic due to its elitist self-proclamation of universality, and that, by appropriating the trope of the flaneur, the novel presents a simultaneously domesticating and un-domesticating portrayal of the modern city which contests and redraws the reified boundaries of the city and the home. Famous for his rootless and peripatetic qualities, the flaneur has been considered the hero of modernism and an emblem of modernity; he embodies the expansive metropolitan consciousness, which nevertheless occludes the correlation of the feminine experience of domesticity and urbanity. The novel not merely undercuts the modernist flaneur's cosmopolitanism based in the metropolis, but inscribes women's experience in domestic space and incipient presence in the city streets. Moreover, it reconfigures the home as an inclusive, hospitable social space for all city-dwellers whose acts of flanerie transgress the systematic order of the city.