Commerce, Politics and the City in A Room of Ones Own...

Commerce, Politics and the City in A Room of Ones Own and Mrs. Dalloway ...At this moment, as so often happens in London, there was a complete lull and suspension of traffic. Nothing came down the street; nobody passed. A single leaf detached itself from the plane tree at the end of the street, and in that pause and suspension fell. Somehow it was like a signal falling, a signal pointing to a force in things which one had overlooked ... Now it was bringing from one side of the street to the other diagonally a girl in patent leather boots and then a young man in a maroon overcoat; it was also bringing a taxi-cab; and it brought all three together at a point directly beneath my†¦show more content†¦In peoples eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and singing; brass bands, barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June. (5) These words serve as a synoptic account both of the novels own aesthetic project (a heightened account of this moment, or day, of June) and of Clarissas own characteristic meaning-making flà ¢nerie (the continual creation of every moment afresh). Each of the two sentences is built on a syntactic pattern which creates a gentle suspense through preterition, the delaying of the concluding verbal component nearly to the point of exhaustion or incoherence. The musically lulling effect of the sentences alliteration (doorsteps/drink/downfall; love/life; tramp/trudge; shuffling/singing; brass bands/barrel; loved/life/London) lends a subtle cohesiveness to what otherwise threatens to become a random list of mutually alienated scraps of urban perception. The suspense-and-fulfillment effect of this preterition is the principle which gives the novel its overall architecture (Clarissas party waits at the end of this June day like the verbal fastener at the end of a clause)