Street Haunting: The Eye as Oyster, Butterfly, and Protector

An essay about Virginia Woolf's "Street Haunting," in which she takes to the streets of London in search of a pencil:

Manet, Street Singer, 1862

Throughout Virginia Woolf’s essay “Street Haunting,” the spectator’s “eye” is described using various images. It is a naked oyster, a butterfly that lands on beautiful things, and an object carried by the tide. The eye is the instrument through which all Woolf’s observations are made; it is, however, continually marked down as a superficial tool, incapable of penetrating surfaces. By looking carefully at the images that Woolf attaches to the eye, we find that the eye actually holds a great purpose in acting as a shallow observer. I argue that rather than a surface-level role, the eye, as vulnerable as a butterfly and an oyster without its shell, serves a protective function for Woolf. 

At first, we cannot escape the idea of the eye as a superficial observer. Once Woolf and the reader leave her home, the “shell-like covering” that protects us is broken, revealing an enormous eye with the “wrinkles and roughnesses of a central oyster” (Woolf, 2). Woolf continuously emphasizes that this exposed oyster is not a penetrative object, not a “miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure” (2). Instead, it rests on surfaces, a passive instrument that “floats us smoothly down a stream…the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks” (2). Woolf next links the eye with the image of a butterfly, an animal perfect for floating us across surfaces. “[The eye] rests only on beauty,” Woolf writes. “Like a butterfly, it seeks color and basks in warmth” (3). The eye, like a butterfly, is focused on the surface and superficiality of things, only “bringing back the prettiest trophies” (3). The eye is thus relegated to a very simple role: look for beauty and nothing further. 

And yet, when Woolf begins wondering about the figure of a woman, she restrains her eye and writes: “Here we must stop. We are in danger of digging deeper than the eye approves; we are impeding our passage down the smooth stream by catching at some branch or root….The sleeping army may stir itself and wake in us a thousand violins and trumpets in response…and assert all its oddities and sufferings and sordidities” (3). There is something dangerous about a waking brain that will work not only to see, but also to know, to disturb beautiful images and smooth streams with real questions and unnerving implications. The eye must therefore “approve” of all our observations and our thoughts. It must stop us when we are in danger, suggesting a much more active, protective role than we had previously imagined.

Here, we must remember what exact objects Woolf has compared the eye to: an oyster without its shell and a butterfly. Author Laura Marcus points out that by using a naked oyster to describe the eye, a sense of vulnerability is suggested (Marcus, 32). As an oyster who has escaped its shelter, the eye is now free to take in the pleasures and surprises of street life. At the same time, to free itself, the eye must also expose itself to the outside world. There is no more protective shelling—the soft, fleshy underbelly of the oyster is left vulnerable to attack. The butterfly too, as the smallest animal, is entirely defenseless. This vulnerability at first lends itself to the standing theory of the eye as a meek observer, unable to penetrate surfaces. But to reconcile this with the eye’s role as a protector, we realize that it is because the eye is vulnerable, like an oyster without its shell, that it must protect itself. The eye is not unable, but refuses to penetrate surfaces, preventing any confrontation with the ugliness of the world, or any complicated, miserable ponderings of the brain. Left exposed, it must create a new protective shell, one made out of intentional obscurity and imagination. We find that rather than serving a merely observational role, the eye instead occupies a fiercely protective one. 

We can look at how this functions in practice by observing what happens once Woolf describes the eye as a naked oyster. “How beautiful a street is in winter,” she remarks (2). The eye, shedding its protective shell, is exposed to the sights of the street. After, however, Woolf notes that “[the street] is at once revealed and obscured” (2). The naked eye immediately steps into its protective role, both revealing and concealing. It takes something in and blocks something out. It notes the facial expressions of the shabbily dressed women who walk by but blunders past without any further analysis. “After all, we are only gliding smoothly on the surface,” Woolf writes, before quickly moving on to exclaim over trees and lights (2). When she is full of the eye’s “simple, sugary fare,” Woolf halts at the boot shop and asks herself: “What, then, is it like to be a dwarf?” (3). Curiously, though this sounds like a signal to the brain, there is no investigation into what it is really like to be a dwarf. Woolf does not enter the store and ask the dwarf about her experiences. Instead, the eye’s protective function kicks in again and passes the question, not to her brain, which would suggest finding the truth, but to her mind’s eye. The mind’s eye is just as protective as the physical eye. It creates a story in Woolf’s head, allowing her to imagine what the dwarf is thinking and feeling. She envisions the dwarf buoyed by the experience of buying shoes, demanding that we look at her feet— “Look at that! Look at that!” (4). This spares her from confronting what the dwarf is actually thinking and feeling; it protects her from any of the unsettling realities of being a dwarf. The same thing happens when Woolf encounters the blind men, the bearded Jew, and the homeless woman, at which “the nerves of the spine seem to stand erect…a question is asked which is never answered” (5). There is something in each encounter that Woolf recognizes, some truth or reality that begs to be pulled out of the surface. Each time, however, we are intentionally diverted away, the eye gliding past to the next distraction or escaping into an imaginative cloud. The dwarf dances. The quarrels between spouses are resolved. The eye thus does more than simply observe—it is “sportive and generous; it creates; it adorns; it enhances” (5). It is connected to an imagination that both reveals and obscures, that creates and adorns and enhances to prevent us from seeing what might truly be there. 

But why is what’s really there so dangerous? What is the eye protecting us from? At the end, Woolf describes escape as “the greatest of pleasures; street haunting in winter the greatest of adventures” (11). It is as if the blind men and poor women on the street have not been able to disturb her. Once she returns home, she decides it is “comforting to feel the old possessions, the old prejudices, fold us round…the self…sheltered and enclosed” (11). When going on her great adventure, the female flaneur is finally free from her enclosure, free to assume identities and to “put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others” (10). The great danger, the sweet paradox, is that out there, she becomes vulnerable to actually becoming someone different, to the possibility of being forever displaced from the shell that houses her old soul. It is a great adventure to pretend to look into the mind of a dwarf and give oneself “the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind” (10). To look too long, to grapple with the real implications of doing so, is another matter. To “buy” from the window instead of just looking, to become other bodies and minds not just as illusion, but as reality, would mean coming back home and no longer feeling the comfort of old possessions folding perfectly around the self (5). What is really vulnerable in this essay is not the oyster as the eye, but the oyster as Virginia Woolf, the exposed walker, the woman, and her ability to be affected by the things around her. Walking amidst “the humped, the twisted, and the deformed,” she is the naked oyster, vulnerable to all that might uproot her from herself (4). It is the eye’s protective function that keeps her from harm and allows her to remain relatively untouched by what she encounters. The eye is proven successful: Woolf comes back fitting perfectly into her old “self,” largely unaffected by witnessing the blights of her fellow streetwalkers. It is the very same critique she gives to the female travel writers, who travel the world only to return home unchanged (8). 

Throughout “Street Haunting,” Woolf continually defines the eye as an organ only able to see the very surface of things, like a butterfly that rests on beauty. It is by exposing the eye, the oyster, the butterfly, and the self as vulnerable beings, that we begin to understand that the eye sees only the surface of things to protect the self. Woolf imagines dialogue, scenarios, and emotions, and in doing so allows herself to glide smoothly along the street, protecting herself from anything that might unfortunately befall a female flaneur walking halfway across London between dinner and tea.

Notes

Marcus, Laura. “The Short Fiction.” In A Companion to Virginia Woolf, edited by Jessica Berman, 27-40. New Jersey: Wiley Blackwell, 2016. 

Woolf, Virginia. Street Haunting. London: Penguin Books, 2023.