The Self and the Collective

The organizing principle around "Street Haunting" is the relationship between the self and the collective. Woolf essentially sets out on her journey through London with the intention of disposing of selfhood and joining the collective masses. She says early on that "as we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one's own room" (2). This declaration sets up the essay to focus on the experience of disappearing into a broader collective consciousness. One of the important tenets of this collective experience is that one must obey the eye rather than the mind – that is, one must merely observe without thinking too deeply about what one sees or hears. This figure...