Cyborg City: The Technologizing of Life in Jacob’s Room Anonymous College

In the essay Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown, Virginia Woolf proclaims that human character changed around the year 1910, a statement that serves as the jumping off point for her insights into the modernist movement. Much of her later writing explores just how human character changed in the early twentieth century. In her first experimental novella, Jacob’s Room, Woolf uses the contemporary city and technology to illustrate just one aspect of how human life changed. Where once people spent their lives within ten miles of the rural farm area where they grew up, now humans lived packed together in dramatically different spaces.

Woolf notes that if one were to simply watch the city, they would be “choked with observations,” (Woolf, 91). To deal with this new overwhelming reality, “nature and society between them have arranged a system of classification which is simplicity itself; stalls, boxes, amphitheatre, gallery,” (91). Comprised of both organic and inorganic parts, the city works to create a cohesive unit that isn’t quite uniform, but also doesn’t necessitate individuality. As a result, the way humans interacted with one another fundamentally changed, moving away from a more fragmented but individual connection to a much more...