After her exhaustive search for women's place in the history of fiction, in the last chapter of A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf turns her eye from the books to the window, from the internal to the external world. “It was tempting, after all this reading, to look out of the window and see what London was doing on the morning of the 26th of October 1928,” she says (AROO 124). The window is a constant trope in Woolf 's oeuvre, a threshold that delimits our internal negotiations and the linguistic projections of our subjective view onto the world—our constant folding and unfolding, as Gilles Deleuze would theorise in his reading of Michel Foucault (97).

Her turning to the window at this point reveals her need to fold back in, from the external world, an image that would help her transcend the very room of her own: the possibility of a third way, a confusion between the places men and women had had in the history of fiction. All she sees, however, is a flux of isolated bodies rushing past one another in the streets of London; men and women who were completely alien to the pain of her intellectual exercise, caught up in the webs of non-being, to remember Woolf 's final philosophy.

Suddenly, the flux stops: “nobody passed” (AROO 125). It is at this moment that Woolf turns her eye to another threshold: the divide between human and nonhuman. In the deserted street, in this suspended reality outside of the time of the passersby, only a leaf seemed to bear movement. “Like a signal falling” (AROO 125), this leaf detached itself from a lonely plane tree reminding Woolf of a different flux: the leaves that make their way with the wind and glide along the streets of hectic men and women in the eternal unrest of the natural world, a movement that escapes us in the confines of the city. It is here, in the movement of this nobody who passes under her window, that androgyny appears.