Wandering Women
Female Flânerie in Twenty-First-Century English Literature
Name of student: Anne Verhoef Student number: 11721448
Study program: rMA Literary Studies
First examiner (supervisor): dr. B.P. (Ben) Moore Second examiner: dr. D.V. (Daan) Wesselman Date: 14 June 2019
Introduction ... 5
Chapter 1. (Re)inventing the Nineteenth-Century Flâneur ... 12
1.1 History of the literary flâneur ... 14
1.2 Psychogeography and the concept of the derive ... 19
1.3 Flânerie today ... 20
Chapter 2. The Rise of the Twenty-First-Century Flâneuse ... 28
2.1 The (in)visible flâneuse in the second half of the twentieth century ... 31
2.2 Problematic gaze ... 34
2.3Recent Revival: Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse (2016) ... 37
2.4 Threshold magic and in-between spaces ... 39
Chapter 3. The Twenty-First-Century Literary Flâneuse ... 43
3.1 Transgressing space: Ayşegül Savaş’s Walking on the Ceiling (2019) ... 44
3.2 Transgressing time: Maggie Gee’s Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (2014) ... 50
3.3 Transgressing age: Kathleen Rooney’s Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (2017) ... 58
Conclusion ... 64
1. Introduction
In October 2018, I attended the “Read My World” international literature festival at the Tolhuistuin in Amsterdam, which included lectures and performances by writers, journalists, and artists. At that time, the image of what my thesis topic, the female flâneur, would look like was starting to form in my head, so I was particularly interested in one of the activities on
offer, titled “Flâneuses: The Walk.” It was advertised as follows:1
Reading the advertisement text, two things stand out. First, how the introductory paragraph mentions the idea of looking at the city as a political space, to be trespassed through certain outlined structures that have been marked out for us. Second, how the next paragraph asks questions regarding changes in the city through gentrification. Although both issues are indeed important and worth exploring, they do not address the specific issue of women walking the city, which the title does suggest it would.
At the start of the walk we were purposely given no instruction and were each handed a bright red balloon and a set of earplugs. The earplugs, I later understood, were meant to close
yourself off from the other people who participated in the walk, creating the illusion of walking the city by yourself. The balloon was a way of documenting the walk, as we would later learn that we were being filmed from above.
The walk was a disappointment to me for a number of reasons. First, men also participated in the walk. Does that suggest that women and men walking the city have the same implications and effects? If so, then what was the point of using the flâneuse as an angle for this activity in the first place? Second, apart from the facilitator being a writer, the literary aspect of the “literary tour” remained vague as no texts were read and no words uttered during the walk. Third, although a nice attempt, the earplugs cannot prevent the fact that you are walking in a group (perhaps as an individual, but not alone). Furthermore, the earplugs not only cut you off from people walking around you, but from the city noises as well, which are an essential part of the modern-day city and thus crucial in observing it. And finally, you were following the person in front of you, which means that you did not have the choice to
participate in the walk and at the same time decide to turn right where the group turned left. So in a way, the people who organized the walk have marked out the route that navigates you through the urban landscape. Is that then really a form of “swimming against the changing tide” as was mentioned in the advertisement text?
All in all, many things can be said about the way that this literature festival tackled the relatively new concept of the flâneuse. It illustrates that it is, in fact, quite a challenging concept to work with in all its complexities, especially in relation to its original nineteenth-century male equivalent, which is generally regarded as Charles Baudelaire’s literary progeny. Answering the question of what a flâneuse is exactly is thus more complicated than simply transferring the notion of the male flâneur onto its more recently emerging female form. It has
been a subject of discussion since the 1980s, with scholars such as Janet Wolff (1985) and Griselda Pollock (1988) arguing for the impossibility of a female flâneur altogether.
Recently, perspectives on the flâneuse-debate have been changing. In 2016, Lauren Elkin published her work titled Flâneuses: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo,
Venice and London, which provides a clear overview of famous flâneuses and narrates her
own experience as a flâneuse in different cities. She refers to the 1980s debate, to the idea that the existence of a flâneuse figure is impossible, and states that “[t]o suggest that there
couldn’t be a female version of the flâneur is to limit the ways women have interacted with the city to the ways men have interacted with the city” (11, emphasis in original).
Hence, Elkin proposes to “redefine the concept itself” (11). However, how she sets out to do that exactly is unclear. In the end, she has created a timeline of the female flâneur with numerous (278 in total) interesting side notes. Moreover, she discusses several twentieth-century fictional and non-fictional flâneuses at length, such as Virgina Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and George Sand, as well as visual artists who are involved in flânerie, such as Sophie Calle and Agnès Varda, but reduces the mass of her examples, including the more recent ones, to one, crucial endnote:
I counter Guy Debord with his ex-wife, Michèle Bernstein. I counter Iain Sinclair with Rachel Lichtenstein, Will Self with Laura Oldfield Ford, Nick Papadimitrou with Rebecca Solnit, Teju Cole with Joanna Kavenna, but also with Patti Smith, Adrian Piper, Lisa Robertson, Faïza Guène, Janet Cardiff, Yoko Ono, Laurie Anderson, Vivian Gornick, Lavinia Greenlaw, Amina Cain, Chloe Aridjis, Atiya Fayzee, Heather Hartley, Wendy MacNaughton, Danielle Dutton, Germaine Krull, Valeria Luiselli, Alexandra Horowitz, Jessie Fauset, Virginie Despentes, Kate Zambreno, Joanna Walsh, Eliza Gregory, Annie
Ernaux, Annett Gröschner, Sandra Cisneros, Halide Adivar, Oriane Zérah, Cécile Wajsbrot, Helen Scalway, Ilse Bing, Fran Lebowitz, Rachel Whiteread, Banu Qudsia, Zadie Smith, Colette, Emily Hahn, Marianne Breslauer,
Gwendolyn Brooks, Berenice Abbott, Laure Albin-Guillot, Zora Neale Hurston, Vivian Maier, Lola Ridge, Nella Larsen, Flora Tristan, and on, and on, and on. (Elkin 302)
The reduction of evidence that could have bolstered Elkin’s argument that “narratives of walking repeatedly leave out a woman’s experience” (20) to a single (although rich) endnote is striking. Moreover, in her valuable attempt to reassess the term, twenty-first-century literary fictional flâneuses seem to be underrepresented. Eliza Gregory, Marianne Breslauer, and
Vivian Maier, for example, are all (street) photographers. Wendy MacNaughton,Helen
Scalway,2 and Rachel Whiteread are visual artists in other fields (illustrator, exhibition
designer, and sculptor respectively). Janet Cardiff,3Laurie Anderson, and Lavinia Greenlaw4
are audio(-visual) performance artists. But above all, many of the women Elkin mentions in the
endnote are no longer alive in the twenty-first century.5
Furthermore, Elkin’s work points at a general expansion of the term flâneuse that is currently taking place in literature; she employs the literary aspect of the concept as broadly as possible to include any self-reflective female writing that has some sort of connection to
2 Helen Scalway is also the author of an article titled “The Contemporary Flâneuse,” published in The Invisible
Flâneuse? Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth Century Paris (eds. Aruna D’Souza and Tom
McDonough), 2006.
3 Janet Cardiff is most known for her “audio walks,” recordings of her walking and narrating specific routes that
people can follow in real-time. These audio walks have been documented in a book titled The Walk Book (2005).
4 Lavinia Greenlaw is initiator of the “Audio Obscura” project, which consists of recordings of Greenlaw’s prose
about strangers’ thoughts in the city. A selection of the project’s audio recordings has been published in book form, titled Audio Obscura (2011), and are accompanied by black-and-white photographs by Julian Abrams.
5 I.e. Atiya Fayzee (1877-1967), Germaine Krull (1897-1985), Jessie Fauset (1882-1961), Halide Adivar
(1884-1964), Ilse Bing (1899-1998), Emily Hahn (1905-1997), Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), Laure Albin-Guillot (1879-1962), Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), Lola Ridge (1873-1941), Nella Larsen (1891-1964), and Flora Tristan (1803-1844).
the modern world and the city.6 Not only has the concept now become so broad that it might start to lose its meaning when applied in literature, but the trend also obscures the fact that the classic category of the flâneur has been used a lot in writing about men but not in writing about (and by) women.
The intermedial use of the meaning and concept of the flâneuse in the way that Elkin does is very much visible today. Festivals like “Read My World” that I attended in 2018, and exhibitions such as Saskia de Brauw and Vincent van de Wijngaard’s “Ghosts Don’t Walk in
Straight Lines,” which was shown at FOAM Amsterdam from 1 until 10 February 2019,7 and
“Flâneur – New Urban Narratives,” which has been on display in different cities from April
2015 until March 2017,8 illustrate the importance and attention that female flânerie now enjoys
in our current society while at the same time highlighting that the interpretation of the concept is in no way limited to a specific medium.
It is, however, important not to lose sight of the literary features of the figure as the flâneuse rapidly rises across different types of media and art precisely because the existence of the flâneuse has been denied in the 1980s and she has not had a chance to develop and evolve in the same pace and under the same societal circumstances as the flâneur. Looking at Elkin’s endnote, the women she mentions who are still alive in the twenty-first century and are actively producing work are few in numbers. The ones who are producing literary fictional work are
6 Elkin mentions a few authors in her endnote that have produced literary work that narrates city life, but not the
specific topic of the flâneuse, such as historian Rachel Lichtenstein’s London trilogy On Brick Lane (2007),
Diamond Street: The Hidden World of Hatton Garden (2012), and Portobello Road (forthcoming), Patti Smith’s Just Kids (2010) and M Train (2015), Faïza Guène’s Kiffe Kiffe Demain (2004), Vivian Gornick’s The Odd Woman and the City (2015), Joanna Walsh’s Vertigo (2015), Annett Gröschner’s Moskauer Eis (2000), Cécile
Wajsbrot’s L’Ile aux Musées (2008), Fran Lebowitz’s Metropolitan Life (1978), Banu Qudsia’s Raja Gidh (1981), and Zadie Smith’s NW (2012) and The Embassy of Cambodia (2013). Virginie Despentes’s Baise-moi (1994) does not necessarily narrate city life nor women walking through cities, but does provoke ideas on female sexuality in the city as the two protagonists hunt men and kill them after they had been raped by a group of men. Its violent storyline has been discussed in relation to modernity’s (and specifically Baudelaire’s) ideas on literary aesthetics in Debarati Sanyal’s The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony, and the Politics of Form (2006).
7 https://www.foam.org/museum/programme/saskia-de-brauw-vincent-van-de-wijngaard, accessed April 9, 2019. 8 http://www.flnr.org/index.php, accessed April 11, 2019.
even fewer.9 And the ones who are producing literary work that narrates not only city life, but addresses the specific topic of fictional, female flânerie in the twenty-first century are highly
limited.10 Despite the large group of (fifty-one) flâneuses that Elkin mentions in her endnote,
only six fit into the category of the recent literary flâneuse: Joanna Kavenna’s Inglorious (2007), Amina Cain’s Creature (2013), Chloe Aridjis’s Book of Clouds (2009), Heather
Hartley’s Adult Swim (2016), which bundles together her “walking sonnets,” Danielle Dutton’s
SPRAWL (2010), and Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl (2011). This particular group is
underrepresented in Elkin’s work; references to them are limited to this one endnote and no further examples of twenty-first-century literary flâneuses are mentioned in the main text. Hence, that is the subject I will expand on in this thesis.
As I have experienced myself during the process of writing this thesis, twenty-first-century literary flâneuses are not easy to find. Whereas the male flâneur has evolved over the centuries into a prominent twenty-first-century literary figure (Cole 2011, Sinclair 2002,
9 Elkin mentions many twenty-first-century authors in her endnote that produce (or have produced) work that is
not necessarily literary or fictional. Laura Oldfield Ford, who is most known for her work titled “Savage
Messiah,” a blog she posted between 2005 and 2009 about her walks through the city of London, had her images and drawings accompany text (not necessarily always her own). The blogposts were bundled together in a book in 2011 that was published by Verso Books, which describes it on its website as “[p]art graphic novel, part artwork.” Rebecca Solnit does write about walking and wandering in literature, Wanderlust (2000) being her most well-known work in this area, but in a critical manner – not in a literary fictional manner. Adrian Piper, a philosopher specialized in topics of otherness and racism, is also active as a conceptual artist; her 1970s work
Catalysis involved walking down the street, attracting attention by wearing filthy clothing or wearing a sign that
reads “Wet Paint,” but she does not address the topic of the flâneuse directly. Lisa Robertson, a poet and essayist, is probably most known for Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2004), a mixture between city prose, poetry, and critical theory, but not exclusively literary nor fictional. Valeria Luiselli’s collection of essays titled Sidewalks (2010) explores different ways of observing the city, but not within a fictional framework. Alexandra Horowitz has written about walking in a non-fictional, popular scientific manner in her work On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes (2014). Oriane Zérah is a
photographer and author of the book Une Flâneuse au Pakistan (2012), narrating a non-fictional account of her experience travelling through Pakistan. Yoko Ono directed the film Rape (1969) together with John Lennon, in which a girl walking the streets of London is followed constantly and eventually against her will, offering a visual representation of a flâneuse as an object that can be looked at with an anonymous, male gaze (whoever is behind the camera and whoever is watching the film).
10 Some of the authors Elkin mentions in her endnote have produced literary work prominently involving a
flâneuse, but not in the twenty-first century, such as Annie Ernaux’s Journal du Dehors (translated as Exteriors, 1993), Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1984), and Colette’s Claudine à Paris (1901) and
L’Ingénue Libertine (1909). Michèle Bernstein is most well-known for being a member of The Situationist
International in the 1950s and for having been married to one of its most prominent members, Guy Debord. She also published two novels, Tous les Chevaux du Roi (1960) and La Nuit (1961), in which she operates the notion of détournement, a technique that was adopted by the Situationist movement for describing the experience of walking the city streets.
McCarthy 2006), Sinclair’s and McCarthy’s flâneur even being adapted onto the big screen in 2002 and 2009 respectively, the figure of the flâneuse is still somewhat hidden in our current literary landscape. However, that does not mean that she is not there. It just means that we have to work a little harder to move her from the background into the foreground in order to
understand the development she has made over the years.
In this thesis, I will attempt to re-conceptualize the literary flâneuse in the twenty-first century. I will do so by not only providing historical and theoretical background to both the flâneur and the flâneuse, but also by presenting close-reading analyses of recent literary works. Hence, I will go beyond creating an extension to Elkin’s timeline to explore what is being done with the figure of the flâneuse in literature now. In order to do that, the first chapter will discuss the definition, history, and evolution of the original male flâneur. The second chapter will address the scholarly flâneuse-debate of the 1980s in light of current developments and relate those perspectives to the evolution of the male flâneur. In the third chapter, I will close read three literary examples of twenty-first-century flâneuses: Ayşegül Savaş’s Walking on the
Ceiling (2019), Maggie Gee’s Virgina Woolf in Manhattan (2015), and Kathleen Rooney’s
Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (2017).11 By doing this, I intend to take the first steps towards a re-conceptualization of the flâneuse in twenty-first-century literature. I do not wish to present the examples in this thesis to constitute a complete overview or to be exhaustive in any way. More examples can be found, but the range of this research master’s thesis does not allow me to attempt such an overview nor would I consider it to be particularly productive as these literary works deserve to be analyzed in their own respect and not exclusively as part of an overview.
11 These are not the same as the six examples that remained after analyzing Elkin’s endnote in detail, because I
want to illustrate that there are more, very recent, examples available if you only take the time to thoroughly search for them.
Chapter 1. (Re)inventing the Nineteenth-Century Flâneur
“[…] and my vision deceived me, or, through a rent in a closely-buttoned and evidently second-handed roquelaire which enveloped him, I caught a glimpse both of a diamond and of a dagger. These observations heightened my curiosity, and I resolved to follow the stranger withersoever he should go.”
- Edgar Allen Poe, “The Man of the Crowd” (184)
In 1840, Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine published Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd,” a short story that narrates the unnamed male narrator’s pursuit of another unnamed male stranger through the city. The chase is unplanned; the narrator is watching masses of people move through the city when the ambiguity of the stranger’s intention on the street, carrying what could be a diamond and a dagger, catches his eye. He decides to follow him, to solve the mystery that surrounds him, in a cautious manner “so as not to attract his attention” (Poe 184).
Poe’s short story generates a mirroring effect, the stranger possibly echoing the figure of the narrator, which makes it difficult to characterize either one as a typical flâneur even though both men wander the city streets exposing through the image of the other a form of anxious doubling of the self. As has been pointed out by Janet Wolff, the archetypal literary figures of the flâneur and the stranger are generally related as they “share the possibility and the prospect of lone travel, of voluntary up-rooting, of anonymous arrival at a new place,” but can be distinguished from each other because the flâneur “[will not] settle down or even make contact with those around him” (40) whereas the stranger will. Hence, Poe’s short story
diffuses, along the lines of the general similarities that Wolff has pointed out, the contours of the typical flâneur; he could be the narrator, the stranger, or even both.
Whether the narrator or the stranger is considered a flâneur, in either scenario, Walter Benjamin argues, the crowd both exposes and protects him. On the one hand, the stranger’s anxious movements through the crowd makes the narrator notice him, although he is the only person who does. On the other hand, the flâneur needs the crowd because “the masses appear as the asylum that shields an asocial person from his persecutors […], [which] is at the origin of the detective story” (Benjamin 40). The asocial person in this case is deeply interlinked with the figure of the flâneur as the classic image of the asocial person as an isolated individual does not hold up in the context of the crowd. The isolated individual would not enjoy people’s presence around him, while Poe’s characters cannot be alone and both men thrive in their proximity to the crowd.
As was pointed out by Benjamin, Poe’s narrative partly embodies the form and feel of the start of a detective story. The glimpse of the diamond and the dagger in the stranger’s pocket suggests the previous occurrence of a criminal event – was the diamond perhaps stolen in a violent manner? Moreover, the two objects combined represent two different sides of crime: the diamond represents beauty, the ultimate commodity, while the dagger implies physically executed violence. They also suggest feelings of attraction and repulsion that cannot be separated as the man of the crowd always represents both. In a way, he functions as the middle rim of a two-sided coin; neither distinctly grounded on the one or on the other side, but at the same time an essential yet often unnoticed part of the whole. According to
Benjamin, “Poe purposely blurs the difference between the asocial person and the flâneur” (48, italics in original), which diffuses the lines between an account of flânerie and a detective story.
The indistinct genre classification of Poe’s short story demonstrates the solid function of the crowd on the street. As Benjamin points out, “[t]he original social content of the detective story was the obliteration of the individual’s traces in the big-city crowd” (43). As such, the function of the crowd in detective stories shows similarities with the function of the crowd for the flâneur: it accommodates the walker with a level of invisibility and anonymity. It is the reason why Poe’s narrator is able to follow the stranger through the city without attracting attention and why the stranger does not attract attention from anyone else but the narrator – both men merge into the crowd and as they become part of the masses, they both become invisible observers.
Today, the flâneur’s immediate environment is rapidly changing. Life on the streets has become faster, more hectic, and is often exposed to new forms of crowd management, for example through the use of technological surveillance devices. The social function of the street now combines the need to control the increased movement of masses with providing the individual shelter, which brings along its own implications regarding people’s ability to observe anonymously on the streets. At the same time, today’s society marks a renewed interest in the act of wandering city streets and even though the world around him has been moving in rapid speed, creating cities that are developed and designed as homogenized spaces, the flâneur still remains an often-used figure in literary narratives. This raises the question: how has the nineteenth-century figure of the flâneur evolved and/or reinvented itself for the twenty-first-century literary landscape?
1.1History of the literary flâneur
In order to look at the development that the flâneur has made over the centuries, it is
the French poet Charles Baudelaire in the nineteenth century, who distinguished the
documenting nature of the artist flâneur from that of the common flâneur, who rarely records his observations and experiences. Later, the figure of the flâneur was appropriated for
academic purposes by several scholars, of which Walter Benjamin is most often cited in this context. Baudelaire described “the crowd [as] his domain” because “[h]is passion and his profession is to merge with the crowd” (12). He continues:
For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions. The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes. (Baudelaire 12-13)
It is, however, not merely “an immense source of enjoyment” for Baudelaire’s artist flâneur to wander the city streets. According to Baudelaire, “[w]e may rest assured that this man […] has a nobler aim than that of the pure idler, a more general aim, other than the fleeting of circumstance” (16). His higher aim is “to extract from fashion the poetry that resides in its historical envelope, to distil the eternal from the transitory” (16). In other words, the flâneur not only participates in the movement that we call modernity, but also actively tries to come to terms with what it means to operate within an art form that is completely new in its aim not to rely heavily on past forms of art (such as, for example, the Renaissance) that were
Ironically, the very act of walking and wandering itself relies heavily on connecting current observations to past events. Flânerie is rooted in acts of memory and reflection; no detail of the city and its streets goes by unnoticed and every observation is meticulously evaluated in the mind of the flâneur, which forces him to physically slow down. As Frédéric Gros notes, “whatever liberates you from time and space alienates you from speed” (Gros 4, emphasis in original). The flâneur moves at a different, slower pace than the rest of the crowd, and as such “his slowness becomes the condition for a higher agility: that of the mind” (Gros 178-179). Hence, while his physical pace is slower than that of the crowd surrounding him, his mental awareness is much higher compared to others. Or, as Gros remarks, “[h]e might do nothing, but he follow[s] everything, observing, his mind always alert” (179).
The nineteenth-century flâneur, being, in Baudelaire’s words, one of “those
independent, intense and impartial spirits” (13), is able to go wherever he wants, whenever he wants, at whichever pace he prefers, because he always enjoys a certain privilege. He has nowhere in particular to be, so he enjoys the privilege of having an abundance of free time on his hands. Giampaolo Nuvolati highlights Benjamin’s famous example of taking a turtle out for a walk as a way of illustrating the flâneur’s relationship with time; he argues that it is “a provocative and metaphorical approach based on a slowness contrasting the local clock of hours and the universal clock of progress which impose the rhythms of the modern life” (Nuvolati 23). The privilege of not having to work or be in a particular place during the day thus not only allows the flâneur to slow down his pace in relation to the crowd surrounding him, but also in relation to the pace of general societal movements.
Besides enjoying the privilege of having the time to wander the streets whenever he wants, the flâneur also has the privilege of going wherever he wants because he has a comfortable amount of money in his pocket. As his “disembodied eye reflects an elite mentality” (Boutin 126) he is generally regarded as part of the upper class, or “coming from
economically advanced countries” (Nuvolati 24). His particular position within society invokes a form of upper class boredom, not knowing what to do with the plenitude of time and money available to him, or, as Benjamin describes it, “the kind of boredom that easily arises under the baleful eyes of a satiated reactionary regime” (37). His ability to “be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere” (13), as articulated by Baudelaire, indicates how his financial privilege allows him to wander in hybrid places: he is not (socially) bound to move within the private, domestic sphere but he can move freely across the public sphere, where he feels most at home.
Another reason why the flâneur is able to go wherever he wants to go, is because of the simple fact that he is a man, which is considered a rather unspoken, self-evident
nineteenth-century privilege. Griselda Pollock notes that “the flâneur is an exclusively masculine type which functions within the matrix of bourgeois ideology through which the social spaces of the city were reconstructed by the overlaying of the doctrine of separate spheres on to the division of public and private which became as a result a gendered division” (67). Hence, the fact that his movements are not limited to the domestic sphere not only indicates his freedom and privileges as a male figure wandering the city streets, but also points at the restrictions of a nineteenth-century woman’s movements between spaces as she was socially expected to stay within the domestic sphere. It is thus no coincidence that Baudelaire speaks of “his dwelling in the throng” (12, the emphasis is mine) and refers to the flâneur as a masculine “prince” (13).
In the end, the upper class privileges of being a man with time and money to spare allows the flâneur, to use Baudelaire’s phrasing again, “to see the world […] and yet to be unseen of the world” (13). His ability to merge into the crowd has allowed him to gaze at objects, at the consumer society at display, without being noticed or observed himself, moving through the city anonymously and invisibly. He is described by Keith Tester as “the
sovereign spectator going about in the city in order to find the things which will occupy his gaze” (7). As has been pointed out by Benjamin, the thing that mostly occupies the flâneur’s gaze in the nineteenth century is the rise of capitalism around him, expressed as the
commodification of the city streets. People and goods become interchangeable to the flâneur; he goes window shopping at the same time he goes out to look at the crowds. Although this utopian dream world of capitalism is what generates the figure of the flâneur in the first place, as the world around him becomes more and more commodified, the flâneur’s “leisurely appearance as a personality” functions as “his protest against the division of labour which makes people into specialists [and] against their industriousness” (Benjamin 54).
The nature of the flâneur’s gaze is, along the lines of capitalist commodification, generally described as possessive. Gros, for example, notes that “[s]eeing, dominating, looking mean possessing” and that “[a]ll that I see, that is open to the gaze, is mine” (55). Pollock affirms that the direction of the gaze is commodity-focused:
The flâneur symbolizes the privilege or freedom to move about the public arenas of the city observing but never interacting, consuming the sights through a controlling but rarely acknowledged gaze, directed as much at other people as at the goods for sale. (67)
Moreover, Pollock emphasizes that the nature of the gaze is both possessive (“consuming the sights through a controlling […] gaze”) as well as anonymous and invisible (“rarely
acknowledged”). This enables the flâneur to observe his surroundings at his own pace while enjoying what Baudelaire refers to as “his incognito wherever he goes” (13).
1.2Psychogeography and the concept of the derive
The previously mentioned indistinct genre classification of Poe’s short story not only
accommodates the protective and expository functions of the crowd, but also emphasizes the indistinctiveness of the role of the flâneur figure. The narrator of Poe’s story, for example, could be considered a flâneur as he has the time and space to wander, but at the same time takes on the role of a detective, initiating the pursuit of the stranger when the undefined object in the stranger’s roquelaire “heightened [his] curiosity” (Poe 184) – it is in this moment that the narrator’s account of his observations turns into what could be the exciting and possibly dangerous start of a detective story. At this point, it becomes evident that the environment of the street has become part of the mental space of the characters. When, for example, the streets empty out, the stranger becomes more and more anxious as the environment around him changes, as if the city is his mind.
In the second half of the twentieth century, Guy Debord gave theoretical formulation
to this interaction of the mind and external space through the term“psychogeography.” He
describes psychogeography as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals” (8). Psychogeography is thus a direct consequence of the effect that space and environment have on the individual’s mind, behavior and emotional state of being.
Part of the concept of psychogeography is the practice of the derive, or drift, which is described by Debord as “a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances” (62). He continues:
In a derive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and
let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. (Debord 62)
Hence, to wander without having a goal in mind, to practice the act of the derive, means being unconcerned with and detached from the societal expectations of the direction one is taking. The environment dictates the route in the moment, as the mind is guided by external space and vice versa. The derive is, however, not merely a concatenation of chance encounters. Debord underlines the importance of “psychogeographical contours” in relation to the derive: “constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones” (Debord 62). Although some of these points are clearly static, such as road blocks or other physical obstacles, others can be more personal and susceptible to change – hence, different people can drift into different directions. Because the stranger in Poe’s short story seems to drift amidst the crowd, expressing almost an obsession with the presence of the
crowd around him which the narrator cannot seem to understand,12 the narrator is unable to
anticipate where the stranger is going exactly and eventually discontinues the pursuit, satisfied and in awe: “He is the man of the crowd. It will be in vain to follow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds” (Poe 188, italics in original).
1.3Flânerie today
Recently, walking and wandering has gained renewed (scholarly) attention. Rebecca Solnit, for example, author of the highly influential Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2001), states that “[t]he new millennium arrived as a dialectic between secrecy and openness; between consolidation and dispersal of power; [etc.], and walking has as ever been on the side of the
12 The derive does, however, involve a form of detachment that is not necessarily always present in Poe’s short
latter” (xi). However, although she argues that walking in cities and rural areas have been “prime ways of exploring the unpredictable and the incalculable” in the nineteenth and twentieth century, at the same time she signals that walking and wandering “are now under assault on many fronts” (10). Most notably, she mentions the rise of technologies that allow people in the twenty-first century to “maximize the time and place for production and
minimize the unstructured time in between” (10) as one of the main reasons for the incursion. She argues that wandering is now generally categorized as “doing nothing” which in most current capitalist societies equals being unproductive and thus being of little value. Another reason why walking and wandering are under assault in her view is related to the fact that “in many new places, public space isn’t even in the design” (11). In other words, the
interpretation of public space in the twenty-first-century city landscape is changing as it is being designed to, for example, accommodate cars rather than pedestrians.
Nevertheless, Solnit still considers walking a way of “maintaining a bulwark against [the] erosion of the mind, the body, the landscape, and the city” (11) in a world where many of the city’s inhabitants live inside their homes, offices or shops – or “a series of interiors” as Solnit refers to it (9). Walking (re)connects places that are now largely disconnected from each other by the contemporary way of life, “for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors” (Solnit 9). Hence, whereas Benjamin’s arcades used to function as a way of “blurring [the] interior and exterior” (Solnit 200), which suited the flâneur perfectly, buildings and city grids are now designed in such a way that the lines between inside and outside space becomes more strictly defined by the city’s very own streets:
Streets are the space left over between buildings. A house alone is an island
than archipelagos in that same sea. But as more and more buildings arose, they became a continent, the remaining open space no longer like the sea but like rivers, canals, and streams running between land masses. (Solnit 175)
Solnit’s arguments about the changing city streets and buildings by design prompt a
reconsideration of Henri Lefebvre’s earlier observations that the capitalist city is becoming a more and more homogenized space. In his groundbreaking work The Production of Space (1974) he had already argued that “[s]pace is […] produced and reproduced as reproducible” (337, emphasis in original) in order to maximize economic profits – all houses and buildings have in effect become commodities of which the value can be increased by creating them as “virtually identical ‘cells’” (337). The fact that this urban design of reproducibility has come to feel natural to most people and leaves little to no questions asked he refers to as “the triumph of homogeneity” (337). Along these lines, Matthew Carmona argues that:
Today, designers, developers and clients in both the public and private sectors are no longer tied to particular localities, but operate across regions, states and increasingly on an international stage. The result is that design formulae are repeated from place to place with little thought to context. (159)
All these urban developments raise the question: is engagement in the act of flânerie still possible in our current day and age? As the lines between public and private spheres merge together while the demarcations between interior and exterior spaces become more strictly outlined, and the boundaries between work and leisure time are left only vaguely defined when people work from their laptops in cafes and read their (work) emails from their mobile phones, where does the flâneur fit in? Even though the privilege of having nowhere in
particular to be is now as much (or perhaps even more) a rarity as it was in the nineteenth century, leisure time is often offered and consumed via social media, where people move around in a new, online public sphere in order to display accounts of their personal lives. This affects the function of the crowd on the streets; because people are more focused on
themselves, and on their own destination, one can move through the city streets relatively invisibly. However, technological advancements account for current discussions of privacy and anonymity that in turn directly affect the level of visibility on the streets – for example, being watched and registered on a daily basis by surveillance cameras.
According to Nuvolati, the concept of the flâneur is still very much alive today. He argues that the city’s fast pace and developments elicit a similar type of resistance against capitalist commodification processes as that of Benjamin’s nineteenth-century flâneur. He states:
The growing process of individualization, the contemporary attempt of some people to personalize their relationships with places, to explore non-conventional urban
territories, refusing standard patterns, makes the flâneur a renewed protagonist of our era. Less elitist than in the past, the new flâneurs or the new practices of flânerie should be considered as emerging figures and activities, able to fill the desire or more active or personal biographies expressed by individuals in fighting against consumerist redundancy. (Nuvolati 22, italics in original)
Nuvolati’s contemporary flâneur, “the hunter of urban signs of everyday life” (28), implies a new form of privilege, not based exclusively on time or money (when after all, time is
money), but based on the notion of uniqueness; on the one hand observing what others do not (bother to) see or going where others do not (bother to) go, and on the other hand creating a
personal connection to a place that others do not have. Although the ability to create a personal connection with a place is a privilege that can be facilitated by having time and money to spare, they are never quintessential prerequisites for the individual’s immersion in unique experiences as everyday encounters with spaces are accessible to everyone and not just to the elite. Hence, searching for these experiences and connecting with ordinary, everyday places in new ways can be something relatively unprivileged people can do. The capacity to resist homogenized spaces in this way is open to most people who are able to step outside and place one foot in front of the other.
The contemporary flâneur is thus less concerned with the general appearance of the world around him, and more concerned with what specific aspects of the world around him can be connected to his personal life. As such, the focus on his relationship with the crowd he surrounds himself with slightly dissipates to the background, and the focus on the connection between the (urban) environment and the self is given more attention: “[t]he use of the concept of flâneur seems to reflect the modern sense of bewilderment, as well as the craving for new relationships with both places and their inhabitants” (Nuvolati 22, italics in original). This urge for a personal, unique connection to everyday spaces that the contemporary flâneur seems to express is a way of resisting commodification in the form of increasingly
homogenized spaces while at the same time immersing the self in it by embarking on a stroll through the exact city landscape that it seeks to escape in a similar fashion to the nineteenth-century flâneur.
A novel such as Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) beautifully illustrates the subtle shift in focus that the literary flâneur has made over the years in order to adjust to his rapidly
changing urban environment. Cole’s protagonist, Julius, a young Nigerian higher educated doctor living in New York, can be characterized as a contemporary post-colonial flâneur as he wanders the streets of New York and Brussels in search of connections to his personal
Nigerian heritage. However, this reinvention of the nineteenth-century flâneur into a twenty-first-century post-colonial flâneur raises questions about race and class issues in urban spaces. Although he is aware of the relative privilege that comes with his education and profession, it would be questionable at the least to assume that Cole’s flâneur enjoys similar privileges regarding the accessibility of space as did the nineteenth-century Parisian upper class flâneur – could Julius truly be able to go wherever he wants, whenever he wants, in whichever pace he prefers without being noticed or perceived as “out of place?”
Although less focused on how the world surrounding him is connected to his personal life, Iain Sinclair’s 2002 novel London Orbital is very much concerned with exploring places that other people generally cannot or do not bother to explore on foot. Walking as closely to the M25 highway as possible, Sinclair steps outside the city’s prevailing footpaths in order to see London from a different point of view. This viewpoint is dictated by the contrast between the speeding cars and the walker’s slow pace, which emphasizes one of the flâneur’s
originally nineteenth-century qualities: being able to observe and contemplate at a slower pace than his surroundings. Moreover, the idea that the flâneur goes wherever he wants to go is again highlighted considering the fact that he takes the time to explore and describe some of the most ignored parts of the city. Unlike Cole, however, Sinclair does not connect his
observations to his own personal history but instead adds to his previous literary work of voluminous descriptions of London.
A twenty-first-century novel that is not necessarily concerned with leisurely walks, creating personal connections with places, or exploring places that other people do not bother to observe is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). However, its protagonists, a father and his young son, could be characterized as contemporary versions of flâneurs in a post-apocalyptic world. Following the only road that is left after an unknown catastrophe has destroyed the majority of mankind, father and son try to survive as best as they can, stealing
any food or weapon they can find from abandoned houses and then continuing their journey without a clear destination. Their quest for whatever commodity is left in the world could be a twenty-first-century translation of the possessive gaze of the nineteenth-century flâneur, but could also be considered the ultimate critique of today’s consumerist societies. Moreover, the young boy’s mother is missing from the narrative as she had committed suicide before the starting point of the novel. It is thus, similar to Cole’s and Sinclair’s, a twenty-first-century narrative that revolves around a single male protagonist-flâneur.
In conclusion, the male version of the originally nineteenth-century flâneur is still very much present in the twenty-first-century literary landscape, although it has had to adapt its ways to the changing urban environment. The contemporary flâneur radiates a new type of privilege that is not necessarily based on having an abundance of time or money on his hands, but on the uniqueness of the relationship he has with his everyday environment. Processes of individualization and homogenization of spaces cause a similar type of growing resistance against the city’s expressions of capitalism as that which the nineteenth-century flâneur asserted. Hence, a renewed literary inward turn, marked by the same self-reflections and prompted by similar psychogeographical features as in the nineteenth century, presents itself and may be considered an important reason for the flâneur’s ongoing literary popularity and importance.
In this chapter I have mentioned three twenty-first-century examples that illustrate how contemporary reinventions of the concept of the flâneur bring about their own challenges, in line with the challenges of the time in which they were written, whether
involving race, class, and/or gender. Although I have limited the examples here to three, many
more could be mentioned.13 It is striking to note how easy twenty-first-century literary
examples that involve a male flâneur are to find, how popular they are, either because they are
13 E.g. Joshua Ferris’s The Unnamed (2010), Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), Tao Lin’s Taipei
written by a well-known, established author (Sinclair) or because they have won several
internationally renowned prices (Cole, McCarthy).14 The twenty-first-century literary flâneur
that is now readily accessible and visible for a large audience is, thus, above all male.
14 According to his publisher’s website, Teju Cole has won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New York City
Book Award for Fiction and the Internationaler Literaturpreis for Open City (2011). In addition, Open City was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Ondaatje Prize of the Royal Society of Literature. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) has won, among many other prizes, the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Chapter 2. The Rise of the Twenty-First-Century Flâneuse
“But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of
perceptiveness, an enormous eye.”
- Virginia Woolf, “Street Haunting: A London Adventure”
(481)
In 1927, Virginia Woolf published an essay titled “Street Haunting: A London Adventure,” which opens with the seemingly trivial comment that “[n]o one perhaps has ever felt
passionately towards a lead pencil” (480). The lead pencil becomes the motivation to walk out the door, onto the streets, “an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner” (480). Woolf continues:
[W]hen the desire comes upon us to go street rambling the pencil does for a pretext, and getting up we say: “Really I must buy a pencil,” as if under cover of this excuse we could indulge safely in the greatest pleasure of town life in winter — rambling the streets of London. (480)
The lead pencil motive suggests two things. First, it emphasizes the writerly nature of the protagonist, who may or may not be Woolf herself. Second, it functions as an excuse, an alibi, bringing to mind the possible start of a detective story as did Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd”
(1840). The apparent need for an alibi to go out on the street implies that she cannot walk out the door by herself without a reason or a specific goal to justify her walk.
She decides to leave the house anyway, covered by the pretext of going out to buy a lead pencil. As soon as she crosses the boundary between the house and the outside world a fundamental transformation of the self takes place; her enclosure, “[t]he shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves,” breaks when she walks outside and exposes her as “a central oyster of perceptiveness” (481). On the one hand, the “enormous eye” that is left after the breaking of her outer shell is now exposed to the outside world, by which Woolf seems to relate to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s idea of becoming a “transparent eye-ball” (10). His comment that “I am nothing; I see all” (Emerson 10) affirms the idea of opening up the self to all the stimuli of the world, of becoming absolute perception.
On the other hand, if the shell remains intact it can also have a protective function against the city’s overwhelming amount of stimuli. Georg Simmel argues that “[t]he
psychological basis of the metropolitan type of individuality consists in the intensification of
nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner
stimuli” (48, emphasis in original). All these stimuli can be overwhelming to the extent that one has to adopt a shell as protection, to separate the self off from stimuli in the urban
environment. This separation does, of course, prevent one from becoming absolute perception as it obstructs the gaze to a certain extent. The shell as a protective mechanism in the city is not uncommon, as Benjamin notes in The Arcades Project. He explicates that the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie also created shells for themselves: “[t]he original form of all dwelling is existence not in the house but in the shell” (entry 14,4). To dwell, according to Benjamin, “has to do with fashioning a shell for ourselves” (entry 14,5). In other words, the idea that the soul creates protective casings against the outside world is nothing new or out of the ordinary.
Woolf, however, seems to argue the opposite from Simmel as she opens up to an Emersonian way of looking at the impressions of the world that involves going outside, breaking the protective shell and becoming an eye that is open to perception. This makes her vulnerable along the lines of Simmel’s reasoning, as her “reaction to metropolitan
phenomena” is not “shifted to that organ which is least sensitive and quite remote from the depth of the personality” (Simmel 48), referring to intellectual reasoning, and is in this case particularly relevant in relation to Woolf’s protective shell. Instead, she feels like she becomes an “enormous eye” once the shell breaks down, emphasizing that in fact the eye is both
literally and metaphorically a very sensitive and thus vulnerable part of the human body. Hence, going outside involves a risk for Woolf’s protagonist. On the one hand, she can step outside the front door, albeit under the pretext of buying a lead pencil, be open to the world around her and absorb all of the city’s impressions. On the other hand, however, this very act of stepping out onto the streets brings with it the risk of vulnerability, of exposing a fragile part of the self, the eyes, to the world. Moreover, for Woolf, a woman writing in the beginning of the twentieth century, this idea of vulnerability on the streets might be even more significant.
Today, the literary flâneuse, a woman walking the city streets in a leisurely fashion, observing while not being observed herself, is less easy to find than the literary flâneur. Whereas its male counterpart has had a solid place and function in literary history since the nineteenth century, the existence of the flâneuse has been denied in the nineteenth century because of the sexual schism between the private and the public space. Its existence was then questioned in the twentieth century, and revived in the twenty-first century. And while the figure of the flâneur evolved over time, the existence, visibility and function of a flâneuse figure in literature is still largely obscured. This raises the question: how has the figure of the
flâneuse evolved over time in light (or in the shadow) of the inventive nature of its male counterpart? And does her vulnerability, as identified by Woolf, still remain?
2.1 The (in)visible flâneuse in the second half of the twentieth century
In the 1980s, influenced by second-wave feminism, the subject of the flâneuse started eliciting greater scholarly attention. One of the best known examples of academic writings on the subject is Janet Wolff’s influential 1985 essay titled “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity.” In this essay, Wolff argues that “there is no question of inventing the flâneuse” because “such a character was rendered impossible by the sexual divisions in the nineteenth century” (45). These “sexual divisions” confined women to the private space of their homes and gave men the freedom to roam about public spaces. A woman by herself in public was rare and thus attracted (unwanted) attention. She could not be invisible in the same way men could. In other words, a woman could not be a princess enjoying her incognito wherever she goes, to use Baudelaire’s phrasing, because the sexual divisions of the
nineteenth century did not let her. And implicitly, argued along the lines of Wolff’s reasoning, these sexual divisions had not (yet) changed significantly enough in the 1980s, making the figure of the flâneuse well into the second half of the twentieth century nothing more than a mirage for many literary scholars.
Three years after Wolff’s article was published, Griselda Pollock refers to Wolff as having “convincingly pointed out [that] the literature of modernity describes the experience of men” (66). Considered an avid advocate for feminism, Pollock also claims that “there is not and could not be a female flâneuse” because “[women] were never positioned as the normal occupants of the public realm” (71). She argues that:
[s]exuality, modernism or modernity cannot function as given categories to which we add women. That only identifies a partial and masculine viewpoint with the norm and confirms women as other and subsidiary. Sexuality, modernism or modernity are organized by and organizations of sexual difference. To perceive women’s specificity is to analyze historically a particular configuration of difference. (56)
Hence, speaking of the flâneur’s “female counterpart” is per definition impossible because the flâneuse cannot simply be added to the discourse of the flâneur as the addition itself would bring with it its own complications and issues. The difference between belonging to a public or a private space, expressed by both Wolff and Pollock, accounts for “a social structure which positions male and female people asymmetrically in relation to language, to social and economic power and to meaning” (Pollock 56). The asymmetry between the spaces to which men and women belong according to social structures thus accounts for a power imbalance between men and women in literature well into the 1980s.
By the end of the twentieth century, however, this decisive view on the non-existence of the figure of the flâneuse was contested by other scholars such as Elizabeth Wilson and Deborah L. Parsons. In 1992, Wilson claims that although she agrees with Wolff and Pollock that “women were exploited and oppressed in the nineteenth-century city” (103), her
disagreement with them stems from differences in emphasis. Most importantly, she questions Wolff’s and Pollock’s notions that “urban space is structured at some fundamental level by gender difference” (Wilson 103), arguing that the private and public spheres were not necessarily exclusively reserved for women and men respectively:
[I]n practice, the private sphere was – and is – also a masculine domain; although the Victorians characterized it as feminine, it was organized for the convenience, rest and
recreation of men, not women, and it has been an important part of feminism to argue that the private sphere is the workplace of the woman. (Wilson 98, emphasis in original)
The distinction between the exclusively male public space and exclusively female private space is thus no longer sufficient. It obscures various things, including the fact that female labor can be designated as being not actually work. Parsons, in turn, eight years later also finds Wolff’s and Pollock’s arguments to be problematic for the same reason as Wilson:
[I]n terms of the social presence of women in the city, they [Wolff and Pollock] generally accept the dichotomous public/private structure of gender relations, and this emphasis on the confinement of bourgeois women leads them to disregard evidence of possibilities for female freedom in the city streets as deviant and thus irrelevant (the prostitute) or rare and thus non-representative (cross-dressing artists such as Rosa Bonheur and George Sand). (Parsons 40)
In addition, Parsons argues that Wolff, Pollock and Wilson all “disregard the fact that the post-Benjamin flâneur is more influentially a conceptual metaphor for urban observation and walking that extends even to the present day” (41) and fail to consider the influence of feminist theory on flânerie in general, thereby opening up the discussion for the possibility of a late twentieth and early twenty-first-century flâneuse figure.
2.2 Problematic gaze
Although the idea that the public and the private space are exclusively reserved for male and female presence respectively is no longer sufficient, there is still a power imbalance between men and women in the public space, on the street, which has often been expressed through a depiction in literature of the wandering woman as a prostitute. Even though it has proven to be challenging to provide a conclusive, clearly demarcated definition of the flâneur, a big part of what defines him and has defined him over the course of time is that he is able to observe without being observed himself. He has the privilege to roam around public spaces without being seen while women are only unnoticed within a “non-social space of sentiment and duty from which money and power were banished,” as Pollock phrases it (68), i.e. within the private sphere. Once women cross the threshold of this non-social space, at the moment their shells break, they are vulnerable and confronted with a world that revolves around money and power.
As these shell-less, vulnerable women become part of the capitalist society that is the main object of the flâneur’s gaze in the public sphere, they inevitably become part of the object of the flâneur’s gaze themselves, a gaze which involves “visually consuming goods and women while resisting the speed of industrialization and the pressure to produce” (Solnit 200). Pollock notes that “[t]he flâneur embodies the gaze of modernity which is both covetous and erotic” (67), the nature of the gaze being as much possessive as it is sexual, implying that the gaze is mostly directed at commodities and persons of a (female) sexual nature. Observing the consumer society that the rise of capitalism has produced thus not only involves the flâneur seeing people and commodities as interchangeable in general, but, more specifically, has become about seeing the commodification of women as they have become goods to be consumed by either the male eye or body when displayed in the public sphere.
Pollock argues that “[t]he encounters pictured and imagined [in canonical works of art] are those between men who have the freedom to take their pleasures in many urban spaces and women from a class subject to them who have to work in those spaces often selling their bodies to clients” (54). She continues that “these exchanges […] are thoroughly captured within gender and its power relations” (54). Wolff, on the other hand, notes that “[w]hat is missing in this literature is any account of life outside the public realm, of the experience of ‘the modern’ in its private manifestations, and also of the very different nature of the experience of those women who did appear in the public arena” (45, emphasis in original).
Once women step outside and engage with capitalist society while at the same time attempt to walk the city streets by themselves, they are quickly depicted in literature as
prostitutes.15 Solnit comments that language in itself has become gendered as “[t]he very
word street has a rough, dirty magic to it, summoning up the low, the common, the erotic, the dangerous, the revolutionary” (176). She further points out that “[a] man of the streets is only a populist, but a woman of the streets is, like a streetwalker, a seller of her sexuality” (176). The flâneuse, one is tempted to argue, has in many cases thus taken on the protective outer shell of a prostitute, as Solnit quotes an unnamed researcher on prostitution that “the prostitute moves around to entice or enjoin customers, reduce boredom, keep warm and reduce visibility [to the police]” (182). However, Meaghan Malone argues that:
[u]nlike the flâneur, [the prostitute] makes a conscious effort to connect with her fellow city dwellers, for they are her source of income. She does not have the luxury of living in self-willed isolation, and her livelihood requires that she seek connections with the society that paradoxically rejects and carries on intimate connections with her. (90, italics in original)
15 This becomes clear from examples from the early nineteenth-century such as Thomas De Quincey’s Ann in
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) until very recently, e.g. Tillie and Jazzlyn in Colum McCann’s
Hence, although the prostitute and the flâneur show similarities in the way they move through the city streets as they both engage in observing as their main occupation and are both
concerned with staying invisible, they observe with different intentions and maintain their invisibility for a different audience; the flâneur wants to be invisible for the entire crowd as he wants to observe the crowd and the city freely and the prostitute attempts to be invisible for the police as they could potentially take away her livelihood. She makes her livelihood out of her sexuality, which is not generally accepted by society, whereas the flâneur is not even noticed by society and could therefore never be marked as a problem. It reinforces the idea that “when we move out of the house and on to the streets, our identities are constantly being monitored, judged, constituted, negotiated and represented” (Domosh 280). Nuvolati takes a standpoint that supports the argument that the flâneuse has often been depicted as a prostitute but at the same time acknowledges the differences in motivation and status with the flâneur by noting that:
hobos, prostitutes, immigrants, hippies, artists and bohemians […] are used to moving in the city observing the urban scene accurately. They walk slowly like the flâneur, not being compelled by work or consumption schedules. Of course these groups present different motivations and social status, nevertheless they are analogous in exploring the city from a non-conventional point of view. (26)
What Nuvolati fails to acknowledge is that the prostitute’s “non-conventional point of view” carries with it a sense of danger, not only of losing her income if she is caught doing what she does by the police but also of being physically assaulted, which is directly linked to her gender and vulnerability on the street. Solnit emphasizes the general idea that “men have usually had an easier time walking down the street than have women” (233). This is not to say
that this idea is now entirely of the past. In fact, it is still painfully accurate. Solnit continues to argue that today “[w]omen’s presence in public becomes with startling frequency an invasion of their private parts, sometimes literally, sometimes verbally” (234). It illustrates how women’s incapability to wander the city streets invisibly highlights both the
commodification of women as inevitably being part of the male gaze in general as well as the occasional trope of the female wanderer as prostitute in literature.
2.3 Recent Revival: Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse (2016)
Her inability to be invisible to the male gaze on the street has been one of the main reasons why scholars such as Wolff and Pollock denied the possibility of the existence of a literary flâneuse figure in the 1980s: as she would always be seen by other people (i.e. men) on the street, a woman could never enjoy her incognito in the same way the male flâneur could. Wolff’s and Pollock’s views were highly questioned by the end of the twentieth century by scholars like Wilson and Parsons, opening up the possibility for a figure that resembles the female version of the flâneur in literature, but not in the form of the prostitute figure. It was not until very recently, however, that the discussion saw a widespread revival with the publication of Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo,
Venice and London in 2016, which was widely available in commercial bookstores and
written in a non-academic and accessible manner. Elkin argues that “[t]he flâneuse does exist” (23, italics in original) and supports this standpoint by narrating the stories of a number of twentieth-century flâneuses, both author-biographical (George Sand) and character-fictional (Mrs. Dalloway), and coming both from literature as well as from other genres such as visual art and journalism, and combines these narratives with an account of her own, personal
experiences as a flâneuse in different cities and countries – very much in the spirit of the contemporary twenty-first-century male flâneur.
More importantly, Elkin stresses the need for a reconceptualization of the flâneuse in our current day and age, suggesting that “[p]erhaps the answer is not to attempt to make a woman fit a masculine concept, but to redefine the concept itself” (11). However, she
systematically ignores twenty-first-century literary examples in her main text, although a few examples are mentioned in one of her endnotes (see the introduction of this thesis for a more detailed critical reading of this endnote). Unsurprisingly, this underrepresentation has left her to refrain from close reading twenty-first-century literary texts, which leaves a
reconceptualization of the recent literary flâneuse at the same point where scholars such as Parsons left off.
How exactly Elkin proposes to reconceptualize the flâneuse thus remains rather unclear. She briefly argues that:
it’s the centre of cities where women have been empowered, by plunging into the heart of them, and walking where they’re not meant to. Walking where other people (men) walk without eliciting comment. That is the transgressive act. (20)
Based on the above quote, she seems to loosely propose a reconsideration of the figure of the flâneuse in today’s society through the concept of the “transgressive act,” which, although a possibly productive starting point, allows for a broad interpretation in itself since this is the only time she explicitly mentions it in her work. Hence, I intend to expand on Elkin’s reference to the transgressive act and reconceptualize more thoroughly, in more detail, the recent literary flâneuse in the final chapter of this thesis.
