Flâneuse

by Lauren Elkin

  A young woman walks down a street in Florence, clutching her scarf to her chest. On the street surrounding her are fourteen men. At least eight are looking at her. One man blocks her path, hands in his pockets. A man to her right has a contorted face, and appears to be grabbing his crotch. Mid-step, she wears a look on her face that suggests something resembling concern, apprehension. The energy of the composition – the curve of the road, her weight as it shifts forward, her skirt as it lifts out behind her – suggests movement forward, and it seems as if she’s already gearing up to go around the man standing stock-still in front of her.

  Surely it’s too easy. It’s a moment of mid-century street harassment. Look at what women have to deal with when they walk in public!

  But this is not what the girl in the photograph says was happening. Interviewed by NBC’s Today Show in 2011, on the sixtieth anniversary of the photograph, she said: ‘It’s not a symbol of harassment. It’s a symbol of a woman having an absolutely wonderful time!’1 For it turns out the woman – whose real name is Ninalee Craig, but who called herself ‘Jinx Allen’ back in those days and went on to marry a Venetian count – was American, twenty-three years old, and travelling abroad in France, Spain and Italy by herself. The photographer, Ruth Orkin, was also an American woman in her twenties, travelling around on her own, living hand to mouth but loving every minute of it. The photo was taken during a day of ‘horsing around’ the city with a camera, with Orkin taking pictures of Jinx taking in the sights, asking questions, haggling over prices and flirting in cafés. The scarf was a bright orange Mexican rebozo. The dress was a tribute to Christian Dior’s New Look. The handbag was a horse’s feed bag. For Craig and Orkin, the thing to take away from the photo is to do with independence and inspiration, about playing with codes, with clothing, with the ways a woman was expected to be or behave.

  The woman in the street is an unstable figure, to be sure, like the well-known drawing of the duck-rabbit that proves the ambiguities inherent in perception. Is she a carefree flâneuse or the object of the male gaze, a rabbit or a duck? The more interesting reading is somewhere in between, in that area of tension and friction where our defiance pushes against people’s expectations. That the photograph has become such a cult image – adorning walls from college dorm rooms to pizzerias – suggests something about the richness of the energy generated there. That horsing around, silliness and fun that Craig and Orkin claim show us that space is ours for the remaking.

  Space is not neutral. Space is a feminist issue. The space we occupy – here in the city, we city dwellers – is constantly remade and unmade, constructed and wondered at. ‘Space is a doubt,’ wrote Georges Perec; ‘I have constantly to mark it, to designate it. It’s never mine, never given to me, I have to conquer it.’

  From Teheran to New York, from Melbourne to Mumbai, a woman still can’t walk in the city the way a man can.

  Cities are made up of invisible boundaries, intangible customs gates that demarcate who goes where: certain neighbourhoods, bars and restaurants, parks, all manner of apparently public spaces are reserved for different kinds of people. We become so accustomed to this that we hardly notice the values underlying these divisions. They may be invisible, but they determine how we circulate within the city.

  They exist in between buildings. On either sides of walls. Around fences and railings, down steps and past stoplights and road signs and bollards.

  They take shape in underground railways and overground trolleys, skating over and through the earth, tracked to the ground, harnessed to power cables. They live in the negative space of alleyways and dead ends and side streets and courtyards.

  They take up space. Spaces within spaces, species of spaces, spaces with the force of social convention as concretely embedded as a stop sign:

  Private park. Don’t go in unless you have a key. Definitely don’t jump the fence. Trespassing.

  Public park. Don’t go into the park at night. Park’s closed after dusk.

  Open park. Populated by homeless people who would be very surprised if you sat down beside them on their bench beds. Unless you are a homeless person too. In which case you’d be sitting on your own bench bed.

  City plaza. Place. Piazza. Platz. How you use it depends on who you are, as the ethnographer Nadja Monnet found when she undertook a study of the Plaça de Catalunya in Barcelona. Although the plaça is one of the most famous sights in the city, the locals avoid it, preferring to meet in the nearby bars. Monnet spoke with a (female) tourist who felt uneasy sitting in the plaça – an uneasiness Monnet herself shared. ‘It’s really not a good place to meet up with anyone. You don’t know where to put yourself. If you wait in the middle, you feel stupid. You feel exposed.’ Monnet quickly realised that even among the locals, fewer women than men used the space, ‘although there were peaks in female attendance at the times when school let out or at the end of the work day’. Women alone rarely sit on the benches, ‘and when they do, they don’t stay long’.

  Virginia Woolf’s 1927 essay ‘Street Haunting’ is an attempt to claim an ungendered place in the city by walking through it. Out in the street, we become observing entities, ‘part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers’. Whether or not we want to be androgynous eyes taking in the city, or bodies inviting desire, or any of the myriad ways of being in between, Woolf is telling us that we can integrate ourselves into the world of the city by becoming attentive to the shifts in the affective landscape. It is only in becoming aware of the invisible boundaries of the city that we can challenge them. A female flânerie – a flâneuserie – not only changes the way we move through space, but intervenes in the organisation of space itself. We claim our right to disturb the peace, to observe (or not observe), to occupy (or not occupy) and to organise (or disorganise) space on our own terms.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  In memory of Jane Marcus

  ‘And in me too the wave rises’

  That this book exists at all is in large part due to Rebecca Carter and Parisa Ebrahimi, who believed in it and saw what it could become: thank you both for your support, patience, championing – for everything really. Thank you as well to everyone at Janklow & Nesbit and at Chatto & Windus, for their hard work and enthusiasm. I’d also like to thank Sarah Chalfant, Alba Ziegler-Bailey, Kristina Moore and everyone at the Wylie Agency, as well as Ileene Smith, Jonathan Galassi and everyone at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  A number of people helped this book in a thousand different ways, through conversations or suggestions or stray comments. They include Katherine Angel, Susan Barbour, Lexi Bloom, Fay Brauer, Zoe Brauer, Amanda Dennis, Allison Devers, Jean Hannah Edelstein, Mel Flashman, Deborah Friedell, Geoff Gilbert, Jane Goldman, Heather Hartley, Elissa Jacobson, Christina Johnsson, Julie Kleinman, Emily Kopley, Sara Kramer, Pam Krasner, Deborah Levy, Sharmaine Lovegrove, Harriet Alida Lye, Anne Marsella, Daniel Medin, James Polchin, Simon Prosser, Rosa Rankin-Gee, Tatiana de Rosnay, Rebecca Solnit, Stelios Sardelas, Rob Sheldon, Russell Williams.

  Parts of this book originally appeared as pieces for Writers at Liberty, Granta, and the essay collection Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York (Seal Press, 2013) – thank you to the editors of those projects for allowing me the space to think through some of these issues.

  Thanks to the staff of the British Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the New York Public Library, as well as to Laurence Labedan in Saint-Dyé-sur-Loire, and Pina and Raffaele Caprara at Palazzo Rinaldi.

  To my teachers: Mary Cregan, Mary Ann Caws, Catherine Bernard and Jane Marcus.

  To Elisabeth Fourmont and Joanna Walsh, best friends and best readers, for making my insights sharper and my jokes funnier.

  To my mother-in-law, Carole Wingett – I am always happy when a journey leads to Upland Road.

  To my family – Patricia and Peter Elkin, Caroline, Imri, Ainsley, and Elinor Eisner – for giving me a place to start from, and to return to.

  To the little bunny to
o.

  And finally, to my partner in that great dérive of life, Seb Emina. To quote the late great Kate McGarrigle:

  Walking beside you / I’ll never get those walking blues.

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Marianne Breslauer, ‘Paris 1937 (Défense d’Afficher)’ © Marianne Breslauer / Fotostiftung Schweiz. Used with permission of Fotostiftung Schweiz

  Long Island, New York (author’s collection)

  Long Island, New York (author’s collection)

  Long Island, New York (author’s collection)

  Blue plaque outside 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury (author’s collection)

  Page from the author’s notebook

  Robert Capa, ‘Martha Gellhorn, April 1953’ © Robert Capa © International Center of Photography / Magnum Photos. Used with permission of Magnum Photos

  Ruth Orkin, ‘American Girl in Italy, Florence, 1951’ © 1952, 1980 Ruth Orkin / Ruth Orkin Photo Archive. Used with permission of Orkin / Engel Film and Photo Archive

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