Flâneuse

by Lauren Elkin

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  NOTES

  FLNEUSE-ING

  1    Janet Wolff, ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity’, Theory, Culture, and Society 3 (1985), pp. 37–46, 45.

  2    Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference, London: Routledge, 1988, p. 71.

  3    Deborah Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity, Oxford: OUP, 2000, p. 4.

  4    Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, New York: Penguin Books, 2001, p. 233.

  5    All translations from French mine unless otherwise indicated.

  6    Patricia Parkhurst Ferguson, Paris As Revolution: Writing the Nineteenth-Century City, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, p. 81.

  7    According to the historian Elizabeth Wilson, the flâneur is a ‘mythological or allegorical’ figure who represents a certain anxiety about the city, its attack on individuality, its threatening abyss, its commodification of daily life and its possibilities for total self-reinvention. ‘The Invisible Flâneur’, New Left Review no. 191 (January–February 1992), p. 99.

  8    Amy Levy, ‘Women and Club Life’, published in Women’s World, a magazine edited by Oscar Wilde, 1888. See her poetry collection A London Plane-Tree (1889). Levy committed suicide not long after its publication.

  9    Pollock, p. 96.

  10  Marie Bashkirtseff, The Journals of Marie Bashkirtseff, 2 vols, trans. Phyllis Howard Kernberger and Katherine Kernberger, New York: Fonthill Press, 2012, 2 January 1879.

  11  Luc Sante, The Other Paris, New York: FSG, 2015.

  12  David Garrioch, The Making of Revolutionary Paris, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, p. 39.

  13  The Golden Guide to London (1975). Quoted in Elizabe
th Wilson, The Contradictions of Culture: Cities, Culture, Women, London: Sage, 2001, p. 81.

  14  Leonora Davidoff, The Best Circles: Society, Etiquette, and The Season, London: Croom Helm, 1973. Quoted in Parsons, p. 111.

  15  In modernising Madrid, the Arco de Santa María and the Calle de los Urosas (named for the Urosas sisters who owned the land) were renamed after Augusto Figueroa and Luis Vélez de Guevara. Only one street was named for an accomplished woman, Maria de Zayas, the seventeenth-century writer. In her article on this subject Elizabeth Munson cites the Almanaque y Guía matritensepara of 1905, and the Guida práctica de Madrid from 1907, which demonstrated ‘an extensive account of name changes’ starting in 1875 in the ten districts of Madrid, finding a total of twenty-six female names deleted, though Munson does not specify how many male names were dropped, p. 65. Revolutionary Paris saw a similar purging of the city, where anything suggestive of saints or aristocrats was renamed. For a while, the rue Saint-Anne became the rue Helvétius, in homage to a (male) eighteenth-century philosopher. The city, its layout, the names of its monuments, its buildings, its streets, reflects the values of its time; a secular state can only be a more democratic one. Elizabeth Munson, ‘Walking on the Periphery: Gender and the Discourse of Modernization’, Journal of Social History 36.1 (2002): 63–75, p. 72, n. 12.

  16  Ibid., p. 66. The Panthéon was originally intended to be a church dedicated to St Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris. But after the Revolution, it became a mausoleum honouring great Frenchmen. Aux Grands Hommes la Patrie Reconnaissante – To Great Men, a Grateful Country – is written across its pediment. It’s only in 1995 that Marie Curie, who lived nearby, was allowed to be interred there. That is, interred because of her public achievements – another woman, Sophie Berthelot, was the first woman to be buried there, alongside her husband Marcellin. In 2008 they hung portraits of nine women on the front of the building – Olympe de Gouges, Simone de Beauvoir, George Sand, Colette, Marie Curie, a few others. But there are still – still! – only two women buried inside, out of seventy-one people in all.

  17  Francine du Plessix Gray claims Colet; Marina Warner and others say Drouet.

  18  Francine du Plessix Gray, Rage & Fire: A Life of Louise Colet, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994; Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985. Warner writes that ‘during the period after 1871, when Alsace – and Strasbourg – were occupied by the Prussians, the statue became a political altar, the focal point of pilgrimage, and patriotic manifestations there on Bastille Day led to the establishment of the national feast of 14 July in 1880’ (pp. 32–3).

  19  Virginia Woolf, ‘London Revisited’, Times Literary Supplement, 9 November 1916. Collected Essays, Vol. 2, p. 51.

  20  She is there to commemorate William Lamb’s having distributed 120 pails to poor women so they could fetch water from the pump he built, which drew from the nearby River Fleet.

  21  Guy Debord, ‘Theory of the Dérive’, trans. Ken Knabb, Situationist International Anthology, Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981, p. 50.

  22  Robert Macfarlane, ‘A Road of One’s Own: Past and Present Artists of the Randomly Motivated Walk’, Times Literary Supplement, 7 October 2005, 3–4.

  23  He explicitly writes, ‘A digression: do I believe that men are corralled in this field due to certain natural and/or nurtured characteristics that lead us to believe we have – or actually do inculcate us with – superior visual-spatial skills to women, and an inordinate fondness for all aspects of orientation, its pursuit, minutiae and – worst of all – accessories? Absolutely. And so, while not altogether abandoning the fantasy of encountering a psychogeographic muse who will make these jaunts still more pleasurable, poignant and emotionally revelatory than they already are, in my continent heart I understand that I am fated to wander alone, or at best with one other, occasional … male companion.’ (Will Self, Psychogeography, London: Bloomsbury, 2007, p. 12.)

  24  Louis Huart, Physiologie du flâneur, Paris: Aubert, 1841, p. 53.

  25  Nicholson writes, ‘In London you had Dickens, De Quincey, Iain Sinclair; in New York you had Walt Whitman, Alfred Kazin, Paul Auster’; writing on walking artists he can name only one woman: ‘Richard Long, Hamish Fulton, Eva Hesse, Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys.’ In recent years, critics and writers have told the stories of walkers from communities which seem ‘marginal’ beside Baudelaire or Thomas de Quincey: Langston Hughes, Henry Darger, Joseph Cornell, David Wojnarowicz, breaking out of the rich white model of the flâneur but reinscribing his gender as male. In Nicholson’s defence, he does reference Margarita Nelken, a Spanish feminist explored in Munson’s essay, Ada Anderson and Exilda La Chapelle, nineteenth-century competitive walkers, or ‘pedestriennes’ (apparently female walking was a ‘serious sport and a series business’ for a while in America), and Dorothy Wordsworth, who ‘walked with [her brother William] and wrote about it in her diary: “March 30, 1798. Walked I know not where. March 31, 1798. Walked. April 1, 1798. Walked by moonlight.”’ He cites Marcus Poetzsch’s essay ‘Walks Alone and “I know not where”: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Deviant Pedestrianism’ and goes on to write about a bunch of male Romantic poets. Geoff Nicholson, The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Literature of Pedestrianism, New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.

  26  30 January 1939, Virginia Woolf, Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 5, London: Penguin Books, 1985, p. 203.

  27  I counter Guy Debord with his ex-wife, Michèle Bernstein. I counter Iain Sinclair with Rachel Lichtenstein, Will Self with Laura Oldfield Ford, Nick Papadimitriou 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 Groeschner, 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.

  28  Self has undertaken this kind of ‘research’ into places like New York and Los Angeles, but it remains a very British practice, deeply linked to the particularities of London.

  29  Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspectives of Experience, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977, p. 6. ‘If we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place.’

  30  For a very good scholarly approach to the flâneuse, primarily from a nineteenth-century art-historical perspective, see Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough’s The Invisible Flâneuse? Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006.

  LONG ISLAND, NEW YORK

  1    Wanderlust, p. 250.

  2    The problem has spread to many American cities as well, as Jeff Speck notes in his book Walkable City: ‘since midcentury, whether intentionally or by accident, most American cities have effectively become no-walking zones’. City engineers ‘have turned our downtowns into places that are easy to get to but not worth arriving at’. Jeff Speck, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time, New York: Macmillan, 2012, p. 4.

  3    According to Lewis Mumford, the car is all that remains of the suburbs’ claim to ‘autonomy and initiative’ (p. 493). He worried that ‘clever engineers already threaten to remove the individual control by a system of automation’ (p. 494). It’s a good thing he didn’t live to see the car itself become autonomo
us in the form of the self-driving car. They say they make driving even safer, once the car is in control … In The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord quoted Mumford’s contention that ‘sprawling isolation has proved an … effective method of keeping a society under control’. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961.

  4    Gallagher, Leigh. The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2013, p. 44.

  5    Marshall Berman, ‘Falling’, Restless Cities, ed. Matthew Beaumont, Gregory Dart, Michael Sheringham and Iain Sinclair, London: Verso, 2010.

  6    According to Leigh Gallagher, the suburbs won’t last much longer; they have changed irrevocably as Americans no longer want to live in them. Leigh Gallagher, The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving, New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2013.

  7    The City in History, p. 494.

  8    We never go to Kings Park Station to get into the city; it takes an hour and a half and you have to transfer at Jamaica, in Queens. We drive fifteen minutes southwest to Deer Park Station, which is on the Ronkonkoma branch of the original Main Line (‘Rahng-kahng-kah-mah line, this is the Rahng-kahng-kah-mah line, express to Hicksville, stopping at Bethpage, Fawmingdale, Wyandanch, Deeh Pawk, Brentwood, Central Islip and Rahng-kahng-kah-mah’), founded in 1834.

  9    Marguerite Duras, Practicalities, trans. Barbara Bray, New York: Grove Press, 1987, p. 42.