Flâneuse

by Lauren Elkin

10  In 1960, the university proposed to build a gym in Morningside Park that would have one entrance for its (predominantly white) students and one (a ‘poor door’) for residents of Harlem. The controversy over the gym was one of the factors that led to the student protests at the university in 1968.

  PARIS, CAFÉS WHERE THEY

  1    Jean Rhys, Complete Novels, New York: W.W. Norton, 1985, p. 462.

  2    Jean Rhys, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979, p. 121.

  3    Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, in Complete Novels, New York: Harcourt, 1985, p. 397.

  4    Quartet, in Complete Novels, p. 14.

  5    Diana Athill, Stet: A Memoir, New York: Grove Press, 2002, pp. 157–8.

  6    Jean Rhys, Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly, The Letters of Jean Rhys, New York: Viking, 1984, p. 280.

  7    Carole Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work, Boston: Little, Brown, 1990, p. 136.

  8    Letters, p. 284.

  9    Stella Bowen, Drawn from Life: A Memoir, Sydney: Picador, 1999, pp. 195–6.

  10  Jacob Michael Leland, ‘Yes, that is a roll of bills in my pocket: the economy of masculinity in The Sun Also Rises’, Hemingway Review, 22 March 2004, p. 37.

  11  Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964, pp. 4–5.

  12  (‘Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.’)

  13  Angier, pp. 174–5.

  14  ‘Outside the Machine’, Jean Rhys, Collected Short Stories, New York: W.W. Norton, 1992, pp. 87–8. She would sign books, to people she thought were comrades, To so-and-so from Jean Rhys – Outside the machine. ‘Because you’re outside the machine, too,’ Jan van Houts recalls being told. Quoted in Pierrette M. Frickey, Critical Perspectives on Jean Rhys, Washington DC: Three Continents Press, 1990, p. 30.

  15  ‘I Spy a Stranger’, Collected Short Stories, p. 247.

  16  Complete Novels, p. 188.

  17  Ibid., p. 18.

  18  Voyage in the Dark (1934), New York: Norton, 1982, p. 74.

  19  See Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: a dual life, Vol. 1, Oxford: OUP, 1996, p. 191.

  20  It sounds like he’s been reading Baudelaire: The crowd is his ‘element,’ Baudelaire writes in The Painter of Modern Life: ‘For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude … To be at home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home … He is an “I” with an insatiable appetite for the “non-I”.’ Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, trans. Jonathan Mayne, New York: Phaidon, 1995, p. 9.

  21  Ford Madox Ford, Preface, Jean Rhys, The Left Bank & Other Stories, London: Jonathan Cape, 1927, p. 27.

  22  Jean Rhys, Quartet (1928), in Complete Novels, p. 132.

  23  Ibid., p. 157.

  24  Ibid., pp. 136–7.

  25  Ibid., p. 145.

  26  Complete Novels, p. 371.

  27  Ibid., p. 121.

  28  Ibid.

  29  ‘The Blue Bird’, Collected Short Stories, p. 131.

  30  Complete Novels, p. 242.

  31  Ibid.

  32  Ibid.

  LONDON, BLOOMSBURY

  1    Virginia Woolf, ‘Moments of Being’, in Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976, pp. 198–9.

  2    ‘I made up The Lighthouse in one afternoon in the square here.’ Virginia Woolf, Anne O. Bell and Andrew McNeillie, The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 3, 1925–1930, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982, pp. 131–2, 14 March 1927.

  3    Virginia Woolf, Quentin Bell and Anne O. Bell, The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 1, 1915–19, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983, p. 9, January 1915.

  4    Diary: Volume 3, p. 298, 28 March 1930.

  5    ‘London Revisited’, Times Literary Supplement, 9 November 1916, in Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, Volume 2, London: Hogarth Press, 1966, p. 50.

  6    Diary: Volume 3, p. 11.

  7    Diary: Volume 5, p. 331. Tavistock Square today is thought of as a ‘peace garden’, with a cherry tree dedicated to the victims of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a statue of Mahatma Gandhi and a rock monument to conscientious objectors to the Second World War. It’s something of a feminist square as well, boasting not only the bust of Woolf but also one of Dame Louisa Aldrich-Blake, Britain’s first female surgeon and the Dean of the London School of Medicine for Women.

  8    Letter to Ethel Smyth, 12 January 1941, Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume 6, 1936–1941, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, New York: Mariner Books, 1982, p. 460; 25 September 1940, Letters, Volume 6, pp. 432–3.

  9    Ibid., pp. 428–34.

  10  Diary, Volume 5, pp. 356–7.

  11  I don’t mean to suggest that because the walking fed the writing, and because not being able to walk deprived the writing, that all of this was somehow a cause for suicide. Had she lived she would surely have walked again and written again. But she could not live. She could not bear another war, another breakdown.

  12  McEwan, Ian, ‘How could we have forgotten that this was always going to happen?’, Guardian, 8 July 2005.

  13  In the time since this was written, Paris was attacked again. More soldiers, more guns, I can be walking blithely around a corner and nearly collide with a man in fatigues carrying an Uzi.

  14  Moments of Being, p. 196.

  15  In her copy of Hare, Woolf apparently copied out a quote from Samuel Johnson into the dedication page: ‘I think the full tide of existence is at Charing Cross.’ Cf. Elisa Kay Sparks, ‘Leonard and Virginia’s London Library: Mapping London’s Tides, Streams and Statues’, in Gina Potts and Lisa Shahiri, Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury, Volume I: Aesthetic Theory and Literary Practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p. 65.

  16  Augustus J.C. Hare, Walks in London, 1879, pp. 164–5.

  17  Moments of Being, p. 182.

  18  Ibid., p. 184.

  19  Ibid., p. 185.

  20  Anna Snaith notes that Woolf’s ‘fictional representations of Bloomsbury focus … on the area as a site of suffrage politics’. In The Years, Rose, an active suffragette, takes Sara to a suffrage meeting in Bloomsbury (p. 134). In the third essay of The Pargiters, Nora Graham invites Delia to ‘join a queer little society that met in the Gray’s Inn Road’. Anna Snaith, Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000, p.27.

  21  Angier, p. 97. It was walking in Torrington Square that she met her future husband, Jean Lenglet.

  22  Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women 1850–1920. London: Virago, 1985, pp. 295–6. See also Sara Blair, ‘Bloomsbury and the Places of the Literary’, ELH 71.3 (2004), pp. 813–38, who reads Bloomsbury as a ‘local world’ rather than an idea or a coterie, ‘at once a habitat and the forms of belonging to it’, p. 816.

  23  Thomas Burke, Living in Bloomsbury, London: G. Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1939, p. 12, quoted in Blair. By which he is referring not to sex workers in a bordello, but to women who worked for a living.

  24  Barbara Green, Spectacular Confessions: Autobiography, Performative Activism and the Sites of Suffrage, 1905–38, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997, p. 194.

  25  Letters, Volume 1, 1888–1912, p. 120.

  26  Virginia Woolf, The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, ed. Susan Dick, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985, p. 24.

  27  Ibid.

  28  Mitchell Leaska, ed., A Passionate Apprentice: Virginia Woolf, The Early Journals, 1897–1909, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990, p. 223.

  29  John Sutherland, ‘Clarissa’s Invisible Taxi’, Can Jane Eyre Ever Be Happy?, Oxford: OUP, 1997.


  30  Diary, Volume 3, p. 186; p. 302, 26 May 1924; Diary, Volume 1, p. 214, 4 November 1918.

  31  ‘I stop in London sometimes, and hear feet shuffling. That’s the language, I think, that’s the phrase I should like to catch.’ The Waves: two holograph drafts, ed. John Whichello Graham, London: Hogarth Press, 1976, p. 658.

  32  The Waves, p. 183.

  33  Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929), New York: Harcourt, 1989, p. 93. See Susan Squier, Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.

  34  Virginia Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, The Virginia Woolf Reader, ed. Mitchell Leaska, New York: Harcourt, 1984, p. 199.

  35  A Room of One’s Own, p. 94.

  36  Diary, Volume 1, p. 9, 6 January 1915.

  37  A Passionate Apprentice, p. 228.

  38  Ibid., p. 246.

  39  Ibid., p. 232.

  40  Ibid., p. 271.

  41  Virginia Woolf, Elaine Showalter and Stella McNichol, Mrs Dalloway, London: Penguin, 2000, p. 4.

  42  Diary, Volume 3, p. 186, 31 May 1928.

  43  Mrs Dalloway, p. 88.

  44  A Passionate Apprentice, p. 220.

  45  Diary, Volume 2, pp. 47–8.

  46  ‘Street Haunting’, Virginia Woolf, Andrew McNeillie and Stuart N. Clarke, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 4, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986, p. 481.

  47  A Room of One’s Own, p. 44.

  48  Charles Dickens, Hard Times. The Shorter Novels of Charles Dickens, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2004, p. 424.

  49  Virginia Woolf, The Years, New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1937, p. 361.

  50  The Pargiters, p. 81.

  51  Ibid., p. 37. In another passage of The Pargiters, Woolf writes that Eleanor ‘half meant to walk home through the Park. She would go to the Marble Arch, she thought, and walk a part of the way back under the trees. But suddenly as she glanced down a back street, fear came over her. She saw the men in the bowler hats winking at the waitress. She was afraid – even now, even I, she thought … afraid. Afraid to walk through the Park alone, she thought; she despised herself. It was the bodies [sic] fear, not the minds, but it settled the matter. She would keep to the main streets, where there were lights and policemen.’ As they grow older, says Rose (who has grown older), they become less visible, and they can walk wherever they like at any time of day (The Years, p. 173).

  52  The Years, p. 112.

  53  Ibid., p. 27.

  54  The Years, p. 29; The Pargiters, pp. 41–3.

  55  The Years, p. 434.

  PARIS, CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION

  1    Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris (1935), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976, p. 152.

  2    Charles Baudelaire, ‘Le Cygne’, Les Fleurs du Mal (1857). Translation mine.

  3    Honoré de Balzac, Les Petits Bourgeois (1843), La comédie humaine, 7 volumes, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1965–6, Volume 5, p. 294.

  4    Guy Debord, Panegyric, Volumes 1 & 2, trans. James Brook and John McHale, London: Verso, 2004, p. 39.

  5    James Joyce and Philip F. Herring, Joyce’s Ulysses notesheets in the British Museum, Issue 3, published for the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia by the University Press of Virginia, 1972, p. 119.

  6    Théophile Lavallée and George Sand, Le Diable à Paris: Paris et les Parisiens, Mœurs et coutumes, caractères et portraits des habitants de Paris, Paris: J. Hetzel, 1845, p. 9.

  7    For more on this fascinating element of Parisian history, see Graham Robb, Parisians, New York: W.W. Norton, 2010, and Andrew Miller, Pure, Sceptre, 2011.

  8    John Litchfield, ‘The Stones of Paris’, Independent, 22 September 2007.

  9    Haussmann was not the first to start razing the Old Paris to make way for the New Old Paris; the first wide roads (including the Champs-Elysées) were built by Rambuteau under the July Monarchy.

  10  George Sand, Indiana, trans. G. Burnham Ives, Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 2000, p. 46.

  11  John Sturrock, ‘Give Me Calf’s Tears’, London Review of Books (21:22), 11 November 1999, pp. 28–9.

  12  Jack notes that Balzac is praised for his productivity while Sand was mocked: ‘There was an implication that such a stream of works was unfeminine in its proportions.’ George Sand: A Woman’s Life Writ Large, New York: Vintage, 1999, p. 3.

  13  Alfred de Musset, Confession of a Child of the Century (1836), trans. David Coward, London: Penguin Classics, 2012.

  14  Letter to Jules Boucoiran, 31 July 1830, Correspondance, Vol. 1, pp. 676–7.

  15  Letter to Charles Meure,15 August 1830, ibid., p. 690.

  16  George Sand, Story of My Life, ed. Thelma Jurgrau, group trans., Albany: SUNY Press, 1991, p. 905. The redingote-guérite was all the rage that year, a long overcoat that nearly reached to the floor.

  17  Ibid., p. 892.

  18  Ibid., p. 893.

  19  George Sand, Histoire de ma vie, Vol. 4, Paris: Michel Levy, 1856, p. 255.

  20  George Sand, Gabriel (1839), Oeuvres Complètes, Paris: Perrotin, 1843, p. 200.

  21  Men in skirts were subject to no such regulation. Why this dissymmetry? Why was it so much more threatening to have a woman in trousers than a man in skirts? Especially given that in our own time, the reverse is true. Why were the lawmakers of 1800 so fixated on controlling cross-dressing women? In an essay for L’Esprit Créateur, the historian (and translator of Sand’s The Countess of Rudolstadt) Gretchen Van Slyke suggests the law was derived from a need to firmly designate women as ‘men’s Other, as irresponsible tongues and debilitated minds dominated by the dangerous and irresistible drives of ovaries and uterus, as moral and political inferiors in imperative need of masculine tutelage’. This ‘is one of the troubling legacies of the French Revolution’, p. 34.

  22  Histoire de ma vie, Vol. 7, Paris: J. Hetzel et Cie, 1864, p. 255.

  23  Jacques Leronde, Revue des Deux Mondes, 1 June 1832. Cited in Belinda Jack.

  24  George Sand, Indiana, Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1852, p. 1.

  25  Histoire de ma vie, Vol. 1, p. 23.

  26  These are the events you might remember from Les Misérables; Sand and Hugo as well as Balzac, Dumas and Heine would all write on the failed revolution of 1832.

  27  Quoted in Eric Hazan, La Barricade: histoire d’un objet révolutionnaire, Paris: Editions Autrement, 2013, p. 89. One eyewitness describes a barricade: ‘At the entrance to a narrow street, an omnibus lies with its four wheels in the air. A pile of crates, which had served perhaps to hold oranges, rises to the right and to the left, and behind them, between the rims of the wheels and the openings, small fires are blazing, continually emitting small blue clouds of smoke’ (Gaetan Niépovié, Etudes physiologiques sur les grans métropoles de l’Europe occidentale, 1840, quoted in Benjamin, p. 141).

  28  All remaining quotations except where otherwise noted are form Histoire de ma vie, Vol. 7, pp. 259–64.

  29  Blanc, Louis. Révolution française: histoire de dix ans, 1830–1840, Vol. 1, Brussels: Société typographique Belge, 1844.

  VENICE, OBEDIENCE

  1    Paul Auster, Leviathan, London: Faber, 1993, pp. 60–1.

  2    The photograph, we learn, is meant to mock a 1989 photograph of Brigitte Bardot, who ‘in recent years has taken her preference for the cause of animals over that of humans to the point of caricature’.

  3    We went there one night not long ago, to celebrate the contracts for my book coming in. Seventeen euros for a champagne à la menthe but it was a special occasion, so it was almost justifiable, though publishers don’t pay what they used to. To my left sat a heavyset blonde girl with a miniature orange Louis Vuitton bag. To my right a man with a long oi
ly ponytail and a raggedy-looking Yorkie in a Louis Vuitton dog carrier, just like the one I have for my dog, but mine was forty euros at the pet shop while his had leather interlocking Ls and Vs printed on it. When I got home I looked up the price: nearly $2,800. On the Louis Vuitton website there was a video playing called ‘L’invitation au voyage: Venise’, in which a model lands in a hot-air balloon on the Piazza San Marco and goes to a masked ball where David Bowie is playing ‘I’d Rather Be High’ on the harpsichord.