by Lauren Elkin
If we tunnel back, we find there always was a flâneuse passing Baudelaire in the street.
* * *
If we read what women had to say for themselves in the nineteenth century, we do find that bourgeois women out in public ran all sorts of risks to their virtue and their reputations; to go out in public alone was to risk disgrace.9 Upper-class ladies displayed themselves in the Bois de Boulogne in their open carriages, or took chaperoned constitutionals in the park. (The woman in the closed carriage was a figure of some suspicion, as the famous carriage scene in Madame Bovary attests.) The distinct social stakes for an independent young woman of the late nineteenth century are made very clear in the eight volumes of the diaries of Marie Bashkirtseff (abridged and published in English under the incredible title I Am the Most Interesting Book of All), which recount her transformation from cosseted young Russian aristocrat to successful artist, showing her work at the Paris Salon a mere two and a half years after she started seriously studying painting, until her death from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five. In January 1879 she wrote in her journal:
I long for the freedom to go out alone: to go, to come, to sit on a bench in the Jardin des Tuileries, and especially to go to the Luxembourg, to look at the decorated store windows, to enter churches and museums, and to stroll in the old streets in the evenings. This is what I envy. Without this freedom one cannot become a great artist.10
Marie had relatively little to lose; she knew she was condemned to an early death – why not walk alone? But she nurtured a hope she would get well until the month before she died; and while she would have happily embarrassed her family, she had also internalised her culture’s objection to a young woman of good family going out alone to such an extent that she would chastise herself for even wanting to, writing in her journal that even if she did defy social strictures, she ‘would only be half free, because a woman who prowls is unwise’.
Though she trailed an entourage behind her, she did spend days walking the slums of Paris with her notebook in hand, sketching everything she saw, research which would produce numerous paintings, including 1884’s A Meeting, which now hangs in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and depicts a group of young street urchins gathered on a street corner. One of them holds a bird’s nest, and shows it off to the others, who lean in with that boyish interest that tries to disguise itself as total indifference.
But she found a way to include herself in the streetscape. To the right of the group of boys, leading down another street, we can see in the background a young girl from behind, braid down her back, walking away, possibly on her own, though it’s difficult to know for sure because the frame cuts off there; we can’t even see her right arm. This, for me, is the most wonderful part of the painting: Marie’s signature is placed below the young girl, in the bottom right-hand corner. I don’t think it’s overreaching to surmise that Marie has painted herself into the canvas, in the figure of the possibly solitary young girl on her way off, leaving the boys to it.
* * *
The argument against the flâneuse sometimes has to do with questions of visibility – ‘It is crucial for the flâneur to be functionally invisible,’ writes Luc Sante, defending his own gendering of the flâneur as male and not female.11 This remark is at the same time unfair and cruelly accurate. We would love to be invisible the way a man is. We’re not the ones who make ourselves visible, in the sense that Sante means, in terms of the stir a woman alone in public can create; it’s the gaze of the flâneur that makes the woman who would join his ranks too visible to slip by unnoticed. But if we’re so conspicuous, why have we been written out of the history of cities? It’s up to us to paint ourselves back into the picture, in ways we can live with.
Though women of Marie Bashkirtseff’s class were mainly identified with the home until late in the nineteenth century, women of the middle and lower classes did have many reasons to be in the street, going out to play or to work as shop girls, charity workers, maids, seamstresses, laundresses, or any number of other occupations. And these were not merely functional or professional outings; in his vivid picture of working-class women’s lives in his study of Paris in the eighteenth century, David Garrioch shows that, in a way, the streets belonged to women. At the Parisian markets they ran most of the stalls, and even at home they would sit out in the street together, practising what two hundred years later Jane Jacobs would call ‘eyes on the street’: they ‘kept an eye on what was going on and were often the first to intervene in quarrels, plunging in to separate men who were fighting. Their commentary on the dress and behavior of the passers-by was itself a form of social control.’12 They knew more about what was going on in the neighbourhood than anyone.
By the late nineteenth century, women of all classes were enjoying the use of public space in cities like London, Paris and New York. The rise of the department store in the 1850s and 60s did much to normalise the appearance of women in public; by the 1870s some guidebooks to London were already beginning to feature ‘places in London where ladies can conveniently lunch when in town for a day’s shopping and unattended by a gentleman’.13 James Tissot’s series of the 1880s, Fifteen Portraits of the Parisienne, depicts women in the city doing all kinds of things, from sitting in the park (accompanied by Maman) to attending artists’ lunches with their husbands (as stiff in their corsets as the caryatids in the background) and riding chariots dressed as Roman warriors at the Hippodrome, Statue of Liberty–style diadems on their heads. His 1885 canvas The Shop Girl takes the viewer right into the painting; the eponymous shop girl, tall and thin, soberly dressed in black, holds the door open to us, in welcome or in respectful adieu. On the table is a dishevelled pile of silken fabric; a ribbon has fallen to the floor. The painting aligns women in public with the crass commercialism of the marketplace, but is also suggestive of loose mores and intimate disarray, of ribbons fallen to floors in other, more private, interiors.
The 1890s saw the arrival of the New Woman, riding her bicycle where she pleased, and the girls who gained their independence by working in shops and offices. As cinema and other leisure activities became popular in the early twentieth century, and taken with the large-scale entrance of women into the workforce during the First World War, women’s presence in the streets was confirmed. But this was dependent on the emergence of safe semi-public spaces in which women could spend time alone and unharassed, like cafés and tea rooms, and the rise of those most intimate of public spaces, ladies’ lavatories.14 Also key to women’s urban independence were respectable, affordable boarding houses for the unmarried; very often, it was difficult to find both of those qualities in the same establishment. As Jean Rhys’s novels attest, many women skirted the boundaries of respectability in down-at-heel places whose morals rose in direct ratio to their level of seediness. The more louche the establishment, the more strict the patronne. Rhys’s single women in the city are forever clashing with the landladies of their fleabag hotels.
* * *
The names a city bestows on its landmarks – especially its streets – are reflections of the values it holds, which change over time. In the effort to secularise (and, ostensibly, democratise) public space, cities in the modern era renamed streets that once honoured female saints, royal women, or mythical figures, replacing them with secular, democratic heroes – all men, intellectuals, scientists, revolutionaries.15 But this fair-mindedness can also ignore those who lack the cultural or gendered capital to rise within a culture’s ranks, and succeeds in identifying women with the outdated regime, associating them with ‘the private, the traditional, and the anti-modern’.16
When they do appear – and it’s not often, there are twice as many statues of dogs in Edinburgh as there are of women – women are decorative or idealized, cast in stone as allegories or slaves. The obelisk at the Place de la Concorde in Paris, which stands at the spot where the king was guillotined (and the queen, and Charlotte Corday and Danton and Olympe de Gouges and Robespierre and Desmoulins and thousands of others w
hom history has rendered nameless), is surrounded by statues of women representing the various French cities. The model for James Pradier’s sculpture of Strasbourg was alternately said to be Victor Hugo’s mistress, Juliette Drouet, or Gustave Flaubert’s, Louise Colet.17 Which is why I like to think of the statue as an allegory not only of Strasbourg but of all the mistresses of great writers and artists, who scribbled and painted and may never get out of their lovers’ shadows, though they sit at the centre of Paris in broad daylight, abstracted into a city fought over by two nations.18
In 1916, Virginia Woolf reviewed E. V. Lucas’s London Revisited for the Times Literary Supplement. In his account of London past and present, Lucas includes a catalogue of monuments in the city. But he omits one in particular, and Woolf asks: ‘why is there no mention of […] the woman with an urn which fronts the gates of the Foundling Hospital?’19 She kneels there still, with her pitcher, on a traffic island across from Coram’s Fields, atop a modern-looking drinking fountain.20 The sculptor is unknown. Dressed in some kind of toga or tunic, with curled hair in coils down her neck, she is sometimes called ‘The Waterbearer’ or the ‘Woman of Samaria’, after the woman who spoke with Jesus at a well, and recognised him as a prophet.
Walk through the streets of any big city, and if you’re paying attention you’ll notice another kind of woman standing around, immobilised. The French director Agnès Varda made a short film in the 1980s, Les dites-cariatides (The So-Called Caryatids), in which she and her camera wander around Paris looking for examples of the architectural oddity that is the caryatid, the stone women who serve as load-bearing columns, holding up the great buildings of the city. They’re all over Paris, these caryatids. They come in sets of two or four and sometimes many more than that, depending on the building’s ostentation. Sometimes they’re male. These are called atlantes, named for Atlas, who holds up the world. The male caryatids, Varda observes, are shown with muscles bulging, while the females are all lithe and lissome, posing elegantly, effortlessly: if they find the building too much to bear, we’d never know it from looking at them.
But then, we never really look at them. Varda’s film concludes with an enormous caryatid in the 3rd arrondissement, so large it takes up three storeys of a building on the busy rue Turbigo. She asks the people in the neighbourhood what they think of the stone woman. They haven’t even noticed she was there. As the writer Robert Musil once pointed out, it is the nature of monuments to go unnoticed. ‘Doubtless they have been erected to be seen,’ he wrote, ‘even to attract attention; yet at the same time something has impregnated them against attention.’ Still, on some level we’re aware of them. In her book Monuments & Maidens, Marina Warner surmises that if someone removed the statue of the Law (allegorically represented as female) from the Place du Palais-Bourbon, we would all somehow sense that something was missing, even if we didn’t know what. We’re more attuned to our environment than we realise.
* * *
The flâneuse is still fighting to be seen, even now, when, as we’d like to think, she more or less has the run of the city.
A more politically engaged descendant of Baudelairean flânerie reigns today, one that operates by dérive, or ‘drift’. A mid-twentieth-century group of radical poets and artists calling themselves the Situationists invented ‘psychogeography’, in which strolling becomes drifting and detached observation becomes a critique of post-war urbanism. Urban explorers use the dérive to map the emotive force field of the city, and the way architecture and topography combine to create its ‘psychogeographical contours’.21 Robert Macfarlane, a masterful writer-walker of the countryside, offers this summary of the practice: ‘Unfold a street map of London, place a glass, rim down, anywhere on the map, and draw round its edge. Pick up the map, go out into the city, and walk the circle, keeping as close as you can to the curve. Record the experience as you go, in whatever medium you favour: film, photograph, manuscript, tape. Catch the textual run-off of the streets; the graffiti, the branded litter, the snatches of conversation. Cut for sign. Log the data-stream. Be alert to the happenstance of metaphors, watch for visual rhymes, coincidences, analogies, family resemblances, the changing moods of the street.’22 Psychogeography is a term that many of Macfarlane’s contemporaries alternately embrace (sometimes ironically) or refuse; Will Self uses it to title a collection of his essays; Iain Sinclair is sceptical of the word, as it’s been co-opted to become a ‘very nasty sort of branding’; he prefers to think of it as ‘deep topography’, a term he got from Self’s buddy Nick Papadimitriou (who talks of making a ‘close study’ of a set environment on certain walks).
Call them what you will; these late-century heirs to the Situationists also inherited Baudelaire’s blinkered approach to the women on the pavement. Self has declared – not without some personal disappointment – psychogeography to be a man’s work, confirming the walker in the city as a figure of masculine privilege.23 Self has gone so far as to declare psychogeographers a ‘fraternity’: ‘middle-aged men in Gore-Tex, armed with notebooks and camera, stamping out boots on suburban train platforms, politely requesting the operators of tea kiosks in mossy parks to fill our thermoses, querying the destinations of rural buses […] prostates swell[ing] as we crunch over broken glass, behind the defunct brewery on the outskirts of town.’
Really, he doesn’t sound very different from Louis Huart, defining the flâneur in 1841: ‘Good legs, good ears, and good eyes […] these are the principal physical advantages needed for any Frenchman to be worthy of the club of flâneurs as soon as we start one.’24 The great writers of the city, the great psychogeographers, the ones that you read about in the Observer on weekends: they are all men, and at any given moment you’ll also find them writing about each other’s work, creating a reified canon of masculine writer-walkers.25 As if a penis were a requisite walking appendage, like a cane.
A glance at the psychogeographical fanzine Savage Messiah, drawn by the graphic artist Laura Oldfield Ford, shows this isn’t true; Ford walks all over London, verging from the ‘inner city’ out to the suburbs, and the sketches she creates out of what she sees reveal a capital surrounded by Ballardian suburbs, cubes of housing estates, disused, temporary structures, anchors in a sea of litter, refuse, anger. Even Woolf, Britain’s most decorous modernist, the favourite target of literary men beefing up their virility by slagging her off, liked to tramp around the filthy places of London. One day in 1939 found her down near Southwark Bridge, where she ‘saw a flight of steps down to the river – I climbed down – a rope at the bottom – Found the strand of the Thames, under the warehouses – strewn with stones, bits of wire … Very slippery; warehouse walls crusted, weedy, worn … Difficult walking. A rat haunted, riverine place, great chains, wooden pillars, green slime, bricks corroded, a button hook thrown up by the tide.’26
It would be nice, ideal even, if we didn’t have to subdivide by gender – male walkers, female walkers, flâneurs and flâneuses – but these narratives of walking repeatedly leave out a woman’s experience.27 Sinclair admits that the work he admires in deep topography makes the walker into a very British figure, the naturalist.28 This is not a way of interacting with the world that particularly interests me. I like the built environment, I like cities. Not their limits, not the places where they become not-cities. Cities themselves. The heart of them. Their manifold quarters, sectors, corners. And 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. You don’t need to crunch around in Gore-Tex to be subversive, if you’re a woman. Just walk out your front door.
* * *
Nearly two decades after those first early experiments in flâneuserie, I still live and walk in Paris, after having walked in New York, Venice, Tokyo and London, all places I’ve lived in temporarily for work or love. It’s a hard habit to shake. Why do I walk? I walk because I like it. I like the rh
ythm of it, my shadow always a little ahead of me on the pavement. I like being able to stop when I like, to lean against a building and make a note in my journal, or read an email, or send a text message, and for the world to stop while I do it. Walking, paradoxically, allows for the possibility of stillness.
Walking is mapping with your feet. It helps you piece a city together, connecting up neighbourhoods that might otherwise have remained discrete entities, different planets bound to each other, sustained yet remote. I like seeing how in fact they blend into one another, I like noticing the boundaries between them. Walking helps me feel at home. There’s a small pleasure in seeing how well I’ve come to know the city through my wanderings on foot, crossing through different neighbourhoods of the city, some I used to know quite well, others I may not have seen in a while, like getting reacquainted with someone I once met at a party.
Sometimes I walk because I have things on my mind, and walking helps me sort them out. Solvitur ambulando, as they say.
I walk because it confers – or restores – a feeling of placeness. The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan says a space becomes a place when through movement we invest it with meaning, when we see it as something to be perceived, apprehended, experienced.29
I walk because, somehow, it’s like reading. You’re privy to these lives and conversations that have nothing to do with yours, but you can eavesdrop on them. Sometimes it’s overcrowded; sometimes the voices are too loud. But there is always companionship. You are not alone. You walk in the city side by side with the living and the dead.
