Before the nineteenth century, when writers like Charles Baudelaire wandered the streets, the lone female observer was rare. Instead, the city streets carried the flaneur, ‘a figure of privilege and leisure, with the time and money to amble around the city at will.’[1] The flaneur is both part of the crowd and observer of the crowd, involved within and yet separate from the hustle and bustle of urban life and, of course, he is always a man. Deborah Parson’s said that ‘the opportunities and activities of flânerie were predominantly the activities of the man.’[2] Even more than that, Griselda Pollock states that ‘there is no female equivalent of the quintessential masculine figure, the flaneur.’[3] By those observations it seems as though the flaneur (the urban observer) was an exclusively male character. However, seventeenth century poet Amy Levy disagreed; she wrote that ‘there have always been women writing about cities, chronicling their lives, telling stories, taking pictures, making films [and] engaging with the city any way they can.’[4]
Jane Rendell describes the early nineteenth century as a period of ‘increasing urbanization and expansion of capitalism resulting in the rising cultural importance of certain social spaces of leisure, consumption, display and exchange.’[5] These spaces included the birth of the department store and the shopping arcade, places that were societally acceptable for women to wander and where they could go to lunch or a café, socialise and observe. These locations were concerning to men in that their ‘female property – mothers, wives and daughters’[6] would now be ‘visually and sexually available to other men.’[7] Yet, as long as cities have existed there have been women inhabiting them, women creating art from urban surroundings and, as the decades continue to pass, women finding new ways to experience the city. It would be myopic to consider the female experience of the city as something that could be compared or equated to the male experience. The female urban observer is not the female flaneur, she is her own separate entity – she is the flaneuse.
The flaneuse, despite being a connoisseur of the city, was not yet free from the men that looked to possess and display her. For centuries the flaneuse, when she was allowed to exist, existed only in misfortune. She was a whore, a temptress, or homeless – her existence in the city had been forced upon her and not chosen by her. Baudelaire, in his poem A Une Passante, describes his own flaneuse. She is thought to be a prostitute and he illustrates her as ‘swift and graceful, with legs like a statue’s.’[8] Baudelaire is unable to grasp anything about her in this meeting. She is too fast for him, ‘swift’[9] but paradoxically statuesque. He knows nothing of who she truly is, as for Baudelaire she acts as a placeholder for her character type – a prostitute, not a person. His male gaze shapes both the city and the way that women are perceived within it and yet, the flaneuse defies this categorisation. Her female gaze understands the city and a woman’s within it differently. Above all, it’s a transformation that the constantly changing streets of a city enable.
A beautiful example of the transformative properties of the city is Agnes Varda’s Cleo de 5 a 7 (1961). Framing Cleo, the flaneuse of the story, as a woman full of hopes, dreams, fears and wants, Varda pushes back against the constraints of the box which the flaneuse once inhabited. As Janice Mouton notes in her essay, Cleo’s transformation from ‘feminine masquerade’[10] to flaneuse only occurs due to her ‘involvement within the city’[11] (in this case, Paris). The film starts with a fortune teller telling Cleo that she will undergo a ‘profound transformation of her being.’[12] Cleo, when we meet her, is obsessed with her ‘fetishised feminine image’[13] but in one afternoon of flânerie learns to observe the city properly for the first time. At the same time, the audience also sees the city as though for the first time through Varda’s cinematographic eyes.
Cleo is an incredibly artificial character when we meet her – wig, heels, and makeup create Mouton’s ‘feminine masquerade’[14] to the world. Varda explicitly draws attention to this during Cleo’s cab ride home. In the window of a city gallery sit two tribal masks, these masks now also exist as ‘fetishes’[15] in Mouton’s eyes. In their proper place they represent ‘elements in a belief system’[16] but now, like Cleo, they are simply on display for the world to observe. In Virginia Woolf’s essay Street Haunting her flaneuse uses the pretence of purchasing a lead pencil to justify wandering through the city: ‘really I must buy a pencil.’[17] Cleo’s justification of her wandering is a trip to the hat shop but after her transformation – where she rips off her wig and fancy clothes and instead wears a simple dress – it is clear that she now is uninterested in participating in her previous feminine masquerade, and instead has taken on the role of observer. The fact that Cleo, in Woolf’s words, ‘has no thought of buying,’[18] is crucial to her transformation. She no longer requires the pretence of socially acceptable commodity consumption to uphold her masquerade. Mouton identifies her transformation: ‘Cleo as fetish woman goes shopping while Cleo as flaneuse haunts the streets.’[19]
Cleo as a flaneuse shakes the stereotype of prostitute or homeless woman. She is not on the city streets due to misfortune but due to the fortune of reclaiming her own identity. The feminine masquerade she upheld, much like Baudelaire’s empty prostitute, was there to be consumed by the city and existed to be observed. Cleo as flaneuse exists to observe – she is lost in the crowd and ceases to be a mask on display. Cleo as flaneuse reclaimed her agency, her identity, and her life from the male-dominated city streets. The flaneuse now may exist in any form, she is the writer in a coffee shop, the woman walking her dog in the park, the girl reclaiming the streets as her own terrain on her way home from school. Lauren Elkin describes the flaneuse’s journey perfectly rather than ‘wandering aimlessly, like her male counterpart, the flaneuse goes where she’s not supposed to.’[20]
Footnotes
[1] Elkin, Lauren ‘A tribute to female flaneurs: the women who reclaimed our city streets,’ The Guardian, 29 July 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/jul/29/female-flaneur-women-reclaim-streets (last accessed 04 February 2024)
[2] Parsons, Deborah, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity, (London: Oxford University Press, 2000) p.43
[3] Pollock, Griselda, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art, (London: Routledge, 2003) p.71
[4] Myers, Elissa Erin, The Politics Of Place: Urban Feminism In The Late Works Of Amy Levy, Honors Thesis for Texas State University, May2013, p.57 https://digital.library.txst.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/ae115d2a-287c-4c75-b156-d793c6524254/content (last accessed 04 February 2024)
[5] Rendell, Jane, ‘Ramblers and Cyprians: Mobility, Visuality and the Gendering of Architectural Space’ in L. Durning and Richard Wrigley, eds., Gender and Architecture (UK: John Wiley and Sons, 2000), p. 13
[6] Rendell, p.13
[7] Rendell p.13
[8] Baudelaire, Charles, ‘To a Woman Passing By’ in The Flowers of Evil ed. James McGowan (Oxford: Oxford Press, 1993) p.103
[9] Baudelaire, p.103
[10] Mouton, Janice, ‘From Feminine Masquerade to Flâneuse: Agnès Varda’s Cléo in the City,’ Cinema Journal, 40 (2), 2001, p.3
[11] Mouton, p.3
[12] Varda, Agnes, Cleo de 5 a 7, Athos Films (1962)
[13] Mouton, p.6
[14] Mouton, p.5
[15] Mouton, p.7
[16] Mouton, p.7
[17] Woolf, Virginia, ‘Street Haunting, A London Adventure’ in Andrew McNeillie, ed.,The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4 (London: Hogarth Press, 1967) p.163
[18] Woolf, p.165
[19] Mouton, p.8
[20] Elkin, ‘A tribute to female flâneurs: the women who reclaimed our city streets,’ The Guardian, 2016
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