As Necessary as Solitude
Lauren Elkin, Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London
Chatto & Windus, 336pp, £16.99, ISBN 9780701189020
reviewed by Helen Tyson
When the bombs fell on London in 1940 and 1941, Virginia Woolf, devastated, wrote to a friend that it ‘raked my heart’ to see ‘the passion of my life, that is the City of London,’ destroyed. Her 1927 essay ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’ is a testimony to that passion. Woolf’s narrator describes the charms of walking in London on a winter’s evening, and revels in the ‘irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow’. She embraces the sense of anonymity we feel when, stepping out of the house, ‘we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers’. Following imagined encounters with a ‘dwarf’, two ‘blind men’, a party in a ‘Mayfair mansion’, and a ‘quarrel in [a] stationer’s shop’, Woolf invokes the pleasures of penetrating imaginatively into other people’s lives, ‘far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others’. One can, on the streets of London, ‘become a washerwoman, a publican, a street singer’. Although some of Woolf’s terms might make us uneasy, the cloak of anonymity provided by the streets of London is crucial to her politics: mingling with the crowds on Oxford Street we become part of a ‘vast republican army’, leaving, Woolf hoped, the trappings of class and gender at home.
Walking in the city provided inspiration and offered a sense of community for Virginia Woolf. And yet, when we look for the history of women in the metropolis, the city, like one of Woolf’s modernist novels, sometimes resists our desire for legibility. In a celebrated passage from A Room of One’s Own, Woolf summoned the ‘infinitely obscure lives’ of women in the city, lives which ‘remain to be recorded.’ Imagining a walk through the streets of London Woolf described:
In Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London, an original and lively love letter to the metropolis, Lauren Elkin takes up Woolf’s challenge to go in quest of those lives occluded by history: the lives of women who have walked in, and been inspired by, the cities of Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London.
The flâneur, from the French verb flâner, ‘to walk about aimlessly’, was born in 19th-century Paris. Immortalised in the writings of Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe and Walter Benjamin, the flâneur, Elkin writes, is ‘A figure of masculine privilege and leisure, with time and money and no immediate responsibilities to claim his attention.’ In his monumental, uncompleted study of flânerie in the Paris arcades (the iron and glass covered passages constructed in the early 19th century), Walter Benjamin noted that, for the Parisian flâneur in 1839, ‘it was considered elegant to take a tortoise out walking.’ The flâneur – from the 19th-century dandy with a tortoise on a leash, to the contemporary ‘psychogeographer’, discovered on the edgelands of urban life, clad in Gore-Tex with a copy of Will Self’s latest tome in his hands – is a decidedly privileged, determinedly masculine figure. Traditional scholarship has, for the most part, refused the idea of a female flâneur, or flâneuse, insisting that the only women who ventured onto the city streets of the 19th century were necessarily streetwalkers. And yet, taking cues from Woolf, Elkin notes simply but firmly that ‘we cannot rule out the fact that women were there.’
The women on the city streets of 19th-century America and Europe belonged to all classes. Maids, seamstresses, laundresses, and shop girls rubbed shoulders with middle-class women flocking to the new department stores. Alongside the New Women of the 1890s exploring the city on bicycles, upper-class ladies like Proust’s Madame Swann displayed themselves in their carriages in the Bois de Boulogne. ‘Perhaps,’ Elkin suggests, ‘the answer is not to attempt to make a woman fit a masculine concept, but to redefine the concept itself.’ Quite right. The flâneuse ‘is not merely a female flâneur, but a figure to be reckoned with, and inspired by, all on her own. She voyages out, and goes where she’s not supposed to; she forces us to confront the ways in which words like home and belonging are used against women. She is a determined, resourceful individual keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city, and the liberating possibilities of a good walk.’
Taking us on a meander through cultural history, personal memoir, and social critique, Elkin offers us a portrait of the flâneuse as artist, rebel and social historian. Elkin’s own account of growing up in the suburbs of Long Island, before moving first to New York and then to Paris, highlights the dangers, for women, of a suburban culture in which there is no space either to wander or to wonder. Elkin interweaves her own experiences in New York, Paris, Venice, London and Tokyo with the lives and works of Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, George Sand, Sophie Calle, and Agnès Varda, all of whom knew well the imaginative possibilities of walking in the city.
‘If one is a woman,’ Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own, ‘one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilization, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical.’ The woman walking in the city, faced with the seat of patriarchal government, is forced to confront the ways in which she is excluded from her own ‘civilization’. For Woolf, this alienation is painful, but it also offers the woman a different perspective: through her awareness of her own exclusion the flâneuse becomes ‘critical’, a critic of the culture that seeks to exclude her. Newly emboldened, she can begin to read and to criticise the often unspoken gendered divisions of urban life. For Elkin, too, the flâneuse is a critical outsider. In one of the most striking chapters, reading Martha Gellhorn’s war reports from the frontline in Madrid in 1937, Elkin offers us the flâneuse as war correspondent, and flâneuserie as a form of testimony to the suffering endured in the Spanish Civil War, and later the Second World War. The woman as war reporter was a step too far for some of the old guard. In 1944 Ernest Hemingway sent a telegram to Gellhorn at the Italian front: ‘ARE YOU A WAR CORRESPONDENT OR WIFE IN MY BED?’ Thankfully, Gellhorn took little notice, and her reports offer a deeply empathetic portrait of lives lived amidst the horrors of a city at war. To flâner, Gellhorn once said, ‘is as necessary as solitude: that is how the compost keeps growing in the mind.’
Elkin is attuned to the palimpsest-like layers of history that run deep within a city. Walking in Paris, she looks for bullet marks, plaques commemorating the deaths of rebels and revolutionaries, inscriptions marking the schools from which Jewish children were deported or where résistants were shot in the 1940s. On rue Monsieur-le-Prince, Elkin passes a plaque dedicated to Malik Oussekine, the student who was beaten to death by police during a student protest in 1986. On the Pont Saint-Michel, she encounters a memorial to the one hundred Algerians drowned in the Seine in 1961, after the Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon commanded that they be ‘heaved in’ for demonstrating in favour of the Algerian National Liberation Front. If she passes road works in Paris, Elkin tells us, she strains to peer into the holes in the ground, hoping for a glimpse of the cobblestones that lie beneath the pavement that was laid down following the protests of 1968. During those protests, as in revolutions and demonstrations dating back to the 18th century, Parisians dislodged the cobblestones and hurled them at the authorities. Quoting James Joyce, Elkin reminds us that ‘Places remember events.’
Recounting Woolf’s response to the bombing of her home in Tavistock Square in 1940, Elkin recalls her own reaction when that square was bombed again on 7 July 2005. 9/11, the 7 July London bombings, Charlie Hebdo, and the November 2015 Paris attacks: all haunt and overshadow Elkin’s love of city life. And yet, writing the history of the Parisian manifestation, the protest, the march, the demonstration, Elkin also offers an impassioned account of what happens when people come together in solidarity on the streets of the city. She traces a parallel between the chants of student protesters in 1968, as described in the work of the writer-flâneuse Mavis Gallant, and the expressions of solidarity articulated in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. In 1968, the student Daniel Cohn-Bendit heckled a visiting minister to Nanterre University, where protests were already underway against a rule forbidding male students to stay the night in female dorms. As the child of German Jews who had fled to France, Cohn-Bendit was born stateless; as protests spread, he was threatened not only with expulsion from the university, but from France. While the nationalist bourgeois counter-protesters on the Champs-Elysées insisted on ‘France for the French!’, Gallant recorded the students chanting in Cohn-Bendit’s defence, ‘Nous sommes tous des juifs-allemands.’ Elkin, standing in the streets near the République in 2015, in the biggest manifestation since the liberation in 1944, notes the echo: ‘Je suis Charlie, Je ne suis pas Charlie, Je suis Ahmed, Je suis les frères Kouachi, Je suis manipulé, Je suis Chalie Juif Musulman Policier.’ ‘The more I read Gallant’s account of 1968,’ Elkin writes, ‘the more I realise it wasn’t about students, or dorms, or mores. It was about immigration.’ Elkin reminds us that alongside terrorism, Europe’s cities are also threatened by a brutal, xenophobic nationalism – by a violent urge to shore up borders in the face of the current refugee crisis. ‘Beware roots,’ Elkin warns, ‘Beware purity. Beware fixity. Beware the creeping feeling that you belong. Embrace flow, impurity, fusion.’
In October 1789 a crowd of women marched on Versailles, resulting in the king and his family returning to Paris, where they were imprisoned in the Tuileries Palace. This was, Elkin writes, the true beginning of the French Revolution. The space of the city, Elkin insists, ‘is not neutral’; it is ‘a feminist issue.’ By walking the streets of the city, whether as a solitary individual or in a group, the flâneuse becomes ‘part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers.' She has the potential to challenge, to criticise, and to change.
Walking in the city provided inspiration and offered a sense of community for Virginia Woolf. And yet, when we look for the history of women in the metropolis, the city, like one of Woolf’s modernist novels, sometimes resists our desire for legibility. In a celebrated passage from A Room of One’s Own, Woolf summoned the ‘infinitely obscure lives’ of women in the city, lives which ‘remain to be recorded.’ Imagining a walk through the streets of London Woolf described:
feeling . . . the pressure of dumbness, the accumulation of unrecorded life, whether from the women at the street corners with their arms akimbo, and the rings embedded in their fat swollen fingers, talking with a gesticulation like the swing of Shakespeare’s words; or from the violet-sellers and match-sellers and old crones stationed under doorways; or from drifting girls whose faces, like waves in sun and cloud signal the coming of men and women and the flickering lights of shop windows.
In Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London, an original and lively love letter to the metropolis, Lauren Elkin takes up Woolf’s challenge to go in quest of those lives occluded by history: the lives of women who have walked in, and been inspired by, the cities of Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London.
The flâneur, from the French verb flâner, ‘to walk about aimlessly’, was born in 19th-century Paris. Immortalised in the writings of Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe and Walter Benjamin, the flâneur, Elkin writes, is ‘A figure of masculine privilege and leisure, with time and money and no immediate responsibilities to claim his attention.’ In his monumental, uncompleted study of flânerie in the Paris arcades (the iron and glass covered passages constructed in the early 19th century), Walter Benjamin noted that, for the Parisian flâneur in 1839, ‘it was considered elegant to take a tortoise out walking.’ The flâneur – from the 19th-century dandy with a tortoise on a leash, to the contemporary ‘psychogeographer’, discovered on the edgelands of urban life, clad in Gore-Tex with a copy of Will Self’s latest tome in his hands – is a decidedly privileged, determinedly masculine figure. Traditional scholarship has, for the most part, refused the idea of a female flâneur, or flâneuse, insisting that the only women who ventured onto the city streets of the 19th century were necessarily streetwalkers. And yet, taking cues from Woolf, Elkin notes simply but firmly that ‘we cannot rule out the fact that women were there.’
The women on the city streets of 19th-century America and Europe belonged to all classes. Maids, seamstresses, laundresses, and shop girls rubbed shoulders with middle-class women flocking to the new department stores. Alongside the New Women of the 1890s exploring the city on bicycles, upper-class ladies like Proust’s Madame Swann displayed themselves in their carriages in the Bois de Boulogne. ‘Perhaps,’ Elkin suggests, ‘the answer is not to attempt to make a woman fit a masculine concept, but to redefine the concept itself.’ Quite right. The flâneuse ‘is not merely a female flâneur, but a figure to be reckoned with, and inspired by, all on her own. She voyages out, and goes where she’s not supposed to; she forces us to confront the ways in which words like home and belonging are used against women. She is a determined, resourceful individual keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city, and the liberating possibilities of a good walk.’
Taking us on a meander through cultural history, personal memoir, and social critique, Elkin offers us a portrait of the flâneuse as artist, rebel and social historian. Elkin’s own account of growing up in the suburbs of Long Island, before moving first to New York and then to Paris, highlights the dangers, for women, of a suburban culture in which there is no space either to wander or to wonder. Elkin interweaves her own experiences in New York, Paris, Venice, London and Tokyo with the lives and works of Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, George Sand, Sophie Calle, and Agnès Varda, all of whom knew well the imaginative possibilities of walking in the city.
‘If one is a woman,’ Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own, ‘one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilization, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical.’ The woman walking in the city, faced with the seat of patriarchal government, is forced to confront the ways in which she is excluded from her own ‘civilization’. For Woolf, this alienation is painful, but it also offers the woman a different perspective: through her awareness of her own exclusion the flâneuse becomes ‘critical’, a critic of the culture that seeks to exclude her. Newly emboldened, she can begin to read and to criticise the often unspoken gendered divisions of urban life. For Elkin, too, the flâneuse is a critical outsider. In one of the most striking chapters, reading Martha Gellhorn’s war reports from the frontline in Madrid in 1937, Elkin offers us the flâneuse as war correspondent, and flâneuserie as a form of testimony to the suffering endured in the Spanish Civil War, and later the Second World War. The woman as war reporter was a step too far for some of the old guard. In 1944 Ernest Hemingway sent a telegram to Gellhorn at the Italian front: ‘ARE YOU A WAR CORRESPONDENT OR WIFE IN MY BED?’ Thankfully, Gellhorn took little notice, and her reports offer a deeply empathetic portrait of lives lived amidst the horrors of a city at war. To flâner, Gellhorn once said, ‘is as necessary as solitude: that is how the compost keeps growing in the mind.’
Elkin is attuned to the palimpsest-like layers of history that run deep within a city. Walking in Paris, she looks for bullet marks, plaques commemorating the deaths of rebels and revolutionaries, inscriptions marking the schools from which Jewish children were deported or where résistants were shot in the 1940s. On rue Monsieur-le-Prince, Elkin passes a plaque dedicated to Malik Oussekine, the student who was beaten to death by police during a student protest in 1986. On the Pont Saint-Michel, she encounters a memorial to the one hundred Algerians drowned in the Seine in 1961, after the Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon commanded that they be ‘heaved in’ for demonstrating in favour of the Algerian National Liberation Front. If she passes road works in Paris, Elkin tells us, she strains to peer into the holes in the ground, hoping for a glimpse of the cobblestones that lie beneath the pavement that was laid down following the protests of 1968. During those protests, as in revolutions and demonstrations dating back to the 18th century, Parisians dislodged the cobblestones and hurled them at the authorities. Quoting James Joyce, Elkin reminds us that ‘Places remember events.’
Recounting Woolf’s response to the bombing of her home in Tavistock Square in 1940, Elkin recalls her own reaction when that square was bombed again on 7 July 2005. 9/11, the 7 July London bombings, Charlie Hebdo, and the November 2015 Paris attacks: all haunt and overshadow Elkin’s love of city life. And yet, writing the history of the Parisian manifestation, the protest, the march, the demonstration, Elkin also offers an impassioned account of what happens when people come together in solidarity on the streets of the city. She traces a parallel between the chants of student protesters in 1968, as described in the work of the writer-flâneuse Mavis Gallant, and the expressions of solidarity articulated in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. In 1968, the student Daniel Cohn-Bendit heckled a visiting minister to Nanterre University, where protests were already underway against a rule forbidding male students to stay the night in female dorms. As the child of German Jews who had fled to France, Cohn-Bendit was born stateless; as protests spread, he was threatened not only with expulsion from the university, but from France. While the nationalist bourgeois counter-protesters on the Champs-Elysées insisted on ‘France for the French!’, Gallant recorded the students chanting in Cohn-Bendit’s defence, ‘Nous sommes tous des juifs-allemands.’ Elkin, standing in the streets near the République in 2015, in the biggest manifestation since the liberation in 1944, notes the echo: ‘Je suis Charlie, Je ne suis pas Charlie, Je suis Ahmed, Je suis les frères Kouachi, Je suis manipulé, Je suis Chalie Juif Musulman Policier.’ ‘The more I read Gallant’s account of 1968,’ Elkin writes, ‘the more I realise it wasn’t about students, or dorms, or mores. It was about immigration.’ Elkin reminds us that alongside terrorism, Europe’s cities are also threatened by a brutal, xenophobic nationalism – by a violent urge to shore up borders in the face of the current refugee crisis. ‘Beware roots,’ Elkin warns, ‘Beware purity. Beware fixity. Beware the creeping feeling that you belong. Embrace flow, impurity, fusion.’
In October 1789 a crowd of women marched on Versailles, resulting in the king and his family returning to Paris, where they were imprisoned in the Tuileries Palace. This was, Elkin writes, the true beginning of the French Revolution. The space of the city, Elkin insists, ‘is not neutral’; it is ‘a feminist issue.’ By walking the streets of the city, whether as a solitary individual or in a group, the flâneuse becomes ‘part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers.' She has the potential to challenge, to criticise, and to change.