I picked up Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London by Lauren Elkin shortly after it was published last year, because I assumed that Elkin’s book was yet another in the subgenre I like to call “European Romance”—a subgenre that, for better or for worse, I find unwaveringly irresistible: the story of a young woman who moves to Paris (or, really, anywhere in France) to begin life anew. Despite the initial foibles that come from reorienting one’s existence in a foreign land, there her life is transformed by finding a new passion (whether it’s for cooking, walking, renovating a crumbling farmhouse, or, most often, for a man), and, aided by a cast of charming locals, she begins to live what Oprah would call her “best life,” but with the style and elegance of la vie européenne. At the end, she stays in France, often with her new lover and/or husband, and usually with a baby on the way. I’ve read more than twenty of these books, and while they’re all repetitive and formulaic, I’ll be damned if I don’t love them, and will read them entirely the instant they meet my hot little hands.
But
Elkin’s book is nothing of the sort. This is hardly the story of a woman
floundering in America who decides to run off into the Parisian sunset. Elkin
went to Europe with a sense of purpose: first, as an undergrad to study abroad,
then as a graduate student to receive her MPhil in French literature from the
Sorbonne, then as an adult to live. And while Elkin relays some stories of
romantic interludes, the relationships she details are all disasters: men who
take her away, and not toward, her “best life,” which, she believes, exists
squarely in Paris. A relationship isn’t the solution to Elkin’s problems the
way it is in so many of this genre; neither is a new patisserie, or a gorgeous pair of shoes, or an even more gorgeous,
if condemned, farmhouse. The purpose of Flâneuse
is more complicated than that.
Elkin’s
true love is cities, and, more specifically, walking through them. A native of
New York from the Long Island suburbs, Elkin came into Manhattan to study at
Barnard, and then went to Paris to study abroad, and then had stints in Tokyo,
Venice, and London. In each city she walked—to explore, to get what she needed,
and to get to and from work, but most of all she walked to get a feel for the
city from the pedestrian’s perspective. What she desired most was to gain that slow
specific view that comes only from being on the street, that takes in the
height of the buildings and the whir of traffic, but also the small moments
that are only visible from the ground—the graffiti hidden behind some stairs, the
overlooked monument in the overgrown park, the mother and child holding hands
as they sit on a bench, feeding the birds.
But Flâneuse has an explicitly political purpose
as well, one that jibes nicely with our culture’s recent rediscovery of
feminist critique. “Flâneuse” is the feminized version of the French word flâneur, which refers to “one who
wanders aimlessly,” and which came about in the first half of the nineteenth
century, when Paris’s medieval narrow streets and alleys were being demolished
and redesigned by Georges-Eugène Haussmann with the express purpose of creating
the vibrant, walkable, wide-boulevarded city that many of us know today. A flâneur was defined as a “figure of male
privilege and leisure, with time and money and no immediate responsibilities to
claim his attention,” who plunges himself into the city’s street life with the
implicit understanding of his dual freedoms: a man walking the street can
either command respect, or he can wander anonymously, with few bothering him as
he walks (3). A bourgeois male, with the implicit means and privileges of
moneyed masculinity, a flâneur could
come and go, transforming his ambles into art. A woman, Elkin notes, lacks this
ability, by the sheer and natural force that she is a “she.”
A single woman
wandering alone with no specific destination or purpose in mind—a flâneuse—is, and long has been, an
object of speculation: she is immediately coded as either a prostitute or a
beggar. Her body is gazed at wherever she goes; Elkin includes the startling
photo of a young woman walking through Florence in 1951, leered at by no fewer
than eight men. One blocks her path, another shouts at her with a contorted
face, his hands unmistakably grabbing his crotch. It is an experience most
urban women know well: street harassment, the practice of being a woman in
public, means that you are inevitably made subject to the male gaze, and
subject to the probing, hyper-sexualized attacks that men feel comfortable enough
to bestow upon any passing woman they deem attractive enough to warrant their
attentions.
But Elkin also
turns this idea around. “Space is not neutral,” she writes. “Space is a
feminist issue” (286). Simply being in public—or, more appropriately, simply being—is a feminist act, because it allows
for the opportunity to gaze back, to reclaim space and reclaim structure and (finally)
claim the ontological nature of existing on a level equal to a man’s. And so
she makes the purpose of her book to detail both the cities she has walked in,
as well as the women who walked there before her.
The book primarily
is set in Paris, the city that Elkin loves the most. In the four chapters set
in France, Elkin writes about other female artists who made the city their
home, many of them transplants like herself, and all of them artists as well.
Jean Rhys, the writer first known as Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, was born in
the West Indies to a Welsh father and a Scottish-Creole mother, but came to
Paris in 1919, at the age of 29, where she wrote stories of tragic women
involved with equally tragic men. George Sand, born Amantine Lucile Arurore
Dupin, came to Paris in 1831, leaving behind her husband and two children in
Northern France to live a life of culture, novel-writing, and a remarkable number
of high-profile affairs. Agnès Varda, the Belgian director, screenwriter and
actress, came to Paris for university and never left, and her work in the
French New Wave, especially with features like Cléo de 5 à 7, gave a pointedly feminist perspective to an
otherwise heavily masculine movement in film.
All of these women
were, like Elkin herself, given to wandering around Paris, exploring the city
entirely by foot, and finding new things about themselves as they discovered
new things about the French capital. Within each chapter, Elkin sprinkles in
anecdotes about herself—the failed relationships with a couple of men, how
strange her suburban family finds her desire to live abroad. In this sense, the
book is part memoir, part cultural history, all of it centered around the idea
of urban involvement and emancipation, and the benefits of the lifestyle of flâneuserie, with its emphasis on
freedom, speculation, and creation.
There is one city
where her desire to walk is heavily curtailed, however: Tokyo, one of the most
densely-populated human capitals in the world. Elkin follows a relationship to
Tokyo, living abroad from the life she had already made abroad, and finds
herself miserable there. Tokyo is too big to cover on foot, and the city is
strangulated by major highways, too unfriendly and dangerous for pedestrians to
traverse by foot. She wanders through her long-term business hotel, wanders
through shopping malls, wanders through her Japanese classes, too angry and
disappointed both in her failing relationship and Tokyo’s inaccessibility to
connect with the lifestyle there at all. She felt “marooned in Tokyo,”
traveling back to Paris without her boyfriend, traveling back to New York to
visit family, who now thought her exploits were even more strange (152). She
eats at a French restaurant but hates the food, tries to find an English
bookshop but can’t locate the store, feels compelled to quarantine herself
inside. For a woman who prided herself on her urbane lifestyle, Tokyo was a
city too much. She leaves both the city and the relationship, and returns to
Paris far happier and more free.
There are other
interludes—a section about London and Virginia Woolf, a chapter on Venice and
Sophie Calle—but these are distractions from Elkin’s larger mission, which is
to detail and celebrate the flâneuse’s
long-held, if long-unacknowledged, relationship with Paris, the city that
created flânerie, and work to expand
it to include the rest of the world. As
with much of feminist literature, there is the need to write women back into this
history, to replace them where they’ve consistently been written out. And Elkin
does this, in her literary way. She writes of women who have traveled the globe—Martha
Gellhorn; my beloved Joan Didion—but who continue to thirst for to know more,
to see more. “I’ll never see enough as long as I live,” Gellhorn wrote to her
then-husband Ernest Hemingway in 1943, the year before he sent her a deeply
asshole-ish telegram at the Italian front, begging her to return home (“Are you
a war correspondent or wife in my bed?”) (266, 250).
For Elkin, these
are woman to be celebrated, not scolded, and the remonstrations from their
husbands seem silly and jealous to a fault. But, from her own stories, as well
as from the biographies of the women she details, it’s clear that there has
long been, and long will be, hesitancy and anger directed toward women taking
their public place in the world. It is a brave act to put oneself out there
into the world and walk, unarmed and alone, through its streets, and Elkin
wants to expand the female sex’s mission to take up space, to find a woman’s
place in the world, and to allow her the ability to walk within it, through it,
and, one day, beyond it.
But this may
require as much a change of mindset for the flâneuse
as it does for the rest of the world. Elkin closes with a surprising story: the
woman in the 1951 photograph in Florence was named Ninalee Craig, but she went
by the nickname “Jinx Allen.” She was single and traveling through Europe
alone, exploring and meeting friends along the way—the epitome of the flâneuse. And in 2011, when she was interviewed
on NBC’s Today Show for the sixtieth
anniversary of her famous photograph, Craig said that the image was being
vastly misunderstood. As much as modern audiences want to code the picture with
patriarchy, chauvinism, and rampant misogyny, “it’s not a symbol of
harassment,” Craig said. “It’s the symbol of a woman having an absolutely
wonderful time!”
One final
thought: I really hate the picture on the book’s cover. It’s the image of a
typical flâneur with his top hat,
coat, and cane. But laid over this sketch is a fucking ridiculous pink flowy
skirt, transforming a bearded flâneur
into a poorly cross-dressed flâneuse.
For a book as philosophical and intellectual as Elkin’s, this image feels
shitty and cheap, a real underselling of the message inside. A clear
illustration of how we should literally never judge a book by its cover but, if
possible, read Flâneuse with the dust
jacket removed.
- Emily Dufton
- Emily Dufton
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