![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Abstract
As ambivalent hero of the urban imaginary of the nineteenth century, the flâneur enjoys the licence to loiter in the streets and look at the spectacle of the crowds and the hall of mirrors of the city scene. However, feminist inquiry has dislocated the flâneur’s panoramic embrace of sites/sights of authority, and reconfigured the gendered mastery of urban perception by the all-seeing voyeur. Benjaminian approaches have focused on the production of art in an age of mass consumption and the flâneur’s seduction by the erotics of capitalist consumption and commodity fetishism. Building on both interpretations, this article performs sensual re-readings of novels and essays by Balzac, Vallès, and Colette, in order to recapture the rich potential of the senses in the activities of walking, feeling, and representing the city. The embodied experience of boundaries undoes three hierarchies: the gendered and class divisions of social spheres, and the division of the senses into higher and lower faculties.
I would like to thank Aimée Boutin for her patience, dedication, and astute readings of the various drafts of this essay.
Notes
1 Deborah L. Parsons points to this elusiveness in Streetwalking the Metropolis: ‘Once an idler observer of the Parisian demi-monde, for contemporary theory he is an increasingly expansive figure who represents a variety of ‘wanderings’, in terms of ambulation, nationality, gender, race, class, and sexuality’ (2000: 4). See also chapter 3 of Ferguson’s Paris as Revolution, ‘The City and Its Discontents’ (1994: 80–114); chapter 8 of Chambers’s Loiterature, ‘Flâneur Reading (On Being Belated)’ (1999: 215–49); and Mary Gluck’s article, ‘The Flâneur and the Aesthetic Appropriation of Urban Culture in Mid-19th-century Paris’, in which Gluck lists all the modernist and postmodernist embodiments of the flâneur as a figure of alienation or fragmentation, in order to ‘estrange him’ from our contemporary paradigms and rethink his belonging to the Parisian popular culture of the 1830s and 1840s, and the avant-garde art of the 1850s and 1860s (2003: 53–80).
2 The ‘invisible flâneuse’ is not the focus of this essay. For a full discussion of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century models for understanding women’s experience and representation of public space, and the recoding of the city following more complex spatial divisions than the clear-cut private-public gendered divides, see the collective volume edited by Aruna d’Souza and Tom McDonough, The Invisible Flâneuse? Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris.
3 For a later period (the London and Paris of the 1880s to the 1940s), Parsons studies mostly Anglophone women writers in her book Streetwalking the Metropolis, which focuses on women who brought fresh eyes to their physical, social, and cultural interactions with their modern urban locations.
4 This passage by Griselda Pollock is quoted by Elizabeth Wilson (1992: 101), without page numbers. In Pollock’s essay ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity’, the passage is on page 79, and ends with an important precision: ‘in deed or in fantasy’. As is often the case for quotations cited out of their original contexts, the use of this precise quotation by Wilson is misleading as Pollock, in that section of her essay, makes an argument not simply on the public and private divides along male and female polarities, but on the class and moral divisions between women.
5 Here is Balzac’s extraordinary manifesto of gendered modernity: ‘Quel est le fantassin de Paris dans l’oreille duquel il n’est pas tombé, comme des balles en un jour de bataille, des milliers de mots prononcés par les passants, et qui n’ait pas saisi une de ces innombrables paroles, gelées en l’air, dont parle Rabelais? Mais la plupart des hommes se promènent à Paris comme ils mangent, comme ils vivent, sans y penser. Il existe peu de musiciens habiles, de physionomistes exercés qui sachent reconnaître de quelle clef ces notes éparses sont signées, de quelle passion elles procèdent. Oh errer dans Paris! adorable et délicieuse existence? Flâner est une science, c’est la gastronomie de l’œil. Se promener, c’est végéter; flâner, c’est vivre. La jeune et jolie femme, longtemps contemplée par des yeux ardents, serait encore bien plus recevable à prétendre un salaire que le rôtisseur qui demandait vingt sous au Limousin dont le nez, enflé à toutes voiles, aspirait de nourrissants parfums. Flâner, c’est jouir, c’est recueillir des traits d’esprit, c’est admirer de sublimes tableaux de malheur, d’amour, de joie, des portraits gracieux ou grotesques; c’est plonger ses regards au fond de mille existences: jeune, c’est tout désirer, tout posséder; vieillard, c’est vivre de la vie des jeunes gens, c’est épouser leurs passions’ (Balzac, 1980, xi: 930, my italics).
6 Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson summarizes Balzac’s conception of ‘flâner’ in this relevant and concise way: ‘In this fusion of science and sensuality lies the key to urban control’ (1994: 92).
7 Here is one of the main passages in Balzac’s Ferragus, which calls for a sensual reading beyond scopic fascination: ‘M. de Maulincour se réfugia donc, avec toute une famille de piétons, sous le porche d’une vieille maison dont la cour ressemblait à un grand tuyau de cheminée. Il y avait le long de ces murs plâtreux, salpêtrés et verdâtres, tant de plombs et de conduits, et tant d’étages dans les quatre corps de logis, que vous eussiez dit les cascatelles de Saint-Cloud. L’eau ruisselait de toutes parts; elle bouillonnait, elle sautillait, murmurait; elle était noire, blanche, bleue, verte; elle criait, elle foisonnait sous le balai de la portière, vieille femme édentée, faite aux orages, qui semblait les bénir et qui poussait dans la rue mille débris dont l’inventaire curieux révélait la vie et les habitudes de chaque locataire de la maison. C’était des découpures d’indienne, des feuilles de thé, des pétales de fleurs artificielles, décolorées, manquées; des épluchures de légumes, des papiers, des fragments de métal. A chaque coup de balai, la vieille femme mettait à nu l’âme du ruisseau, cette fente noire, découpée en case de damier, après laquelle s’acharnent les portiers. Le pauvre amant examinait ce tableau, l’un des milliers que le mouvant Paris offre chaque jour; mais il l’examinait machinalement, en homme absorbé par ses pensées, lorsqu’en levant les yeux il se trouva nez à nez avec un homme qui venait d’entrer’ (Balzac, 1977, v: 815). For my sensual rereading of the excerpt in terms of a classed and gendered poetics, see Nesci, 2007: 161–68.
8 For a more elaborate reading, see Nesci, 1996.
9 On this issue, see the enlightening discussion by Parsons (2000: 6, 36–37).
10 Comte, then Marquis, Auguste de Belloy (1815–71), was Balzac’s secretary while he was writing Gambara. See also note 13 below.
11 The reference to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s My Cousin’s Corner Window (in German, Des Vetters Eckfenster) occurs many times in Walter Benjamin’s Parisian works. See especially in the M konvolut ‘The Flâneur’ of The Arcades Project (1999), pp. 425–26, 450–51; and the essays in Charles Baudelaire (1982), p. 176–78.
12 The Marquis de Belloy, to whom Balzac dedicated Gambara, later published a book on eccentric characters, Les Toqués (1860). For the most recent study on the 1850s and 1860s texts staging Bohemian, marginal, and destitute types, see Miranda Gill’s innovative book Eccentricity and the Cultural Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Paris (2009).
13 See Ross Chambers for a study of Nerval’s ‘loiterly’ subjectivity and fringe knowledge in Les Nuits d’octobre (1999: 56–82); and Gill’s book, in particular Part III, ‘The Underworld’ (2009: 131–203).
14 See Ferguson’s superb analysis of Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale, and its main hero’s anomie and possession by the city (1994: 93–114). Baudelaire and Benjamin scholars have also dealt with the major turning point in the post-1848 conception of flânerie. In Baudelaire’s aesthetic of modern life, sensory experience (especially the child’s unmediated experience) is central, and involves the interplay of synaesthesia and spleen, rather than their opposition as in the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal.
15 ‘Je préfère l’écrivain, qui ne dit que ce qu’il a vu, et nous apporte des émotions, rien que cela’, Vallès writes in one of his last chronicles (1969: 1082).
16 For Vallès’s new practice of reportage, and his role as witness, detective, and interviewer, and the role of sensations in his writing of the present and witnessing, see Silvia Disegni (2010); on Séverine’s and later female reporters’ creation of a reportage of sensation and immersion, see the work by Marie-Ève Thérenty (2007; 2010); and Kathryne Adair Corbin’s dissertation: ‘The Poetics of Women’s Reporting in the Daily Press: Séverine, Colette and Andrée Viollis (France, 1880–1940)’ (University of California at Santa Barbara, 2012). Vallès wrote a beautiful dedication to Séverine for La Rue à Londres, in 1883, in which he stressed her ability to see and translate the perceptions of horror and desolation; he also staged their social enquiry as a team of reporters. Séverine is depicted as both disciple and surrogate daughter (Vallès, 1969: 481–82).
17 For this increased access to the city and the rise of the ‘New Woman’, see the books by Mary Louise Roberts and Deborah Leah Silverman, and the essays in the volume edited by Diana Holmes and Carrie Tarr. Deborah L. Parsons aptly relates women’s wider access to the city to the advent of a new female perspective on the urban experience; see especially chapters 2 and 3 of her 2000 book.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Catherine Nesci
In her 2007 book, Le Flâneur et les flâneuses, Catherine Nesci provides a gendered interpretation of flânerie in French romanticism through discussions of Walter Benjamin and panoramic literature, Balzac’s urban novels, and works by George Sand, Delphine de Girardin, and Flora Tristan. She is currently working on two projects: women and the media (France, 1750–1960); masculinities and masquerades in the panoramic literature and the illustrated press of French romanticism.
Correspondence to: Catherine Nesci, Professor of French, Affiliate in Feminist Studies and Comparative Literature, Department of French and Italian, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-4140, USA. Email: [email protected]