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Configurations 9.1 (2001) 167-171



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Book Review

Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City


Deborah Epstein Nord. Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. 270 pp. $39.95, $16.95 paper.

Among Walter Benjamin's most provocative explorations of modernity is his analysis of the flâneur, a Victorian figure who emerged coincident with industrial capitalism and mass consumer culture. Benjamin's flâneur, impressionistically drawn from Baudelaire's essays and poetry, Balzac's, Poe's, and Dickens's fiction, and Marx's theory of commodity fetishism, is a middle-class rambler who made the crowded labyrinths of London and Paris--with their promise of anonymity, ephemerality, and estrangement--his personal playground. In his promenades, he expended cultural capital as a male bourgeois in such a way as to acquire and exploit the visual images of city life. The most attractive of those images were "fallen" women of the street, especially prostitutes, lesbians, and the seduced. He regarded women as a commodity; his interaction with them, predicated on superficiality and sexuality, amounted to a predatory version of window-shopping.

As Deborah Epstein Nord makes clear in Walking the Victorian Streets, the flâneur is received history, the stuff of authoritative cultural and literary criticism, a story told not just by Benjamin but also by his most important English comrade in the Marxist tradition, Raymond Williams. Echoing Williams's analysis of flâneur-like narrative technique in Victorian city novels, Epstein Nord argues that "the entire project of representing and understanding the exhilarating and distressing new phenomenon of urban life began, in some important sense, with this figure of the lone man who walked with impunity, aplomb, and a penetrating gaze" (p. 1). Far from his being an isolated phenomenon, she locates the "lone man" as a pervasive paradigm of nineteenth-century writing and narrating, including in her canon of flâneur authors such Romantics as Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Blake, Lamb, and De Quincey, as well as their most prominent Victorian descendant, Dickens. With this feature of narrative spectatorship fully in mind, Epstein Nord poses a revisionist question: "[C]ould there have been a female spectator or a vision of the urban panorama crafted by a female imagination?" (p. 3). The inquiry, and the attempt that it implies--to recover from historical obscurity the figure of the flâneuse--are at the heart of this intelligent and perceptive book.

The most exciting discussions found in these pages are not centered on familiar works by Blake, De Quincey, and Gaskell, but are instead excursions into new terrain: an analysis of Regency London's monumental architecture and its close parallel to theater (which altered the architectural scale of England's capitol and helped make possible the advent of the flâneur and the concomitant marginalization of "respectable" women from London street life); the recovery of largely forgotten women writers from both halves of the nineteenth century, including [End Page 167] Flora Tristan in the first half and Margaret Harkness, Amy Levy, and Eleanor Marx in the second half (all of whom played a significant role in narrating as, and representing, a quasi-flâneuse); and research on the late-Victorian and Edwardian generation of New Women and social investigators who made their influence felt on the streets from the 1880s forward, including luminaries like Beatrice Potter Webb as well as lesser lights such as Helen Bosquanet, Mary Higgs, Florence Bell, and Maud Pember Reeves.

These interwoven strands retrieve historical versions of female spectatorship as significant aspects of novelistic method, cultural commentary, and social science--and this is precisely what makes Walking the Victorian Streets such an important contribution to women's and nineteenth-century studies. Unlike feminist theorists such as Teresa de Lauretis, E. Ann Kaplan, Jacqueline Rose, and Laura Mulvey, all of whom attempt to dismantle the contemporary cultural hegemony of the male gaze through psychoanalytic interventions, Epstein Nord works in the historical register and focuses on the woman-as-spectator, thereby helping to fill a significant gap in feminist scholarship. In this...

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