Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity (review)

Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity. Deborah L. Parsons. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. 246. $19.95 (paper).

Deborah Parsons's study of modern women writers and their relationships to the city takes part in a couple of important intellectual debates. Most generally, it addresses the question the art critic T. J. Clark poses in a well-known debate with Michael Fried: Does modernism have "anything to offer but the spectacle of decomposition?" ¹ That is, does our experience of urban dynamism, the fragmentation of tradition, and the psychological disorientation that accompany these tend to produce only disabling negativity within ourselves and our aesthetic and intellectual creations, or can the challenge of modernity be said to be positive and productive in its effects?

The other line of debate Parsons's study enters into involves the more local question of women's place within modernity. Given that they endured greater social and mental constraints than men did, how have women in particular fared in the urban landscape? Indeed, have they even been able to move and think freely within the modern city, or has Baudelaire's peculiar modern product, the flâneur, always been an exclusively male phenomenon?

While Streetwalking the Metropolis contributes to a much-needed revision of this second, more local, debate, it is, I would argue, rather too sentimental in its claims to enter very usefully into the first. Let me begin by discussing the book's welcome revision of received feminist wisdom about women and modernity.

Parsons rightly notes that feminist critics like Janet Wolff and Griselda Pollock have typically portrayed the urban woman as almost exclusively the immobile object of the male gaze: the female equivalent of the flâneur is the prostitute, the fallen, stigmatized woman forced into the public realm by poverty. Men are about the public realm, women the private, and this rather rigid dichotomy means that those women who venture into public will be punished for it. Thus, "by asserting that female experience concerns the domestic world, critics such as Wolff and Pollock only serve to exclude women from the 'modern' altogether and resituate her [sic] in the Victorian home" (40). Even more intelligent writers, like Elizabeth Wilson, tend to literalize the figure of the flâneur, forgetting that "the post-Benjaminian flâneur is more influentially a conceptual metaphor for urban observation and walking that extends even to the present day and the flâneur of de Certeau's postmodern city" (41).

After a series of telling, though somewhat blandly written, chapters considering the work of writers like Amy Levy, Virginia Woolf, and Dorothy Richardson, Parsons concludes that in fact these women emerged into the modern city "keen for freedom and autonomy, seeking to understand the city on their own terms and ready to express their experiences in their own voice" (224). Her own "social and literary genealogy of the flâneuse," she writes, reveals women as "observing subjects in the city." Parsons "troubles" gender in this study; she insists upon the ambiguous gender of the flâneur and therefore the availability of the stance of urban observer and wanderer to both men and women. And she portrays the city itself as a site far more complex than traditional feminist critics of modernity tend to do. She makes wise use of the impressive work of the urban theorist Richard Sennett in arguing, as he does, that the city is in fact "a positive site for the 'other' and the exile . . . the city should be regarded not as a sanctuary but as an open space 'in which people come alive, where they expose, acknowledge, and address the discordant parts of themselves and one another'" (226).

But Parsons herself cannot resist simplifying the terms of the discussion as she concludes her study. Flâneuses, in fact, she argues, go one step further than flâneurs. Unlike their typical male counterpart who tends to regard the anonymity afforded by city crowds as...