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

Parsons, Deborah L. Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Pp. 246. ISBN 0-19-818683-5

Baudelaire's flâneur is an urban (male) walker. He wanders about the city, remarking the sights and sounds around him. Benjamin noted that the flâneur can be under-stood as the writer who writes about the modern city. Deborah Parsons's new book asks the perennial question, "Can there be a flâneuse, and what forms might she take?" This query has been previously answered both in the positive and the negative. Scholars such as Anne Friedberg, Rachel Bowlby, Judith Walkowitz, and Erika Rappaport theorize the figure of the flâneuse while Janet Wolff, Griselda Pollock, and Keith Tester demonstrate her impossibility. As Wolff writes in no uncertain terms, "There is no question of inventing the flâneuse: the essential point is that such a character was rendered impossible by the sexual divisions of the nineteenth century" (Feminine Sentences, 47, quoted in Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities, 10). Parsons however broadens the definition of flâneuse beyond a primarily historical role as the "masculine and bourgeois privilege of modern public life . . ." (Schwartz, 9). She explains that the flâneur is more importantly a ". . . critical metaphor for the characteristic perspective of the modern artist" (5). Her arguments are based on two premises:

first, that the concept of the flâneur itself contains gender ambiguities that suggest the figure to be a site for the contestation of male authority rather than the epitome of it, and secondly, that a mode of expression can be seen to develop in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that emphasizes observation of the city yet is distinct from the characteristic practice of the authoritative flâneur, comparable instead to the marginalized urban familiarity of the rag-picker. (6)

Parsons first theorizes this more broadly envisioned flâneuse through rereadings of Baudelaire, Benjamin, and Simmel (the latter's primary texts are, curiously, not cited directly) and then in the six remaining chapters she shows how both male and female writers use the figure of the flâneuse in their literature of urban space, specifically narratives set in London and Paris. For the scholar of nineteenth-century French studies, this book is of limited use. Beyond the first two chapters of the work, "Mythologies of Modernity" in which Parsons theorizes the possibility of the flâneuse, and "Woman of the Crowd" in which she examines the representation of urban women in, among others, the work of Zola and Proust, the huge majority of this study is devoted to analyses of English and American writers. Parsons helps to recover a neglected English poet, Amy Levy, whose poetry and novels set in 1880s London are narrated by strong female author-observers, flâneuses who are inspired by the crowds and sights of urban space. In addition to Levy, Parsons studies work by George Gissing, Theodore Dreiser, Henry James, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Janet Flanner, Jean Rhys, Djuna Barnes, Anaïs Nin, Mina Loy, H.D., Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen, and finally, Doris Lessing. Her study moves from Paris in the 1840s to Lessing's idealized post-World War II London. On the one hand this vast sweep of time and writers allows us a good general view; in fact, the immense scope of Parsons's study proves beyond a doubt that the figure of the flâneuse is not only imaginable, but quite easy to spot in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. However, this same scope can be confusing at times. There are moments in the book when Parsons refers to different characters as though we were intimately familiar with them - quite impossible given the number of writers, characters, and narrators we meet along the route of Street-walking the Metropolis.

Despite some problems, Parsons's study offers a theoretical reconsideration of the figure of the flâneur...