Le Flâneur et les flâneuses: Les Femmes et la ville à l'époque romantique (review)

Since Janet Wolff first suggested the "invisibility" of the flâneuse back in 1985, the marginalisation of women in the discourse on gender, the city and modernity has been debated — though less extensively in French than in Anglo-American studies. Wolff drew attention to the absence of a female flâneur, and called for (but didn't provide) an examination of her writings. Nesci's expertly researched and documented study fills that gap by providing a masterful close reading of three women writers whose explorations of urban space during the Romantic (pre-Haussmannian) era have been neglected in the critical debate about modern city experience. The result is a broader understanding of both the flâneur and his relationship to gender and modernity, as well as the role of women in the development of modern urban culture.

Not only does Nesci account for the historical existence of the flâneuse (beyond Walter Benjamin's prostitute), but she also addresses the paradoxical nature of her "invisibility." One of the strengths of Nesci's study rests on her thorough investigation of all the dimensions of (in)visibility. According to the theory of separate spheres — whereby women are excluded from public male-dominated space — the flâneuse will be invisible because women are not seen in the city but exclusively in the bourgeois interior. Like a number of other feminist critics (notably Sharon Marcus), Nesci refutes the exclusivity of the theory that irrevocably divides private/public, female/male, in favor of a more fluid construct of sexualized spaces. She shows how flâneuses resort to disguise, masquerade, parody, pseudonymous signatures, among other writerly strategies, to manipulate their (in)visibility, move about the city and leave a visible mark on the public sphere.

After a short laudatory preface by the author of Paris as Revolution, the first part provides a dense, in-depth theoretical examination of the concept of flânerie (authored by male critics and focused on a male subject, the flâneur) and its relationship to women, the city and modernity. Following Walter Benjamin, as well as Pierre Loubier, Alain Montandon, and Karlheinz Stierle, Nesci discusses the two facets of the flâneur myth, the euphoric (the hero of modern life) and the melancholic (the anti-hero, alienated and marginalized by an errant existence) in an impressive array of examples of "panoramic" literature both graphic and textual. The flâneur seeks to master the totality of urban experience visually; to unveil the hidden realities of the city; to decipher urban signs to make the city intelligible as a reader would a book. Nesci argues that the accumulation of social observations that will be transformed into art, fosters a retribution of cultural capital that goes hand in hand with the death of the passante, the object of the male gaze in the fatal "shock" encounter. The flâneuse must find a way around this lethal trajectory.

The Balzacian model as deployed in Ferragus, described in the second part, serves as the foil for the three following sections on feminine flânerie. Nesci emphasizes here how Balzac's eroticisation of urban space makes strolling in the city fatal for women. For the flâneur-voyeur, conquering the modern city means visually tracking and possessing a Parisienne, leading to her disgrace.

To include the too little known poet, journalist and novelist Delphine de Girardin (aka Vicomte de Launay) enables Nesci to explore the trope of visibility innovatively. Under the cover of Vicomte de Launay, Girardin can adopt the role of the invisible flâneur-observer (who sees but isn't seen), and report on social mores and fashion for her feuilleton in the newspaper La Presse. She also questions the flâneur's voyeurism by parodying Balzac's realism in such fictional works as La Canne de M. de Balzac and Le Lorgnon. Like Girardin, George Sand adopted...