Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Redefining a concept long associated only with men
Flaneur is one of those fancy-sounding French words that tend to freak Americans out, but its meaning is unintimidating and should be a lot more widespread. Although, as with any word, there are debates about its nuances, simply put, it means: one who wanders aimlessly through a city as an inveterate pedestrian. In fact, plenty of people drift on foot through urban landscapes taking great pleasure in the activity of directionless strolling without even knowing that there’s a term for what they’re doing.
As is typical of French nouns, flaneur is gendered — in this case masculine. It would follow that there should be a feminine counterpart, flaneuse. Sadly, as Lauren Elkin points out in her eclectic and absorbing memoir and cultural history “Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London,” “most French dictionaries don’t even include the word.”
Experts both male and female attribute this conspicuous omission to the oppressed state of women in cities until relatively recently. Elkin allows that the flaneur has generally been “a figure of masculine privilege and leisure, with time and money and no immediate responsibilities to claim his attention.” So, too, does she concede that the invisibility — seeing while not necessarily being seen — that’s considered a key part of flanerie is often unavailable to women due to societal surveillance and street harassment.
So, too, does she cite Janet Wolff ’s landmark essay on the subject, “The Invisible Flaneuse,” in which Wolff claims, “such a character was rendered impossible by the sexual divisions of the nineteenth century.” Luckily for readers, walkers and city lovers, Elkin aims, in this book, to argue for a reassessment and a correction of this misguided notion.
Throughout the pages of this erudite yet conversational book, Elkin sets about successfully persuading her audience that the joy of walking in the city belongs now — and has for ages belonged — to both men and women: “We can talk about social mores and restrictions but we cannot rule out the fact that women were there.” If anything, she suggests, “Perhaps the answer is not to attempt to make a woman fit the masculine concept, but to redefine the concept itself. If we tunnel back, we find there always was a flaneuse passing Baudelaire in the street.”
As befits such an ambitious mission statement, tunneling back is exactly what Elkin proceeds to do. The book strikes a rewarding balance between present and past, as it establishes and illustrates the much-needed definition of the flaneuse as “a determined, resourceful individual keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city, and the liberating possibilities of a good walk.”
A native New Yorker, Elkin has been based in Paris since 2004. She deftly intersperses her own opinions and experiences of flanerie with portraits and explorations of such notable flaneuses as Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, Sophie Calle and Martha Gelhorn.
Writing of George Sand (the male pen name of Amantine-Lucille-Aurore Dupin), Elkin points out that the author, upon moving to Paris, took to crossdressing to assist her mobility and invisibility. In trousers and boots, Sand “could ‘fly’ from one end of the city to the other in spite of the weather, the hour and the setting, blending with the crowd like a true flaneur.”
Though the book derives its chapter titles primarily from geographic locations, it feels drifty and meandering, almost like a walk itself. Elkin’s sections give the reader the sensation one often has with neighborhoods when one is strolling — the locations feel distinct, but the borders are vague.
Suburbanites might not like this book, for Elkin rightly criticizes the suburbs as places built upon fragmentation and exclusion. But they — and all readers — would do well to keep an open mind to its praise of cities and its execution of its admirable goal of claiming the flaneuse’s right “to organize (or disorganize) space on our own terms.”