{"id":101913,"date":"2016-08-25T13:10:08","date_gmt":"2016-08-25T17:10:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=101913"},"modified":"2016-10-30T20:51:40","modified_gmt":"2016-10-31T00:51:40","slug":"radical-flaneuserie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/08\/25\/radical-flaneuserie\/","title":{"rendered":"Radical Fl\u00e2neuserie"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reimagining\u00a0the aimlessly wandering woman.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"John<\/a>

John Singer Sargent, A Street in Venice<\/em>, oil on canvas.<\/p><\/div>\n

I.<\/p>\n

I started noticing the ads in the magazines I read. Here is a woman in an asymmetrical black swimsuit, a semitransparent palm tree superimposed on her head, a pink pole behind her. Here is a woman lying down, miraculously balanced on some kind of balustrade, in a white button-down, khaki skirt, and sandals, the same dynamic play of light and palm trees and buildings around her. In the top-right corner, the words Dans l\u2019oeil du fl\u00e2neur<\/em>\u2014\u201cin the eye of the fl\u00e2neur\u201d\u2014and beneath, the Herm\u00e8s logo. The fl\u00e2neur though whose \u201ceye\u201d we\u2019re seeing seems to live in Miami. Not a well-known walking city, but why not\u2014surely fl\u00e2nerie needn\u2019t be confined to melancholic European capitals.<\/p>\n

The theme was set by Herm\u00e8s\u2019s artistic director, Pierre-Alexis Dumas. While the media coverage of the campaign and the traveling exhibition that complemented it breathlessly adopted the term, Dumas gave a pretty illuminated definition of it. Fl\u00e2nerie, he explained, is not about \u201cbeing idle\u201d or \u201cdoing nothing.\u201d It\u2019s an \u201cattitude of curiosity \u2026 about exploring everything.\u201d It flourished in the nineteenth century, he continued, as a form of resistance to industrialization and the rationalization of everyday life, and \u201cthe roots of the spirit of Herm\u00e8s are in nineteenth-century Fl\u00e2nerie.\u201d This is pretty radical rhetoric for the director of a luxury-goods company with a \u20ac4.1 million yearly revenue. Looking at the ads, as well as the merchandise\u2014including an eight-speed bicycle called \u201cThe Fl\u00e2neur\u201d that retailed for $11.3k\u2014it seems someone at Herm\u00e8s didn\u2019t share, or understand, Dumas\u2019s vision.\u00a0<\/p>\n

II.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s something so attractive about wandering aimlessly through the city, taking it all in (especially if we\u2019re wearing Herm\u00e8s while we do it). We all, deep down, want to detach from our lives. The fl\u00e2neur, since everyone wants to be one, has a long history of being many different things to different people, to such an extent that the concept has become one of these things we point to without really knowing what we mean\u2014a kind of shorthand for urban<\/em>, intellectual<\/em>, curious<\/em>, cosmopolitan<\/em>. This is what Herm\u00e8s is counting on: that we will associate Herm\u00e8s products with those values and come to believe that buying them will reinforce those aspects of ourselves.<\/p>\n

The earliest mention of a fl\u00e2neur is in the late sixteenth century, possibly borrowed from the Scandinavian flana<\/em>, \u201ca person who wanders.\u201d It fell largely out of use until the nineteenth century, and then it caught on again. In 1806, an anonymous pamphleteer wrote of the fl\u00e2neur as \u201cM. Bonhomme,\u201d a man-about-town who comes from sufficient wealth to be able to have the time to wander the city at will, taking in the urban spectacle. He hangs out in caf\u00e9s and watches the various inhabitants of the city at work and at play. He is interested in gossip and fashion, but not particularly in women. In an 1829 dictionary, a fl\u00e2neur is someone \u201cwho likes to do nothing,\u201d someone who relishes idleness. Balzac\u2019s fl\u00e2neur took two main forms: the common fl\u00e2neur, happy to aimlessly wander the streets, and the artist-fl\u00e2neur, who poured his experiences in the city into his work. (This was the more miserable type of fl\u00e2neur, who, Balzac noted in his 1837 novel C\u00e9sar Birotteau<\/em>, \u201cis just as frequently a desperate man as an idle one.\u201d) Baudelaire similarly believed that the ultimate fl\u00e2neur, the true connoisseur of the city, was an artist who \u201csang of the sorry dog, the poor dog, the homeless dog, the wandering dog [le chien fl\u00e2neur<\/em>].\u201d Walter Benjamin\u2019s\u00a0fl\u00e2neur, on the other hand, was more feral, a figure who \u201ccompletely distances himself from the type of the philosophical promenader, and takes on the features of the werewolf restlessly roaming a social wildness,\u201d he wrote in the late 1930s. An \u201cintoxication\u201d comes over him as he walks \u201clong and aimlessly through the streets.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so the fl\u00e2neur shape-shifts according to time, place, and agenda. If he didn\u2019t exist, we would have had to invent him to embody our fantasies about nineteenth-century Paris\u2014or about ourselves, today.<\/p>\n

Herm\u00e8s is similarly ambiguous about who, exactly, the fl\u00e2neur in their ads is. Is he the man (or woman?) looking at the woman on the balustrade? Or is she the fl\u00e2neur, too? Is the fl\u00e2neur the photographer, or the (male?) gaze he represents? Is there a fl\u00e2neuse<\/em>, in Herm\u00e8s\u2019 version? Are we looking at her? Are we\u2014am I, holding the magazine\u2014her?<\/p>\n

But I can\u2019t be, because I\u2019m the woman holding the magazine, being asked to buy Herm\u00e8s products. I click through the pictures of the exhibition Herm\u00e8s organized on the banks of the Seine, Wanderland, and one of the curiosities on view\u2014joining nineteenth-century canes, an array of ties, an Herm\u00e8s purse handcuffed to a coatrack\u2014is an image of an androgynous person crossing the road, holding a stack of boxes so high he or she can\u2019t see around them. Is this fl\u00e2nerie, Herm\u00e8s-style?<\/p>\n

Many critics over the years have argued that shopping was at odds with the idle strolling of the fl\u00e2neur: <\/em>he walked the arcades, <\/em>the glass-roofed shopping streets that were the precursor to the department store, but he did not shop. Priscilla\u00a0Parkhurst Ferguson, writing on the fl\u00e2neur in her book Paris as Revolution<\/em>, argues that women could not fl\u00e2ner because women who were shopping in the grands magasins<\/em> were caught in an economy of spectacle, being tricked into buying things, and having their desires stimulated. By contrast the fl\u00e2neur\u2019s very raison d\u2019\u00eatre was having no reason whatsoever.<\/p>\n

Before the twentieth century, women did not have the freedom to wander idly through the streets of Paris. The only women with the freedom to circulate (and a limited freedom at that) were the streetwalkers and ragpickers; Baudelaire\u2019s mysterious and alluring passante<\/em>, immortalized in his poem \u201cTo a (Female) Passer-by,\u201d is assumed to have been a woman of the night. Even the word fl\u00e2neuse<\/em> doesn\u2019t technically exist in French, except, according to an 1877 dictionary entry, to designate a kind of lounge chair. (So Herm\u00e8s\u2019s woman reclining on a balustrade was right on the money, for the late nineteenth century.)<\/p>\n

But why must the fl\u00e2neuse<\/em> be restricted to being a female version of a male concept, especially when no one can agree on what the fl\u00e2neur is anyway? Why not look at what women were actually doing on the city streets? What could the fl\u00e2neuse<\/em> look like then?<\/p>\n

\"othilia-simon-hermes\"<\/a><\/p>\n

III.<\/p>\n

In her recent collection Garments Against Women<\/em>, the poet Anne Boyer writes:<\/p>\n

\n

I will soon write a long, sad book called A Woman Shopping<\/em>. It will be a book about what we are required to do and also a book about what we are hated for doing. It will be a book about envy and a book about barely visible things. This book would be a book also about the history of literature and literature\u2019s uses against women, also against literature and for it, also against shopping and for it. The fl\u00e2neur<\/em> is a poet is an agent free of purses, but a woman is not a woman without a strap over her shoulder or a clutch in her hand.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

These paradoxes and contradictions encapsulate what we all face in the city. Do we want to blend in or stand out? Do we crave anonymity or fear loneliness? But women experience this in a particular way, wary of attracted unwanted attention, but also wanting to be noticed, to exist, to count, to be seen on their own terms. This is the radical move of the fl\u00e2neuse<\/em>: I will shop, or I won\u2019t shop, but I am not defined by it either way. The barriers and expectations women negotiate in the city have called for a more active kind of transgression than idle wandering. Unstrap that purse, unclutch that bag! The city can be a site of great freedom for anyone, but especially for women. Laying claim to fl\u00e2nerie has always enabled us to disrupt the lives we were expected to live.<\/p>\n

The fl\u00e2neuse<\/em> is the kind of woman who writes books, and the kind they write books about. You\u2019re not worried about the fl\u00e2neuse<\/em> walking alone in the city: she knows how to stand up for herself. This makes me think of the Walking Woman, who the American writer Mary Austin wrote about in a 1909 short story of that name. The narrator describes this woman as a cipher to inhabitants of the Southwestern desert towns she passes through. \u201cWe heard of her again in the Carrisal, and again at Adobe Station\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

She was the Walking Woman, and no one knew her name, but because she was a sort of whom men speak respectfully, they called her to her face Mrs Walker, and she answered if she was so inclined. She came and went about our western world on no discoverable errand, and whether she had some place of refuge where she lay by in the interim, or whether between her seldom, unaccountable appearances in our quarter she went on steadily walking, was never learned.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Along with her name, the Walking Woman has \u201cwalked off all sense of society-made values.\u201d But when the narrator finally gets to speak with her, the Walking Woman tells her there are three things that are worth having in this world: love, work, and a child. She has had, and lost, each of them in turn. And so the narrator finally disagrees with the Walking Woman\u2019s philosophy: \u201cTo work and to love and to bear children. That<\/em> sounds easy enough. But the way we live establishes so many things of much more importance.\u201d What those things are, Austin doesn\u2019t say. The woman who walks is outside of their settlement, outside of all settlements, by necessity, but how to live within the settlement while maintaining the freedom of the walking woman? That is the question Austin\u2019s story gestures at. Where is the happy medium between being an independent woman and a vagabond?<\/p>\n

The fl\u00e2neuses<\/em> I found, the ones I wrote my book about, go walking in cities, but often with a purpose: to throw off the weight of their families, their husbands, their social roles, to explore who or what they can be, traveling around the world feeding off the chemical reaction, the flinting spark, provoked by the encounter with the foreign city. Fl\u00e2neuserie\u2014<\/em>to coin a term\u2014is about women moving from being looked at to looking. Through movement, we assert our subjectivity. The journalist Martha Gellhorn\u2019s travel writing and war reporting, for example, is an engaged form of fl\u00e2nerie: she passionately believes that what she sees must be told. But how does she see it? By wandering around cities, reporting not on the great currents of history, but on everyday human life, writing \u201cfrom the ground up.\u201d The fl\u00e2neuse<\/em> is someone who gets to know the city by wandering its streets, investigating its dark corners, peering behind its facades, penetrating its secret courtyards. Rather than wandering aimlessly, like the fl\u00e2neur, the most salient characteristic of the fl\u00e2neuse<\/em> is that she goes where she\u2019s not supposed to.<\/p>\n

I\u00a0believe Herm\u00e8s\u2019s artistic director when he says that, in the nineteenth century, the fl\u00e2neur challenged commercialized ways of being in the world. But today, as the fl\u00e2neur is co-opted out from under us, the fl\u00e2neuse<\/em> is the more radical idea.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Lauren Elkin is the author of\u00a0<\/i>Fl\u00e2neuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reimagining\u00a0the aimlessly wandering woman. I. I started noticing the ads in the magazines I read. Here is a woman in an asymmetrical black swimsuit, a semitransparent palm tree superimposed on her head, a pink pole behind her. Here is a woman lying down, miraculously balanced on some kind of balustrade, in a white button-down, khaki […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1044,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[24163,14238,17827,24150,5931,19842,24162,24154,538,6563,24151,24155,111,24149,19863,1204,24159,24156,16472,269,22160,24161,24157,24158,24160,6664,11768,2629,24153,24152,36],"class_list":["post-101913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-ads","tag-advertisements","tag-alexandre-dumas","tag-anne-boyer","tag-cities","tag-commercialism","tag-dans-loeil-du-flaneur","tag-doing-nothing","tag-fashion","tag-flaneur","tag-flaneuse","tag-flaneuserie","tag-freedom","tag-garments-against-women","tag-hermes","tag-honore-de-balzac","tag-lauren-elkin","tag-looking","tag-luxury","tag-magazines","tag-martha-gellhorn","tag-pierre-alexis-dumas","tag-radical-idea","tag-radicalism","tag-seine","tag-shopping","tag-voyeurism","tag-walking","tag-walking-in-cities","tag-walking-woman","tag-women"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nRadical Fl\u00e2neuserie: Reimagining the Aimlessly Wandering Woman<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Rather than wandering aimlessly, like the fl\u00e2neur, the most salient characteristic of the fl\u00e2neuse is that she goes where she\u2019s not supposed to.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/08\/25\/radical-flaneuserie\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Radical Fl\u00e2neuserie by Lauren Elkin\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"August 25, 2016 \u2013 Reimagining\u00a0the aimlessly wandering woman. 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