Cities and Gender 2 The Flaneuse

The private and the Public In Victorian culture: private as feminine, public as masculine Apotheosis of modernity: associated with progress vs a ‘dangerous’ place for women Moralizing and regulatory discourses Safety, decorum propriety, surveillance (Foucault), fear of contamination The myth of the metropolis as freedom, disorder, fear of prostitution, immorality

The public woman “The public woman” as threat: “The very presence of unattended – unowned – women constituted a threat both to male power and a temptation to male ‘frailty’” (Wilson 74). Movement of middle-class women: more successfully restricted the prostitute as a public woman, spectacle “In British society it was the young marriageable woman under thirty years of age who was most rigorously chaperoned; married women, governesses and old maids had rather more – if hardly flattering – freedom” (Wilson 74)

The term: flaneur Derived from the Irish word for libertine! Post-revolutionary Parisian figure “monsieur bonhomme”, 1806  shopping, window-shopping cafés, restaurants Watches the behavior of the lower ranks of society (soldiers, workers, grisettes) Observes dresses, fashion Observes women Marginal writer

commodification Window-shopping, fascination, everything is for sale in the city tension between the position of the creative artist (innovative, subversive perspective, etc.) and fascination with the commodity New forms of writing, e.g. the magazine article, voyeuristic literature. Less political, more entertaining, amusing articles about everyday life, gossips, etc. Journalists are similar to upper-class dandies (kracauer) Blasé attitude (simmel): the attitude of the man who has been bought, enetrtaines the philistines they despised Prostitution symbolizes commodification: the body of the woman is sold

Feminist interventions Position of women in 19th century paris: Grísettes, lorettes. Women who lived by their wits and sexuality Feminist readings: the flaneur is the embodiment of the male gaze (lacanian term). “He represents men’s visual and voyeuristic mastery over women” (Wilson 79) Janett wolff: there is no female flaneur Challenges the opposition of public and private

The place of women Women as object: dressed to show their husband’s wealth The grand narrative of the angel of the house makes atrocities committed on the streets invisible (Wolff) End of the 19th century: women were emerging more and more into public spaces The male gaze annihilates the threat posed by female subjectivity, woman as other

Art Elizabeth siddall as dante Gabriel rossetti’s muse Notion of woman as sign, psychoanalytic study of meaning – reduction of woman to sign, devoid of agency The tantalizing urban spectacle, even misery is aestheticised

Empowerment – Wilson’s argument George sand: male attire Danger posed by unfeminine working-class women “unnatural” types of urban femininity: the prostitute, the lesbian, the androgynous woman, the childless woman sexualizing urban space (Baudelaire) the paradox: tension between the ideal portrayal of the flaneur (artist, free, etc.) and the insecure position of artists in a more and more commercialized society

“The flaneur has never existed” “since he was the embodiment of the special blend of excitement, boredom and horror evoked in the metropolis” (Wilson 87) “his masculinity is unstable, caught up in the violent dislocation that characterizes urbanization” (Wilson 88) “the only defence against transgressive desire is to turn either oneself or the object of desire to stone. One such attempt may by the representation of women in art as petrified, fixed sexual objects. Another is the transformation of the masculine self into its own object of desire. This is the project of the dandy, who also in the process turns himself to stone” (Wilson 88)

Afterword Contemporary versions Her position (vs wolff) Critique of lacanian theory

Gender, generation and the city “perhaps the time to take up a career as a flaneuse is after retirement” (Wolff 7) Old women are invisible – does this mean they have more “freedom” in the city? Older women as ghosts Cult of beauty, privileging of youth Both Wilson and wolff: how to construct a more positive, viable theory that do not simply posit women as objects, as other Old age as nee freedom? E. said, on late style Why does the postmodern loosening of the strict conceptual model of private vs. public provide possibilities for re-integrating older women into the frame?