On my first day of college in the United States, I got lost. I was, I would later learn, only a few blocks from the off-campus apartment where I was living. I had even walked the route before in an effort to ward off just this possibility. Practice, however, had not made perfect; fresh from Pakistan and weighed down by books, I panicked. Suddenly nothing at all was familiar. After roaming for an hour, and burning with shame, I called someone for help. They arrived in a car and, within five or six blinks of an eye, deposited me outside my building. The lesson I learned from all of this was simply, I must get a car.
It was the wrong lesson. As Lauren Elkin points out in her skillful memoir, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London, “walking is mapping with your feet. It helps you piece a city together.” In turning to a car, that cocoon that would insulate me from the street, I was giving up, refusing both reclamation and transformation, the symbiotic process of changing the city I had moved to and allowing it to change me. In her book, Elkins tackles both; the very term flâneuse is a feminization of the male flâneur, that “dawdling observer usually found in cities.” His literary origins (until recently a flâneur could only be a he) lie in Balzac and Baudelaire; for the latter, the flâneur was an artist who “seeks refuge in the crowd.” Poe and Flaubert added on, the latter using the anonymous face among the throng as an apt figure for his feelings of social discomfiture.
If the flâneur has a long literary history, the flâneuse has been without one. The flâneuse, Elkins notes, is not merely a female flâneur but “a figure to be reckoned with and inspired by. She voyages out and goes where is not supposed to and she forces us to confront how words like ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ are used against women.” Finally, and particularly relevant to writers, the flâneuse is “keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city and the liberating possibilities of a good walk.” We begin in Paris, where Elkins interweaves her own life and love with the work of émigré writer Jean Rhys, whose heroines are similarly given to roaming, to mapping an emotional geography on the terrain of an actual city. Rhys becomes, then, twenty-year-old Elkins’s walking companion, the ill-considered romances of Rhys’s heroines providing emotional precedent for her own doomed relationship with a boy from New Jersey.
Elkins was new to Paris and to walking then. The portion of Long Island where she was raised is a visual desert of car dealerships and strip malls. Yet it is this sparse and unwalkable landscape that is the impetus for her quest to situate exploring on foot as a feminist project. As she says, ” . . . let me walk, let me go at my own pace, let me feel life as it moves through me and around me,” for the “city is life itself.” In ensuing chapters we stroll through Virginia Woolf’s London and Sophie Calle’s Venice, roam with Martha Gellhorn (she risked losing Hemingway to remain a flâneuse), and accompany George Sand on her cross-dressing escapades through Paris. Elkins begins her chapter on London with a quote from Woolf’s diary that captures symbiotic relationship between the writer and her wanderings “Also London itself perpetually attracts,” Woolf writes “gives me a play & a story & a poem without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets.”
Even as she excavates walking women from the past, Elkins is candid also about her failed overtures. London may have been made for here pedestrian explorations, but Tokyo — where she lands after trailing a French boyfriend — is markedly less so. Even as walking has enthralled and empowered her in other places, it deflates her here. The “pure functionalism” of the buildings is depressing, the infantilization of women into a perpetual cuteness is upsetting, and the folk song that plays at five o’ clock each day just bizarre. After many furtive efforts, she likens herself to the heroine of the movie Lost in Translation, trapped in a hotel in a city that refuses to unfold itself, instead wheedling and tempting her to stay indoors. Looking about the sterile hotel apartment, Elkins is led to declare, “All my walks have led to this space, these sixty square meters.” Her persistent sense of displacement never quite goes away, eventually claiming as casualty the relationship that brought her to Tokyo. Elkins packs up and moves back to Paris without her French boyfriend. Cities can provide clues not simply to who you are but also to whom you should give up.
The literary genealogy that Elkins constructs for the walking, idling, loitering, wandering woman in Flâneuse is urgent also for its connection to feminist efforts in places that do not appear in the book. In India for instance, feminists have long argued that the reclamation of urban public space is central to women’s empowerment. In their book Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets, authors Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade underscore just this when they point out that “women cannot claim the right to fun” and how this severely abridges the terms on which they can occupy public spaces. They see loitering, so central to being a flâneuse, as a rebellion against the idea that women’s public presence must be legitimized by purpose and function, often visibly evoking the private spaces where women are actually supposed to be. This same idea of reclamation lies behind “Girls at Dhabas,” a project conjured up by urban Pakistani women who encourage other women to visit and to take and post pictures of themselves at the country’s sidewalk cafés (dhabas). Being seen having fun, in public spaces, is a part of establishing their right to them and to fun in general and of pushing back against religious extremists that see it as a contamination and an abomination. “The flâneuse is fighting to be seen.” Elkins declares early in her book, as these examples attest, for some flâneuserie, is quite literally a fight.
I have walked in nearly all of the cities that appear in Elkins’s book, but I have been, admittedly, a reluctant walker even as I have been a fervid feminist. Like most women, and unlike most men, I located my discomfort in myself: a less than optimal sense of direction, a hyper-vigilance about judgment from others, a susceptibility to seeing every encounter as inflected with danger. In Flâneuse, Elkins undoes women’s penchant for self-blame by revealing feminine discomfort in urban spaces as a product of our exclusion from the right to freely explore them. The consequences go beyond chafing at the boundary: Creativity is the product of an alchemy that involves who we are, what we see and where we see it. Elkins presents an assessment of the cost of staying home, of closing ourselves to the inspirational, generative, or romantic encounter — walled and warded off by getting in a car, or a bus, or a train, by saying no to that risky endeavor: taking a walk.
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Sig Nordal 