The Case for the <em>Flâneuse</em>

For as long as there have been cities, there have been wanderers, figures who have slipped away from the constraints of time and responsibility, to drift through urban terrain, seduced by a hidden alleyway or a crowd in the marketplace. The flâneur, as this wanderer came to be known in his more polished nineteenth century incarnation, was a symbol of privilege and leisure, an embodiment of the artist who submits himself to the transient experience of the metropolis. A passionate spectator of the ways in which modernity unfolded across these cityscapes, he became both a recorder and a reflection of a new historical moment. The flâneur was, as Charles Baudelaire wrote, “a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness … an ‘I’ with an insatiable appetite for the ‘non-I’.”

The idea of the flâneur presented by Baudelaire, as a phantom of the streets who can dissolve into the flux of daily life, ignores the key fact that invisibility was widely only afforded to men. From the city-driven poetry of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, to the modernist essays of Walter Benjamin and James Joyce’s odyssey through Dublin in , to the work of Guy Debord and Vito Acconci (who were interested in and the impact of the urban landscape on memory), the archetype of the flâneur flourished in literary and artistic movements of the twentieth century, while continuing to largely exclude women.