PRECIOS INTERNACIONALES DEL CACAO

For the last twenty years there has been an on-going debate considering the existence of a flâneuse, a female variant of the flâneur, and whether she is possible (Parsons), non-existent (Wolff, “Invisible” 68) or invisible (E Wilson 90) is a question which still remains open. Normally connected to Charles Baudelaire’s concept of the urban stroller as an interpreter of the modern and industrialised nineteenth-century Paris, the flâneur also becomes an embodiment of the modern male gaze. As women could not access the streets of the modern metropolis on the same conditions as men the existence of a flâneuse has been questioned. In this context, Janet Wolff’s seminal essay “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity” has become a key reference within this scholarly debate as the critic clearly denies the possibility of the flâneuse claiming that “the essential point is that such a character was rendered impossible by the sexual divisions of the nineteenth century” (Wolff, “Invisible” 45).

However, this statement has invited for several misinterpretations of the basic idea in

Wolff’s article. As the title indicates, Wolff is concerned with the female urban stroller in the context of literature and modernity, whereby she also refers to the flâneur in terms of Walter Benjamin’s readings of the French poet Charles Baudelaire. As I have explained before, there were different types of the male flâneurs as well as alternative approaches to what he symbolises.

There are several facts and arguments that pinpoint that women moved around in the nineteenth-century city, observing the streets and its inhabitants, and what is more, deriving pleasure from doing so. I will focus on Victorian London, regarding it as a city where women from different classes were constantly on the move. Hence, I will examine representative female figures ranging from different classes: from outlaws like prostitutes to working-class women and actresses to middle-class wives carrying out philanthropist work in the slums or shopping ladies at the department store. In an attempt to locate a nineteenth-century flâneuse, I will take a closer look on women moving dangerously in Victorian London—“the city of dreadful delight” (Walkowitz, City ix). My main scope is to analyse how women used different strategies to escape gendered confinement to private spaces and gain access to the public realm. Therefore, rather than considering the female urban stroller on the same terms as the flâneur, I aim to show how their female condition shaped their view of the metropolis in terms of their own. Even though I will focus on London, Paris is also a central city for my analysis as the origins of flânerie are connected with the modernisation of the French capital. There are four topics in particular that are connected to the urban practice of flânerie – walking, watching, public space and subjectivity – and all of them are central to the way women came to terms with their role in the new cityscape in the nineteenth century.

Yet, the question whether a woman could be a flâneur remains unanswered.

I suggest that there are three main reasons that problematise theoretical approaches to the figure of the flâneuse. Naturally, scholars often ground their arguments on the fact that nineteenth-century society was strictly gender-biased, and as a consequence, conditioned women’s access to public spaces. This is an issue I will look into later. However, as the flâneuse is a derivation from the flâneur, we need to reconsider the male urban stroller in order to redirect the scope of the analysis. First of all, there has been an overgeneralisation of the flâneur to one specific and representative figure of the urban experience, which is related to Charles Baudelaire’s poetry.

Subsequently, I will refer to this urban stroller and observer as the Baudelairian flâneur.

Secondly, and as a consequence of the first, this has, moreover, led to a misuse of the flâneur as critical assessment favouring the use of this male urban stroller as a theoretical figure. Thus, on several occasions readings of the flâneur fail to recognise him as a metaphor of the modern urban experience. I suggest that, once established the identity and features of the flâneur, we ought to consider the symbolism in his experience focusing on subjectivity, sight, movement and space in order to denote how the urban walker negotiates his or her identity. Third, in the context of female flânerie, the reasons stated above point at that the doubtful identity of a flâneuse is due to a lack of terminology that describes the female experience in the modern city. If there was a

“particular mode of female urban vision” (Parsons 6), then I pose the question, should not women’s experience be described and determined according to a different set of terms? In this section, I will renegotiate the symbolism of the flâneur to analyse how the female experience can be represented similarly, yet with some noteworthy differences.

One of the main arguments that support the idea that the experience of modernity was unavailable for women, at least on the same terms as men, is that the public sphere was a male domain. Wolff contends that, “women could not walk alone in

the city” (Wolff, “Invisible” 41). The scholar stresses that the public realm of the nineteenth-century city was so intrinsically mapped according to sexual divisions whereby “the flâneuse was rendered impossible” (Wolff “Invisible” 45). Throughout her article Wolff argues that a female variant of the flâneur was not possible because this urban stroller was an embodiment of the male urban experience and modernity;

gendered conditions of “involvement/non-involvement” excluded women from the public sphere because of their socially inferior position (Wolff, “Invisible” 40).

Walkowitz coincides with Wolff on this point and denotes how the public realm was presumably a dangerous sphere for women. Due to this, Walkowitz remarks, they lacked autonomy and were rather “bearers of meaning than markers of meaning” (City 21). At the same time these critics along with others, acknowledge the presence of women in public spaces like the streets and department store. Indeed, women were present in the city and could be seen in different spaces of the urban panorama. For instance, Deborah Epstein Nord and Lynda Nead, have drawn attention to how female figures as shopping ladies, philanthropists and prostitutes moved around the Victorian streets of London and favour the idea of female flânerie (Nord, “The Urban Peripatetic”

375; Nead 64-67). Nevertheless, independently of the position they take, all scholars coincide on the point that in order to move freely within the public sphere, women had to adopt certain strategies.

Lately, there has been a shift in the focus of scholarly debate regarding the inclusion and exclusion of women in the context of the ideology of separate spheres. In the foreword to Inside Out: Women Negotiating, Subverting, Appropriating Public and Private Space (2008) Wolff contends that the dichotomous model of separate spheres persisted at large albeit being contested and defied (Foreword 16). Still she recognises that the interrogation of this ideology “illuminate[s] an oblique angle of meanings of

gender and femininity in the city” (Foreword 16). In these lines, several scholars have looked into how as the Victorian period evolved, the gendered boundaries and limitations started to blur out and women constantly trespassed socially imposed limitations. Nead defies the public/private dichotomy and argues that the tradition of chaperonage started to decline in the 1860s and was a subject of debate as it blurred the lines between fallen and respectable women, and consequently, women in general could easily be mistaken for being prostitutes by simply moving alone along the streets (64).

As expressed before, although women were gaining more access to the streets, their presence was conditioned by social gendered restraints that circumscribed the public spaces of Victorian London. Walkowitz coincides with Nead on this point as she remarks that “[e]ntering public space placed women of all classes, whether shopgirls or shopping ladies, in a vulnerable position” (City 46). Walkowitz argues that the public sphere was linked to erotic activity and exchange, and thus, was conceived as a negative environment for respectable women and notices that the opportunities for civic participation did not expand until the 1880s (City 46). Similar to Walkowitz, Sizemore highlights that middle-class women could not walk the streets at any hour of the night or day like men did (2-3). Thus, in addition to spatial constraints, women faced a temporal obstruction as well since they were hindered by what I have referred to in 2.1 as the daylight restraint.

Some examples of female flânerie are George Sand, Flora Tristan and Elizabeth Banks,²¹ who were women that defied women’s assigned place to the private sphere and ventured out into the public realm using several strategies. There participation in public life and observations of the city deconstruct gendered and dichotomous models of

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21 Lucy Snowe in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette is an example of a fictional representation of a

subject/object relationships. Their flânerie reveal the porosity of patriarchal spatial divisions and exemplify specular elements of female urban experience.

The French author Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin (1804-76) was an extravagant woman journalist, poet and novelist who became famous under her penname George Sand. She enjoyed an unorthodox lifestyle and defied the social restraint on women by wearing men’s clothes, smoking the cigar and openly taking lovers. Nord notices that George Sand wanted to “soak up with the Bohemian world of letters” and have the possibility to roam the public spaces of Paris with freedom and anonymity (Walking 118). By using male disguise George Sand could move incognito and blend into the crowd of people in different social spaces as the streets, the theatre and cafés. She rejoiced in her freedom to participate in the social sphere and public life of Paris and claimed, “[n]o one paid attention to me . . . No one knew me, no one looked at me; I was an atom lost in that immense crowd” (qtd in. Nord, Walking 119). E Wilson remarks that this enabled her to enjoy the role of a flâneur, which was inaccessible to women of her class (The Sphinx 52). George Sand became a famous writer and she led a very emancipated lifestyle compared to other women at the time. Gossip and rumour hinted at a lesbian affair between George Sand and her friend Marie Dorval. Belinda Jack remarks that George Sand’s poem “La Marquise” describes sexual encounters with lesbian connotations, which hints at the author had experienced same-sex relationship herself, yet, it may have been a purely fictional experiment. Wilson considers her as a feminist and revolutionary socialist who offered a different model of womanhood, and together with Flora Tristan (1803-44), they lived independently (E Wilson, The Sphinx 51-52).

Wilson suggests that while the city is perceived as a male domain, women who trespass onto urban space represent disorder and a symptom of disruption (E Wilson,

The Sphinx 9). When considering George Sand and Flora Tristan, the critic refers to them as Les Lionnes and highlights how these women often provoked a hostile reaction with men who scorned their unfeminine behaviour, and conversely, served as a source of inspiration to other women (E Wilson, The Sphinx 51). Thus, this points at that women in public were tolerated as long as they did not overstep their assigned gender roles or interrupted heteronormative regulations of social standard and belonging.

George Sand and Flora Tristan applied different strategies to gain access to the public sphere and wrote about their experience. Even though they were contemporaries and practised some form of flânerie, they carried out their tasks in different countries.

Whereas George Sand was active in Paris, Flora Tristan is linked to London.

Flora Tristan’s (1803-44) observations of London, Promenades dans Londres (1840-42), translated into English as The London Journal of Flora Tristan (1842), is a collection of texts and scenes that describe different activities and people from the streets of London and its official institutions. Flora Tristan carried out a stern social investigation of London society and often took radical measures to expose what she referred to as the underlying hypocrisy of a nation that proclaimed to uphold virtue and constitute liberties (Hawkes xxi). As the original title reveals, the French word promenade suggests strolling with leisure and pleasure. In many ways, Flora Tristan was a female variant of the flâneur in the sense that she walked and observed the streets and in doing so turned it into a legible experience that she later published as a text. Her visits to England between 1826 and 1839 situate her historically closer to the popular flâneur than to the avant-garde type. Jean Hawkes argues that Flora Tristan’s writing is reminiscent of Dickens’s as both show great concern for social injustice as well as the repressive machinery of legal institutions (Hawkes xxiii). Although, the Frenchwoman could be interpreted as a female counterpart to Dickens’s Boz, she also reveals traits

that are characteristic of the Baudelairean flâneur. Nevertheless, Hawkes does not speak about flânerie when describing Flora Tristan’s experience as a pedestrian urban observer: “The book opens with an impressionistic description of London seen through the eyes of the bewildered newcomer, followed by an essay on the then fashionable topic of climate upon mental development . . .” (Hawkes xxiii). Thus, this situates Flora Tristan in the middle ground in-between the popular and Baudelairean flâneur as she in a true avant-garde-like manner attempts to render the fleeting and fragmentary urban vision into a coherent image.

Flora Tristan had to face spatial restraints in London and in order to avoid these she, like George Sand, resorted to disguise. For instance, to be able to enter the House of Parliament, which did not allow female access to the building, Flora Tristan planned to use male disguise. When telling a British member of parliament about her plan the politician reacts with indignation: “My proposal had the same effect on him as had, in days gone by, sprinkling holy water on the devil! What! Lend men’s clothes to a woman and insinuate her into the sanctuary of male power? What an abominable scandal. . . ” (Tristan 58). When she later managed to attend a session of parliament she was recognised as a woman in men’s clothing. But this was more or less overseen, as it was perceived as harmless.

She used disguise on more than one occasion to move freely in the public realm.

Nord remarks that during her stay in London, Flora Tristan discovered the saya or manto, which was a special headdress used by women. She argued that this cloth offered women public anonymity and freedom to walk the streets unidentified (Nord, Walking 118). By escaping the male gaze they also avoided the objectifying male gaze.

Nevertheless, when she tried to wear this headdress in Paris, it was seen as derogating for women (Nord, Walking 118). Using male attire or a headdress, she also resorted to

traditional chaperonage. She ventured into the slums to dig out information about their harsh living conditions. Nevertheless, she was obliged to go there chaperoned—not only for being a woman in public but in addition for moving along the streets at night.

In other words, she was not able to move freely because of the daylight restraint.

Her visit to the rookeries to document prostitution proves that the potential sexual dangers for women in public were a fact. Flora Tristan was truly conditioned by the daylight restraint and her social status as woman. Foreseeing the risks she faces by entering the slums at night she decided to go there chaperoned by two gentlemen as, using her own words, “it is a courting danger to go there alone at night” (Tristan 83).

Nevertheless, she was still unable to escape the objectifying male gaze of the men present in the streets, who addressed her as if she were a prostitute,

several of them accosted us and asked if we wanted a room. When we answered in negative, one bolder than the rest demanded in a threatening tone, ‘What are you doing here then, if you don’t want a room for you and your lady friend?’ I must confess I would not have liked to find myself alone with that man. (Tristan 84)

This happend in the 1840s, before the chaperonage started to dissolve and proves how the streets of London were still regulated by dichotomous structures that positioned women as not pertinent to the public sphere. Flora Tristan could not go undisturbed in the streets at night, but even though she was chaperoned by two men, she was mistaken for a prostitute, by simply being in the rookeries at night – the wrong place at the wrong time – because these were the haunts of men and women that were involved with sex trade.

Parallel to Wolff, Griselda Pollock understands the flâneur as a male figure who exerts power through his ocular superiority. In an interpretation of female spaces and modernity in nineteenth-century Paris, she explains this as follows:

the flâneur [sic]/artist is articulated across the twin ideological formations of the private and public with its double freedom for men in the public space, and the pre-eminence of a detached observing gaze, whose possession and power is never questioned as its basis in hierarchy of the sexes is never acknowledged. . . Women did not enjoy the freedom of incognito in the crowd. They were never positioned as the normal occupants of the public realm. They did not have the right to look, to stare, scrutinize or watch. As the Baudelairean text goes on to show, women do not look. They are positioned as the object of the flâneur’s [sic]

gaze. (71)

Both Wolff and Pollock take up the idea of women’s lack of freedom in the public sphere and the flâneur’s objectifying male gaze. Rob Shields states that “the flâneur is a figure of excess: an incarnation of a new urban form of masculine passion manifest as connoisseurship and couched in scopophilia” (64). Indeed, they held a different social position than men, and although Baudelaire is connected to mid nineteenth-century Paris, the quote above suits Victorian London too. British culture rested to a large extent upon a gendered division of society, which was circumscribed by patriarchal hierarchy.

Moreover, other critics coincide with Wolff and Pollock in a feminist approach to the Baudelairean flâneur as a symbol for visual and voyeuristic mastery over women.

For example, Hille Koskela defines scrutiny as a form of harassment and remarks that

“power relationships intertwine with the field of vision, including acts of seeing and being seen, as well as the cultural meanings of the visual and its representations” (258).

In this context women’s visibility in the streets triggers the feeling of being unsafe in

the public sphere. Therefore, the objectifying male gaze disrupts female privacy through the mere act of looking. Moreover, by simply appearing in the streets women are scrutinised and categorised, in according to Koskela, “a flâneurlike manner” (259).

Taken the evidence that women like George Sand, Flora Tristan or Beatrice Webb moved in the public sphere and practised some form of flânerie it is interesting to take a closer look at what affinities female walking and observing hold to the male

Taken the evidence that women like George Sand, Flora Tristan or Beatrice Webb moved in the public sphere and practised some form of flânerie it is interesting to take a closer look at what affinities female walking and observing hold to the male