Walking in Wartime: Edith Wharton’s “The Look of Paris”

Abstract

By the outbreak of World War I, almost everyone agreed that mobility and speed were inescapable realities. Yet in August 1914 the famously restless Edith Wharton suddenly slowed down. In her essay, “The Look of Paris,” walking becomes a way of seeing and cadence a way of measuring the mood of the city. Wharton registers a community of feeling and the sense of a collective fate. She describes not the indifference that Georg Simmel thought was the hallmark of the modern metropolis, but a form of Unanimism instead. There is a shift away from the individual, towards a Whitmanesque mystique of camaraderie. Walking appears to have transformed the formidably mobile writer, revealing her awareness of the solidarity of city-dwellers and an attachment to place.