Women Writing the City

Abstract

The significance of the urban observer within recent cultural and literary criticism owes much to the writings of German cultural theorist Walter Benjamin on the flâneur: essays on Baudelaire, and his large, unfinished study of Paris in the nineteenth century, the Arcades Project.¹ Through the renewed interest in Benjamin since the 1980s, the flâneur has become the iconic personification of the highly developed perceptive skills of the urban observer, a connoisseur of metropolitan life, skilled at folding himself anonymously into the city streets, and priding himself in his ability to delineate the different types that made up the seemingly faceless urban crowd. Yet for many feminist theorists, noting that the experiences of women have largely been excluded from the literature of urban modernity,² the flâneur has also been a marker of the social and gender dynamics of the urban environment. The existence of a female urban observer, or flâneuse, was anathema to the social and gender configurations of the nineteenth- and turn-of-the-century city. To loiter anonymously on the city streets of the nineteenth-century metropolis was an all but exclusively male luxury.