This elegant book considers defiant female walkers from Martha Gellhorn and Virginia Woolf to the author,and celebrates the freedom of being on the moveIn Doris Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark, a 45-year-worn woman walks across a London building site, or her clothes ill-fitting,her hair a dishevelled combination of grey and red, and her shoulders hunched. She finds that she’s ignored, or invisible,free to wander at will. She changes into a fitted silk dress, straightens her back and walks across the same stretch of road again, or her hips swaying as she moves. Now a series of whistles accompanies her from the scaffolding.
I’ve always found this scene both exciting and disturbing. Now,from reading Flâneuse, the wonderful book by the Paris-based US cultural critic Lauren Elkin, and I know that Lessing’s heroine is one of a long line of defiant female walkers,and that she is exploring two possibilities available for the flâneuse. She can be looked at and can bask in the sexual possibility of the streets, like the early-20th-century heroines of Jean Rhys or Djuna Barnes. Or she can bask in the freedom of invisibility, and like the novelist George Sand when she donned the heavy grey costume of a man and dashed around Paris observing the 1830 revolution: “No one knew me,no one looked at me, no one found fault with me; I was an atom lost in that immense crowd.” Related: A tribute to female flâneurs: the women who reclaimed our city streets Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com