Flâneuse – Women Who Walk

“Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.” 

 Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost 

I walk every day. I walk to run errands, to explore, to simply feel the breeze on my skin and the sun on my face. And I walk even more when I’m travelling to get the feel of a new place and a sense of its culture, history, and mood. So I couldn’t resist a book entitled Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London by Lauren Elkin.

The book begins by pointing out how difficult it has been and still is for women to simply wander around a city. There is danger. There are expectations that a women’s place is in the home. Fortunately, there are women throughout the years who have resisted societal norms.

George Sand delights in the freedom she gains by cross-dressing: “With those little iron-shod heels, I was solid on the pavement. I flew from one end of Paris to the other. . . . I came home at every sort of hour, I sat in the pit at the theatre. No one paid attention to me, and no one guessed at my disguise . . . . No one knew me, no one looked at me, no one found fault with me; I was an atom lost in that immense crowd.”

When Virginia Woolf moves to Bloomsbury, she “threw off the mantle of her family, of her mother, the Angel in the House, and her father, the Eminent Victorian.” Bloomsbury was the headquarters of the suffragettes, of bedsits for single working women, and the free-thinking Bloomsbury group (Dorothy Parker is reported to have said that they “lived in squares, painted in circles, and loved in triangles”). Woolf began to walk everywhere. She “mined the streets for drama, filling her books with the people she observed, walking, shopping, working, pausing. Especially the women.” She wrote, “The things one sees - & guesses at – the tumult & riot & busyness of it all.”

Flâneuse revolves around women and walking city streets, but it diverges in various different directions – from protest marches in Paris to being cut off from the street in Tokyo. Some chapters focus on the personal life of the author while others look at the lives of literary figures, journalists, photographers, political and philosophical ideas. I was rarely familiar with the authors and artists under discussion, but I was always stimulated and challenged by the ideas. It was a slow read with much to digest, but it left me looking for the ghosts that people our city streets and a greater understanding of my own urge to roam.

Even in this time of Covid, I long to travel. Part of it is so I can experience different places – the profusion of spring flowers in Victoria, the waves rushing up the beach at Westward Ho! But it’s more than that. As a traveller, a stranger in a strange place, I am freed from the societal and cultural norms that bind me when I’m at home. I pass like a ghost through other people’s lives and experiences. There’s a tremendous degree of freedom.

 As Solnit says, “Something happens when we push at boundaries, and cross over them; some ambiguity is sustained, that cannot be absorbed into some kind of homogenized identity. . . . Beware roots. Beware purity. Beware fixity. Beware the creeping feeling that you belong. Embrace flow, impurity, fusion. ‘To be unhomed is not to be homeless,’ writes this wonderful critic named Homi.”

Photos: Tarragona, Spain