Review: Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London by Lauren Elkin

‘Why do I walk?’ asks Lauren Elkin, ‘I walk because I like it.’

If the Flâneur is the meandering man of the crowd made famous by Baudelaire, Balzac and others in nineteenth century Paris, then the Flâneuse is the wandering woman who demands some space of her own in which to walk the city streets. While the flâneur is necessarily invisible, however, the flâneuse is always to some extent conspicuous; she is a novelty, or a subversion of the norm. In Elkin’s words, ‘she shows up against the city.’ Together, these subtle differences encapsulate the distinction that Elkin in her ‘part cultural meander, part memoir’ and wholly captivating book notes about the flâneuse: the sense of purpose in her walking. Trivial as it may seem, women still feel obliged to answer or respond to the question of ‘why do you walk?’ while men, apparently, just go out and do it. The flâneuse has to stride out with a purpose, even if that purpose is merely to walk without one.

In her cultural exploration of flâneuserie, Elkin insightfully probes her own experiences as a walker and a wanderer, charting the itinerant years of her twenties and thirties in which she made the eventually permanent move from Long Island to Paris. The draw of Paris to Elkin is palpable throughout the book; for her it is where the story begins and ends. Coming from a US suburb which in places lacks even a sidewalk, Paris was the city that taught her the art of ‘flâneuse-ing’ before she even knew that such a pastime existed and even had a name: ‘I was a flâneur’ she discovers both to her delight and disappointment. There is an enjoyable honesty to Elkin’s approach, which does not claim absolute authority but authenticity, and this is coupled with an acknowledgement of how comparatively lucky she has been to fulfil her wanderlust: ‘From Tehran to New York, from Melbourne to Mumbai, a woman still can’t walk in the city the way a man can.’

Accompanying Elkin on her journey is a disparate group of notable women, all of whom share her affinity with a certain city and the habit of flâneuserie. Each chapter is not only devoted to a separate city but also to a separate flâneuse, from Virginia Woolf in London, to Sophie Calle in Venice, to George Sand and Agnés Varda in Paris, all of whom walked and recorded and made their mark upon the urban landscape. Some of these women will be familiar, some perhaps less so, and they are as eclectic as they are inspirational, sharing neither time nor place nor profession (although most are artists of one sort or another). What binds them, and what they share with Elkin herself, is the ways in which they have dared to step beyond the boundaries society has set for them, even if that was just a step outside their front door.

Elkin’s intelligent enthusiasm for the power of the woman wanderer should inspire anyone to get out into the street and walk, simply for the hell of it, simply because you can, and because you like it; and this is a book to take with you as you go.

by Ruth Hobley