The title page of Louis Huart’s 1841 Physiologie du flâneur shows two fashionable women walking side by side while a man behind them has stopped on the pavement in order to stare intently at them. The female faces betray their hesitancy as they draw near to each other. The male figure, whose facial features are obliterated, communicates his confidence by the swagger of his pose as he leans jauntily on his walking-stick, a haughty Van Dyck type transposed to the pavements of Louis-Philippe’s Paris. This male walker and observer, the flâneur as social type, has received the majority of critical attention and interpretation prior to the postmodern period when feminist scholars began to question women’s agency or lack of it in the urban milieu of Haussmannized Paris. Janet Wolff in “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity” (in Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990, 34–50) and Griselda Pollock in “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity” (in Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art, London: Routledge, 1988) investigated the social and psychological constraints imposed on women as portrayed in the literature and art of the nineteenth century when the growth of the city and emerging bourgeois culture transformed modern experience. Within the field of gender relations in nineteenth-century studies, these seminal essays generated much productive scholarship on dichotomies of public versus private, central versus marginal, and normative versus deviant behavior. As knowledge and insight developed, the founding positions of these articles themselves came under closer scrutiny, and their conclusions were not so much attacked as further expanded and tested. The Invisible Flâneuse? Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris, edited by Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough, is one result of such interrogations.

D’Souza and McDonough’s introduction masterfully sets forth the history of feminist scholarship on the flâneur and the allegedly invisible flâneuse, clearly navigating the reader through the thicket of semiotic, Marxist, psychoanalytic, and sociological positions maintained by the authorial voices that defined the debate. Wolff then revisits her 1985 essay on the flâneuse, turning her attention to new work in architectural and urban theory to recast her former thesis. Wolff acknowledges the work of scholars who have claimed that the flâneuse achieved visual parity with the male through the activities of shopping at department stores and attending films. Nevertheless, she counters their assertions by negating the store and the cinema as public space and cogently argues that the literature of modernity, by privileging the urban sphere, marginalized the domestic realm. She borrows James Donald’s notion from Imagining the Modern City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) concerning the power of the metropolis as a category of thought to construct a new feminist urban theory that recognizes the discursive and provisional nature of urban existence in a way that accounts for past and present social interactions, thus yielding a true space for women’s experience in and about the city. She advocates recognizing the fundamental instability and provisionality of social categories, casting “public” and “private” as narrative devices and considering the city as a discursive construct.

Given this interpretive flexibility as a modus operandi, the editors of the volume chose essays that pry open a variety of perspectives on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as they roam across the conceptual topography of city spaces. Greg Thomas analyzes the presence of the flâneuse in Parisian parks in the works of Édouard Manet and Mary Cassatt, claiming that parks enabled an alternate coding of public space by allowing women to be not only objects but subjects of the gaze. His analysis of Manet’s Music in the Tuileries (1862) concludes that Manet’s painting strikes a tentative balance between the powers of the public sphere and the private, between the flâneur and the family. Cassatt’s and Berthe Morisot’s images of the Bois de Boulogne highlight the private experience of being a woman in public. Little that is new can be gleaned from this essay which mainly repeats information from guidebooks and summarizes other scholars’ interpretations of the paintings. One wishes the author had speculated more productively—as Linda Nochlin did in her essay entitled “Morisot’s Wet Nurse: The Construction of Work and Leisure in Impressionist Painting” (in Woman, Art and Power and Other Essays, New York: Harper and Row, 37–56)—on the meaning of the circuit of gazes that take place in these paintings. Marni Kessler, on the other hand, takes the same Manet painting and offers intriguing insights into the presence of the veiled women depicted in it, demonstrating how an article of fashion functioned as a multivalent signifier of power discourses about women and their place in the city. Her reading of Gustave Caillebotte’s View through the Balcony Grill (1880) is as perceptive as it is informative about the gaze of the flâneuse from the domestic interior.

The flâneuse is missing from Ting Chang’s and Simon Leung’s essays as they turn to the male experience of sight in the city. Chang considers what happens to Parisian flâneurs such as Théodore Duret and Henri Cernuschi when they visit the Orient on collecting missions. She tracks the curtailment of their ambulatory freedom in Japan and the shock of otherness as they journey to China, and she demonstrates how the travelers impose their Eurocentric values onto a culture whose strangeness they define in opposition to Parisian norms. Chang shows how Duret’s travelogue resists the notion of flânerie, an indulgence in the sensuality and idleness of casual strolling and gazing at women, as a result of his relentless pursuit of experiences and commodities that secured his idea of the otherness of Japan. When she details the experiences of Emile Guimet and Félix Régamey in Asia, she demonstrates how strolling is replaced by being toted about the area in a litter by Japanese porters. Her claim at the end of her essay that the display of the objects collected on trips both embedded and erased the early traces of the flâneurs is fascinating and one that reflects directly on Parisians’ sense of place and identity at home and abroad. Leung’s notion of otherness is invested in the potential of the homoerotic gaze in the public restroom whose space is co-opted for furtive sexual encounters. Categories of self and otherness, the power of the gaze, genital access through the glory hole, and physical obliteration of sight by the wall in the pissoir are prefaced by a reference to Baron Charlus’s butler in Marcel Proust speculating on his employer’s too-frequent use of these public utilities and the history of their association with homosexual encounters. This essay leads into twentieth-century perspectives on sex and the city. It provides a view of urban encounters that was largely proscribed in writings on the nineteenth-century male Parisian experience and which has only recently been addressed more openly.

Tom Gretton lets his fingers do the walking as he traces how the flâneur’s experience was mirrored in the images of the illustrated weeklies that proliferated in Paris during the nineteenth century. He offers an intriguing thesis of how the visual act of perusing a newspaper’s contents mimics the experience of flânerie in the metropolis, gathering information, interiorizing optical experiences, and articulating assumptions on how the city is perceived and consumed. Ruth Iskin’s essay proves how fin-de-siècle posters were aimed directly at the flâneuse as enticements to consume and how they provided women with an image of new possibilities of freedom to engage with metropolitan life. Iskin deftly contextualizes sociological and historical narratives in her astute readings of the role of women in posters and literary texts, illuminating themes of emancipation and increased mobility at a time when the flâneuse emerged from invisibility to active engagement with the urban milieu.

D’Souza’s contribution comes in the form of an inquiry that aligns well with the title of the volume positing the leading question of the absence of the flâneuse. Asking why the Impressionists never painted the department store, a key visual and economic aspect of modern urban culture, D’Souza trains her sight on Edgar Degas’s milliners, separating them from the discourse of clandestine prostitution and situating them within the economic nexus of commodity exchange. She aligns the experience of browsing the goods of the department store with the act of looking at the Salon, establishing the parallel between the easel and the notion of an alluring decorative product for sale. She reads the provocative interplay of glances in James Tissot’s The Shop Girl (1883–85) as an illustration of the flâneur’s fantasy of power and control of an environment established primarily for female scopic indulgence and acquisition. D’Souza illuminates the anxiety of the male viewer excluded from areas of the department store via a delightful narrative taken from an 1876 issue of La Vie Parisienne where in a kind of Mozartian Cosi fan tutti duplicity, the fidelity of a wife is tested in a planned assignation in a department store. Her essay goes far in establishing the gendered taxonomies of space cited as essential by Wolff’s essay at the beginning of the volume.

McDonough brings the reader into the lonely crowd on the street, highlighting the dangers of nocturnal criminal assault. He details a crime wave reported in the press in the winter of 1845–46 and then demonstrates how the wave of panic that ensued was based on class fears rather than actual urban reality. Seeing a stranger from the marginal classes of the working poor engendered anxiety in the passant experiencing ephemeral encounters in the metropolis. One sees how the physical and psychological orders of the city are constructed through the visual shocks perceived by the anonymous Parisian stroller who is both observer and observed. McDonough’s essay verifies how the street served as a stage for urban dramas with their admixture of external pleasures and internal anxieties. The street became metonymic of the metropolis as a whole, producing as well as mirroring the complex experience of the tableaux parisiens pictured in the visual and literary products of nineteenth-century Paris. McDonough highlights the irony of how a new kind of physical proximity in the city generated a further sense of distance between bourgeois and subaltern classes.

The last two essays join Leung’s in documenting current experiences in the urban milieu. The perils of being a contemporary flâneuse are addressed by Helen Scalway as she highlights the gendered language of “walking the street” and being a “street walker.” Her essay serves as an up-to-date coda to the themes of fashion, specularity, anxiety, and accessibility examined in the previous essays. She takes the reader with her through London streets as she “botanizes the asphalt” in Benjaminian terms; and instead of looking at the flâneuse as a historicized type, she gives voice to the somatic experience of contemporary female flânerie. Her strongly emoted disquietude as she negotiates the Queensway is tempered by her acknowledgment of pleasurable encounters and conversations that occur in her passage through the city. I understand the editors’ reasons for including this essay but wish it could have been written by a Parisienne who walked the same streets and quais as their historicized counterparts discussed in other essays. Nochlin’s afterward pertinently surveys the imagery of females in public places in nineteenth-century Paris, and then takes us to Brooklyn where she grew up, providing the reader with tantalizing croquis of her experiences in its public spaces. She concludes by discussing the public artworks of Rachel Whiteread, Jenny Holzer, and Maya Lin, noting how female interventions differ markedly from those created by males. As ever, Nochlin’s observations are sharp and insightful, thus making the reader regret the brevity of her remarks here.

Like the street on which the flâneuse and flâneur strolled, this collection of essays offers multiple views through the lens of history, literature, criticism, philosophy, sociology, and personal memoir. Baudelaire’s plaintive cry “Paris change!” in his poem of urban flânerie “Le Cygne” comes to mind as the authors trace the disarticulations, displacements, and mutations of the experience of the topos of the cityscape throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The volume functions well in its integration of conceptualizations of modernity with feminist inquiries, the culture of consumption, and the erotics of the gaze. Scholars of art history, the social sciences, and gender studies will find much that is useful in this volume due to its reinvestigation of the issue of the presence—both imaginative and material—of the flâneuse in Parisian society. The book functions well as an analytical text on women and their place in the city along with male responses accorded them, even though the title is somewhat of a misnomer, given the range of topics treated and the focus on issues other than the flâneuse. The book is nicely produced with forty black-and-white illustrations that serve to illustrate the authors’ arguments. Many of the illustrations were printed in black and white in their original publications. However, one would wish for color in the poster images in Iskin’s chapter, as they are not reproduced as frequently as the major works of Manet, Degas, and Cassatt found in other chapters. D’Souza’s examples from Le Monde illustré and La Vie Parisienne could have been larger, given that she discusses details they contain, but the overall appearance of the book is handsome and appended with a useful select bibliography at the end.