Flaneuse Dissertation Complete

Abstract
Abstract……………………………………………………………………Page 2
Introduction………………………………………………………………..Pages 3-7
Section I: The Art of Flânerie……………………………………………Pages 8-20
Section II: Cavendish, Irigaray, The Veil & Disguise………………….Pages 21-33
Section III: Invisibility, Absent Presence & Virtual Flânerie……….….Pages 34-44
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………Pages 45-48
Bibliography………………………………………………………………..Pages 49-52
023450471 1

Abstract
Flâner is a French verb meaning to stroll, or to take a leisurely walk. In 1863,
poet Charles Baudelaire introduced his readers to his idea of the flâneur; the
flâneur first appears in “The Painter of Modern Life”. Walter Benjamin’s Arcades
Passagen-Werk which was begun in 1927 and remained unfinished and it takes
the idea of the flâneur, or the stroller, much further. My inspiration for this project
about the flâneuse was Janet Wolff’s 1985 essay ‘The Invisible Flâneuse:
Women and the Literature of Modernity’ in which Wolff argues that the existence
of the female flâneur, or the flâneuse, is impossible because she could not
wander the streets of the metropolis without compromising her reputation. I
outline six component properties necessary to achieve the status of the flâneur in
the introduction.
Section I: The Art of Flânerie looks at both Baudelaire’s idea of the flâneur and
the flâneur as classified in stage III of Benjamin’s project and I apply ideas from
more contemporary literature in this field to the concept of both the flâneur and
the female flâneuse. I was concerned with establishing what may be understood
by the art of flânerie and two main features stood out for attention. Firstly, the
spectatorship of the flâneur needed to be addressed in terms of gender and
subjectivity. The other crucial element looked at in detail in Section One and
throughout the dissertation is the paradoxical quality of the flâneur, i.e. the ability
to be in the crowd yet simultaneously have the capacity to resist incorporation
into it. Wolff’s argument that the female flâneuse could not exist was based on
both of these features.
In Section II, Cavendish, Irigaray, The Veil & Disguise, I investigate the possibility
that Margaret Cavendish might have achieved the elevated status of the flâneuse
by employing certain (cunning) techniques in both her personal life and her
fiction to deflect the superior male gaze and produce work that demonstrates her
‘artist’s eye’ and capacity to be subversive in a feminist mode. I look at the
possibility that, in this respect, Cavendish manages to fulfil one of the six
component properties outlined in the introduction, i.e. that she is subversive and
is part of the crowd while resisting incorporation into it. I also look at transvestism
and veiling as methods by which the female may disguise herself and deflect the
gaze and thereby become the flâneuse.
In Section III, Invisibility, Absent Presence and Virtual Flânerie, I look at a more
contemporary setting for the flâneuse, namely cyberspace. As Wolff says,
suggestions as to ways in which woman may occupy the role of the flâneuse
include shopping and cinema going. I make moves from concealment of the body
by masking or disguising it to disembodiment in cyberspace. Disembodiment
and Cavendish‘s ‘spirits’ link Section II and Section III. In extension of the
suggestion from section one that the space of the cinema and the gaze of the
camera may afford the potential female flâneuse anonymity and thereby allow
her to come into being, in this it will be argued that cyber space accommodates
an absent presence. The removal of the corporeal body paradoxically, allows
freedom from the embodied gaze and complete disguise by invisibility.
023450471 2

Introduction
Flâner is a French verb meaning to stroll, or to take a leisurely walk. In 1863,
poet Charles Baudelaire introduced his readers to his idea of the flâneur; the
flâneur first appears in “The Painter of Modern Life”. Walter Benjamin’s Arcades
Passagen-Werk which was begun in 1927 and remained unfinished, it takes the
idea of the flâneur, or the stroller, much further. Section I: The Art of Flânerie
looks at both Baudelaire’s idea of the flâneur and the flâneur as classified in
stage III of Benjamin’s project and I apply ideas from more contemporary
literature in this field to the concept of both the flâneur and the female flâneuse.
Benjamin was concerned with classification and stage III of his project was
entitled The Flâneur, Prostitution and The Streets of Paris. I am specifically
interested in the female equivalent of the flâneur, namely the flâneuse whose
existence has sometimes been denied. Both Baudelaire’s and Benjamin’s male,
artistic, wandering spectator can be said to possess the gaze as theorised by
Sartre, i.e. the judgemental and objectifying gaze capable of the commodification
of those it objectifies. The gaze and its implications in terms of gender and
subjectivity are implicit throughout and remain central to this dissertation and
flânerie. The flâneur is the wanderer, possessing of the gaze and is part of the
crowd yet resistant to it. It is important to remember that this dissertation falls
into the category of cultural theory as the common thread throughout the three
sections is the invisibility or possibility of the female flâneuse and not any one
singular text. In Section I: The Art of Flânerie, I mention the work of three women
on the flâneuse. My inspiration for this project was Janet Wolff’s 1985 essay ‘The
Invisible Flâneuse : Women and the Literature of Modernity’ published both in
Theory Culture & Society, Volume 2, Number 3, (1985) and as Chapter 8 in Style
and Time: Essays on the Politics of Appearance (Ed. Andrew Benjamin), 2006.
Wolff argues that the existence of the flâneuse is impossible, predominantly
because potential flâneuses cannot occupy the public realm in which the flâneur
must stroll.
023450471 3

Introduction
Wolff lists six classifications of public women from Baudelaire’s essays and
poems, the first of which is the prostitute to whom I also give attention, not least
because she may be considered the ultimate commodity, that which men shop
for. In Section I, I also discuss Elizabeth Wilson’s theory that the flâneuse does
exist, albeit later, in the shopping mall as the consumer. Wilson’s article entitled
‘The Invisible Flâneur’, published in The New Left Review, 1/191 (January 1992)
also cites the six main properties that the flâneur possesses from Larousse that
she and I use to examine the flâneur and the possibility of the existence of the
flâneuse.
The six crucial component properties necessary to achieve the status of flâneur
are as follows;
1. He is an idler, a stroller without purposeful employment.
2. He possesses an ‘artist’s eye’ (later to become the gaze of the consumer).
3. He watches the lower ranks of society (his is the impervious, Imperial
male gaze).
4. He is a dandy, overtly interested in fashion.
5. Women play a minor role in his life (this is clearly debatable by virtue that
there are six types of women for Wolff to mention in her aforementioned
1985 article).
6. His marginality is striking, he is possibly subversive. He is part of the
crowd yet resists incorporation to it.
Clearly due to restrictions of time and space in terms of this Master of Letters
dissertation, it is only possible to give any attention to some of the elements in
depth. In Section II I look at the second and forth elements and combine them in
the flâneuse in terms of the gaze and the way in which it may be manipulated or
deflected.
023450471 4

Introduction
I propose that Margaret Cavendish by being a fashion icon of her time and
embracing traditional Renaissance Conduct Book values in her fictional letters, is
employing Irigaray’s Mimicry in the same way as one might deploy Monique
Wittig’s Trojan horse to ‘get inside’ discourse and ‘fire arrows at it from within’. In
Section III I look at virtual flânerie, cyber space takes the idea of the manipulated,
deflected gaze further to discuss the possible freedom afforded by the virtual
mobilised gaze,
The third theorist’s work mentioned in Section I is that of Deborah L. Parsons,
she has written extensively on the flâneuse in the metropolis, she points out,
importantly, a contradiction as regards the sixth in the aforementioned list of
criteria. Parsons points out that Benjamin’s flâneur transforms from the man in
the crowd to the man at the window. This changes the flâneur’s perspective and
this blurred identity is taken up in Edgar Allen Poe’s short story The Man of the
Crowd. Literary examples of flânerie novels include Virginia Woolf’s Mrs
Dalloway and James Joyce’s Ulysses, but it is Poe’s man or woman at the
window who assists discussion about the flâneuse’s existence most as he/she
allows for a domestic location for the flâneuse and thus opens a debate against
Wolff’s invisible flâneuse. Poe’s man of the crowd has been compared to Satan
and has sparked debate over whether the flâneur needs to be actually alive – the
flâneur may be a spirit, witch or demonic creature. Joyce’s Leopold Bloom has
been described as potentially dangerous or as a revolutionary, the female flâneur
has often had to disguise her appearance deflect from the fact that she is gazing
by drawing the male gaze, a female flâneur may be considered subversive too.
The flâneur has also been situated as the undercover detective. Discussions of
the flâneuse, on the other hand rarely appear without mention of the figure of the
prostitute, predominantly because of Benjamin’s account of ‘social types’
emanating from his Passagen-Werk whereby he positioned the prostitute directly
opposite the flâneur as the public, yet marginalised woman.
023450471 5

Introduction
I take pains not to situate the flâneuse in direct opposition to the flâneur hence
the discussions in sections two and three as to possible different situations in
which she may appear. The timeline moves from the 1600’s and Margaret
Cavendish, through dandyism and obsession with fashion/clothing (number four
in Wilson’s aforementioned list of criteria for the flâneur), back to Paris in the
1850’s from whence Baudelaire’s initial flâneur originated. The dissertation
therefore starts in the centre of the timeline and discusses the origins of and
various viewpoints of flânerie and the existence of the flâneuse. The second
section looks at the possible pre-modern/early modern existence of the flâneuse
before she is located as a consumer in the shopping mall and the third section
puts her in a contemporary setting.
Section II Cavendish, Irigaray, The Veil and Disguise is firstly concerned with
methods which can be employed in order to facilitate female flânerie in both life
and art (it is important to remember that the flâneur was once in possession of
the ‘artist’s eye’ before being reduced to the status of mere consumer). Margaret
Cavendish has her female characters attempt to take control of the male gaze
by presenting themselves as a theatrical spectacle which bears relation to the
female flânerie of the prostitute. Cavendish also courted the gaze in life. Miriam
Wallraven has written a remarkable essay about Cavendish’s literary souls and
spirits whereby she links them to cyber theory. Wallraven’s essay provides a link
from section two to section three. They can be proposed as potential flâneurs.
Cavendish also, by being a fashion icon and being obsessive about clothing
fulfils number four in the list of criteria, furthermore she has her female
characters dress as men and she has been accused of dandyism in her personal
life. She embraced the ‘frivolous’ status of fashion plate but by doing so
deflected from her capacity to disarm dominant discourse through her fiction.
Cavendish too, provides a link to transvestism (she dressed as a man sometimes
as do her female characters). Transvestism it will be argued in section two is
another method used by women to experience the world as the flâneuse.
023450471 6

Introduction
A further method credited for the possible emergence of the woman who may
stroll, is the wearing of the veil. Discussion of the veil provides a contrast to
transvestism in that one accentuates the feminine and one denies it and both are
possible disguises or masks used to divert or deflect the male gaze and allow the
existence of the flâneuse.
As mentioned, Wallraven in her essay “My Spirits long to wander in the Air…”:
proposes that parallels may be drawn between Cavendish’s use of spirits and
agency in cyber space. Disembodiment takes disguise or deflection of the gaze a
step further. In extension of the suggestion from section one that the space of
the cinema and the gaze of the camera may afford the potential female flâneuse
anonymity and thereby allow her to come into being, in this it will be argued that
cyber space accommodates an absent presence. The removal of the corporeal
body paradoxically, allows freedom from the embodied gaze and complete
disguise by invisibility.
023450471 7

Section 1: The Art of Flânerie
Figure 1
Painting of the flâneur downloaded with kind permission 1st December
2006 <http://www.othervoices.org/gpeaker/Flanuer.html
Figure 2
Painting of homeless female reproduced with kind permission 1st
December
2006<http://steelturman.typepad.com/thesteelIdeal/2005/week16
023450471 8

For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense
joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow
of movement, in the midst of the fugitive…The crowd is his element,
as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his
profession are to become one flesh with the crowd.i
There are two main features of Baudelaire’s description of the flâneur that stand
out for attention. The first is the element of spectatorship. Both Baudelaire’s and
Walter Benjamin’s 1927 project about Baudelaire’s work position the male,
artistic wandering spectator (the flâneur) in possession of the gaze as later
theorised by Sartre. This judgemental, objectifying gaze capable of the
commodification of women is implicit throughout this dissertation and flânerie and
this is what I mean when I refer to the gaze. The other element which cements
the criteria for flânerie has two-fold implications– the ability to be in and part of
the crowd yet simultaneously remain distinct from it, resisting absolute
assimilation. My inspiration for this project was Janet Wolff’s 1985 essay ‘The
Invisible Flâneuse : Women and the Literature of Modernity’ published both in
Theory Culture & Society, Volume 2, Number 3, (1985) and as Chapter 8 in Style
and Time: Essays on the Politics of Appearance (Ed. Andrew Benjamin), 2006.
Wolff argues that the existence of the flâneuse is impossible, predominantly
because women cannot occupy the public realm in which the flâneur must stroll.
Wolff cites six classifications or social types of woman, with the prostitute getting
first mention and the unknown woman also standing out due to her anonymity
which is of course, one of the main criteria required to be a flâneur.
In Baudelaire’s essays and poems, women appear very often, Modernity breeds,
or makes visible, a number of categories of female city-dwellers. Among those
most prominent in these texts are: the prostitute, the widow, the old lady, the
lesbian, the murder victim, and the passing unknown woman. ii
Begun in 1927, Walter Benjamin’s Arcades ‘project as Benjamin most commonly
referred to the Passagen-Werk was originally conceived as an essay of fifty
pages’.iii
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In her detailed book The Dialectics of Seeing Walter Benjamin and the Arcades
Project, Susan Buck-Morss states that the Arcades project was ‘intended to
provide a political education for Benjamin’s own generation’.iv
It is with stage III
of the project (1937-40) that this assignment is predominantly concerned, the
part which ‘was dominated by Benjamin’s work on a book about the
[aforementioned] poet Charles Baudelaire (together with the sections with the
specific Konvolut titles, The Flâneur, Prostitution and The Streets of Paris).’v
Like
Baudelaire, Benjamin was artistically developing ‘social types’.vi
It is also though,
of importance to analyse what constitutes the ‘crowd’ in historical-political terms.
Elizabeth Wilson believes that ‘both Baudelaire and Benjamin view the
metropolis as the site of the commodity and of commodification above all else.’vii
In The Invisible Flâneur Wilson puts forward a compelling argument in favour of
female flânerie albeit with different properties than those of the male artistic
spectator, Wilson also locates her completely visible flâneuse slightly differently,
as the ‘shopper’ – the consumer rather that the flâneur with an artist’s gaze.viii
On the question of spectatorship, Griselda Pollock is clear on her view of the
‘gaze of the flâneur’ which ‘articulates and produces a masculine sexuality which
in the modern sexual economy enjoys the freedom to look, appraise and possess
in deed or in fantasy’.ix
For Pollock, this male gaze may not be reciprocated by
the female and Pollock’s use of ‘possess’ is crucial – the flâneur here is viewing
the female body as a commodity. It is interesting that for Pollock an eminent
feminist thinker with specific interest in visual art, the male flâneur is the
consumer with the female body as his object, whereas for Elizabeth Wilson, not
only is the flàneuse the consumer, albeit of objects and not the reciprocal male
body; but the definitions of flànerie include more diverse connotations.
In the underworld of the anonymous crowd the identities of flâneur,
investigative journalist, spy, criminal and revolutionary became blurred
with that of artist.x
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This has serious implications, while the undercover detective as a literary social
type has valid claims on the title of flâneur if one compares it to the opening
quotation of this section, can one say the same of the revolutionary? A
revolutionary is not likely to want to be at one with the crowd/the multitude.
Furthermore, it might be argued that the female flâneur ever really experience
the world free from the male gaze if it has been internalised?
A potential female flâneur may disassociate herself altogether from an
exterior world defined by the male gaze. Instead, she may retreat into
domestic interiors, contemplate women’s own bodies and psyches,
assume her culturally prescribed presence as a man’s companion, or
take refuge with her family and friends all in place of the pursuit of a
flânerie of her own.xi
Also in her article The Invisible Flâneur, Elizabeth Wilson cites six main criteria
from Larousse which can be used to identify the flâneur.xii
It is these six
identifying ‘tags’ that I will use to discuss the flâneuse. The first of these dates as
far back as 1806 and relates to the financial position of the flâneur. He is
(mysteriously) independently wealthy but as he is an ‘idler’, free to gaze upon
others, he is not, for example, the eldest son of an aristocratic family. Indeed, he
cannot be because the duties of running the family estate would not allow
anything like this amount of leisure time.xiii
What is clear here though is that the flâneur is (like Wilson’s depiction of his later
female counterpart) a visual consumer of aesthetic commodities, a ‘window
shopper’. This first element is followed by the ‘Bohemian’ element to flânerie.
A second feature of M. Bonhomme’s day is the amount of time he
spends in cafés and restaurants; and, significantly, he chooses
establishments frequented by actors, writers, journalists and painters-
that is, his interests are predominantly aesthetic. During the course of
the day, he picks up gossip about new plays, rivalries in the art world,
and projected publications, and several times he mentions his eager
anticipation of the salon exhibitions of painting.xiv
It is noteworthy that the flâneur is either in possession of or is exposed to a level
of artistic expertise.
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Furthermore, whilst the café is undoubtedly an urban setting, it might be
described as a domestic one, it is after all a sheltered, inclusive environment,
irrespective of whether one is seated indoors or outside on the pavement. ’Cafés
were political as well as intellectual centres.’xv
The politicisation of these spaces
however is conducive to the flâneur as a dissident or revolutionary and potentially
allows inclusion of the female. Third in the list of Wilson’s criteria is the label of
Imperial snobbery attributed to the flâneur.xvi
He [the flâneur] is presented as
watching [the spectacle of] ‘the behaviour of the lower ranks of society – for
example, he watches soldiers, workers and ‘grisettes’ at an open-air dance.’xvii
This is a combination of spectatorship and Imperialism and it is from this that the
issue over whether or not it is indeed possible for the flâneuse to actually exist
arises. If the Imperial male gaze is impervious, then female flânerie is
impossible. Enda Duffy during his passionate and thorough book on Joyce’s
Ulysses, which is considered to be the modernist flânerie novel, argues that the
act of flânerie can be considered liberating and discusses this in terms of
Ireland’s freedom fighters and thereby confirms Elizabeth Wilson’s idea that the
flâneur may be considered a revolutionary.
[I will] read Bloom’s flânerie as aggressive, emancipatory, and the
blueprint for a potential version of new postcolonial subjectivity. I will
claim that the enlivened, reborn flâneur in Joyce’s text is formed out of
a model for the representation of the urban subject that more
Eurocentric modernists were chiefly concerned to suppress.xviii
The idea of the flâneuse as revolutionary or dangerous requires further
exploration and will be addressed in Section Two during a discussion of disguise
and anonymity within the crowd in relation to the female flâneur. The notion of
the female flâneur being somewhat of a danger or threat to society is
underpinned by the fourth in the list of criteria for flânerie, clothing or dress, ‘for
the flâneur ‘[he] is interested in dress as a vital component of the urban scene.’xix
The flâneuse becomes the transvestite to exist under the public male gaze. It is
with the fifth bullet point cited by Elizabeth Wilson that issue must be taken.
Wilson stipulates that ‘women play but a minor role in his life’. xx
023450471 12

Wilson then goes on to list three areas where the flâneur not only notices the
women who surround him, but is clearly categorising them for himself.
Three main social types of women are beginning to materialise; the
street vendor by day, prostitute by night, the female artist and the
woman manageress, the women of public power, all of whom might
take on the role of the flâneuse themselves.
The sixth and final identifying characteristic of the flâneur is that which Wilson
calls his ‘marginality’. xxi
Again this is an interesting interpretation of a refusal to
be incorporated into the crowd. It has implications in several directions, and
again, the role of dissenter is implicit.
In Streetwalking the Metropolis, Women, the City and Modernity, Deborah L.
Parsons points out a contradiction relating to this ‘marginality’ in Benjamin’s own
essays specific to the concept of the flâneur, namely, ‘The Flâneur’ and ‘On
Some Motifs in Baudelaire.’xxii
In Benjamin’s earlier essay on Baudelaire, the
flâneur is distinctly the man of the crowd, it is later that he becomes the man at
the window. This might be explained in terms of the advent of the powerful
medium that is cinema.
The first description of the urban observer as ‘man of the crowd’ is a
concept reputedly derived from the urban figures represented in the
poetry of Baudelaire, but the later definition transforms Baudelaire’s
city-dwellers and relates the urban observer not so much to the man
in the crowd but a man at the window.
This, of course, sheds a brand new light on the concept of the flâneur; if he is an
unobserved voyeur, then his description is far more appropriate when he is
placed at the theatre watching the moving pictures of the cinematograph from
1895 onwards.xxiii
This has further significant implications. Firstly, it locates him
inside a domestic space and as Parsons points out provides foundation for
arguments against Wolff and Pollock who advocate that the existence of the
female flâneuse is impossible. xxiv
The woman in the cinema may be the woman
in the crowd and the woman at the window at the same time.
023450471 13

The location of the flâneuse inside a domestic space also adds credence and
substance to Elizabeth Wilson’s suggestion that the shopping mall occupant
may be a form of female flâneur . So, it is necessary to look at the flâneuse in
two completely different settings. As ‘the person of the crowd’ she would be
public, objectified by the male gaze and in need of disguise/invisibility. As the
‘woman at the window’ she may be inside a shopping mall or even a cinema and
she may look without incurring immediate penalty. For this second flâneuse, it is
also important to discuss the implications of exactly who controls what she is
looking at. At least when she is disguised or ‘invisible’ she may see all that she
wishes to, although perhaps in the case of the prostitute or the beggar this may
be too much.
To conceptualise people, groups, as visible or invisible is to come
back to the public/private divide. The consumerization of space and
the development of electronics and fibre optics erodes the classical
distinction between public and private spheres. The whole world
becomes like a nineteenth-century department store when televised
shopping invades the home.xxv
However, the flâneuse my still be reduced to the role of mere consumer unless
she possesses the artist’s eye. Perhaps women’s film making i.e. female
directors can truly call themselves flâneuses.
Literary examples of flânerie use both forms of the flâneur. James Joyce’s
Leopold Bloom ‘seems the very personification of the most characteristic modern
persona, the man of the crowd’.xxvi
He is the stroller and, of course, is distinctly in
the crowd and not ‘at the window’. If one refers back to Charles Baudelaire’s
1863 piece III, An Artist, Man of the World, Man of Crowds, and Child, it is
possible to argue that that both Elizabeth Wilson and Enda Duffy on James
Joyce have chosen to ignore a crucial element – the quality of childishness.
Now imagine an artist perpetually in the spiritual condition of the
convalescent, and you will have the key to the character of M.G.
But convalescence is like a return to childhood. The convalescent, like
the child enjoys to the highest degree the faculty of taking a lively
interest in things, even the most trivial in appearance. … The child
sees everything as a novelty; the child is always ‘drunk’.xxvii
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The capability to be child-like ‘at will’ – which contains within itself the recollection
of childhood images is for Baudelaire, a possible key to being a great artist.xxviii
I
am going to suggest Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle as a possible
example of an early flâneuse in the next Section –Cavendish, Irigaray, The Veil
& Disguise. One of the criticisms of Cavendish is that she possesses a child-like
innocence.
The question of the identity and properties of the flâneur will be revisited in the
final section Invisibility, Absent Presence and Virtual Flânerie. In Edgar Allen
Poe’s short story, The Man of the Crowd, the flâneur seems to be the man who is
observed moving through the crowd precisely because he stands out from the
rest but the real flâneur actually turns out to be the narrator. This very cleverly
contains both of Benjamin’s types of flâneur, the one in the crowd and the one at
the window. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) also blurs the identity of the
flâneur/flâneuse. ‘She moved; she crossed; he followed her… but other people
got between them in the street, obstructing him, blotting her out. He pursued; she
changed.’xxix
The Man in the Crowd is a reference to an old legend called "The Wandering
Jew", in which it is said that a man refused to let Jesus rest outside his house on
the road to Calvary, and was thus doomed to walk the earth for eternity without
ever finding rest again. Satan, according to Jewish legend, is said to "go to and
fro in the earth" without ever resting. xxx
This can be offered as even more proof
of the flâneur’s positioning as revolutionary, alternatively it is possible that the
flâneur is actually dead, a spirit or uncanny creature.
Of course, a woman at a window may also be a prostitute which on one level
appears to be the ultimate in commodification of the female body. ‘Prostitution
comes to symbolise commodification, mass production and the rise of the
masses all of which phenomena are linked’.xxxi
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On another level, the prostitute as voyeuse may also be linked to the suggestion
that the flâneuse may be a revolutionary certainly in relation to the ‘decent’
Victorian domesticated ‘mother’ type as she can be seen as having ownership of
her own sexuality and as actively inviting the male gaze.
The prostitute as a subversive force is not she who does it for money,
but the woman who, like Saint Ange, does it for pleasure. Everything is
exchanged but without commerce.xxxii
Whether the male gaze can be reciprocated by the prostitute, particularly in
terms of pleasure in looking i.e. scopophillia and voyeurism remains to be seen.
What is once again reinforced though is the connection between spectatorship
and power.
If subjectivity concerns encounters with others then it could be argued that the
fleeting, and therefore shallow impression that the flâneur forms of others will not
be as powerful as the prostitutes more prolonged encounter with her regular
client/s. What is certain is that these are marginalised women, invisible in the
sense that they generally work at night and there would almost certainly have
been people who would shun them and pretend not to see them.
The right to escape to public privacy was unequally enjoyed by the
sexes since even by late nineteenth century women could not go
alone to a café in Paris or a restaurant in London. .. In the earlier
period of ‘public life’ women had to take a good deal more care about
the ‘signs’ of their dress, which would be scrutinised for an indication
of their social rank; in the nineteenth century, the scrutiny would be in
order to differentiate ‘respectable’ from ‘loose’ women.xxxiii
The flâneur acts as an inter-connecting device for the relationship between
vision, knowledge, space (i.e. the city) and power relations between the subject
who controls the judgemental gaze and the commodified object of that gaze.
Leopold Bloom wandering through the streets of Dublin represents the dichotomy
of subject and object of the gaze – he is seen on one level and sees without
being seen on another as does Poe’s ‘Man of the Crowd’.
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And, as the shades of the second evening came on, I grew wearied
unto death, and, stopping fully in front of the wanderer, gazed him
steadfastly in the face. He noticed me not, but resumed his solemn
walk, while I, ceasing to follow, remained absorbed in
contemplation.xxxiv
John Rignall tributes Poe with ‘taking over and intensifying the purposeful
detective quality of the flâneur’s vision’.xxxv
It is possible to reconcile the idea of
the flâneur as the detective and the subversive at the same time – a point I will
return to in Section III: Invisibility, Absent Presence and Flânerie.
The notion of the flâneur as detective reinforces the idea of power entwined with
the vision of the flâneur but it also emphasises the fragility and vulnerability of the
circumstances in which the flâneur might exist. The crowd may absorb and
thereby obliterate the privileged observer at any point – Virginia Woolf
recognised this delicateness and temporality and again demonstrates it
effectively in Mrs Dalloway (1925).
The car had gone, but it left a slight ripple which flowed through glove
shops and hat shops and tailor’s shops on both sides of Bond Street.
For thirty seconds all heads were inclined the same way – to the
window.xxxvi
Although the art of flânerie derives from the ‘idle observer’ of days gone by, it
seems to have evolved in the early 20th
century as a result of social political
change. The camera, in particular, has had an enormous impact on the
development of female flânerie. While department stores are credited by some
for the creation of the flâneuse, there is still a strong argument to suggest that
the gaze of these idle women shoppers is not as powerful as, for example, the
artistic one of the flâneur.
However, this conflation of shopping and strolling necessarily
relativizes what is presumed to be the first instance of an “empowered
gaze of the flâneuse,” to the purposefully limited and economically
promoted license of shopping.xxxvii
023450471 17

In this respect, it is useful to turn to Anke Gleber discussion “filmphotography of
photographing women” and the woman and the camera in Berlin. A key part of
Gleber’s argument is the suggestion that photography, and in particular woman’s
film making finally allows the female flâneuse to come into being.xxxviii
Their
existence is possible as the anonymity afforded by being in an audience
facilitates the flâneuse to have the qualities and capacities of Baudelaire’s male
equivalent. ‘The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes.’xxxix
There is a link between Poe’s narrator’s impartial impartment of knowledge and
the camera’s impersonal deliverance of visual data, indicating that the flâneur
does not have to be a living human being. ‘Baudelaire clearly associates the
flâneur with the act of seeing not the person seen.’xl
I n will return to the question
of anonymity in relation to the female flâneur in Section Two; Cavendish, Irigary,
The Veil & Disguise. However, at this point it is important to at least call into
question the confines of the cinema frame.
While ‘the look of the camera is, whenever possible, denied or suppressed in the
interests of verisimilitude’, even postmodern ‘reality’ documentaries are edited,
So a feeling may be aroused in the audience, as it casts its look upon
the screen, that something is being withheld… aroused in the
spectator, re-evoking infantile fears, is an awareness of lack.. xli
Of course, this must be addressed with regard to flânerie terms of identity in
Section Three, Invisibility, Absent Presence and Virtual Flânerie. In terms of
Lacanian analysis, for John Rignall, the flâneur’s ambiguous identity is
synonymous with the instability of meaning in art or indeed language. For, if there
is no secure foundation, there is in a Nietzschean sense, a palimpsest of layers
of interpretation, at its base, nothing.xlii
Poe’s story too reveals the relationship between meaning and image,
between world and word, to be arbitrary and mysterious, and by
implication, the mirror theory of representation to be without secure
foundation.xliii
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Despite this, there is no apparent lack in Baudelaire’s flâneur; he is fulfilled by
his re-creation and classification and thereby subjection of that which he has
observed by day.
And things seen are born again on the paper, natural and more than
natural, beautiful and better than beautiful, strange and endowed with
an enthusiastic life, like the soul of their creator. The weird pageant
has been distilled from nature. All the materials, stored higgledy-
piggledy by memory, are classified, ordered, harmonised, and
undergo that deliberate idealization, which is the product of a childlike
perceptiveness, in other words a perceptiveness that is acute and
magical by its very ingenuousness.xliv
Endnotes Section One
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Section II: Cavendish, Irigaray, The Veil & Disguise
Figure 3
From Ralph Lauren’s Spring 2008 Collection
Reproduced with permission from http://dandyism.net
visited on 10th
October 2007.
023450471 20

For Irigaray mimicry was a [more] effective way for women to “convert
a form of subordination into an affirmation, and thus begin to thwart it”.
Mimicry, or as Irigaray would later describe it , “hysterical mimicry”,
allowed women to pass from “imposed mimesis”—in which the female
is positioned as mirror to the male, reflecting and thus confirming the
truth of his centrality—into a female miming that has no recognisable
referent.xlv
In this section I will deploy at Irigaray’s notion of ‘Mimicry’ in relation to flânerie to
aid any argument that Margaret Cavendish can be read as an early modern
feminist. In an interview entitled ‘The Power of Discourse and the Subordination
of the Feminine’, Luce Irigaray provides a critique of Freudian psychoanalysis
while seeking ways in which an already structured ‘discursive mechanism’ can be
‘destroyed’ or at least ‘disarmed’. One means of achieving this that she suggests
is something that she calls ‘mimicry’. I am interpreting ‘mimicry’ in this instance
by way of being parallel to Wittig’s metaphorical appropriation of the ‘Trojan
horse’. According to this strategy, appearing to assume the feminine role
deliberately one may question dominant (masculine) discourse stealthily. By
feminine I mean the passive role, or even the subordinate role. By embracing
passivity one can become empowered and ‘jam the machinery’ as Irigaray puts
it. I would like to propose that Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle
(1623-1673) was employing a sort of ‘mimicry’ to the effect of a ‘Trojan horse’ in
order to be the flâneuse as far back as the Renaissance.
What interests me is “the intersection between theory and practise” as advocated
by Gail Schwab in Returning to Irigaray, Feminist Philosophy, Politics and the
Question of Unity.xlvi
Cavendish, by being a fashion icon and generally
downplaying her cerebral capacity manages to produce incredible pieces of
advanced thought without overtly ‘threatening’ the dominant male discourse or
appearing to be subversive. Joyce Devlin Mosher cites Cavendish’s strength as
being her ‘foolishness’.
Cavendish’s great achievement is her foolishness; her unconventional
dress and unreasonable speech serve to disarm authoritative
discourse.xlvii
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This can be interpreted as mimicry in practice. In real life, Cavendish appears to
embrace the role of the ‘good’ Renaissance wife at the same time as writing
prolifically and ambitiously (not expected of a ‘good’ Renaissance wife).
Furthermore, this compacted and thereby given profundity at the meta level of
Margaret Cavendish’s authorship. An example of where she appears to abhor
sexual behavior unbecoming of a ‘good’ women yet advocate ‘fine rhetoric’
(also unbecoming of a ‘good’ Renaissance woman) in her literature can be found
in her fictional text Sociable Letters, this is picked up by James Fitzmaurice’s in
his essay on the Duchess of Newcastle entitled ‘Autobiography, Parody and the
Sociable Letters of Margaret Cavendish, according to Fitzmaurice,
‘[In Sociable Letters], she devotes an entire letter to Aspasia, a
courtesan who eventually married the Athenian Prince. Margaret
believes Aspasia to be thoroughly unclean but at the same time
credits her as a fine rhetorician.xlviii
Fitzmaurice goes on to state that Cavendish ‘mentions in passing that Aspasia is
a ‘whore’’ and explains why he thinks that she uses this word:
It seems likely that Margaret Cavendish uses the word ‘whore’
because she finds the mistress of Restoration England irritating and a
potential source of competition for the attentions of her husband. What
makes the situation interesting is that she gives Aspasia her due.xlix
However, Fitzmaurice does not offer any evidence that Margaret Cavendish was
anything other than ‘Happily married by all accounts to an emotionally and
financially supportive husband.’l
As it is rather well-documented that Margaret’s
husband adored her and indulged her every whim, it is equally likely that she was
disguising her own capacity for writing excellent rhetoric behind her
condemnation of the publically unacceptable sexual woman that was the
Renaissance mistress. In this text Cavendish can be read as publically
embracing the passive role that would be expected of an aristocratic wife in the
1600’s by appearing to be giving a moral lesson fit for a ‘Conduct book’. She
further compounds this by flattering the male powers, ‘Wise men’ as Statesmen,
Philosophers and Governours’.li
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However, by deflecting the attention away from her own authorship of excellent
rhetoric she can be read as successfully employing Irigaray’s mimicry. I am not
suggesting that she was immodest and lacking in ambition. I am merely
proposing that she is employing the technique of mimicry in one respect, that of
embracing an acceptable feminine role at a superficial level. I purport that this is
an attempt to deflect from that which would be considered subversive i.e. serious
intellectual abilities to rival the male thinkers of the day such as Thomas Hobbes
(1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1704) and James Harrington (1611-1676).lii
In her essay on Cavendish’s female characters and their sexuality entitled
‘‘Making a Spectacle’: Margaret Cavendish and The Staging of the Self’,
Rebecca D’Monte draws attention to the empowering qualities of Cavendish’s
female characters and the utilization of their sexual power which enables them to
control the gaze. This can be situated in relation to the flânerie of the prostitute
discussed in Section One.
‘Cavendish’s plays show[ing] an awareness of this sexualised
atmosphere surrounding notions of acting and display. Whilst
commenting on the dangers implicit in the power of ‘looking’ –
surveillance, control, suspicion… these women can be seen to
deliberately present themselves as a form of theatrical spectacle as
they indulge in a seductive striptease, publically unveiling, revealing
and displaying their bodies. liii
In a sense Cavendish’s characters are using their bodies as weapons. Cecilia
Sjöholm’s article on Irigaray and sexual difference entitled “Crossing Lovers:
Luce Irigaray’s Elemental Passions” discusses ‘mimicry’ in terms of the position
of “Woman” as patriarchal fetish. Perhaps these fictional representations of
women deliberately acting as fetish objects are demonstrating ‘mimicry’;
The elevation of “Woman” into a patriarchal fetish has served to bury a
desiring, corporeal feminine subject. Resurrecting that body, Irigaray’s
mimicry displaces and distorts the gaze focusing on the fetish.liv
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In addition to having her female characters embrace their ‘feminine’ charms and
wiles whilst distracting from the fact that they are verbally and visually taking
power and beginning to control the ‘gaze’, Cavendish appears to downplay
rational female intelligence altogether,
Poetry, which is built upon Fancy, Women may claim as a worke
belonging most properly to themselves: for I have observ’d that their
Braines work usually in a Fantasticall motion.lv
In this quote, Cavendish refers to women as ‘they’ (themselves) and by doing so
distances herself. This belies the fact that it is a woman who makes this
apparently rational judgement. So, either the judgement is unreliable because it
has been made by a woman, and therefore the claim that women are ‘fantastical’
is false; or a woman can make sensible claims so, again the claim that they are
‘fantastical’ is unreliable.
For Margaret Cavendish ‘the body is a garment which is separated from the soul
in death, the spirit in “The Traveling Spirit” can leave the body behind like a
garment even in life, and can travel on its own because it is also made of matter,
even without the human body.’lvi
Cavendish’s use of clothing as a metaphor for
the human body’s relationship to the soul is remarkable, thus I will address
clothing and its effect on the flâneuse at some length later in this section. In
terms of spirituality, and the possibility of the para-normality of the flâneuse,
Cavendish’s 1668 work The Description of a new World, called the Blazing World
is another key text. In this piece, communication between the Empress, any other
creatures and the reader is via a dialogue with spirits. The spirits can travel
between worlds seeing without being seen and in order to communicate or write
(which may be interpreted as create art), they must ‘put on a body’.
The Empress received the proffer which they made her, with all civility;
and told him, that she desired a spiritual scribe. The spirit answered,
that they could dictate, but could not write, except that they put on a
hand or arm, or else the whole body of a man. The Empress replied,
how can spirits arm themselves with gauntlets of flesh? As well,
answered he, as man can arm himself with a gauntlet of steel.lvii
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Not only does Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle use clothing
metaphorically for the body, she associates the putting on of a body with
weaponry. I look at the veil and mention its ability to both protect and inhibit the
women of Paris in the 1850s later in this chapter. ‘Through masking and veiling,
wrapping and revealing, Cavendish’s characters prolong the threshold state of
female freedom’.lviii
Cavendish is not associating the body with imprisonment,
rather with protection and empowerment. The soul is wearing the body like an
outfit.
Cavendish’s interest in clothing is unmistakable.
When Margaret Cavendish visited the Royal Society in London in
1667, she was wearing a gown with an eight-foot train borne by six
waiting women. Some in the crowd mistook her for a young man,
though, because she also wore a wide-brimmed cavalier hat and a
knee-length riding coat. Cavendish, dressing the part of a woman who
invades the forbidden masculine province of writing and publishing,
projects a sexual ambivalence in her public image that turns her
woman’s status as fetish to fresh advantage. When the crowds came
running to see the Duchess of Newcastle in her gilded coach and to
marvel over her latest extravagances, it is one of the many instances
of Cavendish making use of dress as gender spectacle to unsettle
fixed ideas about identity and sexuality. In her plays as in her public
persona, Cavendish repeats emancipating acts of gender
transformation through social performance and elaborate costuming.lix
In terms of her physical appearance, Cavendish courted the gaze in her personal
life which on initial inspection, appears to prevent her from being the flâneuse (if
we take seriously Pollock’s notion that the flâneur’s gaze refers specifically to the
commoditisation of the female body, and if she is being gazed upon, then she
may not return the gaze as it will not be accepted). As we have seen, Wolff, too,
would not accept the existence of the flâneuse, for Wolff, ‘the flâneur is
necessarily male’.lx
However, I want to return to Mimicry and fetishism, and to
use Rebecca D’Monte’s words to illustrate Cavendish’s practical application of
the technique at both the level of her craft and her public persona.
023450471 25

[Nevertheless], while working within these literary and social
conventions… Cavendish’s female characters frequently control their
own discovery and display to explore the ambiguous qualities of
theatrical performance. Although realising a conventional ‘feminine’
power through ensnaring men with their beauty, they also achieve a
transgressive ‘masculine’ power through their control over language
and learning and their manipulation of the ‘gaze’.lxi
D’Monte’s reading helps us to see that Cavendish fabricates potentially
subversive female characters by employing certain cunning techniques.
Moreover, if one maps Cavendish’s personal characteristic of inviting the gaze
onto the model of the flâneur as expounded by Wilson and look at the fourth of
the six criteria that Wilson cites as being necessary to fill the position of the
flâneur – ‘the flâneur ‘[he] is interested in dress as a vital component of the urban
scene, then Cavendish accomplishes the status of flâneur here also.lxii
So if
flâneurs are ‘Fastidious, unbelievables, beaux, lions or dandies’, then the
Duchess of Newcastle is surely the female equivalent.lxiii
Cavendish designed
her own clothes; in fact, she ‘delighted in creating her own fashions’.lxiv
This
extreme interest in fashion might also, in modern terms be considered ‘feminine’,
although not necessarily so. Interestingly, ‘Dandyism recently made a jaunty
appearance at New York Fashion Week when Ralph Lauren’s Spring 2008
collection showcased a number of outfits echoing Brummell and Beerbohm’lxv
As well as connecting the idea of ‘the dandy’ with Baudelaire, Virginia Woolf and
the totally contemporary Ralph Lauren Spring Collection, the website
www.dandyism.net wittily quotes Baudelaire and provides a super link between
fashion, androgyny and transvestism. Dandyism, an integral part of flânerie and
flânerie itself can be located outside of modernism, incidences of both can be
found before the nineteenth century and after the twentieth as the example of
Margaret Cavendish illustrates.
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As explained in the introduction, I am interested in looking outside of ‘The
Literature of Modernity’. Further exploration about the impact of technology
emanating from the fledgling cinema on flânerie and the implications for
contemporary female spaces such as cyberspace will be undertaken in Section
Three, Invisibility, , Absent Presence and Virtual Flânerie
On the Ralph Lauren collection mentioned above ‘Jim Dandy’ writes’
The ensembles are bound to rekindle the vexed question of whether
women who raid men’s closets are really dandies, or merely females
in drag. On one side, professional provocateurs like Sebastian Horsley
portentously pronounce, “The key attribute of dandyism — detachment
— cannot come from someone with a womb.” This misogynistic
attitude dates back to Baudelaire, who wrote “La femme est toujours
vulgaire, c’est-à-dire le contraire du dandy.” On the other side, gender
activists like Jack Dandy insist not only that women can be dandies,
but that they’re better at it than men. This in flagrant disregard of 200
years of literature and scholarship on dandyism in which women play
no part in the Brummell-D’Orsay-Baudelaire-Wilde-Wolfe continuum.
And assuming women can embody the male archetype of dandy, is
their dandyism dependent upon wearing men’s clothing?lxvi
The article also effectively illustrates the problem with mapping the properties of
one gendered classification directly onto the other biological sex from the same
era. Of course, Baudelaire’s The Dandy also from “The Painter of Modern Life”,
shares many of the characteristics of the flâneur, he has wealth and leisure time
and for Wilson dandyism is a fundamental part of being a flâneur.
These beings have no other status but that of cultivating the idea of
beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their own passions, of feeling
and thinking. Thus-they possess, to their heart’s content, and to a vast
degree,. both time and money.lxvii
It should also noted that I am not suggesting that the dandy is the flâneur merely
that dandyism is one of the properties that Wilson accredits to the flâneur from
Larousse in her essay The Invisible Flâneur. Virginia Woolf’s comical short story
‘Beau Brummell’ in The Common Reader (1935) points out the ridiculous
shallowness of dandyism when taken on its own (dubious) merits
023450471 27

According to Lady Hester Stanhope, he [Beau Brummell] might have
been had he chosen, a very clever man; and when she told him so,
the Beau admitted that he had wasted his talents because a dandy’s
way of life was the only one “which could place him in a prominent
light, and enable him to separate himself from the ordinary herd of
men, whom he held in considerable contempt”lxviii
This short story does not just deal with the single property of the flâneur that is
dandyism however, contained within the text is a potential flâneuse, albeit an un-
dead one. The flâneur as a spirit or non living human was suggested via Poe’s
short story in section one.
Why should the rustle of her silken skirts disturb those gloomy
meditations? Undoubtedly the Duchess was a good haunter. Long
after those words were written, when she was dead and buried
beneath a tinsel coronet, her ghost mounted the stairs of a very
different dwelling-place.lxix
The issue of whether woman can or should wear men’s clothes is rather less
comical and more poignant when considering the problems facing a potential
flâneuse. She can either invite the gaze as did the fashion icon Cavendish or she
can attempt to deflect the gaze. Deflecting the gaze may be achieved in two
different ways. Firstly, clothes with religious significance may we worn, such as a
nun’s habit, or secondly, the potential flâneuse may disguise herself as a man.
In her essay ‘Dusting the surface, or the bourgeoise, the veil, and Haussmann’s
Paris, Marni Kessler discusses the item of clothing which became fashionable in
Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century – the veil.lxx
During this
discussion, the figure of the ‘dangerous’ prostitute comes up once more. Kessler
cites Jules Michelet’s La Femme of 1859.
She [the bourgeouise alone] can hardly ever go out in the evening,
she would be taken for a prostitute. There are a thousand places
where only men are to be seen, and if she needs to go there for some
reason, the men are amazed and laugh like fools. For example, For
example, should she find herself delayed and hungry at the other end
of Paris, she will not dare to enter a restaurant . She would be an
event, she would be a spectacle. All eyes would constantly be on
her.lxxi
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Marni Kessler argues that rather than affording freedom, the veil restricts the
vision of the potential flâneuse and thereby suppresses her. ‘The veiling of the
respectable woman, indeed the deliberate discouragement of her looking, was a
means of controlling her exposure to the city, the male gaze, and even her
sexuality.’lxxii
However, Kessler points out that the veils were originally introduced
to filter out the dust from the demolition and subsequent rebuilding of Paris. If
the veil was being worn then the vision of the women who wore them was at
least dust free in terms of obscuring vision and irritating the eyes which would
have affected the men. Furthermore, if the features of the women were being
obscured, then their expressions would be difficult to read. If their facial
expression or emotion was invisible, then a level of privacy or freedom to gaze is
starting to emerge. By embracing this dress code, to the extent that veils
themselves became elaborate pieces of couture, and by doing so escaping
domestic spaces, these women too are practising Irigaray’s ‘Mimicry’ as I
interpret it.
By embracing the wearing of the veil, the female is not completely denying her
body, as men did not wear the veil; her image is made more likely to be female
by the wearing of the veil. Some veils were sheerer than others allowing degrees
of visibility for the wearer and degrees of accessibility for the gazer at the veiled
woman. The veil combines the features of invisibility and absent presence
simultaneously and I will return to this in relation to cyber-flânerie in Section III –
Invisibility, Absent Presence and Virtual Flânerie. Invisibility of the individual’s
recognisable features are crucial in terms identity and subjectivity in terms of
returning the male gaze. Absent presence requires slightly more explanation. If
one is enclosed in a space inside one’s protective clothing which admits nothing,
not even a gaze, then no-one else may share that space. The clothing of the
nineteenth century (particularly that which obscures visibility of the face) can be
seen as a sort of self-contained domestic space surrounded by the public arena.
Walter Benjamin uses ‘veiling’ allegorically to describe the crowd as seen by the
master of allegory, Charles Baudelaire, ‘The mass was the agitated veil; through
it Baudelaire saw Paris’.lxxiii
023450471 29

This is given more weight when one considers the imprisonment of women in
hooped skirts and corsets.
Domestic space is considered to be the domain of the ‘feminine’, so, it may be
that the ‘fashion plate’ by implementing the tools of the constructed imposed
‘feminine’ such as restrictive clothing and especially the veil becomes the
flâneuse precisely because she is separate from the crowd, yet at the same time
part of it, a sort of absent presence. The veil is also a poignant metaphor when
considering the palimpsest of layers of interpretation mentioned at the end of
Section One, The Art of Flânerie. Recently, there have been attempts to stop
Muslim schoolgirls in France from wearing the veil because it is considered
aggressive.
Jacques Chirac hinted strongly yesterday that France will soon
introduce legislation banning Muslim girls from wearing headscarves
to school, saying most French people saw "something aggressive" in
the veil.lxxiv
In her book on Feminism and Psychoanalysis, Jane Gallop cites Lacan’s
reference to veiling in relation to the phallic mother, who like the flâneuse may be
seen as a subversive, powerful and threatening figure. She states;
The phallic mother is more dangerous because less obviously phallic.
If the phallus ‘can only play its role when veiled’ (Lacan), then the
phallic mother is more phallic precisely by being less obvious.lxxv
This offers one angle from which to look at explanations of why the veil may be
considered subversively threatening. I mention this to emphasize the
empowering quality that the veil might have had in Paris in the 1850s.
On the subject of clothing, transvestism is, of course relevant when considering
the example that Wolff cites in her 1985 essay, ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women
and the Literature of Modernity’ - that of George Sand.
023450471 30

In 1831, when George Sand wanted to experience Paris life and to
learn about the ideas and arts of her time, she dressed as a boy, to
give herself the freedom she knew women could not share…The
disguise made the life of the flâneur available to her; as she knew very
well, she could not adopt the non-existent role of a flâneuse. Women
could not stroll alone in the city.lxxvi
Wolff has not changed her mind about the impossibility of the existence of the
flâneuse in terms of mapping the female properties onto Baudelaire’s and
Benjamin’s male ideal flâneur. However; in March 2000 she concedes that
technology and modernity can give different perspectives of the definitions. As
with Parsons’ work on the flâneuse Streetwalking the Metropolis, Women, the
City and Modernity, though, Wolff’s conclusion is restricted to women in the city
in the Victorian era.
My second example is the flâneur. Fifteen years ago, I wrote an article about the
impossibility for women to inhabit this role, and hence the invisibility of women in
the literature of modernity, in which the flâneur appears as a central figure
(reprinted in J. Wolff Feminine Sentences Cambridge: Polity, 1991). I've come
back to this question once or twice in the meantime, and others have suggested
ways in which women could, in fact, occupy the role of flâneuse - for example, in
shopping or cinema-going. Now I am inclined to think about this question from a
somewhat different point of view, exploring instead the very constitution, in
critical and historical thought, of the category of 'modernity'. If the definition of 'the
modern' privileges the anonymous city stroller (and I still maintain that this figure
is paradigmatically and practically a man), then we must reconsider the ways in
which we conceptualize modernity - for example, by placing less emphasis on
the street and the public arena, and exploring the intersections of home and
work, family and enterprise, city and suburb, men's and women's work. lxxvii
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Endnotes Section Two
023450471 32

Section III: Invisibility, Absent Presence and Virtual Flânerie
Figure 4
This is a file from the Wikimedia Commons. Commons is a freely licensed media
file repository. Downloaded freely and with permission from
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Paris_-_Passage_de_Choiseul_04.jpg on 20th
October 2007.
Le passage de Choiseul à Paris (France) - Avril 2007
Photo personnelle (own work) de Clicsouris
023450471 33

The most obvious and universal aspect [of disguise] is concealment,
the paradoxical choice to absent oneself when present. Disguise
confers invisibility. What matters is not what one has become but
merely that one is not oneself…Concealment enables one to act as
well as observe, to be a saboteur as well as a spy. It facilitates crime
and dirty tricks. …A third and most immediate function of concealment
is isolation. Even if one has no wish to spy on others or trick them, one
may relish the feeling of being invisible, the assurance that one has
put oneself outside familiar commerce with others – the expectations,
demands and acknowledgements that are second nature to us but
also clutter our lives.lxxviii
In this section, I will look at invisibility and disguise in relation to flânerie. As
Wolff says ‘others have suggested ways in which women could, in fact occupy
the role of flâneuse – for example, in shopping or cinema-going.lxxix
If one can
substitute the camera for the human eye and actual bodily presence is not
essential, then one can extend this to ones activity on-line. One’s presence and
agency in cyberspace is, after all, invisible or one is elsewhere, an absent
presence. In Cyberspace, one can be seen or not, one may gaze without being
gazed upon. It may even be the case that one’s consciousness is elsewhere, in
virtual space. Websites are appearing in which the owners are calling themselves
flâneuses, such as http://uneflaneuse.blogspot.com or http://flaneuse.org/,
http://flaneusenotes.blogspot.com/ is particularly interesting as the web page
owner, Lisa-Marie (surname unspecified), cites photography as the art-form that
enables her to be the flâneuse.
Anne Friedberg goes into some detail in her article “Cinema and the Postmodern
Condition” in linking the cinema with female flânerie.
This chapter is, then, a route, an itinerary. It begins by situating the
origins of a mobilised gaze and identifying it with that fundamental
paradigm of modernity, the flâneur – the male dandy who strolled the
urban streets and arcades in the nineteenth century. As the
department store supplanted the arcade, the mobilised gaze was
implemented in the service of consumption, and the space opened for
a female flâneur – a flâneuse – whose gendered gaze became a key
element of consumer address. And such spatial and temporary
mobility led to a unique apparatical sequel: the moving virtual gaze of
the cinema.lxxx
023450471 34

Friedberg credits Benjamin’s study of the Paris Arcades as the origin of the
movement of the flâneur from the pavements to the more domestic location of
the shopping mall. ‘Benjamin traces this figure [the flâneur] from the arcades into
the department store.’lxxxi
It is Benjamin who then makes the association between
flânerie and consumerism.
In it [the crowd] the city was now landscape, now a room. And both of
these went into the construction of the department store, which made
use of flânerie itself in order to sell goods. The department store was
the flâneur’s final coup. As flâneurs, the intelligentsia came into the
market place. As they thought to observe it – but in reality it was
already to find a buyer.lxxxii
`Of course, it should be noted that the arcades are hardly outdoors themselves,
see Figure 4, they are a sort of stepping-stone from pavements to shopping
malls. The glass encasement which many had often afforded shelter from the
elements but glass can be reflective or even distorting, so the question of what is
actually being seen arises. It could be argued that the flâneur is not free but
perhaps imprisoned by his location and a parallel with glass encased exhibitions
might be made. Comparisons to Poe’s ‘Man at the Window’ from Section One,
The Art of Flânerie may also be made, however what is not clear is whether the
flâneur is on the inside of the window or not. The idea that the arcades are in
fact more like domestic spaces and not public ones is supported by Benjamin’s
original text.
But even in those days it was not possible to stroll about everywhere
in the city. Before Haussmann wide pavements were rare, and the
narrow ones afforded little protection from vehicles. Strolling could
hardly have assumed the importance it did without the arcades.lxxxiii
Ann Friedberg moves flânerie from the department store to the cinema and by
doing so, also points the way for the flâneur and the flâneuse to move into
cyberspace via the ’virtual gaze’.lxxxiv
023450471 35

One of the pieces of supporting evidence that Friedberg uses to link the
department store, the cinema and consumerism is a marketing technique
recommended in 1890. It was ‘A window display called the vanishing lady
[which] used a live female model who, at intervals, would disappear into a
drapery-covered pedestal and reappear after changing her hat, gloves or
shawl.’lxxxv
This has been developed and in contemporary fashion and beauty one
can try on hairstyles with computer graphic imaging or buy from fashion
collections without ever leaving our living rooms with internet shopping.
While the veiled women of Paris in the nineteenth century were able to stroll with
relative anonymity, their faces being masked, the women in the cinema, in the
darkness were not gazed upon at all.
The space of female flânerie has been prefigured in another realm, the
scopophilia in the cinema. The store-windows of Berlin, Die Sinfonie
der Großstadt through which the stroller sees her own objectification
and beyond, if she dares, are replicated in the frames of the camera
and extended to the images of the world. As the cinema releases the
female spectator of her exclusion from exterior reality, scenes and
sites of female flânerie have been inscribed in the medium of film
since its beginnings.lxxxvi
The scenes and sites of female flânerie to which Anke Gleber is referring to here
are those of the consumer, and the way this is replicated in the cinema audience
member. This returns us to the problem with the diminished gaze of the
consumer which I referred to in Section One, The Art of Flânerie. The artist’s eye
has no place unless it is to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of the window
display. However, Gleber concludes that ‘Any theory of a female aesthetics,
gaze or “women’s movement” implies a quest for the freedom of female
flânerie.lxxxvii
This in turn implies a need to further discuss vision alongside time
and space.
Elizabeth Grosz writes about “the space-time of bodies” [Grosz 120]
as she investigates the history of connections between bodies,
disembodiment, space and time as it affects today’s theorisation of
cyberspace and virtual reality. Grosz states that “Historically it can be
argued…that as representations of subjectivity changed, so did
representations of space and time.”lxxxviii
023450471 36

Architecture from the Outside is a remarkable collection of essays on virtual and
real space, and its connection to flânerie and in particular the flâneuse is
unmistakeable. In the essay entitled “Cyberspace, Virtuality and the Real” Grosz
considers the impact of cyberspace for the transsexual theorist Allucquère Stone.
More than most cultural theorists, Allucquère Stone – perhaps
because of her dual intellectual investments as emblematic
transsexual and as eminent cyber theorist/performer – finds the allure
of cyberspace precisely that of transsexualism: the capacity of a
supervening subject or mind to choose its body and modes of
materiality, claiming experience of multiple subject positions even
while appearing to acknowledge the inherent belonging together of
any mind in and as a body. While she acknowledges corporeal
embeddedness, she is fascinated by the options available to a
consciousness that can choose a male or female body, a black or
white one.lxxxix
Because of the issues of spatiality surrounding the concept of the flâneuse, it is
easy to forget that the flâneuse, or to be more precise, the flâneur has its origins
in visual fiction, as a poetic creation of Charles Baudelaire, identified and
classified by Walter Benjamin. Benjamin’s Arcades Project stimulated many of
the debates (still ongoing) as regards the situation of the female in the metropolis
at the same time as Baudelaire was creating Guys the flâneur. The Arcades
Project did so by the virtue of the nature of classification. Classification gives the
impression of a stability of meaning Therefore; there is now a mergence or sort
of overlay of the imaginary flâneur and one with real physical corporeal
properties which may be transposed onto my contemporary model of the
flâneuse in cyberspace. Avatars, the created virtual personae may be considered
in parallel to Baudelaire’s poetic creation, while their creator, the real embodied
person my be compared with Benjamin’s flâneur in the Arcades. The embodied
flâneuse is subject to and objectified by the male gaze and therefore cannot exist
on the same terms as her male equivalent. It is possible though, that she may
come into being through different mechanisms such as technology, and therein
lies the relevance of discussions of the virtual mobilised gaze, the cinema and
cyberspace.
023450471 37

Two main threads of discussion concerning the flâneuse connect this section
with its predecessor Section II: Cavendish, Irigaray, The Veil & Disguise. The
first is the female body and ways in which it may be utilised to either attract or
dispel the gaze. The second is the idea that mechanisms can be used to
overcome potential problems concerning the existence of the flâneuse, these can
be devices stealthily hidden within fictional texts, they can relate to the body in
terms of fashion or be innovations in technology that enable the flâneuse to
overcome restrictions applied to the female body. Creative changes and
developments show up the implausibility with dismissing the existence of the
flâneuse as impossible. To turn to Grosz again, in “The Natural in Architecture
and Culture” she describes the possibility contained within nature (which may be
aligned with the female body) as the producer or consumer of culture, and in this
I include the cinema, cyberspace and fashion. Grosz is providing a critique of
those such as Wolff who argue that the existence of the flâneuse is impossible
due to the fixed, static nature of the female.
I am not interested in affirming a fixed static nature [either]: the limits
of any fixed, deterministic naturalism have been made apparent over
the last twenty years or more. Instead I am interested in rethinking the
status of the natural, to affirm it and to grant it the openness to
account of the very inception of culture itself. Nature must be
understood in the rich and productive openness attributed to it by
Darwin and evolutionary theory, by Nietzsche, Deleuze or Simondon
as force, as production, as a revelry in the random and the contingent,
as a continuous opening up to the unexpected, as relations of
dissonance, resonance and consonance as much as the relation of
substance or identity.xc
As mentioned, cinema and cyberspace are connected through the virtual
mobilised gaze and consumerism. Directed by brothers Allen and Albert Hughes
in 2001, From Hell, starring Johnny Depp is based on speculation surrounding
the Jack the Ripper story. Its setting of busy, impoverished Victorian London is
ideal for illustration of examples that might fit into the idea of the flâneur.
023450471 38

The film is set in 1888, just over twenty years after Charles Baudelaire’s The
Painter of Modern Life first appears in 1863, so it pays homage to the origins of
the flâneur in the metropolis in the nineteenth century. But, for the purpose of this
discussion, I am interested in what the Allen brothers do with the idea of the
camera as the flâneur. Throughout this movie, the camera acts as the flâneur, it
is most noticeable in the opening scene when it is broad daylight and the
camera is moving around the city at a steady pace (as though it is someone
strolling or walking) and rests on first one face then another. This has the effect
that that the viewer is actually the flâneur/flâneuse through the camera’s eye-
view. Herein is a good illustration of the virtual mobilised gaze. Allen and Albert
Hughes also incorporate the figures of the prostitute and the detective, who
himself is being followed thus confusing the identity of the flâneur in this film.xci
Cyberspace takes the mobilised, disembodied gaze further still. With a webcam
the gaze may become two-way, reversible but only if one chooses. One may look
at people’s ‘blogs’ which can be described as contemporary texts. One of these
can be found at http://flaneuse.org/2007/10/08/my-poor-blog/ . Another relevant
example of on-line flânerie can be found at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/flaneuse/; here the website owner has posted
photographs of her travels around European cities. There is even a virtual realm
where people can become virtual real estate millionaires, it can be found at
www.secondlife.com. Miriam Wallraven in her 2004 article “My Spirits long to
wander in the Air…” Spirits and Souls in Margaret Cavendish’s Fiction between
Early Modern Philosophy and Cyber Theory” draws a parallel between
Cavendish’s fantasy and twentieth century theories of virtual reality and the
cyborg. Wallraven argues that;
I [Miriam Wallraven] argue that Cavendish uses scientific and
philosophical theories about souls/spirits in order to fantasize in the
medium of fiction about an enhanced kind of humanity. This is
connected with reconceptualisations of space and time, thereby
anticipating debates which are currently discussed in the realm of
cyber theory.xcii
023450471 39

Undoubtedly, in terms of disembodiment, vision and the acquisition of
knowledge, the spirits and souls in Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World may
describe agency in cyberspace. They also have the ability to travel between
realms, while having to acknowledge the corporeal (they have to wear the body
like a garment as described in Section II; Cavendish, Irigaray, The Veil &
Disguise). These spirits may also change their bodies, which points ahead to the
example of Allucquère Stone in the 21st
century and her interest in being able to
try on different bodies in cyberspace. Vision, movement, the mobilised virtual
gaze, invisibility and absent presence are all linked together through the art of
flânerie.
The concealment of one’s sex by either disguise or invisibility is not exclusive to
female flânerie but it has been one of the techniques used in order to have
freedom of movement without one’s safety or reputation being compromised.
Cyberspace is an alternate geography that needs to be seen,
witnessed, and experienced in order to exist. The flaneur is a suitable
metaphoric vehicle for the 'witnessing' of this space because 'the
flaneur moves through space and among the people with a viscosity
that both enables and priviledges visionxciii
In terms of the identity of the flâneur, precisely because of the ability to be
anonymous, or to disguise oneself as someone else, cyberspace facilitates the
activity of virtual sexual predators, rapists and pedophiles. It also, allows for
disembodied technological detective work to catch these criminals, particularly
through their entrapment whereby detectives pose as children of either sex. It is
clear then that both the criminals and the police authority figures may be child-
like at ‘will’, again this is one of the properties or qualities attached to the
Baudelaire’s flâneur of 1863.
Cyber space allows for organizations such as Interpol to engage in multi-spatial,
multi dimensional detective work which is by definition linked to many of the
criteria and definitions attributed to the art of flânerie as outlined in section one of
this dissertation. The multi-faceted nature of the flâneur is credited to Walter
Benjamin.
023450471 40

The fundamental ambiguity of the figure of the flâneur, sometimes
verging on that of the mere stroller, at other times elevated to that of
the detective, to the decipherer of urban and visual texts, indeed to the
figure of Benjamin himself, was amplified by Benjamin’s own analysis.
xciv
It is this complexity that has lead to the many discussions on different levels as
the identity of the flâneur. Discussions as to the qualities that the flâneuse might
possess have escalated to a debate over whether or not she may even exist.
This is entirely due to the visibility of the body and the constrictions placed on
women. I am suggesting that she does exist and that women have had to be
more creative and find devious ways sometimes in which to achieve the status of
the flâneuse. Not only am I suggesting that she exists now in cyber space, but I
am suggesting that she has existed at least since the 1650s, through the
Victorian era and modernist literature. She has been afforded anonymity by the
virtual mobilised gaze from early cinema and now exits in cyber space.
Some of the possible means by which a female may become the flâneuse
include embracing femininity in terms of fashion, or embracing veiling (which
women did to the extent that veils became elaborate fashion statements
indicative of status in themselves). Anonymity in a crowd was possible for
female cinema audience members which (of course) was made possible via the
virtual mobilised gaze. Disguise as in transvestism was and is another method
used; this contains the crucial component of disguising the sexed body and this
move is extended to removing the body (agency in cyberspace) which involves
both invisibility and absent presence simultaneously, (reminiscent of the veil in
section two) as well as relying on a virtual gaze.
Engaging with cyberspace is a form of virtual travel, where an
immobile spectator enjoys virtual mobility to ‘elsewhere’s’ in the non-
space of electronic information (sites). Although the cyber-flâneur is
physically immobile, their gaze is “mobilised” by an illusion of spatial
and temporal mobility – a perception of virtual locomotion in time
within an alternative geography. Television and cinema offer a
‘perceptual displacement’ similar to that provided by the panorama
and freeways, except that it defers external reality by providing a
‘controlled, commodified, and pleasurable substitution’. xcv
023450471 41

The cyber flâneur or flâneuse may be the person in the crowd because there are
‘networks of electronic surveillance… Cyber-flâneurs know that they may be
watched and counted’ at the same time they may be ‘at the window’.xcvi
This is exactly what is going on in Poe’s short story as noted in Section One and
that which has been identified as relating to the flâneur’s marginality by Parsons
in her book Streetwalking the Metropolis (see above, page 4 of Section One, The
Art of Flânerie ). The Cyber-flâneuse has completely ‘disassociated herself from
an exterior world defined by the male gaze.’xcvii
The removal of the corporeal
body from cyber- text is a double-edged sword though. It certainly allows for
subversive behaviour through stealth. It facilitates freedom for the female on the
one hand but is open to abuse by those who would exploit the ability to be
invisible or anonymous. There have instances of virtual muggings and even
rapes of Avatars. Avatars are the created personae of those who participate in
virtual worlds such as www.secondlife.com as described on page 38. Ironically,
the virtual female flâneur is facing the same risks of violation that the women of
the streets of Paris in the 1850s needed to embrace the veil to avoid.
Linden Lab’s Second Life has seen its fair share of controversies in
the past; an FBI investigation led to a shut down of inworld casinos,
some media reports suggested that Second Life may be being used
as a training area for terrorists… Someone recently said to me at a
conference that Second Life’s greatest strength is also its greatest
weakness: pure uncensored freedom; they are completely right. xcviii
023450471 42

Endnotes Section III
023450471 43

Conclusion
My inspiration for this project was Wolff’s 1985 essay ‘The Invisible Flâneuse:
Women and the Literature of Modernity’ in which Wolff argues that the existence
of the flâneuse is impossible because she could not wander the streets of the
metropolis without compromising her reputation. Section one was concerned with
establishing what could be understood by the art of flânerie. Two main features
of flânerie stood out for attention. Firstly, the spectatorship of the flâneur needed
to be addressed in terms of gender and subjectivity. On the one hand, the idle,
wandering flâneur possesses the judgemental, impervious objectifying gaze, on
the other he has the artist’s eye later to become inextricably linked to
consumerism. The other crucial element looked at in detail was the paradoxical
quality of the flâneur, i.e. the ability to be in the crowd yet simultaneously have
the capacity to resist incorporation into it. Wolff’s argument that the female
flâneuse could not exist was based on both of these features. Wolff’s argument
was supported by Pollock’s affirmation that the gaze of the flâneur views the
female body as a commodity. Wolff argued that as the nineteenth century
woman could not return the male gaze nor wander the streets of the metropolis
alone, it is not possible for the flâneuse to exist as a binary polarised opposite of
Baudelaire’s flâneur. But the flâneuse did exist in Paris in the 1850’s albeit as a
veiled woman. Wilson situates her flâneuse later, as a consumer of objects in
the shopping malls. For Wilson the underworld of the bohemian crowd allows the
flâneur to take on many different identities that of investigative journalist, spy,
criminal and revolutionary. The complex and diverse nature of definitions of the
flâneur start to emerge from the research into section one making it doubly
difficult to specify the possible qualities of the flâneuse and thereby maintain the
claims that she could not.
Edgar Allen Poe’s short story The Man of the Crowd and Benjamin’s conflicting
essays provide ammunition for arguments against Wolff as the flâneur may be
the man of the crowd as well as the man at the window.
023450471 44

Conclusion
Clearly, if he is the man at the window, he is located inside a domestic space and
Wolff’s argument that rests on the female being unable to wander the streets
becomes null and void.
Parisian Arcades were not entirely outdoor spaces. Poe’s short story also
facilitates definitions of the flâneur/flâneuse as being a possible spirit, not a living
human in any case. Positioning the potential female flâneur in the cinema is a
progression from the female flâneur in the shopping mal and Poe’s ‘man at the
window’. This is made possible by the virtual mobilised gaze of the camera. This
flâneuse located in an interior space may not however, have unlimited freedom to
gaze and it may be that her gaze is that of the consumer. As is suggested in
Section I, perhaps it is only the female auteur who achieves the status of
flâneuse as she controls the gaze. I also indicated that the prostitute may not be
the flâneuse as she may not reciprocate the Imperial male gaze.
In Section Two, I investigated the possibility that Margaret Cavendish might have
achieved the elevated status of the flâneuse by employing certain (cunning)
techniques in both her personal life and her fiction to deflect the gaze and
produce work that demonstrates her ‘artist’s eye’ and capacity to be subversive
in a feminist mode. I looked solely at Cavendish’s fiction because flânerie itself
has its origins in fiction. There is almost certainly scope for addressing her
philosophical work, specifically her metaphysical thought in relation to flânerie but
this must be held back for a larger project. By employing Irigaray’s mimicry the
application of which in this case I describe as being interchangeable with a
metaphorical ‘Trojan Horse’, I argued that Cavendish manages to deflect from
her potentially subversive rhetoric by assuming the role of the indignant ‘good’
Renaissance wife and by downplaying any rational intelligence that she may
have. In this respect Cavendish manages to fulfil the sixth in the list of criteria
outlined in the introduction, she is subversive and is part of the crowd while
resisting incorporation into it.
023450471 45

Conclusion
By drawing the male gaze, both Cavendish in her personal life and her female
characters start to take control of the gaze. In direct contrast to drawing the gaze
in order to control it, Cavendish also experiments with transvestism in her fiction,
both masculine to feminine and vice versa. This allows Cavendish’s female
characters to wander and gaze as flâneuses. Cavendish’s obsession with
fashion certainly fulfils the fourth in the list of properties which the flâneur must
possess.
Cavendish’s use of spirits as potential flâneurs and their ‘putting on’ the body like
clothing is foregrounded in two ways; firstly the disembodiment of the spirits can
be linked to invisibility, cyber flânerie or even the virtual mobilised gaze.
Secondly, the body being used metaphorically as protective clothing can be
compared with the veiling of the Parisian flâneuse of the 1850s. Veiling and
transvestism do appear to be mechanisms that may be used to afford the
potential flâneuse freedom to wander and gaze without compromise. These are
masks and disguises, utilised by Cavendish in both her personal life and her
fiction. Therefore, in this section, it may be concluded that in some respects she
did achieve the status of flâneuse by adopting certain techniques, or at very
least, she created literary flâneuses. The section ended by moving on to explore
the ways in which the wearing of the veil allows for invisibility. Disguising the
female body or achieving anonymity in order to wander and gaze is then taken a
step further in section three in the discussion of invisibility and absent presence
in cyber space.
In section three I looked at a more contemporary setting for the flâneuse, namely
cyberspace. As Wolff says, suggestions as to ways in which woman may occupy
the role of the flâneuse include shopping and cinema going. Cyberspace is an
extension of these spaces because of the mechanised, mobilised gaze. I make
the move from concealment of the body by masking or disguising it to
disembodiment.
023450471 46

Conclusion
One’s agency in cyberspace is not gendered – one can create one’s own virtual
physical characteristics or remain incorporeal if one wishes, not unlike Margaret
Cavendish’s sprits in Blazing World. This affords protection from the objectifying
gaze and freedom of movement on the World Wide Web.
It seems possible that one can both deconstruct and reconstruct one’s identity
and ‘try on’ different component parts in cyberspace; this too affords freedom to
gaze without compromise. The cyber-flâneur can be ‘person in the crowd’ –
online at the same time as many others, at the same time as being ‘the person at
the window’. The question of whether the female gaze is fully developed
remains. If cyberspace is an extension of the shopping mal and the cinema, it is
possible that the flâneuse’s gaze is simply that of the consumer in a new
environment. The cyber-flâneuse may be no more than the cyber-consumer. She
does not appear to be the cyber-commodity though as she cannot be seen.
There is a negative side to cyber-flânerie though, the same qualities that allow for
the flâneuse to freely gaze and wander, i.e. anonymity and invisibility, permit
serious criminal activity. Ultimately though, this new, free space does allow the
flâneuse to appear to be invisible.
023450471 47

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10th
October 2007 from http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0301251h
Websites sourced
http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/schools/optimist.htm visited on 6th October 2007.
023450471 50

http://www.flickr.com/photos/flaneuse/, visited on 2nd
December 2007.
ttp://flaneuse.org/2007/10/08/my-poor-blog/ visited on 2nd December 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/story/0,11882,1101321,00.html visited on 16th
October 2007.
www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/cavendish/quotes.htm visited on 6th September
2007.
http://www.idst.vt.edu/modernworld/d/Baudelaire.html visited on 10th October
2006.
http://www.marthawilson.com/wark/text04_identity.html. visited on 6th September
2007.
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/philosophers/cavendish visited on 6th
September 2007.
http://www.pinn.net/sunshine/march99/cavendish.html. visited on 6th September
2007
http://www.raynbird.com/essays/Passage_Flaneur.html visited on 29th October
2007.
http://www.secondlife.com visited on 31st
October 2007.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/30/virtual-pedophilia-report-bad-news-for-
second-life/ visited on 03 November 2007
http://web.ukonline/n.paradoxa/panel8.htm visited on 14th October 2007.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_film#The_Birth_of_Film visited on 04th
July
2007
Films Cited
From Hell, Directed by The Hughes Brothers, (2001)
Reference Works Consulted
http://www.oed.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2new
023450471 51

Flaneuse Dissertation Complete

Flaneuse Dissertation Complete

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