Women and the City in French Literature and Culture

Reconfiguring the Feminine in the Urban Environment

Siobhán McIlvanney, Gillian Ni Cheallaigh

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781786834324
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786834348
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire française

The city has traditionally been configured as a fundamentally masculine space. This collection of essays seeks to question many of the idées reçues surrounding women's ongoing association with the private, the domestic and the rural. Covering a selection of films, journals and novels from the French medieval period to the Franco-Algerian present, it challenges the traditionally gendered dichotomisation of the masculine public and feminine private upon which so much of French and European literature and culture is predicated. Is the urban flâneur a quintessentially male phenomenon, or can there exist a true flâneuse as active agent, expressing the confidence and pleasure of a woman moving freely in the urban environment? Women and the City in French Literature and Culture seeks to locate exactly where women are heading – both individually and collectively – in their relationships to the urban environment; by so doing, it nuances the conventional binaristic perception of women and the city in an endeavour to redirect future research in women's studies towards more interesting and representative urban destinations.

Part I

Images of the Flâneuse: Mediatic Representations of Women’s Relationship to the City

1

A City for Young Ladies: The Parisian Flâneuse of the Journal des Demoiselles¹

LUCIE ROUSSEL RICHARD

Nineteenth-century Paris was an arena of wide-reaching shifts in social configurations. The French Revolution had initiated a levelling period during which every domain of society was being rethought, and political, social and cultural paradigms were being reconstructed. This atmosphere of challenging norms and expectations would apply to artistic life as well as to social organisation more broadly. The diminishing influence of the aristocratic class and the increasing impact of the bourgeois class modified the ways in which artists would achieve social recognition. In the 1830s, a new figure would appear as a natural evolution of the man of letters, namely the flâneur. Both a character and a narrator, the flâneur strolled about the city, observing its changes and seeking to blend in with the crowds. Such specific characteristics of the flâneur made this figure difficult for French women to adopt, largely because of the ‘separate spheres’ ideology.² And women who wrote endured a double marginalisation in their careers as writers, one in the literary domain itself, and the other in urban space. A suitable model of flâneuse thus had to be designed if women writers were to make any claim to accessing urban territory. Jeanne Justine Fouqueau de Pussy, the editor-in-chief of the Journal des Demoiselles, does just that in the column she writes in the Journal des Demoiselles by creating a women-friendly version of the flâneur. The aim of this chapter is to analyse how Fouqueau de Pussy borrows from the characteristics of the masculine flâneur in order to create a feminine version, thereby challenging gender expectations in literature and in society.

The Rise of the Literary Flâneur

Following the lead of Catherine Nesci (2007), we may define the flâneur as the ‘character in charge of the city’s readability … a man busy enjoying the pleasures of urban observation’.³ Between 1833 and 1848, the Count of Rambuteau began the first stage of major urban development in Paris by broadening streets and modernising key facilities such as lighting and sewerage. Such changes inevitably modified the geography of the city and its social practices; in literature, Paris is represented as a new city that needs to be explored and explained, and, in this context, the flânerie genre – literary texts portraying a character strolling through the streets (the flâneur) – first sees the light. According to David Jérôme (2012), the flâneur acts as a type of narrator seeking to comprehend the ‘devenir heurté de la capitale’ [uneven fate of the capital].⁴ These flâneries can be seen as echoing Walter Benjamin’s (1982) ‘littérature panoramique’:

quand l’écrivain s’était rendu au marché, il regardait autour de lui comme dans un panorama. Un genre littéraire particulier a conservé ses premières tentatives pour s’orienter. C’est une littérature panoramique … Ces livres sont faits d’une série d’esquisses dont le revêtement anecdotique correspond aux figures plastiques situées au premier plan des panoramas, tandis que la richesse de leur information joue pour ainsi dire le rôle de la vaste perspective qui se déploie à l’arrière plan.⁵

Once a writer had entered the marketplace, he looked around as in a diorama. A special literary genre has preserved his first attempts at orienting himself. It is a panorama literature … The books consist of individual sketches which, as it were, reproduce the plastic foreground of those panoramas with their anecdotal form and the extensive background of the panoramas with their store of informations.⁶

Benjamin’s definition of panoramic literature is precisely what I mean by the term flânerie: a term which describes a writer walking along the street, relaying his observations in a series of short texts published in newspapers or in collective works. In other words, the literary flânerie is the written result of the activity of strolling. We may date the first flâneries to the end of the eighteenth century with Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Tableau de Paris (1781–88) and Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne’s Nuits de Paris (1786–92). At that time, the apparition of the flâneur archetype was inscribed in newspaper columns entitled ‘L’Hermite de la Chaussée d’Antin’ by Etienne de Jouy published in the Gazette de France.⁷ Etienne de Jouy portrays a character who, after a reversal of fortune, lives in a fourth-floor flat located in the rue Saint Lazare. This location allows the character to roam all over Paris and thus to make numerous ethnographical observations about the richest and the poorest members of the capital’s population. Here is how he describes his life as a flâneur: ‘je vais, je viens, je regarde, j’écoute, je tiens note, le soir, en rentrant, de tout ce que j’ai vu et entendu dans la journée’ [I come, I go, I look, I listen, I make notes in the evening when I come back home about everything I saw and heard during the day].⁸

Thus the flâneur first walks throughout the city and later consolidates his observations into written form. We may suppose that such leisurely strolling is a pretext to writing about the changing city. We may also hypothesise that flânerie, as framed in the periodical column, illustrates urban complexity as it reflects its ‘mosaïque’ aspect.⁹ As the flâneur forms a link between form and content, between the myriad narratives to which the city gives rise and which are reflected in the ever-changing newspaper columns, he helps to build a new understanding of the city. Common features of flânerie works may be found in their descriptions of frequented walkways and little-known corners of the city, and of course in the relationships between the two.

Later in the century, collections of writings by flânerie authors would be found in works such as Paris ou le Livre des Cent-et-un (1831–34) and Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (1840–42). The publisher and bookseller Ladvocat (1831) initiated the idea of grouping such writings within the same volume. He explains this notion in the introduction to his work:

Quel écrivain pourrait suffire à ce Paris multiplié et tricolore ? … renoncez à l’unité pour une peinture multiple, appelez à votre secours toutes les imaginations contemporaines avec leurs coloris si divers.¹⁰

What one writer would be enough to reflect this myriad and multi-coloured Paris? … we must replace unity with multiple, different depictions and make use of every contemporary imagination with all their diverse colours.

Depicting the modernisation of Paris required a plurality of literary writings. The flânerie volumes are composed of topical chapters written by different authors such as Balzac, Janin, and Sainte-Beuve. They project the flâneur into urban areas such as the Jardin des Plantes, the Palais Royal, and Vincennes. They also describe typical moments in Parisian social life as is reflected in the title of some of the short stories: Une matinée aux Invalides [A Morning in the Invalides], La Journée d’un journaliste [A Day in the Life of a Journalist], Un jour de paiement de rente au Trésor [A Day of Annuity Payment to the Treasury], and Des Soirées littéraires ou les poètes entre-eux [Literary Evenings or Poets Among Themselves]. They also have a tendency to portray characters in a somewhat archetypal manner: Les Enfants-trouvés [The Foundlings], Les Musiciens [The Musicians], Les Jeunes Filles de Paris [The Young Women of Paris], L’Apprenti journaliste [The Aspiring Journalist], and Le Compositeur typographe [The Typesetter]. The flâneur is another one of those character types. Each ‘panoramique’ collective work includes a chapter focused on the flâneur, who is thus not only observer but observed. In the sixth volume, we read the following:

Le voyez-vous mon flâneur, le parapluie sous le bras, les mains croisées derrière le dos ; comme il s’avance librement au milieu de cette foule dont il est le centre, et qui ne s’en doute pas ! Tout, autour de lui, ne paraît marcher, courir, se croiser, que pour occuper ses yeux, provoquer ses réflexions, animer son existence de ce mouvement duquel sa pensée languit.¹¹

Do you see him, my flâneur, umbrella under his arm, hands folded behind his back; how freely he walks forth in the middle of this crowd who don’t even realise he is at their centre! Everyone around him seems to walk, run, bump into each other with the sole purpose of entertaining his gaze, of feeding his thoughts, of livening up his existence with this movement that his thoughts long for.

In the description of the flâneur’s habitus as fuel for his self-representations, what draws our attention is the flâneur’s function, his place in urban society. In this quotation, the flâneur is placed at the centre of the crowd and everything seems to be arranged in such a way as to satisfy his intellectual curiosity. The flâneur is portrayed as a visual and intellectual consumer of the urban environment, an authority of sorts, available to serve as a guide for others who do not possess the same intellectual curiosity and skill.

Interestingly, the flâneur is often brought closer to the figure of the author in his role as flâneur. Auguste Lacroix (2004), in a chapter dedicated to the definition of the flâneur postulates that men of letters can be authors only if they are, first of all, able to be flâneurs:

La flânerie est le caractère distinctif du véritable homme de lettres. Le talent n’existe, dans l’espèce, que comme conséquence ; l’instinct de la flânerie est la cause première. C’est le cas de le dire, avec une légère variante : littérateurs parce que flâneurs.¹²

Flânerie [the activity] is the distinctive characteristic of a true man of letters. Talent exists in the species only as a consequence; the instinct of strolling is the first cause. It is fair to say, for the most part: literary men are such because they are first of all flâneurs.

We may wonder why authors portray themselves as flâneurs; why do they identify themselves as wanderers in the city, observing and writing about their surroundings? These writings may be interpreted as a means of valorising themselves and their lifestyle. It is well known that artists in bourgeois society have felt the need to explain or even justify a way of life that was in contradiction with more conventional models of productivity. Human inactivity and leisure had been perceived as valuable ‘achievements’ during the period of aristocratic domination of French social life and mores. With the rise of an industrial bourgeois model, however, inactivity became synonymous with petty idleness. In this light, the man of letters, re-creating his image as a flâneur, may have been seeking to rid himself of any association with the new stereotype by harnessing leisure and relaxation to writerly productivity. In any case, he was affirming his role in society as vital, assigning a new and meaningful function to the artist as one who charts and translates the readability of the urban environment in transition.

The Gendered Division of Urban Spaces

In light of this new social status acquired by male flânerie, how are we to interpret Fouqueau de Pussy’s rise in Parisian literary circles? What were the means available to her for creating a female variation of literary flânerie and what was her motivation to participate in this reconfiguration of literary space? In her article ‘Multiculturalisme et genre: entre sphères publique et privée’ [Multiculturalism and Gender: Between Public and Private Spheres], Anouk Guiné (2005) explains that the nineteenth century confirmed the gendered ideology of ‘separate spheres’:

Depuis la rationalisation de la société au XIX^e siècle, le privé et le public sont traditionnellement pensés comme une distinction entre, d’un côté, vie personnelle, individuelle, passions, reproduction … et, de l’autre, vie politique, collective, raison, production et application du droit dans une perspective universelle … La modernité est donc marquée par ce que Wierorka appelle ‘le principe de démarcation’ (1997, p. 21) entre le public et le privé, donnant ainsi lieu à la ‘double équation’ (1997, p. 21) qui consiste à associer la sphère privée aux femmes et la sphère publique aux hommes.¹³

Since the rationalisation of society in the nineteenth century, the private and the public domains have traditionally been thought of as a distinction between, on the one hand, personal life, individual life, passions, reproduction … and, on the other, political life, collective life, reason, production and the application of the law from a universal perspective … Modernity is thus marked by what Wierorka calls ‘the principle of demarcation’ (1997, p. 21) between the public and the private, thus giving rise to the ‘double equation’ (1997, p. 21), which involves associating the private sphere with women and the public sphere with men.

It has traditionally and universally been a matter of custom to assign public and private spaces to men and women respectively, spheres that predetermine their domains of activity. Thus women are encouraged to spend their time fulfilling their ‘natural’ interest in personal and individual matters, and in all tasks related to domesticity and motherhood. What Tocqueville (1848) writes about America is also true for France: ‘Ainsi, il règne aux États-Unis une opinion publique inexorable qui renferme avec soin la femme dans le petit cercle des intérêts et des devoirs domestiques, et qui lui defend d’en sortir’ [Thus in the United States the inexorable opinion of the public carefully circumscribes woman within the narrow circle of domestic interests and duties and forbids her to step beyond it; Book 3, chapter 10].¹⁴ The public and ‘masculine’ urban space was thus severely circumscribed for French women during the nineteenth century. Such social constraints and norms were also sustained by representations of the urban space as a dangerous one for women. As Griselda Pollock (2003) remarks:

The public space was officially the realm of and for men; for women to enter it entailed unforeseen risks … For women, the public spaces thus construed were places where one risked losing one’s virtue, dirtying one’s self; going out in public and the idea of disgrace were closely allied.¹⁵

Nineteenth-century literary production maintained this idea of an urban space as a threat to women’s virtue. Literary representations of women in the streets are limited to a range of stereotypes such as prostitutes, widows and murder victims. Those representations are stereotypes because, if some women did become prostitutes, widows and murder victims, most of those who accessed the city were workers or consumers. For example, Eugène Briffault, a flâneur from Le Livre des Cent-et-uns, describes a ‘typical’ woman who frequents the city at night:

Il existe à Paris une femme mystérieuse ; elle ne sort que la nuit ; elle se promène ordinairement dans les environs de la Place Vendôme … Malheur à celui qu’elle séduit et retient, il se trouve possesseur d’une femme, réduite par sa laideur à ne faire un aussi ignoble trafic que la nuit, au sein de la plus complète obscurité.¹⁶

There exists in Paris a mysterious type of woman, she only goes out at night; she usually walks in areas around Place Vendôme … Woe betide he whom she seduces and keeps hold of, he now owns a woman whose ugliness means she can only carry out such despicable business at night, surrounded by the most complete darkness.

Briffault’s des...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Preface
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I. Images of the Flâneuse: Mediatic Representations of Women’s Relationship to the City
• Part II. From the Periphery to the Centre: Marginalised Re-inscriptions of the Urban
• Part III. Gendered Spaces, Gendered Places: The Feminisation of the City Environment
• Notes & Works Cited