Jackson Martinez
The flâneur is a commonly associated with class and masculine privilege because he is capable of being invisible to the crowd. The flâneuse, however, experiences alterity because they are denied this privilege along with being subjected to the male-gaze. Therefore, the flâneuse is exposed to forms of oppression that further marginalize and exile the female wanderer. The flâneuse is marginalized for their gender, yet fetishized because of it. Lastly, the flâneuse is subjugated to exile contrary to their male-counterparts.
Flânerie, then, is further representative as being a comment on upper-middle class society, while also revealing the oppressions of gender politics and a misogynistic hegemony. The flâneuse’s behavior is antithetical to the male flâneur. As Parsons notes, the flâneuse, is “less leisured, as well as less assured, yet consciously adventurous” (42), which solidifies and skews female subjectivity in the twentieth century. This is because Parsons’ initial conceptualization offers the suggestion that the flâneuse is fetishized for their “consciously adventurous” disposition. Yet their “less leisured, as well as less assured” subjectivity perpetuates limitations. Parsons further asserts that the flâneuse is “ambiguously gendered” (42) while under surveillance by the “urban spectator.” Moreover, the flâneur comodifies the flâneuse through the male-gaze. As Parsons posits, the flâneuse “is a labelled object of his gaze, from outside a gendered structure of literature” (42). There is an ambiguous disposition perpetuating the flâneuse, and is an effect of their own visibility. The flâneuse’s visibility is systemically “labelled” by the male gaze. Hence, it is problematic to be the “man of the crowd” and invisible to society because the “woman of the crowd” is perpetually visible to the male-gaze. Woolf and Barnes portray flânerie as a means to confront female subjectivity and visibility, but their flâneuse aims to escape a misogynistic ideology posed by the male gaze. Furthermore, Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse: Women Walk the City… expands on Parson’s assertions pertaining to gendered subjectivities. For instance, “The argument against the flâneuse sometimes has to do with questions of visibility...it’s the gaze of the flâneur that makes the woman who would join his ranks too visible to slip by unnoticed” (13). Such questions of visibility will be the focal points in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Barnes’ Nightwood.
The flâneuse, for Woolf and Barnes, is a problematic figure because of misogynistic hegemonies ruling the city. The connecting thread that weaves these authors’ portrayal of flânerie all gravitate towards presence and visibility. Perception in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Barnes’ Nightwood illuminate such questions of presence and visibility through their flâneuses’ mobility. Consequently, the flâneuse is presented under constant surveillance by the male-gaze while also in the shadow of their male-counterparts. Therefore, surveillance further problematizes the flâneuse because of a patriarchal hegemony. The flâneuse is also depicted as a sensation whose haunting reflects the presence of mind, body, and spirit throughout these texts. Characters like Clarissa Dalloway and Robin Vote haunt the streets throughout the narratives they occupy. Woolf’s and Barnes’ subjects further haunt the interiority of the character’s psychological dispositions throughout the texts.
Woolf’s depictions of her flâneuse operate as a comment on the complex nature of intersectional alterity between class, ethnicity, and age. For instance, Mrs. Dalloway interpolates “invisibility” and flânerie by constantly interrogating public spaces in the city. Such spaces have systemically subjected women to the male-gaze, and these spaces are both psychological and spiritual. Various passages in Mrs. Dalloway perpetuate the intersectionalities of psychological neuroses due to post-war anxiety. With these notions in mind, it becomes problematic to precisely “isolate” the flâneuse in the city. An example being where Elizabeth Dallloway’s visibility to the crowd on an omnibus is immediately commodified as both pastoral and misogynistic. On the omnibus, “[P]eople were beginning to compare her to poplar trees, early dawn, hyacinths, fawns, running water, and garden lilies, and it made her life a burden to her” (131). With the juxtaposition of nature and misogyny attributed to Elizabth’s image, this passage reaffirms how problematic it is to be a flâneuse because of this question of visibility. Elizabeth is completely under surveillance to the crowd, and thus her visibility is a “burden” that problematizes her flânerie. Coincidentally, life in the city is also a “burden” for youthful figures like Elizabeth because they will consistently be susceptible to the male-gaze, and moreover fetishized because of it.
Another flâneuse who is antithetical to this “observing presence” is Miss Kilman, Elizabeth’s history teacher. While Kilman is not susceptible to the male-gaze per se, she is, however, susceptible to a gaze of scorn because of her German ethnicity, especially in postwar Britain. Even her name alone, “Kilman” spells “kill man,” which further subjugates her disposition to being both racially and sexually othered. The former is represented through Clarissa Dalloway’s contempt for Miss Kilman. Although Miss Kilman is not subjected to the male-gaze, she is nonetheless exiled from British community because of her German ethnicity. In addition to Clarissa Dalloway’s own ambivalence towards Miss Kilman, it is worthy to note how Woolf portrays her appearance wearing, “a mackintosh; but she had her reasons. First it was cheap; second, she was poor, moreover degradingly poor. Otherwise she would not be taking jobs from people like the Dalloways; from rich people,” (120). By noting Miss Kilman as a subaltern subject from Clarissa Dalloway’s perspective, Woolf shows the flâneuse trope as an intersectional exile wandering within the shadows of an oppressive gaze. Both Dalloway and Kilman are similar in age and are both flâneuses, but their own dispositions of class and ethnicity further denote a spectrum of adversity. Where there is a hierarchy between the sexes and ethnicity, there is also a hierarchy between race and class, hence the intersectional alterity placed upon Kilman. In turn, this reserves the female subjectivity as marginalized through intersectional ooppressions due to intersections of wealth, class, sex, and even age.
In the middle of Clarissa Dalloway’s flânerie on Bond Street, we see her “invisible” body politicized and fetishized in the public by virtue of being associated with her spouse’s name. By meditating on her “being” out of the domestic sphere, this “Mrs Richard Dalloway” is subjected to a double oppression: the male-gaze and the property of her husband Mr. Richard Dalloway. Therefore, the gender politics present themselves by obscuring the figure of the flâneuse as being both in plain sight, yet invisible to the crowd. Woolf portrays Dalloway’s only ability of being “of the crowd,” by interrogating her superficial identity with gendered confinements to Richard Dalloway. And by doing so, we see how Clarissa Dalloway does not have “country,” but also, as de Certeau asserts, “lacks a place.” Lastly, this is where Woolf has alluded to flânerie as a whimsical, if not a leisurely, “street haunt.” This concept interrogates flânerie because of the privilege of class and its status associated with wandering and exile.
Barnes’ Nightwood positions Robin Vote in the guise of a somnambulant flâneuse. As a hauntingly androgyous—and often mystically grotesque—figure, Robin Vote’s polyamorous disposition represents a presence rather than a commodified human being subjected to both a male and female gaze. She is a paradox. Vote is capable of showing glimmers of her character in alcoholic-induced liminal spaces. She seems like an innocent child, yet is the most controversial figure in the novel. Vote is spoken about incessantly, yet her won voice is limited. And lastly, Vote is an omnipresence that haunts the psyche of all her lovers, both past and present. The last example—being the most paradoxical—is Vote’s persistent, yet fleeting, presence. Barnes has created a character who is a dreamlike presence that haunts both the mind and cityscape in Nightwood. It’s not who Robin Vote is, nor what she does in the novel that evokes her unalterable disconnection to hegemony in the text. Rather, it is Vote’s uncanniness that enables her to be a state of mind, which is an impression she leaves for the reader and her subjects in the novel. As Doctor Matthew O’Connor put it to Nora Flood, we “are in her dream” (155). For that observation alone, Robin Vote is closer to being the ultimate flâneuse because she is emphatically of the crowd. And Vote’s phantasmic presence, a rather surreal state of mind, reveal more of her invisibility without being subject to the male gaze. Nightwood, then, is the somnambulistic shadowplay of a flâneuse circumventing the hegemonies that restrain and confine gender identity and sexuality. Robin Vote, then, represents a subversion to the gender politics of the twentieth century.
Robin Vote disturbs her lover Baron Felix’s aristocratic ideology. Her presence interpolates Felix’ being, and perpetually haunts him because of the way that Vote “was gracious and yet fading, like an old statue in a garden, that symbolizes the weather through which is has endured” (45). Vote is surreal: a paradoxical flâneuse that surrounds her victims. Vote’s flâneuse occupies a presence both spatial and psychological. While we see Vote’s somnambulistic wanderings on the Parisian streets at night, we do not see Vote in the spotlight, but rather her presence is the spotlight. Parsons would agree about Vote’s flâneuse by asserting that she “exists in a pre-moral world that tastes fruit without the accompanying knowledge of evil. It is as impossible for us to conceive of Robin’s sense of existence..., and it is partly this that makes her character so mythical” (181). Vote’s flâneuse and character is certainly “mythical” because of her presence in the text. It is through Vote’s character that she exudes a presence that leaves us wandering the text in the same way Vote wanders at night.
By juxtaposing Vote’s haunting presence in the text, we witness surreal accounts of the shadows she projects and misdirects throughout Nightwood. Robin Vote’s flânerie haunts the surreal landscape of the night. We are given accounts of Vote as “la somnambule” because she exhaustively haunts the night leaving shadows of her own existence for the reader. And, in conjunction with the inhabitants of her worlds, Vote occupies these shadows that are projected by her subjects. These subjects are consistently attempting to track her flânerie. Vote’s positions flânerie reflect wandering subjects in her “dream.” Her dream which is littered with trials and tribulations that are unable to be explicitly mapped by those of the real world: only the surreal world.
In conclusion, gender politics and sexuality are interrogated in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Barnes’ Nightwood. This is executed in the way that the flâneuse is subjected to surveillance throughout their wanderings, and the methods in which they circumvent being both visible and invisible to the male-gaze.
Works Referenced
Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood. New Directions, 1946.
Breton, André. Nadja. Translated by Richard Howard, Grove Press. 1960.
Certeau, Michel de., and Steven Rendall. “Walking in the City.” The Practice of Everyday Life.
University of California Press, 1984.
Cole, Merrill. "Backwards Ventriloquy: The Historical Uncanny in Barnes's
Nightwood." Twentieth Century Literature 52.4 (2006): 391-412. Web. 25
April 2018.
Dowling, David. Mrs. Dalloway: Mapping Streams of Consciousness. Twayne Publishers, 1991.
Elkin, Lauren. Flâneuse. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2016.
Parsons, Deborah L. Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity. Oxford
University Press, 2000.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Ed. Mark Hussey. Harcourt, Inc., 2005.
—.Three Guineas. Ed. Mark Hussey. Harcourt, Inc., 2006.
Biography
Jackson Martinez is a graduate student about to complete their Master's of Arts in English at California State University Dominguez Hills. Jackson's current research interests include modernism of the twentieth century with an emphasis on literature from the British Isles. This presentation derives from a portion of his master's thesis.
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