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

I remember the exact moment when I felt Elizabeth Bennet and I were kindred spirits and very much potential best friends: when she decides to walk 3 miles to Netherfield Hall, her independent determined walker’s spirit leaving everyone including Darcy flummoxed. Indeed, throughout history, a woman walking alone has never been without some reaction or polemic. 

Having walked the streets of my tiny Indian town and later having lived and walked the streets of New Delhi, I moved to Paris 1.5 years ago. Walking in Paris is another ball game altogether. Moving to a new country upsets the equilibrium of our past habits, behaviors, and every notion about ourselves and the world. For me, this included walking. During this moment of me learning to walk anew in a city famed for being the best city to walk in, I discovered Lauren Elkin’s beautiful book, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London. 

Elkin’s book is a homage to women walking and wandering the cities of the world, in various forms and for various reasons. It’s a lyrical and contemplative study of the relationship between women and the city, with the act of walking as a mediator through which this relationship is realized, nurtured, and as Elkin demonstrates deftly, conveyed. Part memoir and part an exercise in biography, Elkin intersperses the life stories of women like Jean Rhys, George Sand, Virginia Woolf, and others, with her own experiences of walking in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London.

Elkin’s starting point is, of course, the French verb “flâner.” She unpacks the word carefully, unwrapping how male privilege has always permeated the act of discovering the city by walking, how the visibility of women could be used against her ability to flâner, so much so that this verb has been gendered as male for the better part of its existence. Elkin’s book is a diatribe against this limitation, and an introduction to the female counterpart of this figure, the flâneuse.

In demonstrating how walking itself is a subversive act of rebellion for women, her reverence to the flâneuses who paved the way for others is quite infectious; this motley band of women whose walks enriched their art or whose art re-defined walking culturally and artistically. If you love Paris, this book is especially rewarding as she brings us along in her sauntering discovery of this city and its nooks rich with the evidence of all those who lived here before.

Much like Elkin, I think I too could divide various stages of my life geographically among the various places I have lived. When you walk to think, feel, reflect, or heal, the city itself becomes the bearer of your emotion: the various forks, bends, and benches along the road tinged with the memories of the thoughts you had in your walks. Elkin’s greatest success is in demonstrating walking as an art of documenting not just what we see, but also a medium of documenting urbanity itself. 

While at various points, the author posits walking as an act of leisure and privilege, she does not really delve deep into the extent of it. While this book is a stunning invitation into a richly layered cultural rumination of walking, it would have done well to think of those who have very much been “othered” in cities. There is no mention of women of color or even an acknowledgment of the intersectionality in the ways in which women experience violence and discrimination. We live in a world where women of color are statistically more at risk than cis white women, where bodies of color inhabit a different structural reality than white bodies. These acknowledgments are intrinsic to the discussion of women in public spaces. 

Along with this, there is not much for anyone interested in finding out about flâner and its relationship to disability. I think Paris is one of the most notoriously difficult cities to navigate if you are not able-bodied. And the politics of why this also needs our attention. 

As a woman of color, being in public spaces comes with its own confusing bag of experiences. I think of the first time I walked alone in a small town in Germany and realized embarrassedly, that the calls of “ching-chong” I was hearing, were directed at me. I did not know if it was because of my race or because of my gender. This is unfortunately not an uncommon experience and not that serious, in a scale of violence in public spaces that occur at the intersectionality of gender and race. 

While she derides the way Hemingway and his ilk might have seen the city as belonging to them, she herself professes a sense of belonging to Paris. This sentiment remains unexamined by the author, particularly when not everyone feels a sense of belongingness in spaces because belongingness itself can be structurally determined by class, race, gender, and sexual orientation. We are after all still talking of Paris, where wearing a veil in an educational institute can be criminalized, and presenting as the other is still considered problematic.

As evident from the cities in the title, much of the book’s space is occupied by cities in the West and dipped in the mores of a very Euro-centric understanding of the city. While Tokyo could have been a window to another world, it very much becomes a confrontational point in the book where, for the first time, the author seems to have been confronted by the “other” and even more shockingly for her, being posited as “the other” herself. There was no belongingness here. “It was not going to be easy being a woman in Tokyo, especially a non-Japanese one. I signified in a different way. I was either invisible…or I received a distinctly negative form of attention,” she says.

This tacit acknowledgment that it had been easier for her to be a woman elsewhere, is not really engaged with. It is quite ironic that Elkin’s relationship with Tokyo resonated with me the most when it came to my relationship with Paris, as a woman of color. 

So shocked is she by Tokyo, that she is convinced in the beginning that they were living in “the shit part of town.” I think it is an interesting acknowledgment of the existence of this geographical area deemed “the shit part of town.” This is a way of getting to know a city as well, of learning the geography of the good part and “the shit part.” Apart from this point, in general, the idea of “public space” itself exists quite uninterrogated by the author in the book. It exists simply as something out there. Space is not just culture; it is also economy and finance. Privilege is not only in walking but also in accessing places for walking. 

Much of women moving in the public space is tinged with fear and while reading about women resisting such risks and existing in public spaces sans repeating the same narrative of fear is quite refreshing to hear, it is equally dissatisfying to absolutely not acknowledge the depth of these risks. 

Elkin’s overall proposition of women navigating public spaces on foot and casting our grooves on the map of the cities where once we had been invisiblised, is extremely well received. However, I would like to invoke another way of existing in public spaces, as talked about by Indian feminist Shilpa Phadke. In her fearless book, Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets, Phadke goes a step further and deems not just walking, but the right to loiter” as a feminist issue. This calls for women to be able to occupy spaces without performing “respectability” i.e. without demonstrating that we exist in public spaces for respectable reasons. She says, “Risk-taking is often considered acceptable, even desirable masculine behaviour. For women, on the other hand, it is not only seen as unfeminine but as potentially the behaviour of a ‘loose’ woman.” I think the flâneuse herself cannot exist without this freedom and right to loiter. 

In an effort to support Bookshop.org, this post contains affiliate links. We may receive a commission for purchases made through these links. Thank you for the support!