Women and the City in French Literature and Culture: Reconfiguring the Feminine in the Urban Environment

FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES

Women and the City in French Literature and Culture

Series Editors

Hanna Diamond (Cardiff University)

Claire Gorrara (Cardiff University)

Editorial Board

Kate Averis (Universidad de Antioquia)

Natalie Edwards (University of Adelaide)

Kate Griffiths (Cardiff University)

Simon Kemp (University of Oxford)

Margaret Majumdar (University of Portsmouth)

Debarati Sanyal (University of California, Berkeley)

Maxim Silverman (University of Leeds)

Other titles in the series

Jonathan Lewis, The Algerian War in French/

Algerian Writing: Literary Sites of Memory

Helena Chadderton and Angela Kimyongür (eds), Engagement in Twenty-first-Century French and Francophone Culture: Countering Crises

Kate Averis and Isabel Hollis-Touré (eds), Exiles, Travellers and Vagabonds: Rethinking Mobility in Francophone Women’s Writing (2016)

David A. Pettersen, Americanism, Media and the Politics of Culture in 1930s France (2016)

Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye (eds), Women’s Writing in Twenty-First-Century France: Life as Literature (2013)

Fiona Barclay (ed.), France’s Colonial Legacies: Memory, Identity and Narrative (2013)

Jonathan Ervine, Cinema and the Republic: Filming on the margins in contemporary France (2013)

Kate Griffiths and Andrew Watts, Adapting Nineteenth-Century France: Literature in Film, Theatre, Television, Radio and Print (2013)

Ceri Morgan, Mindscapes of Montréal: Québec’s urban novel, 1950–2005 (2012)

FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES

Women and the City in French Literature and Culture

Reconfiguring the Feminine in the Urban Environment

Edited by

SIOBHÁN McILVANNEY AND GILLIAN NI CHEALLAIGH

© The Contributors, 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to The University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The right of the Contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77, 78 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Gaston Lachaise, Standing Woman (1932). By permission Panther Media GmbH/Alamy Stock Photo.

Contents

Series Editors’ Preface

List of Illustrations

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

Siobhán McIlvanney and Gillian Ni Cheallaigh

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

Chapter 1: A City for Young Ladies: The Parisian Flâneuse of the Journal des Demoiselles

Lucie Roussel Richard

Chapter 2: Unfolding the Domestic Interior: Women, Newspapers and the Nineteenth-Century City

Kathryn Brown

Chapter 3: Agnès Varda in Paris: The Urban Gaze of the Female Film-maker in Three Short Films

Jennifer Wallace

Chapter 4: Imagining on the Outskirts of the City: Duras’s Le Camion and the marcheuse

Sarah Cooper

Part II. From the Periphery to the Centre: Marginalised Re-inscriptions of the Urban

Chapter 5: Morphologies of Becoming: Dehumanisation and Dandyism in Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin

Marina Starik

Chapter 6: Towards a Globalised Banlieue ? Resilience through Literature in Three Narratives of the ‘Ultraperiphery’

Nathalie Ségeral

Chapter 7: Marriage, Pregnancy and the City in Marie Darrieussecq’s Le Pays

Sonja Stojanovic

Chapter 8: Viewing the Algerian Cityscape in Nina Bouraoui’s La Voyeuse interdite and Leïla Sebbar’s ‘La Jeune Fille au balcon’

Siobhán McIlvanney and Gillian Ni Cheallaigh

Part III. Gendered Spaces, Gendered Places: The Feminisation of the City Environment

Chapter 9: ‘For Their Trouble and Labour’: Women’s Work Reconsidered in Late Medieval Amiens

Julie Pilorget

Chapter 10: City, War and Politicisation in Journal à quatre mains by Benoîte and Flora Groult

Imogen Long

Chapter 11: C’est l’endroit qui nous a faits ainsi : Place, Gender and Belonging in Nathacha Appanah’s Blue Bay Palace and Ananda Devi’s Ève de ses décombres

Julia Waters

Chapter 12: Gendered Spaces of Ageing: The Liberations and Limitations of Urban Space in Annie Ernaux and Nancy Huston

Kate Averis

Notes & Works Cited

Series Editors’ Preface

This series showcases the work of new and established scholars working within the fields of French and francophone studies. It publishes introductory texts aimed at a student readership, as well as research-orientated monographs at the cutting edge of their discipline area. The series aims to highlight shifting patterns of research in French and francophone studies, to re-evaluate traditional representations of French and francophone identities and to encourage the exchange of ideas and perspectives across a wide range of discipline areas. The emphasis throughout the series will be on the ways in which French and francophone communities across the world are evolving into the twenty-first century.

Hanna Diamond and Claire Gorrara

List of Illustrations

Figure 2.1: Mary Cassatt, Lydia Reading the Morning Paper (No. 1) (Woman Reading), 1878–9, oil on canvas, 81.28 × 59.69 cm. Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska. Museum purchase, Joslyn Endowment Fund, 1943.38.

Figure 2.2: James Tissot, Hide and Seek, c. 1877, oil on wood, 73.4 × 53.9 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Chester Dale Fund, 1978.47.1. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Figure 2.3: Michel Simonidy, Le Figaro. Poster (colour lithograph on paper), before 1903, 120 × 81 cm. Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona, Plandiura Collection, 000127–C. © Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona 2018. Photo: Calveras\ Mérida\Sagristà.

Figure 2.4: Édouard Vuillard, The Newspaper, c. 1896–8, oil on cardboard, 32.38 × 53.34 cm. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., acquired 1929. Image courtesy of Bridgeman Images.

Figure 3.1: An elderly woman walks up the rue Mouffetard in the rain on market day in Agnès Varda’s L’Opéra-Mouffe.

Figure 3.2: Cleaning ‘la dame au sac’ on the rue Turbigo in Agnès Varda’s Les Dites cariatides.

Figure 3.3: ‘Give the Lion of Belfort a big bone to gnaw and turn him towards the West’ – Breton’s wish is fulfilled by Varda in Agnès Varda’s Le Lion volatil.

Notes on Contributors

Kate Averis teaches European literatures at the Universidad de Antioquia, Colombia. Her research lies in the fields of contemporary literatures in French and Spanish, and in particular, women’s writing, transnational mobility and cultures, ageing studies, and feminisms. She is the author of Exile and Nomadism in French and Hispanic Women’s Writing (Oxford: Legenda, 2014) and co-editor of Exiles, Travellers and Vagabonds: Rethinking Mobility in Francophone Women’s Writing (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2016). She is currently working on research projects on francophone women’s writing of female ageing, and transnational women’s writing in the Americas.

Kathryn Brown is a specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French art and literature. Her books include Women Readers in French Painting 1870–1890 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), Matisse’s Poets: Critical Performance in the Artist’s Book (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) and (as editor and contributor) The Art Book Tradition in Twentieth-Century Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), Interactive Contemporary Art: Participation in Practice (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014) and Perspectives on Degas (London: Routledge, 2016). She is a lecturer in art history at Loughborough University in the United Kingdom and is the series editor of Contextualizing Art Markets for Bloomsbury Academic.

Sarah Cooper is Professor of Film Studies at King’s College London. Her books include Selfless Cinema?: Ethics and French Documentary (Oxford: Legenda, 2006), Chris Marker (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008) and The Soul of Film Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). She has also edited a special issue of the journal Film-Philosophy, ‘The Occluded Relation: Levinas and Cinema’ (vol. 11, no. 2, 2007). She is currently writing a book on film and the imagination.

Siobhán McIlvanney is Reader in French and Francophone Women’s Writing at King’s College London. She has published extensively on French and francophone women’s writing and on the origins of the French women’s press. Her most recent publications include a chapter on the pathologisation of the maternal in paradigms of anorexia in French women’s writing in Starvation, Food Obsession and Identity: Eating Disorders in Contemporary Women’s Writing, published in 2018, and a journal article comparing Simone de Beauvoir’s theoretical and filmic representations of ageing, in the Journal of Romance Studies in 2017. She has a recent monograph, Figurations of the Feminine in the Early French Women’s Press, 1758–1848 published by Liverpool University Press in 2019.

Gillian Ni Cheallaigh was awarded her PhD in French literature in 2015 from King’s College London, where she lectured in French women’s writing, francophone literature and twentieth-century thought. Her thesis is a diachronic examination of the figure of the madwoman in women-authored novels in French. Publications include Quand la folie parle: The Dialectic Effect of Madness in French Literature since the Nineteenth Century (Gillian Ni Cheallaigh, Laura Jackson and Siobhán McIlvanney (eds)) (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014) and numerous articles on women, madness and authorial voice in French and francophone women’s writing.

Imogen Long is Lecturer in French at the University of Hull and is the author of Petitions and Polemics: Women Intellectuals in Post-68 France (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). She has published widely on writing by French feminists from the second wave women’s movement and on the fiction and life-writing of Benoîte Groult in particular. After having recently worked on Françoise Giroud and the early days of L’Express, she is now embarking on a new project on French Culture in the Cold War era.

Julie Pilorget has recently been awarded her PhD in Medieval History at the Université Paris-Sorbonne. Her dissertation, entitled ‘Gender and Urban Space in the Middle Ages (Amiens, 1380–1520)’, uses both urban history and gender studies’ frameworks to examine urban northern Europe, where local customs and economic regulations helped promote women’s inclusion in medieval society. She has taught medieval history at the Sorbonne and currently gives classes at Sciences Po, Paris.

Lucie Roussel Richard is a doctoral student at LASLAR (Lettres, Arts du Spectacle, Langues Romanes), at the University of Caen, France. Her thesis aims to define the relationship between the French press and women writers during the nineteenth century. Her recent work focuses on the women’s press and the July Monarchy. She is co-director of the Ateliers du genre at the University of Caen. Recent publications include ‘La naissance de la presse féminine comme réponse aux solitudes des femmes écrivaines en France au XIXe siècle’, in Solitaires/Solidaires: Conflict and Confluence in Women’s Writings in French (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015).

Nathalie Ségeral is Assistant Professor of French at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, USA. She received her PhD in Francophone Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2012. Her research explores the articulation of gender, trauma and memory in contemporary women’s narratives in the francophone world (especially around the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and the South Pacific). Recent publications include a French translation of David Chappell’s Le Réveil kanak: La montée du nationalisme en Nouvelle-Calédonie (Nouméa: University of New Caledonia Press, 2017) and ‘(Re-)Inscribing the South Pacific in the Francophone World: (Non)Motherhood, Gendered Violence and Infanticide in Three Oceanian Women Writers’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 22/2 (2018).

Marina Starik received her PhD in French from the University of Pittsburgh, USA. She is currently a visiting lecturer of French at Smith College, Geneva. Her research focuses on the semantics of clothing and the figure of the dandy in fin-de-siècle French literature viewed through the lens of postmodern, gender theory and psychoanalysis. She recently contributed to an exhibition catalogue on material culture in the Soviet Union entitled L’Utopie au quotidien (Editions Noir sur Blanc, Switzerland, 2017). She is currently working on a project which examines women dandies in Proust.

Sonja Stojanovic is Assistant Professor of French and Concurrent Faculty in the Gender Studies Program at the University of Notre Dame, USA. Her current research focuses on how spectral figures, as sites of disruption and embodiments of a number of paradoxes, allow us to think disappearance. She has a long-standing interest in representations of motherhood and has written several articles on Marie Darrieussecq.

Jennifer Wallace holds a PhD from the Film Studies department at King’s College London. Her thesis, under the supervision of Professor Ginette Vincendeau, examined the representation of Paris in the films of Agnès Varda. She has given public lectures on the French New Wave and Varda’s career in both the UK and France, although she has left academia due to the precarious position of Early Career Researchers. She is now Digital Recruitment Manager for the MBA program at HEC Paris Business School, and teaches Cultural Studies for the Master’s program.

Julia Waters is Professor of French at the University of Reading, Great Britain. She has published extensively on modern French and francophone literature, especially Marguerite Duras and Indian Ocean literatures. Her main publications include: The Mauritian Novel: Fictions of Belonging (Liverpool University Press, 2018), Duras and Indochina: Postcolonial Perspectives (SFPS Critical Studies, 2006) and Intersexual Rivalry: A ‘Reading in Pairs’ of Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000). She is also editor of ‘"L’ici et l’ailleurs": Postcolonial Literatures of the Francophone Indian Ocean’, e-france: an online journal of French Studies, vol. 2 (2008); and, with Adalgisa Giorgio, of Women’s Writing in Western Europe: Gender, Generation and Legacy (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008).

Introduction

The city has traditionally been configured as a fundamentally masculine space, an ordered, rational, man-made expression, a projection, both material and symbolic, of men’s intellectual projects and spiritual ideals. In contrast, rural domains – metaphorical ‘wild zones’ – are associated with the natural, the non-rational, the feminine. To judge from earlier historical and literary accounts, it would appear to be men who found, plan, build and dominate cities – who constitute the City Fathers and Sons – and who recreate those cities in art, while women figure far less frequently in cityscapes and feel less ‘at home’ when they do. A brief consideration of literary and filmic texts dealing with representations of the city brings to mind a host of male writers and directors, ranging from Charles Baudelaire to Emile Zola to Marcel Carné (Hôtel du nord, 1938) and Matthieu Kassovitz (La Haine, 1995). If historically women figured only rarely in cultural representations of the urban, they could nonetheless read about life in the city, and thus be literary flâneuses of other male – and occasionally female – writers’ representations of the urban environment, whether in novels or journals. This binaristic, gendered approach to representations of the urban is nuanced, and often challenged, in the chapters in this book, which either tease out contestatory discourses behind apparently conventional representations of women’s access to what has been perceived as a quintessentially male space or else portray the pioneering presences of women who forge their own path through the ‘masculine’ urban environment.

Until the nineteenth century in France, the city was characterised as a zone interdite for any respectable bourgeois woman, as an immoral, exploitative and corrupt power against which women had little chance of remaining ‘pure’ – as demonstrated both by the relatively upmarket prostitute Manon in Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut (1731) and by the working-class Nana’s inevitable descent into prostitution in Zola’s eponymous novel (1880). This interdiction partly accounts for the paucity of texts with a female protagonist in the mould of Gustave Flaubert’s Frédéric Moreau in L’Education sentimentale (1869) or Honoré de Balzac’s Eugène de Rastignac in Le Père Goriot (1835), in which a young man moves to the city in order to find fame and fortune; it also accounts for the fact that the author George Sand had to disguise herself as a man in order to walk the city streets without being viewed as a ‘street-walker’. For women, the boundary between prostitute and flâneuse was often deliberately blurred as a means of social and sexual control. This characterisation of the city as a sexually threatening force has been used – and is still used in certain countries and cultures – as a tool to forbid women access to it, in particular prolonged or independent. Yet, a counter-narrative of the city has long sought to find expression. In 1405, Christine de Pizan wrote an allegorical account about women planning, building and living in an urban environment in La cité des dames in which she symbolically constructed an all-female community built on narratives of women’s accomplishments past and present. That early renaissance interest in women’s involvement in public places and literary spaces has undergone a more recent renaissance in contemporary French and francophone women’s literature and culture which are manifesting a renewed interest in women’s public trajectories, in their direction of travel outwards, rather than the traditional movement inwards either towards the domestic arena typically associated with the feminine or towards the reflective female self.

The growth of the fashion industry in France in the latter half of the nineteenth century – and with it the department store – played an important role in the feminisation of urban spaces, as wealthy French women shopped for the wardrobe du jour and, having purchased it, made sure they were seen wearing it by numerous others.¹ That same industry also attracted rural working-class girls and women into the urban environment in order to produce the clothes for these middle- and upper-class consumers. The move from the rural to the urban brought with it an increase in opportunities for women, a greater potential for financial independence (as well as exploitation), and access to educational and professional opportunities – and thus economic emancipation. As Elizabeth Wilson (2002) argues in her chapter ‘The Invisible Flâneur’: ‘[T]he reason divorce was more common in cities was because women had a wider choice of alternative forms of financial support (paid work) and a wider range of alternative housing than in rural areas.’² In her article ‘Albertine’s Bicycle, or: Women and French Identity during the Belle Epoque’, Siân Reynolds (2001) highlights the increasing feminisation of the working environment in French cities – and in Paris, specifically – at the beginning of the twentieth century, citing secretarial, commercial, factory and domestic work as key contributors to the female urban economy, adding: ‘They [women] were hardly being emancipated by such work, but it meant that many were leaving their native villages to become Parisians, leading a very different life from their mothers and grandmothers.’³ Indeed, domestic servants and factory workers were often so poorly paid that prostitution became an obligatory means of survival. It is thus important to steer an accurate course between representations of the city as a dynamic and enriching location for women on the one hand and as a dangerous or oppressive locus on the other: it has been all of these things, and much more, as the contributions to this volume make clear.

Unlike many French publications dealing with women’s relationship to the urban environment, Women and the City is less concerned with ‘sociological’ angles such as the economic disparities suffered by working women in the city, the inadequacies of urban public transport in serving women’s particular needs, or the lack of affordable accommodation for single mothers who need to live near their workplace and have access to childcare.⁴

Rather, while inevitably touching upon some of the more ‘pragmatic’ aspects of women’s experiences of living in a city, this book focuses above all on women’s myriad perceptions of the urban environment – what the city symbolises for them and how they live out their relationship with it – whatever the ontological status of that relationship: real, imaginary or a combination of the two. The city has typically been represented as a melting-pot of humanity, as an arena where all social strata and types are visible. Women’s increasing access to the city has therefore allowed them a creative freedom and a rich supply of material for both their imaginative wanderings and their literal ones. Many of the essays in this volume point to the creative function of the city in representing an external manifestation of an internal space of movement and exploration, but also as a rich source of artistic inspiration through half-glimpsed views or overheard conversations.

Not all women can access the urban space, whether for historical, cultural or religious reasons, and, according to Michel de Certeau’s (1990) emphasis on the importance of walking in the city as an ambulatory means of laying claim to a territorialisation and appropriation of it, this would clearly prevent them from experiencing a strong sense of affiliation with, or knowledge of, the urban environment.⁵ For de Certeau, as we walk the same routes on a daily basis, we accumulate collections of memories and associations which give us a sense of belonging to, and a form of embodied knowledge of, a particular space or place.⁶ Thus ‘ownership’ of the urban has a distinct corporeal slant for de Certeau which results in a spatial knowledge of the city – and which women confined to the domestic cannot possess. According to Neil Leach (2002) in ‘Belonging: towards a theory of identification with place’, de Certeau describes how ‘we make a sense of space through walking practices, and repeat those practices as a way of overcoming alienation’.⁷ This emphasis on the mobility associated with forming a memory bank or associative relationship is what turns a static place into a space for de Certeau. As Women and the City illustrates, many women do not have the opportunity to engage in these walking practices, yet nonetheless succeed in forging imaginary or vicariously anamnestic relationships with the urban space.⁸

This collection of essays, originating in a one-day Women in French conference hosted by King’s College London in May 2014, seeks to question many of the idées reçues surrounding women’s ongoing association with the private, the domestic, and the rural; it interrogates the traditionally gendered dichotomisation of the masculine public and feminine private upon which so much of French literature and culture is predicated. This anthology can also be read as a successor to both an earlier Women in French publication ‘Women’s Space and Identity’ (1992) and a Dalhousie French Studies issue, originating in a conference organised by the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing, entitled ‘Space, Place and Landscape in Contemporary Francophone Women’s Writing’ (2010). The current volume narrows the treatment of space to the urban environment and seeks to ‘denaturalise’ many of the ideologies underpinning the separate spheres’ binary. Why is the ‘man in the street’ taken as a neutral designation for both men and women, while the gender-neutral term ‘streetwalker’ is only ever used as a pejorative term of reference for a putatively sexually licentious woman, a woman who ‘doesn’t know her place’? 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? Is the city environment inevitably hostile and threatening to (lone) women, an intimidating and dehumanising force? Or does it, rather, represent a liberating space – whether anonymous or sororal – of rich social and cultural horizons where women can self-determine? The following collection of essays represents an important and timely reassessment of the role of women in the city, examining the relationship of women to the urban environment portrayed in literary, filmic, pictorial and journalistic texts. It seeks to locate exactly where women are heading – both individually and collectively – in their relationships to the city; 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

The four essays which make up this section provide a chronologically diverse analysis of differing mediatic representations of women’s access to the urban environment, above all through their role as types of flâneuses. The first two chapters deal with the press either as primary subject or as portrayed in pictorial representations of reading women. The latter two chapters discuss cinematic representations of women and the cityscape. The flâneuse, whether literary or literal – a female version of that quintessentially male ‘stroller’ epitomised in Baudelaire’s poetry, who enjoys a leisurely voyeuristic relationship with the city – is a recurrent figure in many female authors’ portrayal of the urban environment. The flâneur has gained a quasi-allegorical significance as an individual embodying complete physical freedom, who can access and observe any social stratum or event and take his time in doing so. He consumes views and happenings, in the same way the bourgeois female in the first two chapters of this anthology is portrayed as consuming fashion journals and the accounts of city life they provide. And this is a key difference between the two genders’ contact with the city in the nineteenth century: not only do the women discussed in these chapters usually read about the city as opposed to experiencing it directly, but they are also resolutely middle- and upper-class. The typical male flâneur, while in possession of the financial and temporal means to indulge in leisurely strolling in an attempt to stave off his ennui, is portrayed as a type of déclassé who is at home everywhere and nowhere; his locus on the margins of the city reinforces the traditional detachment characteristic of the flâneur’s perspective. The nineteenth-century flâneuses portrayed in this volume are firmly anchored in a particular (wealthy) class, yet possess a similar drive to gain access to the city either through readerly or visual appropriation of it, or, on rare occasions, in person.

It is not coincidental that both early chapters examine the role of women’s journals and newspapers in mediating women’s relationship with the city, since the fragmented, ever-changing content of the feuilleton was seen to correspond perfectly to a representation of the manifold experiences and events of busy city life. These chapters demonstrate that the patriarchal ideology which deemed the city an unsafe and unsavoury space for women was always open to challenge, in that, however constrained their domestic existence, French women sought to negotiate different means of accessing the urban, and to promote the ongoing importance of feminine re-visions of it. Both these opening chapters point to the implicit, liberatory interpretative readings which newspapers and paintings offered the reader and spectator. Such media did not portray women’s access to the urban as unproblematic, but, rather, offered up alternative means of appropriating the city visually and intellectually for those women whose physical access to it proved limited, if not impossible – means that we also see replicated in later chapters in this volume, as in Chapter 8 which examines twentieth-century postcolonial women’s writing.

Lucie Roussel Richard’s contribution, which forms the first chapter of the anthology, examines the role played by the nineteenth-century female flâneuse-by-proxy as she accesses public spaces vicariously through her newspaper and thus gains a (foot) hold on the urban environment forbidden to her. It focuses on the physical and professional constraints experienced by writing women in nineteenth-century Paris, and details the accepted experiential links between accessing that urban environment and gaining writerly insight into multiple aspects of the human condition. Without such access, women writers were viewed as running the risk of limiting their literary output to often rather insipid moral tales or etiquette manuals. Indeed the profession of writer itself was closely correlated with the role of the flâneur, in that s/he approximated individuals in writing whom the flâneur encountered in the city in person. Given the rigid ideological separation of the private and public spheres in the nineteenth century, the editor of the Journal des Desmoiselles (1833–1922), Jeanne Justine Fouqueau de Pussy, describes some interesting cases of the entre-deux where she allows women readers to enter the urban environment through her detailed journalistic descriptions of certain areas of Paris; like so many subsequent women writers, she uses her own limited access to the city as a springboard for rich imaginative wanderings, both for herself and other women. Fouqueau de Pussy does not yet live in an age where such access can be granted to women unproblematically.

That access continues to remain principally vicarious in the material covered in Chapter 2. Kathryn Brown further develops the argument positing women as active consumers of the city in her essay on representations of reading women in nineteenth-century pictorial art. The late nineteenth century saw a proliferation of images portraying reading women both within the domestic realm and in the urban environment. In other words, women viewers could see numerous paintings of women reading in different locations, representing and normalising women’s need for different kinds of reading matter beyond that of the novel, with which they were most closely associated. By portraying women reading newspapers about and in the city, these paintings helped make acceptable the belief that women were both interested in and inhabited areas beyond the private sphere of the home; indeed, they flagged it up in a visible material manner, not unlike the posters the chapter goes on to discuss, giving literal form ‘to the increasing visibility of female newspaper readers both within and outside the domestic sphere’ (p. 49). During a period of growing commodification and commercialisation, French women’s access to material representations of the city further expands both their urban and political knowledge, whether from within the safe confines of the home or outside in the urban environment itself. As Virginia Woolf (1984 [1930]) remarks in ‘Street Haunting’, one of the many benefits of flânerie is its fuelling of multiple potential (female) selves in order ‘to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others’.⁹ These pictorial representations similarly erode entrenched binaries between private and public space, the domestic and the urban, unsettling critical assumptions about women’s exclusion from, and lack of engagement in, the public sphere.

Such vicarious access finds realisation in the cinematic considerations of women exploring the urban environment in both Jennifer Wallace’s and Sarah Cooper’s contributions to the anthology. These chapters examine cinematic portrayals of the female’s appropriation and radical transformation of the city, in which women use the city as material for their own ‘feminine’ creativity, rather than accessing it through the representation of a – typically male – Other. Wallace’s essay examines both Agnès Varda’s and her female protagonists’ perception of Paris in three short films spanning three different decades: L’Opéra-Mouffe [Diary of a Pregnant Woman] (1958), Les Dites Cariatides [The So-Called Caryatids] (1984) and Le Lion volatil (1997). Wallace argues that Varda brings a female perspective to the conventionally ‘masculine’ urban spaces she portrays in these short films, a perspective which reflects traditional female experiences related to pregnancy or domesticity, yet challenges them through the subversive angle of their representation. Varda refutes any notion that such work reflects a documentary-style objectivity in its depiction of the city by projecting the film-maker’s own anxieties regarding pregnancy or her concerns for the future onto the surrounding environment, thereby breaking down boundaries between subject and object. Similar to the flâneuse, Varda merges with her environment, fusing the observing subject with the objectified Other. Wallace also looks at the role of women and the city from a materialist, architectural angle in her study of the representation of female caryatids in Paris, thereby tracing a trajectory linking architectural ‘images of women’ located in Paris. While apparently decorative in function, these imposing female statues can also be seen as a symbolic representation of women’s longheld contribution to supporting city life. Wallace’s chapter thus provides evidence of a profoundly feminocentric viewpoint on the city in Varda’s filmic texts.

Cooper’s essay examines Marguerite Duras’s film Le Camion [The Lorry] (1977) and links the role of the flâneuse with both visible and invisible musings, as the woman in the film is described as travelling through an industrial landscape and the spectator learns of her imaginative trajectories. Like the women portrayed in the paintings studied in Chapter 2, the woman in Duras’s film is removed from the urban landscape both through her actual location – this time through her enclosure in a lorry’s cabin – and through her mental transportation elsewhere. That focus on the evocative power of imaginative flânerie is one replicated in the spectator of Duras’s film who is also encouraged to create and inhabit an imaginary space in his or her understanding of the film – which comprises a series of non-totalising images – to be both part of and removed from the interpretative process of filmwatching, in a manner similar to the woman’s relationship with the landscape through which she is travelling. In a further dissemination of roles, Cooper sees the act of film-making as echoed by the creative act