The Flâneur

The French poet Charles Baudelaire wrote that in the city we become a flâneur or stroller.  This was a new urban figure.  According to Baudelaire, the flâneur moves through the labyrinthine streets and hidden spaces of the city, partaking of its attractions and fearful pleasures, but remaining somehow detached and apart from it.

An Austrian writer called Walter Benjamin described the city as a labyrinth, an endless maze.  According to Greek Mythology, there was a gigantic labyrinth on the island of Crete.  Inside the labyrinth was a Minotaur, a monstrous creature that was half man, half bull.  This is an image of the Greek hero Theseus killing the Minotaur.

Benjamin used the metaphor of the labyrinth to describe his conception of the city.  He argued that the streets, alleys and hidden spaces of the city were like an endless labyrinth.  Benjamin also argued that the city was a site of fearful pleasure, and he used the Minotaur to represent that.  Benjamin’s Minotaur, his source of fearful pleasure, was the three prostitutes in a small Berlin brothel.  It was a site that he was drawn to and which provoked fear and desire at the same time.

In Benjamin’s work, the city is presented as the playground of the male flâneur and women are present only as objects of the male gaze.  He presents the prostitute as the archetypal female figure in the city.

Feminist writers have argued that only men had unrestricted access to urban space.  For example, Griselda Pollock is a feminist art historian.  She examined the experience of Impressionist artists in Paris.  The Impressionists often painted the hidden spaces of the city.  Degas, for example, painted the backstage areas of theatres and nightclubs.  He painted the dancers in images charged with eroticism. 

Toulouse Lautrec was a painter who frequented the shady nightclubs of Paris.  One of his paintings depicts the Moulin Rouge, the notorious nightclub were the Can-Can was invented.  A lot of impressionist painting focuses on these types of space.

These were spaces where respectable women couldn’t go.  Women artists couldn’t gain access to these spaces and for that reason they were unable to participate in a critical area of Impressionist activity.  Only male artists were able to access the bohemian and sexually-ambiguous spaces that formed the subject matter of their paintings.  This partly accounts for the marginal status of women artists within the history of art.

In the 19th century, the city was conceptualised as a labyrinth full of secret spaces of pleasure and danger.  It’s been argued that only men had free access to urban space and that women were only present as objects to be consumed.