The Flâneuse: Appearing to be Invisible

Flâner is a French verb meaning to stroll, or to take a leisurely walk. In 1863, poet Charles Baudelaire introduced his readers to his idea of the flâneur; the flâneur first appears in “The Painter of Modern Life”. Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Passagen-Werk which was begun in 1927 and remained unfinished and it takes the idea of the flâneur, or the stroller, much further. My inspiration for this project about the flâneuse was Janet Wolff’s 1985 essay ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity’ in which Wolff argues that the existence of the female flâneur, or the flâneuse, is impossible because she could not wander the streets of the metropolis without compromising her reputation.