On Wilson's "Invisible Flaneur"

I really enjoyed this week's reading. I liked how it helped piece together several issues we've discussed in class over the past several weeks. While it's still very heavy on theory, I think Wilson's style just made it a very good read. As she discusses and historicizes the “relationship of women to cities,” I found it easier to track the claims she disagreed with and where she positioned herself as a feminist writer. She discusses issues of marginality, commodification, consumerism, sexuality, and gender roles. And she explores these issues by citing other critics and theorists. From Baudelaire to Benjamin to Lacan and to other feminist writers, Wilson seems to be situating herself amidst these writers by arguing that women were not isolated from the public sphere; they did have a visible place in the city and they play an important role in the city. One of the claims that she makes, as she responds to Janet Wolff’s argument that women were “wholly excluded” from a male-dominated public sphere, is that images and representations are more important than words or established discourses. She says, “we are confronted with representations, and these are impossible to counter by means of material evidence, trapped as we are in ‘the ultimate labyrinth-history’” (99).

With the rise of department stores, restaurants, and ladies’ rooms, we can see that women were in fact participating in consumerism and were present in public spaces. As I was following Wilson’s argument, I kept thinking about why this would be an important point to make? From today’s perspective, it’s not difficult to understand that woman’s relationship to shopping, consumerism, and the public sphere has a long history dating back to the nineteenth-century. However, in the section “Blurring the Lines of Demarcation,” I understood that Wilson was less concerned with establishing that women were in the public sphere than with exploring a woman’s position in the city, public space. I think she makes a valid point when she argues that women in the city had more opportunities than women in the countryside. The working-class woman had more options in work and residence than if she stayed in the country, “embedded in the family economy” (103). It seems as if Wilson is arguing against other feminist critics who downplay or ignore a woman’s agency, freedom, and opportunity that can be better actualized in the city space than anywhere else.

            If I could try to sum up what I take away from Wilson, I’d say that women and men can be marginalized in society. She ultimately argues against women being invisible flaneurs because the flaneur himself “never really existed” but was just an “embodiment of the special blend of excitement, tedium, and horror aroused by many in the new metropolis” (109). In the city, we are all battling against commercializing and marginalizing forces in a capitalistic society. I love how Wilson states that the true heroism lies in “surviving the disorienting space” of the city (110). It’s not about arguing over the position that men and women hold in society. It’s more about being aware of how a woman’s presence in the city can undermine established ways of thinking and negotiate new ways of thinking.