Women in the city: Female flanerie and the modern urban imagination

My dissertation follows the trajectory of female flanerie in women's writing from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. I analyze the transformations of female urban subjectivity in the works of Charlotte Bronte, Katherine Mansfield, Jean Rhys, and Virginia Woolf. These writers imagine female characters and narrators as urban subjects whose sense of self develops in the dangerous and attractive spaces of the modern city. I target those moments in which female flaneurs collapse the perceptual distance between themselves and the city so that their imagination fuses with urban space.;In my first chapter, I explain the concept of the flaneur as an urban walker and spectator, a central figure in urban modernity. I trace the transformations of the female flaneur in the urban culture of spectacle, and underscore the indispensible role of the flaneuse for modernist literary experimentation. In the second chapter on Bronte's Villette (1853), I focus on the heroine's struggle for independence and agency as an urban spectator. Next I treat Katherine Mansfield's short story, "The Tiredness of Rosabel" (1918), and Jean Rhys's novel, Good Morning, Midnight (1939), showing how these writers employ the flaneuse's subjective fragmentation in order to imagine a new urban self that opens toward urban space. My study culminates with the analysis of Woolf's writing, especially "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1923), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and A Room of One's Own (1929), in which she moves beyond the conventions of realism to emphasize the contingency and mystery of city life. Her characters and narrators come to life only in urban exchanges. Drawing on this kind of reciprocity between the flaneuse and the city, I argue that Woolf breaks new ground in articulating a provisional kind of collectivity between urban dwellers that becomes a base for future women's writing.