Freedom begins in the city and the city raises barricades against respectability and misogyny. The city is the amniotic fluid of the strollerwhich is not just the masculine of stroller, but she is a new woman, who walks towards the future, free, hair blowing in the wind, full of colors and projects. The writer Lauren Elkin tries to tell it in her own Flâneuse. Women walking around the city in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London, a chic book, very cultured, full of ideas, places, achievements. It is a volume in which the cities crossed, lived and loved become books to leaf through to find history, literature (so much and beautiful) and customs.
Baudelaire as inspiration
Il stroller it is not only that of Balzac, aimless wanderer or artist who puts the experiences of the city into his works. It is not only that of Baudelaire, also here an artist who seeks refuge in the crowd. The idea of stroller it has no gender, it is universal because men and women enjoy walking. Women were on the streets like men with the appearance of department stores in the 50s and 60s of the nineteenth century, at the end of the century they ride bicycles and work in offices and shops, so, explains Elkin, the Susan Sontag of her generation, who has tasted the cities he writes about for study or work: «The portraits in these pages show that stroller it is not simply the feminine of stroller, but a reference figure, to be inspired by, an independent figure. He travels, goes where he shouldn’t go; it forces us to face the ways in which words like home and belonging are used against women. He is a determined individual, resourceful and deeply in tune with the creative potential of the city, and with the liberating possibilities of a good walk. There stroller it exists whenever we deviate from the road that has been traced for us, starting in search of our own territory ». This book teaches us, and above all it teaches men, that we women are all strollers: many women, girls want to discover each other and discover each other. They leave alone, free, curious, like Alessia Piperno, a travel blogger arrested in Iran.
Strolling in New York, Tokyo and London
Lauren Elkin walks and feels at home, because the world is home: she goes at her pace, measures Long Island in New York, feels life moving in and around, encounters unexpected corners, parks and shops: “The city sets you in motion , it makes you go, move, think, desire, commit. The city is life ». In Paris she makes us walk next to the women of Farewell, Mr Mackenzie by Jean Rhys, an alcoholic, alienated writer who finds the heat of refuge in the French capital and who knew how to observe life with a difference of vision. In the Parisian streets, it is also George Sand who is radical in everything, with his men’s suits: “I had the feeling of being able to travel around the world“, yet he violated a law of 1800, and still in force, which prohibited women to wear pants in public. But Sand fears nothing, walks and attracts the glances, incarnation of the revolution as were the women in turmoil who marching on Versailles opened the dances of the French Revolution.
In London Virginia Woolf’s eyes act as Virgil, especially in Bloomsbury, idea gypsy and the concept of freedom before geographical area: the writer confesses that all her novels were born observing an old lady in the opposite corner. To say how women went out, conquered the streets and destiny, experienced it street haunting: whoever observes the city is “an oyster of perception”.
The labyrinth of Venice
Venice is a labyrinth where you are sure to be late even before you have set foot outside your home: «The labyrinth of the city is designed to encourage desire. What we want, and which disappears around the next corner, is always a few steps further on ». Like the one that Elkin makes us stretch to Tokyo, where women are present in the small details: “The syllabic hiragana alphabet in calligraphy is called not at alland it is said onnade, woman’s hand “. Then, every city changes and we hardly recognize it: «Maybe it’s good to keep a little distance from the things we know best, to always be slightly out of sync, and not pretend to be in control. Under the cities that we do not recognize, all those that we know well are stacked ». And that give us strength to start again, perhaps by following the pages of Traveling women by Lucie Azema. Penelope stayed at home, Ulysses traveled, the story is all here, but the journey is about unhinging conventions, walls, violence because, Simone de Beauvoir recalls, «the female body is a social body before being a lived body; and, as such, it functions like a destiny ». All to devour, ravenous.