Fla^nerie in Zola's Paris

"This thesis is a study of the practice of fla^nerie ("strolling") in three novels by the nineteenth-century French author and purveyor of Naturalism, E´mile Zola: The´re`se Raquin, La Cure´e, and Au Bonheur des dames. Fla^nerie, the dual activity of walking and observing, constitutes a spatial and visual negotiation of the urban landscape. As defined by Charles Baudelaire and redefined by the twentieth-century German Marxist critic, Walter Benjamin, the fla^neur is a leisurely male stroller with an ambiguous role in the changing metropolis. The possibility of a female fla^neuse raises fundamental questions about the role of women in urban public life. In the course of this thesis, I expose the presence and nature of a Zolian fla^neuse by examining the cases of his female characters in the three novels and their relation to existing social limitations and new possibilities for emancipation in late nineteenth-century Paris. In the end, I propose that the successful and failed fla^nerie of these characters highlights the paradoxes of women in the new spaces of modernity, areas devoted to leisure, consumerism, and spectatorship."--Abstract from author supplied metadata