Approved by

Directed by Dr. Roberto E. Campo. 87 pp. This thesis is a study of the practice of flânerie (“strolling”) in three novels by the nineteenth-century French author and purveyor of Naturalism, Émile Zola: Thérèse Raquin, La Curée, and Au Bonheur des dames. Flânerie, 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 flâneur is a leisurely male stroller with an ambiguous role in the changing metropolis. The possibility of a female flâneuse 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 flâneuse 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 flânerie of these characters highlights the paradoxes of women in the new spaces of modernity, areas devoted to leisure, consumerism, and spectatorship. FLÂNERIE IN ZOLA’S PARIS b