Abstract
This conference paper explores the question of female flânerie in Maeve Brennan's short contributions published in the 1950s and 1960s in The New Yorker's 'Talk of the Town' column. The writing of this Irish-American woman can be read as an answer to the question whether there ever 'could be such a figure-a female flâneur in a man's world.'1 Inventing the persona of The Long-Winded Lady, Brennan explores and challenges the traditional relationship between the one who sees and the one who is seen: the flâneur and the passante.
Trying to step into the flâneur's shoes and transition from the passante into the flâneuse, the Lady voices her experience as an arduous task that produces ambiguous results. The persona's breaching of gender norms induces feelings of shame, marking the position of the flâneuse as insecure, while also creating a strong connection between her and those that she observes.
At the same time, the persona's style and sophistication, which allow her to command more respect as narrator and a woman in public urban space, alienate her from the poor and less fortunate that she encounters in the streets. As the daughter of the Irish Ambassador to the United States, Brennan was on the one hand privileged and benefited from her social connections, while her gender, on the other hand, made her an outsider in the city, among the staff of The New Yorker magazine, and within the literary canon itself.
Since the Lady's flânerie is stifled and complicated in multiple ways, she is forced to experiment with creative solutions, her ambiguous outsider-insider status adding a unique perspective to the corpus of literature gathered within the category of flânerie. 1 Rudrani Gangopadhyay, 'The 'Woman' of the Crowd: Exploring Female Flânerie,' Rupkatha Journal: On Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities 7.3 (2015), 91-9 (p.91).