Chapter 2 Hidden Figures: Women Writing the July Monarchy Night
In: Marginal ParisSearch for other papers by Charlotte Berkery in
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Abstract
A time and space of alterity, the Parisian nightscape undergoes fundamental changes during the July Monarchy (1830–1848), most notably due to the advent of gas lighting and the city’s transformation from a medieval landscape into a modern metropolis. Many authors and chroniqueurs seek to record these changes in texts ranging from social realism to the fantastic, praising or criticizing, mocking or lamenting the transformation of the Paris night. Going beyond the canonical works that represent nocturnal Paris during the July Monarchy, this chapter analyzes the female author’s perspective on the Parisian nightscape. Drawing from George Sand and Delphine de Girardin, as well as lesser-known or forgotten authors, I consider the writing strategies adopted by women of the period to represent nocturnal Paris. The prevailing idea in well-known literary depictions of July Monarchy Paris at night is that of the nocturnal street as a masculine space where women generally feature as objects of the male gaze. From shadowy figures in doorways to scenes of exhibition under the boulevards’ streetlamps, such evocations of the Parisian night typically include the representation of the sexualized female body alongside a discourse of control and containment. This chapter examines a variety of female-authored texts, extracting recurring themes and motifs and the ways in which these writers seek to differentiate themselves from their male counterparts. Janet Wolff and Griselda Pollock have argued the impossibility of the figure of the flâneuse, but this chapter demonstrates the solutions women writers offered to the difficulties presented by female nightwalking, analyzing scenes of companionable nocturnal flânerie, as well as representations of the night-time street from a window or balcony.