The title page of Louis Huart’s 1841 Physiologie du flâneur shows two fashionable women walking side by side while a man behind them has stopped on the pavement in order to stare intently at them. The female faces betray their hesitancy as they draw near to each other. The male figure, whose facial features are obliterated, communicates his confidence by the swagger of his pose as he leans jauntily on his walking-stick, a haughty Van Dyck type transposed to the pavements of Louis-Philippe’s Paris. This male walker and observer, the flâneur as social type, has received the majority of critical attention and interpretation prior to the postmodern period when feminist scholars began to question women’s agency or lack of it in the urban milieu of Haussmannized Paris. Janet Wolff in “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity” (in Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990, 34–50) and Griselda Pollock in “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity” (in Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art, London: Routledge, 1988) investigated the social and psychological constraints imposed on women as portrayed in the literature and art of the nineteenth century when the...