Two Cities Seen by Flâneur and Flâneuse: Benjamins’ Paris and Woolf’s London

This paper explores how Walter Benjamin and Virginia Woolf reflected on metropolitan city life in early modern period as a flâneur and a flâneuse . In Arcades Project, Benjamin attempts to reassemble ‘thought images’ from former century’s historical fragments in Paris streets of the 1920s and the 1930s and make a new literary montage. As a flâneur, he observes the streets flooded with people and the products to get his insights on the consumerism of capitalist production. Virginia Woolf, on the other hand, describes in her essay “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” a flâneuse who comes to intuitively grasp the two faces of the metropolis where wealth and poverty coexist. In “The Docks of London,” she criticizes surging merchandises of New imperialist capitalism which are born and domesticated by relentless human desire. While street walking enables Benjamin to embody thought images, it gets Woolf to feel freedom as an imaginative individual being. Benjamin searches for the meaning of phantasmagoric ‘merchandises’ on Paris street, but Wolf glances deserted ‘lives of people’ veiled with glittering city lights.