The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 19 (2008)

Defining the American Flâneuse:
Constance Fenimore Woolson and “A Florentine
Experiment”

Yuko MATSUKAWA*[F]lânerie parallels with the idea of the search, and in the abstract wandering in
the city this search would seem to be not for place but for self or identity. Flânerie
can thus be interpreted as an attempt to identify and place the self in the uncertain
environment of modernity . . . 1

The figure of the flâneuse (the female counterpart to the urban stroller, theflâneur, who fascinated both Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin as they
contemplated how this figure of modernity defined urban spaces in Europe)
initially was considered to be represented by the body of the streetwalker, theprostitute, who was thought to be the only kind of woman “on the stroll” incities; however, recent scholarship has shown how female flânerie and its
representation in writing reconfigures our understanding of not only modernity but also the construction of female subjectivity. Most considerations of
the flâneuse as a visible and active agent in defining the metropolis focus
upon European cities and European women who were, more often than not,consumers, shop girls, and artists, rather than prostitutes.
The non-European women who strolled through European cities also complicated this category. Given that in the latter part of the nineteenth century,
many American women traveled to Europe and many writers, both male andCopyright © 2008 Yuko Matsukawa. All rights reserved. This work may be used,with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may
be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission
from the author.
*Associate Professor, Seijo University

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female, adopted the figure of the American Girl Abroad in their fiction totease out the complex relationship between the Old World and the New, it isno surprise that many American women travelers participated in flânerie as
they made their way across the European continent. In fact, the surfeit oftravel writing by American women in the nineteenth century stands as a testament to not only the pleasures of travel but also the intensity of their experiences as they wandered through old European cities.
Did not American women stroll through American cities during modernity? The rise of American cities understandably comes after that of European
cities; therefore the flâneuse of American cities inhabits a different space inrelation to her European counterparts in that the city itself is busily being
constructed and has less baggage than European cities. One may argue thatthe flâneuse, at least in the context of earlier American centuries, strolled
through the wilderness or nature to observe not only her country but also her
counterparts. In the post-Civil War era, when the metropolises of the UnitedStates started to flourish with both the influx of people and a constant streamof capital, women became more visible in the city, both as workers and as
shoppers. Literature mirrors this bifurcation: in works such as Mary Austin’s“The Walking Woman” (1907) and Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the
Pointed Firs (1896), female protagonists walk through sparsely populated
terrain that is untouched by industrialization or urbanization, whereas in novels such as Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), Frances Ellen Watkins
Harper’s Iola Leroy; or Shadows Uplifted (1892) and Pauline Elizabeth
Hopkins’s Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life Northand South (1900), the female protagonists’ identities depend on and areshaped by the metropolises they inhabit.
American women who traveled abroad in the nineteenth century as well as
representations of such women in literature brought their American walking
sensibilities to Europe and often used their perambulations in foreign cities toponder what they had been and what they were to become. One such woman
was the American writer Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840−1894), who inletters to family members and close friends in the United States, expressed
her delight in living abroad for the first time, after her mother’s death freed
her from familial obligations in the United States and allowed her to travel todestinations she had only dreamt about. Woolson’s unfortunate childhood in
New Hampshire and Ohio had been scarred by the deaths of most of her siblings (some in childhood of scarlet fever, others after marriage of tuberculosis) as well as by the early death of her father. This prompted years of traveling around the United States with her mother while trying to carve out aDEFINING THE AMERICAN FLÂNEUSE

85

writing career for herself.2
A grand-niece of James Fenimore Cooper on her mother’s side, Woolson
had relatives in Cooperstown, New York, and a family summer cottage on
Mackinac Island, Michigan, but it was St. Augustine, Florida, where she
spent some years with her widowed mother, that charmed her enough for her
to consider it an ideal place to which she might retire. However, after her
mother’s death, the chance to travel to Europe, and to meet expatriate writer
Henry James, was too tempting to resist. Her departure from the UnitedStates in 1879, which marked the beginning of a nearly fifteen-year sojournin Europe, also signaled the beginning of a peripatetic and nomadic existence, punctuated by long sojourns in Florence and shorter stays in places
such as Geneva, London, Venice, and Oxford, as well as trips to Greece andEgypt.
Woolson, a popular novelist, short story writer, poet, and travel writer during her lifetime, though enthralled by Europe and all its possibilities for her,wrestled with the problem of how to make a home when all the prerequisites
for home—at least to a single woman living in the latter half of the nineteenth
century—were not available to her. Writing both in the United States andabroad, Woolson examines the condition of women in post-Civil War America and reveals gendered spaces that were closed to, and forgotten, overlooked, or ignored by, male writers of the same time period. A prolific writerand an enthusiastic walker, her life and works highlight the constraints andlimitations of womanhood in the United States in writings set in the UnitedStates and abroad. In particular, her keen observations of city life amongst
the expatriate communities in Italy—Rome, Venice, Florence—where she
lived and worked provide us with paradigms of the American flâneuse in action. In particular, Florence stands out as the location where Woolson cultivated lasting friendships with American writers and artists, and contemplated
the condition of expatriate American women while she tried to make herself
at home.
This paper traces the intersections of flânerie, travel, and gender throughan examination of Woolson herself as a flâneuse whose observations of urbanlife informed her fiction, and of the figure of the American Girl Abroad as
flâneuse in Woolson’s fiction. Focusing on Woolson’s short story “A Florentine Experiment,” I discuss how Florentine urban spaces and their subjection
to the expatriate female gaze provide Woolson and her flâneuse protagonist
with the means of addressing their identities as American upper-middle-classwomen in Italy and of reinventing themselves in Florence, a foreign city thatitself symbolizes artistic rebirth.

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THE FLÂNEUSECharles Baudelaire’s essay, “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), is anappreciation of the artist and illustrator Constantin Guys (1802−92), who
specialized in painting contemporary life. Baudelaire’s characterization ofGuys as a flâneur defines this stroller of cityscapes in the following way:
The crowd is his element, as the air is that of the birds and water of fishes. Hispassion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfectflâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in theheart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the
fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhereat home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hiddenfrom the world—such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent,passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes
the whole world his family . . . 3

Baudelaire declares that the “mainspring of [Guys’s] genius is curiosity”4and that this quality is what allows Guys to enjoy flânerie so that it informs
his art. In his essays on Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin also imagines his flâneur as a man of the crowd, mingling anonymously with the masses in his
perambulatory perusal of Paris. Benjamin declares that the figure of the flâneur is a symbol of modernity who transforms the city to suit his own purposes:
The street becomes a dwelling place for the flâneur; he is as much at home amonghouse façades as a citizen is within his four walls. To him, a shiny enameled shop
sign is at least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to a bourgeois in his
living room. Buildings’ walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks;
newsstands are his libraries; and café terraces are the balconies from which helooks down on his household after his work is done.5

The flâneur in Benjamin’s construction is a man who strolls through thecity but does not make a spectacle of himself; rather, it is his eye that makesa spectacle of the city. By occupying space that would have been alien to him,
he makes it his own, just as he, in the quotation above, makes public space his
own by transforming its parameters into private domestic space. His discerning eye connects him to literary realism as he takes in the quickly-changing

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city.
Considerations of the flâneur’s female counterpart, the flâneuse, have challenged models of modernity as masculine. In an influential essay, “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity,” Janet Wolff declares:“The literature of modernity describes the experience of men. It is essentiallya literature about transformations in the public world and in its associative
consciousness . . . [which addresses] their concern with the public world ofwork, politics and city life.”6 By reminding us that “these are areas fromwhich women were excluded, or in which they were practically invisible,”7
and that men and women occupied separate spheres, Wolff argues that the
flâneuse “was rendered impossible by the sexual divisions of the nineteenth
century.”8 Wolff ends her essay by hinting at some possibilities for correcting
this imbalance:
What is missing in this literature is any account of life outside the public realm, ofthe experience of “the modern” in its private manifestations, and also of the very
different nature of the experience of those women who did appear in the publicarea; a poem written by “la femme passante” about her encounter with Baudelaire,
perhaps?9

Wolff’s essay triggered a landslide of essays about the existence, definition, and validity of the flâneuse. For instance, Elizabeth Wilson’s essay,“The Invisible Flâneur,” points out that the existence of the flâneur itself was,by the same token, precarious and verging on the invisible. Wilson notes here
how women in nineteenth-century Europe could not be made invisible inpublic spaces, despite restrictions: “although the male ruling class did all it
could to restrict the movement of women in cities, it proved impossible tobanish them from public spaces. Women continued to crowd into the city
centres and the factory districts.”10
Wilson also points out that in economic terms, the position of the flâneur
was far less financially and emotionally stable than we might imagine andthat “excessive emphasis on ‘the Gaze’ occludes—ironically—the extent towhich the flâneur was actually working as he loitered along the pavement ordelved into the underworld of the ‘marginals.’”11 Taken in conjunction with
the Benjamin quotation earlier in this essay, the flâneur’s work can also beseen as a kind of home-making, and thus not only is his livelihood insecure
financially, but it also disrupts gendered notions of space and work.
Deborah L. Parsons, in her book entitled Streetwalking the Metropolis:
Women, the City, and Modernity, continues to survey flânerie in the late nine-

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teenth and early twentieth centuries and acknowledges that the decline of the
flâneur and the rise of the flâneuse coincide.12 Because the moments in which
they enter the public sphere are different, the flâneur and the flâneuse bringdifferent perspectives to how they engage with the city and Parsons emphasizes the importance of flânerie as a metaphor for the experiences and theaesthetic styles of urban society by identifying its characteristics as “adaptability, multiplicity, boundary-crossing, fluidity.”13
Parsons goes on to agree with Wilson that “the concept of the urban spectator is ambiguously gendered,” undercutting “the myth that the trope of theurban artist-observer is necessarily male and that the woman in the city is alabeled object of his gaze, from outside a gendered structure of literature.”14This demolishing of binaries allows for a more constructive consideration of
the urban gaze. Parsons also provides us with the categories of the flâneuse
associated with the city of modernity: the New Woman, the working girl, andthe female shopper.15 Parsons explains:
They are significant as images of urban women within the city as well as metaphors for female perceptions of the city. Although this new freedom was limited,and subject to the manipulations of employers and the commodity industry, its
importance for emancipation should not be overlooked. Women’s legitimate participation in city life was an extremely significant divergence from Victorianconventional belief and acquired a great deal of anxious attention from contemporary social commentators, who tended to regard women as becoming overwhelmingly present.16

Though neither a working girl nor a shopper and perhaps born half a generation too early to be labeled a New Woman, Constance Fenimore Woolson’s flânerie abroad is made possible because she works (though not a shop
girl, she is nonetheless subject to the whims and demands of her publishers)
and because her work, in turn, chronicles creatively her observations about
her surroundings, her friends, and herself within this urban context.
CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON IN FLORENCE:
WALKING, OBSERVING, WRITING
Woolson remarked in a letter to Samuel Mather dated March 20, 1880,“[T]he only way I can manage ‘Europe’ and my own life here is to settle
down for a number of months in each place. So I shall see Europe slowly andby no means extensively; but I shall see and enjoy thoroughly the places I do

DEFINING THE AMERICAN FLÂNEUSE

89see.”17 In Florence, Woolson settled for longer periods of time: from 1880 to1883 she stayed in various pensions in Florence and from 1885 to 1889, shemostly stayed on Bellosguardo hill, overlooking the city. During both sojourns, she was walking, observing, and writing: in the first stay, she delighted in discovering Florence and its environs as well as becoming friends
with Henry James who showed her Florence and tutored her in Florentine art;in her second stay, as a known member of the expatriate community in Florence through her friendships with James and others on Bellosguardo, shemore actively constructed a home for herself.
Woolson chronicled her delight in reaching Florence for the first time to
Samuel Mather in the letter mentioned above:
Here we are on the bank of the Arno, with the Duomo and Giotto’s beautifulCampanile opposite. I feel more foreign, more far away in the old world, in Florence, than I have felt since leaving New York. London I seemed to have learned
from books so thoroughly that it was not novel; Paris was New York over again;
Mentone was a country place; but Florence! I foresee that I am going to be quite
roused up here.18

And once she was settled in the spring of 1880, she exclaimed in a letter
dated April 10, “I am enchanted with Florence, it is even more beautiful thanI expected,” and recounted her schedule: “Every afternoon I give an hour or
two to one of the churches, generally managing to go by the Campanile and‘Gates of Heaven,’ and then off I go for a long walk outside the city, often up
one of the hills in order to get the beautiful views which open in every direction.”19
Woolson’s being “roused up” in Florence, interestingly enough, seemed tohave as much to do with flânerie as it did with enjoying nature. Rayburn S.
Moore notes how even as a young girl, Woolson “enjoyed taking long walks
in the ‘Water Cure Woods’” in Cleveland where she went to school20 and thatan older Woolson, living in St. Augustine after her father’s death in 1873,
expressed her delight in walking in a letter to her old friend Arabella Carter
Washburn: “The life here is so fresh, so new, so full of certain wild freedom.
I walk miles through the hummocks, where it looks as though no one had
ever walked before, gathering wild flowers everywhere, or sitting down under
the pine trees to rest in the shade.”21 It is no wonder then, that in Florence,
Woolson walked not only in the city but on the outskirts of Florence as well.
In a letter to Katharine Livingston Mather dated December 10, 1880,
Woolson indicated how important her writing and walking schedule was to90

YUKO MATSUKAWAher:
The best of me goes into my writing, and so, on the whole, I prefer to write quietly for the freshest part of the day, take a good walk, and then curl up in an easychair with an entertaining book, and go to bed early. If people will be so kind as toseek me out in my leisure time, or come and go to walk with me, I am delighted;
but that is all the time I have for them! . . . I find I know a good many people here
this winter, and have even been invited out several times to dinner, to evening
companies, and to lunch parties. I have declined everything except one or two afternoon teas, which come in nicely with my afternoon walk.22

Walking gave Woolson’s life a structure, a routine, to facilitate the writingthat was her livelihood. During her years in Europe, a period in which “women were achieving greater liberation as walkers and observers in the public
spaces of the city,”23 she not only wrote serialized novels but also short stories
and travel essays for Harper’s Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, Lippincott’s
Magazine, and Century.24 Many of her works from this period recalled American terrain with which she was familiar or drew inspiration from the Italian
cities she inhabited. As Parsons remarks, “It is with this social influx of
women as empirical observers into the city street that aesthetic, urban perception as a specifically masculine phenomenon and privilege is challenged.”25
For Woolson, her urban observations are an important and necessary part ofher identity as a writer.
As a working woman abroad, Woolson herself challenged gendered conventions by embodying various transgressions of the ideology of separate
spheres: she was a woman, but her work was not housework; she was unmarried and supported herself in a profession that was increasingly female,though also still dominated by men; she wrote where she lived and so her
private domestic space was also where she conducted her public work; and at
the same time, she was expected to observe the social niceties of genteel
women living abroad.
The delight Woolson experienced when she first arrived in Florence turned
into exasperation as the social demands made upon her as a private individual encroached upon the activities that sustained her as a public published author. In a letter from early 1883 she wrote:[T]he demands that Florentine society makes upon one’s time are too great for any
person who has other things to do. It is a very hurried, breathless sort of existence.

DEFINING THE AMERICAN FLÂNEUSE

91

Every family has its day for “receiving” and if one calls on any other day, it isconsidered to mean that one does not care to get in. Result: one has to take all the
precious afternoon hours—my only ones for walking and visits to the galleries—
for these tiresome receptions, and one cannot even walk at that time, because there
is not time for it!26

Nevertheless, Woolson’s commitment to her afternoon walk perhaps wasdue to the fact that Florence brought together the best of both worlds: walks
in nature that recalled to her walks she enjoyed in various climes in the
United States as well as urban strolls to take in the cityscapes. She wrote to
Katharine Livingston Mather about this in a letter dated April 27, 1880: “Inaddition to the pictures and churches, the very streets of Florence are full ofinterest to me, and certainly the country is a never-ending pleasure for myeyes—the snow-capped mountains in the north-east, and the lovely valley ofthe Arno going down toward the west.”27 To Samuel Mather she wrote later:“But it seems to me, so far at least, that the natural scenery of my own country is as fine as anything there is here. But what we have not at home, is theArt, and the associations. So these make my pleasure here.”28
Art is what brought together Woolson and her fellow expatriate American
writer, Henry James. Armed with a letter of introduction from one of James’s
cousins, Henrietta Pell-Clark (sister of Minnie Temple, who served asJames’s muse both during her life and after her early death at age twenty-fourin 1870), Woolson met Henry James in Florence in the spring of 1880; heproceeded to befriend her and school her in Florentine art. In various lettersfrom that period, she wrote of how she “is up to [her] head in Florentine history, books on art, etc.”29 and which buildings and works of art she admired:
the Strozzi Palace, the old convent of San Marco, the interior of Santa Maria
Novella, and the statue of Lorenzo Medici in the sacristy of San Lorenzo.30
Most of what Woolson did not understand or disliked seemed to be art that
James appreciated. Woolson remarks in a letter from 1880, “At present I confess, Giotto remains beyond me. And H. J. says calmly, ‘Some day, you will
see it.’ May be [sic].”31 Her comments about the Duomo are also telling: “TheDuomo (interior) is too vast and cold. I went there one rainy afternoon alone,and had the weirdest time! It was almost dark inside, and I was the only person in all the great gloomy space. I went there again with H. J. who admiresit, and tried to make me admire it too.”32 When Woolson confessed to notadmiring the statues called “Day” and “Night” in the chapel of San Lorenzo
because she thought they “looked so distracted,” Woolson recounted James’s
response: “ ‘Ah yes,’ he said, ‘distracted. But then!’ Here words failed him,

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and he walked off to look at a fresco (we were in Michael Angelo’s house)and (probably) to recover from my horrible ignorance.”33
Woolson was good humored about her ignorance about art and was willing
to be schooled in it, but also noted “I have been perfectly honest and even tomyself would not pretend to admire what I did not admire.34 In fact, she was
as charmed by her gallery visits with James as she was with their walks
around the city, jaunts to various parks within the city such as the Cascine andthe Boboli Garden, and excursions without, such as a drive to Fiesole which
she wrote was “one of the loveliest drives around Florence, this to Fiesole,which is an ancient Etruscan village, much older than Florence, on a high hillsome miles distant. There is a most beautiful view there from the little plateau in front of the old convent.”35
Sharon L. Dean comments on this insistence on Woolson’s part to viewarchitecture as part of the landscape: “[F]or Woolson, the art or architecturalobject improves when it is transformed into landscape.”36 That is, despite
James’s tutorials on the virtues of individual pieces of art and architecture,
Woolson was never unaware of how those works are situated within a larger
environment and she recalled American space while viewing and inhabiting
European space. In this independent and American view, she constructed her
identity as an American flâneuse; Woolson reflected this new point of view inher short story, “A Florentine Experiment.”
THE AMERICAN FLÂNEUSE IN “A FLORENTINE EXPERIMENT”“A Florentine Experiment,” published in the October 1880 issue of theAtlantic Monthly and included in the posthumously published Dorothy andOther Italian Stories (1896), is one of Woolson’s earliest published stories set
in Italy. In fact, of the Italian stories, only “Miss Grief” (Lippincott’s Magazine May 1880), the story which is probably now the most anthologized ofher short stories (though not included in either of her two Italian story collections), was published earlier than “A Florentine Experiment.” In her introduction to Women Artists, Women Exiles: “Miss Grief” and Other Stories, thecollection of Woolson short fiction she edited, Joan Myers Weimer discusses
three Italian stories she included in the volume that “feature successful malewriters and critics who resemble James”37—“Miss Grief” (1880), “The Streetof Hyacinth” (1882), and “At the Château of Corinne” (1887)—but does not
mention “A Florentine Experiment” which features a male character who cicerones the female protagonist through Florence’s galleries and visits thesame churches that Woolson and James did. Weimer notes that in the threeDEFINING THE AMERICAN FLÂNEUSE

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short stories she selected, “their plots insist on the negative effect of [the maleprotagonist’s] arrogance and the patriarchy that sustained it. In two of thestories, the heroine marries the James-like character, but it is clear in bothcases that this solution is a ‘downfall.’”38 “A Florentine Experiment,” thoughof this period, does not match these plot summaries: arrogance is evenly
spread out between the protagonists, patriarchy is countered by matriarchal
power, and the marriage of the protagonists is not a capitulation to patriarchal
norms but a measured decision that suggests the male protagonist and thefemale protagonist are equals.
“A Florentine Experiment” accomplishes this by establishing the relativeautonomy of the protagonist, Margaret Stowe (whose name recalls those of
two earlier women writers who traveled to and wrote about their experiencesin Europe, Margaret Fuller and Harriet Beecher Stowe), and her non-dependence upon the male protagonist, Trafford Morgan. Margaret’s independence
is symbolized by the ease with which she strolls by herself through the byways and parks of Florence; her familiarity with the city and its art complements the poise with which she responds to Trafford’s conversation and allows her to physically walk away when she deems conversations are
finished.
The narrative begins with Margaret sitting “on the heights of Fiesole overlooking Florence”39 with a childhood friend, Beatrice Lovell, who hands her
a letter an admirer has written. Beatrice, with golden hair and violet eyes, isin mourning for her husband, the late Mr. Lovell, who at fifty-six, was her
senior by three decades. Beatrice does not particularly care for the letter
writer and asks Margaret to keep the letter. She then goes off to Venice.
Margaret, unlike her friend, is not yet married. She is the orphaned niece(but not the heiress) of a wealthy American woman, Miss Harrison, withwhom she has been living for eighteen months. Margaret is “not beautiful”
but has “a well-shaped, well-poised head” with dark hair and dark eyes, is“tall, slender, and rather graceful,” and has “an air of what is called distinction [which was] . . . but a deep indifference, combined with the wish at thesame time to maintain her place unchanged in the society in which she
moved.”40 In contrast to the more conventionally pretty Beatrice, Margaret issomewhat plain, but as the narrative progresses, we see that she has a spiritthat keeps her from being put upon by others.
Margaret meets Trafford Morgan at a gathering within the expatriate community in Florence and describes him to her aunt as being “of medium height,
neither slender or stout; he is light, with rather peculiar eyes because they areso blue . . . He has a long light mustache, no beard, and very closely cut light94

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hair. . . . He looks fatigued. He looks cynical. I should not be surprised if he
was selfish. I do not like him.”41 Later, she discovers he is the man who had
written the letter to Beatrice, who also turns out to be the grandson of Adam
Morgan, a friend of her aunt’s.
Margaret and Morgan begin to spend time together walking in Florence—in the art galleries, churches, and parks—until he misinterprets her behavior
as affection for him and tells her “I am in love with some one [sic] else.”42
Margaret is incensed by his arrogance and says that she knew he was in lovewith Beatrice and also informs him that her attentions to him were an experiment to help her forget a past suitor who is now to be married to another.
Margaret declares her experiment is a complete failure and they part company.
The following year, after sojourns in other countries, Margaret and Morgan meet again in Florence. They both have learned that Beatrice Lovell is
engaged and to be married in England. This time it is Morgan who proposes
his experiment to “build up an interest in” Margaret in order to forget Beatrice.43 Again, they frequent the sights of Florence, with most of their community understanding he is courting her but when Morgan tells her that his
experiment has succeeded, Margaret is perplexed. She asks him, “You do notlove me; I am not beautiful; I have no fortune. What, then, do you gain?”44
When he responds, “I gain, Margaret . . . the greatest gift that can be given toa man on this earth, a gift I long for,—a wife who really and deeply lovesme,”45 Margaret is livid because she interprets this as Morgan’s “deeplyrooted egotism” deluding him into thinking that she loves him; therefore she
wishes “to make [him] put into words [his] egregious vanity, to make [him]stand convicted of [his] dense and vast mistake.”46 Again they part ways andthey travel in different parts of Europe for the duration of the summer.
The following autumn, Miss Harrison encounters Morgan and invites him
to call on her. When he comes, she informs him that Margaret is to be married. Margaret herself comes home from a party but does not converse muchwith Morgan who announces he is to leave town the following morning.
However, he oversleeps and kills time until the next train by going to the
Duomo where he encounters Margaret. As they walk and talk within the
Duomo, he confesses his love for her and urges her not to marry without love.
In the last scene, when they confront Miss Harrison and ask her why she lied
to Morgan, she laughs and tells them that she invented “a sort a neutral
ground upon which [they] could meet and speak . . . a sort of experiment . . . a
Florentine experiment.”47 Morgan and Margaret laugh, confessing to “one or
two of those experiments, already!”48

DEFINING THE AMERICAN FLÂNEUSE

95“A Florentine Experiment” echoes not only the perambulations of Woolson and James (there is in this short story mention of the sculptures in the San
Lorenzo chapel as well as the key scene in the Duomo in the rain), but also
shows the American flâneuse in her element. And it is Margaret’s walking
alone in the city that demonstrates her relative independence. This independence is in part a financial independence: though most of Florence thought
Margaret would inherit her aunt’s money, they both understood that most of
it is to go to another relative. In the meantime, Miss Harrison “gave Margaret
every luxury; especially she liked to see her richly dressed.”49 As a non-heiress, Margaret is her own person and does not feel the burden of wealth though
she reaps benefits from it. She is more like a paid companion to her aunt, andso her going off on her own to walk in the Boboli Garden while her aunt goeson a drive with Morgan indicates her need for some time on her own and her
sense that she is entitled to it.50
Walking defines Margaret: she is fearless when traversing Florentine
space. Unlike Venice, with its reputation for decadence and danger, Florenceis safer, more comfortable, and more refined for a walker like Margaret. Her
composure is commensurate with her familiarity with the city and its parks:
indeed her encounters with Morgan in the Boboli Garden spread out behind
the Pitti Palace and in the Cascine along the Arno River show how in control
she is of herself, of her environment, and of Morgan, who comes upon her
walking alone in each park. When they walk together, it is Margaret who
takes the lead in suggesting walks and places to sit. For instance, in the beginning of their relationship, they chance upon each other in the Boboli Garden,
where Morgan “had gone to walk off a fit of weariness; here he came upon
Miss Stowe. There seemed to be no one in the garden save themselves, atleast no one whom they knew.”51 After exchanging greetings, she is the one
who invites him to walk with her: “Are you going now? If not, why not stroll
awhile with me?”52
Margaret’s invitation clearly marks this space as hers: much like Baudelaire and Benjamin’s flâneurs, she makes this space her home. Morgan discourses on art as he and Margaret stroll around the park; when he rejects her
suggestion of sitting in the amphitheatre because he wants something moresecluded, she is able to guide them higher up the slope to a seat which provides them with a panoramic view of the city and beyond:It commanded a view of the city below, with the Duomo and Giotto’s lovely belltower; of the fruit-trees all in flower on the outskirts; of the tree-tops of the Cascine, now like a cloud of golden smoke with their tender brown leaflets, tasseled

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blossoms, and winged seeds; of the young grain springing greenly down the valley; and the soft velvety mountains rising all around. “How beautiful it is!” shesaid, leaning back, closing her parasol and folding her hands.53

Her appreciation of this view, which situates Florentine architecture withina verdant landscape that may recall vistas in the United States, reminds us of
Sharon Dean’s statement about how Woolson, and here by extension, Margaret, believe that architecture has more value when it is situated within a natural environment. Her delight in this view contrasts with Morgan’s comments
on Giotto, Titian, and Botticelli, offered in response to Margaret’s wishing to
be instructed in art, which imply that art can outdo nature.
Despite her ease as a flâneuse, with or without a companion, Margaret is
not unaware of social rules that restrict her mobility and freedom. On one
hand, after their meeting in the Boboli Garden, Margaret remains in controlof their relationship by ignoring Morgan’s attempts at flirtation and declining
his offer to escort her home.54 On the other hand, she is cautious about advancing her relationship with Morgan: she waits until May, when most of the
tourists and her circle have left Florence for Venice, before she takes action:
Miss Stowe now stepped over the boundary-line of her caution a little . . . she
went with Trafford to the Academy, and the Pitti; she took him into the cool dim
churches and questioned him concerning his creed; she strolled with him throughthe monastery of San Marco and asked what his idea was of the next world.55

When they re-encounter each other after a year’s hiatus, Margaret still enjoys her solitary walks. Again, Morgan encounters her in a Florentine park:“Then one afternoon, he came upon her unexpectedly in the Cascine; she wasstrolling down the broad path, alone.”56 Again, the landscape is compared toAmerican scenery: “They had strolled into a narrow path which led by one ofthose patches of underwood of which there are several in the Cascine, little
bosky places carefully preserved in a tangled wildness which is so pretty andamusing to American eyes, accustomed to the stretch of real forests.”57 Margaret finds this charming and feigns inattentiveness when Morgan reminds
her that he used to tell her that art was better.
In the year they are apart, Margaret acquires a biting sarcasm which she is
not loath to reveal to Morgan. When he proposes his own experiment inwhich he would try to fall in love with Margaret in order to forget Beatrice,
Margaret’s “lip curled.”58 In the ensuing conversation, Margaret clearly has
the upper hand:DEFINING THE AMERICAN FLÂNEUSE

97“The plans are not alike,” she said. “Yours is badly contrived. I did not tell you
beforehand what I was endeavoring to do!”
“I am obliged to tell you. You would have discovered it.”“Discovered what a pretense it was? That is true. A woman can act a part better
than a man. You did not discover! And what am I to do in this little comedy ofyours?”59

Morgan asks her, “After all, if there is no one upon whom it can really infringe (of course I know you have admirers; I have even heard their names),
why should you not find it even a little amusing?” but with a “peculiar expression” she responds, “I am not sure but that I shall find it so.”60 When
Morgan asks her, after she imagines the Medicis buried underneath theMedici chapel, “Since when have you become so historical? They were awicked race,” she can drolly reply, “And since when have you become sovirtuous? . . . They were at least successful.”61 Dean states that this shortstory is “so heavily ironic that it is difficult to know if and when either ofthese characters loves the other”;62 however, the irony contained within theirverbal sparring reveals a genuine interest in each other, which Margaret andMorgan try to conceal.
Walking promotes talking in “A Florentine Experiment.” Morgan is attentive to Margaret in his experiment: “He now asked questions of her; when
they went to the churches, he asked her impressions of the architecture; when
they visited the galleries, he asked her opinions of the pictures. He inquired
what books she liked, and why she liked them; and sometimes he slowly repeated her replies.”63 This last trait annoys Margaret but that does not deter
their strolling and conversing. In the cloisters of San Marco they discuss
George Eliot’s Romola (1863), and in the “Michael-Angelo chapel of San
Lorenzo” they bribe the custodian, sneak in to admire the two pairs of statues
named “Day” and “Night” and “Dawn” and “Evening,” but end up talking
about Morgan’s infatuation with Beatrice.64
Because it is in stilted spaces where social drama is viewed or staged
rather than places to stroll that Margaret and Morgan have the confrontations
that lead to long separations—their first is in Miss Harrison’s drawing room,
their second is in the amphitheatre of the Boboli Garden—Woolson keeps us
wondering as to the outcome of Morgan’s last encounter with Margaret in the
Duomo because the Duomo is also where religious rites are staged andviewed. Nonetheless, just as she transforms the outdoors of Florence into the
traditionally indoor space of the home for Margaret, Woolson brings aboutanother startling metamorphosis by expanding the inside of the Duomo to98

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accommodate strolls that seem more in order in a landscaped park.
What seems like a horribly ironic and embarrassing chance encounter in adim cathedral becomes a serendipitous meeting when Morgan accompanies
Margaret as she walks to one of the exits and then convinces her to stroll
within the cathedral with him: “See how it is raining outside. Walk with meonce around the whole interior for the sake of the pleasant part of our Florentine days,—for there was a pleasant part; it will be our last walk together.”65
Margaret’s silence during most of the walk encourages Morgan to confess his
love for her. As he speaks, Woolson marks the sections of the cathedral: they
pass the choir, pass “under Michael Angelo’s grand, unfinished statue and[come] around on the other side,” walk down the north aisle, and then to thecenter of the cathedral where Margaret sheds tears and Morgan realizes thathe still has a chance.66 They make two more circuits of the Duomo together;relieved that their love for each other is reciprocated, their conversation regains its usual vivacity and implies a happy ending.
Margaret’s ownership of Florence through her frequent walks allows her adegree of confidence that levels the playing field and allows her to meet Morgan on her home ground and on her own terms. With relatively unimpeded
mobility and freedom Margaret makes herself at home in Florence: not only
within social circles but in the city. Though she is away from home and perhaps not yet ready to admit to the fact that she, like Baudelaire’s perfect flâneur feels at home everywhere,67 for Margaret, this exercise in American
flânerie has resulted, happily, in starting a new home with Morgan.
FLORENTINE HOMEMAKING
When Woolson returned to Florence in 1886 after a few years of living
elsewhere in Europe, she saw herself as more of a native Florentine and reveled in that feeling in a letter to Katharine Livingston Mather: “Florence islovely. I am such an old resident now that I no longer go about with a Baedeker at nine o’clock in the morning. But I anticipate the greatest pleasure in
re-visiting, one by one, and at my leisure, all my favourite pictures, statues,
churches and palaces.”68 By choosing to live on Bellosguardo (“beautifulview”) hill, southwest of Florence, Woolson was able to enjoy the best ofboth worlds: the rural retreat of Bellosguardo within walking distance fromthe urban splendor of Florence. Surrounded by nature and a panorama of
Florence before her, the American flâneuse in her must have been deeply
satisfied.
James introduced her to his friends, Francis Boott, his daughter Lizzie, andDEFINING THE AMERICAN FLÂNEUSE

99

her husband Frank Duveneck who arranged for her to rent rooms in the Villa
Castellani where they were staying in 1886; in 1887, she moved to the nearby
Villa Brichieri.69 In a letter to E. C. Stedman in 1887, she described herhomemaking in Florence:
After seventeen years of wandering, I have at last a home of my own—(though but
a temporary one). Such joy as I take in my own tables & chairs, tea-cups & cushions, I don’t believe you can imagine, but Mrs. Stedman can. . . . But the view, &the air, & the scene, & the flowers, & the sense of ownership (for a year)—thetranquility of spirit, the far-awayness—these to me, just now, seem infinite
riches.70

Making friends—she became godmother to Lizzie Boott Duveneck’s
baby—and enjoying the seclusion and beauty of her new environment gave
rise to such expressions of happiness in being settled.
However, this sense of home in Bellosguardo did not last very long: now a“native” and better known in society than during her last sojourn in Florence,social engagements intruded upon Woolson’s time and she grew to resent thisstate of affairs. James wrote to Boott about Woolson’s departure from Florence: “She has gone, with her sister, to Corfu and the East, and she will probably have written you that at the last she left Florence with (seemingly) a kindof loathing: loathing, I mean, for the crowd, the interruptions and invasions.”71 These social interruptions and invasions kept Woolson from doing
what she did best and liked most: walking, observing, and writing. The“crowd” invaded her home where she worked on her writing, and they took
up her time so she had no time to walk around, observe, and enjoy Florence,
the urban space that she as a flâneuse transformed into home. No wonder,
then, that she felt such a loathing: she was doubly homeless and so had toleave.
The writing of “A Florentine Experiment” so early in her stay in Florence
was for Woolson a Florentine experiment. If, as Parsons maintains, flânerie is“an attempt to identify and place the self in the uncertain environment ofmodernity,”72 these American flâneuses in fiction (Margaret Stowe) and inreal life (Woolson herself) accomplish this with self-control, independence,
and a keen eye for observation. Woolson responds to the long tradition ofAmerican and British fascination for Florence chronicled by male writers
such as Byron, Shelley, Cooper, Melville, Hawthorne, Ruskin, Browning,and James with her own construction of an American woman strolling in andaround Florence: the American flâneuse is cognizant of that tradition but de-

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velops, through her own flânerie, different ways to experience the world anddefine herself.
NOTES
1Deborah L. Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 41.
2
Until scholars such as Rayburn S. Moore, Cheryl B. Torsney, Joan Myers Weimer, Sharon
L. Dean, Victoria Brehm, and Lyndall Gordon “rediscovered” Woolson, most scholars who
had heard of her knew her through the biased and unflattering references made by Leon Edelin his multi-volume biography of Henry James. These scholars’ works serve as correctives to
Edel’s work and present exciting, important, and diverse views on Woolson’s life and writing.
Moore and Brehm have chronologies of Woolson’s life that are helpful. See Victoria Brehm,ed., Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Nineteenth Century: Essays (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001); Sharon L. Dean, Constance Fenimore Woolson and Edith Wharton:
Perspectives on Landscape and Art (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002); Dean,
Constance Fenimore Woolson: Homeward Bound (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,
1995); Lyndall Gordon, A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art (New York:W. W. Norton, 1998); Rayburn S. Moore, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Twayne’s UnitedStates Author Series (New York: Twayne, 1963); Cheryl B. Torsney, Constance Fenimore
Woolson: The Grief of Artistry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989); Torsney, ed.,Critical Essays on Constance Fenimore Woolson (New York: G. K. Hall, 1992); Joan Myers
Weimer, ed. and introd., Women Artists, Women Exiles: “Miss Grief” and Other Stories (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988).
3
Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” The Painter of Modern Life and Other
Essays, trans. and ed., Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 2006), 9.
4
Ibid., 7.
5Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed., Michael W. Jennings, trans. Howard Eiland, Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingston, and Harry Zohn (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2006),
68−69.
6
Janet Wolff, “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity,” The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin, ed., Andrew Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1991),
141.
7
Ibid., 141.
8
Ibid., 154.
9
Ibid., 154. “La femme passante” (“A female passer-by”), from Baudelaire’s poem “À une
passante” (“To a Woman Passing By”), one of the poems added to the second edition of Les
Fleurs du Mal (1861), is a statuesque woman in deep mourning the narrator glimpses and bywhom the narrator is entranced; she is silent though the narrator imagines that she may besomeone whom he might have been able to love. See Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil,trans. James McGowan and introd. Jonathan Culler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993),
188−89.
10
Elizabeth Wilson, “The Invisible Flâneur,” Postmodern Cities and Spaces, eds., Sophie
Watson and Katherine Gibson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 61.
11
Ibid., 72.
12Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis, 6.
13
Ibid., 41.
14
Ibid., 42.

DEFINING THE AMERICAN FLÂNEUSE
15101

Ibid., 43.
Ibid., 43.
17
Clare Benedict, ed., Constance Fenimore Woolson (London: Ellis, n.d. [1930]), 181.
18
Ibid., 179.
19
Ibid., 181.
20
Moore, Constance Fenimore Woolson, 21.
21
Ibid., 25.
22
Benedict, Constance Fenimore Woolson, 237−38.
23
Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis, 6.
24
Harper’s Magazine published her major novels and novellas as serials: Anne (Dec.
1880−May 1882), For the Major (Nov. 1882−April 1883), East Angels (Jan. 1885−May
1886), Jupiter Lights (Jan.−Sept. 1889), and Horace Chase (Jan.−Oct. 1893). It also published
all of the Italian stories collected in The Front Yard and Other Italian Stories (1895) andDorothy and Other Italian Stories (1896)—“At the Château of Corinne” (Oct. 1887), “Neptune’s Shore” (Oct. 1888), “A Pink Villa” (Nov. 1888), “The Front Yard” (Dec. 1888), “Dorothy” (March 1892), “A Christmas Party” (Dec. 1892), “A Transplanted Boy” (Feb. 1894), and“A Waitress” (June 1894)—except for “A Florentine Experiment” (Oct. 1880) and “In Venice”(April 1882) which ran in the Atlantic Monthly and “The Street of the Hyacinth” (May andJune 1882) which was published in Century. The Atlantic Monthly published some of her
representative short stories, such as “Lady of Little Fishing” (Sept. 1874) and “Rodman the
Keeper” (March 1877). Lippincott’s Magazine is where two of her most anthologized shortstories, “Felipa” (June 1876) and “Miss Grief” (May 1880) appeared.
25
Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis, 6.
26
Benedict, Constance Fenimore Woolson, 269−70.
27
Ibid., 182, 184.
28
Ibid., 190.
29
Ibid., 184.
30
Ibid., 185−87.
31
Ibid., 186.
32
Ibid., 187.
33
Ibid., 188.
34
Ibid., 185.
35
Ibid., 190.
36
Dean, Constance Fenimore Woolson and Edith Wharton, 196.
37
Weimer, Women Artists, Women Exiles, xxxv.
38
Ibid., xxxv.
39
Constance Fenimore Woolson, “A Florentine Experiment,” Atlantic Monthly 46 (Oct.
1880): 502.
40
Ibid., 506.
41
Ibid., 507.
42
Ibid., 513.
43
Ibid., 519.
44
Ibid., 524.
45
Ibid., 524.
46
Ibid., 524.
47
Ibid., 530.
48
Ibid., 530.
49
Ibid., 507.
50Ibid., 507.
51
Ibid., 510.
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Ibid., 510.
Ibid., 511.
54
Ibid., 511.
55
Ibid., 512.
56
Ibid., 518.
57
Ibid., 518.
58
Ibid., 519.
59
Ibid., 519.
60
Ibid., 519.
61
Ibid., 522.
62
Dean, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Homeward Bound, 120.
63
Woolson, “A Florentine Experiment,” 520.
64
Ibid., 520−22.
65
Ibid., 528.
66
Ibid., 528−29.
67
Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” 9.
68
Benedict, Constance Fenimore Woolson, 295.
69
Lyndall Gordon discusses James’s sojourns in the Villa Brichieri, first as Woolson’s subletter in December 1886 and then later as a houseguest for over a month during the spring of
1888 and reads them, especially the first, as indications that James and Woolson knew eachother better than formerly supposed (A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art,
208−12, 217−19).
70
Dean, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Homeward Bound, 91.
71
Henry James, Letters, Vol. III: 1883−1885, ed., Leon Edel (Cambridge: Belknap Press,
1980), 267.
72
Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis, 41.
53