A survey of female characters as flaneuses and their interactions with modernity in early modern British literature

This thesis argues that the flaneuse is present in literature well before the late nineteenth century. Similar to Charles Baudelaire's flaneur figure, the flaneuse herself is an observer of modernity. Through her interactions with the crowd, the flaneuse is able to read the urban landscape. Chapter One focuses on defining the historical context of when the term flaneur appears in critical discourse. Chapter Two introduces the first example of a flaneuse: the narrator of Isabella Whitney's poem "Will and Testament." It focuses on how the narrator offers a reading of London in flux, its attractions as well as its growing problems. Chapter Three presents flaneuses of the seventeenth century: Moll from The Roaring Girl and Hellena from The Rover. These two texts introduce the crowd and present flaneuses who interact with the crowd. They also present the power and dangers of using costumes to enter into public spaces and for walking on the streets. In Chapter Four, we enter the eighteenth century, and through Moll Flanders and Evelina, we explore how the ideology of the separate spheres dictated women's roles and where women could frequent. Even more important to this study is the fact that this ideology ultimately limited women's roles as flaneuses for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.