The Body Flâneur: Body-Biased Gaze and Ocular Inspections of Women’s Bodies in Swedish Serial Literature, 1850–1890

ABSTRACT

The article analyses the male body-biased gaze in serial fiction in the Swedish press 1850–1890, by using the concept of the body flâneur as an analogy to the well-known city flâneur. The normative construct of the body flâneur was a discursive practice, normalising the male gaze in media representations in period still poor on visual representations. It gave authors an opportunity to describe, in detail and in an educated manner, female bodies as aesthetic objects. It had a twofold educational function. First, the body flâneur taught readers, both female and male, what the ideal female body looked like and how it could be detailed in words, but also that the woman was a natural object of scrutiny, and a field of expertise. Second, it presented to readers to various conceivable female reactions to being stared at.

KEYWORDS:

• Body-biased gaze
• lookism
• misogyny
• body flâneur
• nineteenth-century Swedish press

In this article, I analyse the male body-biased gaze in serial fiction in the Swedish press 1850–1890, by using the concept of the body flâneur as an analogy to the flâneur, a central symbolic figure for the visual culture of the period. The flâneur was an urban phenomenon that arose in Paris during the first half of the nineteenth century, immortalised by Baudelaire and later Walter Benjamin. He was the educated bourgeois man who spent his abundant free time strolling the city streets, only seemingly aimless – his gaze was guided by his education, his knowledge, his curiosity, his ability to observe, and his taste for all interesting things that the modern city offered in terms of impressions and experiences.¹ The body flâneur, as he appears in fiction, was a literary method for writers to stroll, in an educated manner, not on foot on the city streets, but with their gaze over women’s bodies. Examining the body flâneur, I discuss men’s right to look and women’s obligation to allow themselves to be looked upon in late nineteenth-century middle-class culture, and the construction of inequality through normalised objectification.

Research on the male gaze is extensive and spans many fields. In this article, I use fiction to access an everyday practice of looking that has otherwise left few traces. My contention is that the body flâneur was a normative construct with two educational functions. I have drawn inspiration partly from social psychological research on body-biased gaze and lookism, partly from media research on normalisation. Body-biased gaze – that is, when visual attention is focused towards body parts in everyday practices of looking – has long been seen as an essential part of sexual objectification.² Since Barbara Fredrickson and Tomi-Ann Roberts formulated the objectification theory in social psychology in 1997, innumerable experimental studies have shown that the body-biased gaze is practiced by both women and men, regardless of sexual orientation and both consciously and unconsciously, but that men practice it significantly more than women.³

This is not only a consequence of a gendered hierarchical order but a vital part of its continuous reproduction: it is well known that the heterosexual male gaze has had a privileged position and played an important role in the maintaining of gendered inequality.⁴ Hence the now established term lookism, defined as the bias or discrimination against individuals on the basis of appearance, and as a widespread practice of commenting upon and judging the appearance of certain others.⁵ We lack historical analyses of the everyday maintaining of the male right to look in the form of normalising practices of looking. Media-research has shown that sexualised representations in the media normalise lookism and the body-biased gaze.⁶ Sexualised media representations of women can create a climate that favours body-oriented looking and perpetuate the notion that women’s value lies in their appearance.⁷ What I specifically want to point out is the lack of research on historical representations of practices of looking, to which men and women were exposed. Late nineteenth-century feuilletons, or serial fiction, is rich in such representations, involving descriptions, not only of men’s looking at women, but also of women reacting to men’s looking. From what modern media research says about the normalisation of the male gaze in the media and its importance, it is relevant to study such representations.

Our contemporary society is so embedded in the visual culture of modern media, advertising, and entertainment, that we imagine that sexualisation in media mainly take place in the form of visual representations. However, mass-produced images in Swedish media have a history of about 150 years. Swedish nineteenth-century press had few visual representations in general, albeit the number of illustrations were rapidly growing at least from the 1880s. I have chosen to study the body-biased gaze in fiction running as serials in the daily press. This fiction lacked any accompanying illustrations. Although it rarely made great literary claims, often written in a popular style for a commercial purpose, and was not always of the highest quality, it was probably the form of literature which had the largest readership in Sweden. Thus, I assume that it may have had a great influence on the normalisation of the male body-biased gaze during a period when visual representations were scarce.

After an account of my method and sources, the analysis consists of three parts. First, I present the body flâneur and his looking at women in serial fiction. Based on examples, the presentation provides an explanation of what I mean by body flâneur, and points to the kinship between the city’s flâneur and that of the body as two sides of the male visual culture that emerged with modernity. The second part addresses a situation that could occur when the body flâneur had such a strong experience of female beauty that he lost control of his vision and the gaze turned into staring, an educated homage to beauty but also a loss of the male self-control that characterises the flâneur. In the third part, I discuss the body flâneur as an educational project, teaching readers, how to describe female beauty and that it was supposed to be described and evaluated, and how women were supposed to react when exposed to men’s staring.

Sources and method of analysis

This study focuses on the Swedish daily press because there is a considerable lack of research on nineteenth-century visual culture, ways of seeing, and lookism outside the major Western countries, id est Germany, France, Britain and the United States. However, Sweden works as a case study to introduce the body flâneur as a concept and method that was European rather than Swedish. Very little is known about how men looked at women in nineteenth-century Sweden, and even less about how women reacted to men’s gazes. However, serial fiction is a rich normative source material which shows how a cultivated man was expected to look at women, and, on fewer occasions, how women should respond to male gaze. The second half of the nineteenth century was a golden age for the Swedish press. After a steady growth in the first half of the nineteenth century, newspapers were now available in every town. The market was entirely commercial and competition fierce, also from weekly magazines and specialised periodicals aimed at different target groups. Maintaining and expanding readership was essential to a newspaper’s survival. In the second half of the century, the commercial potential of female readers was discovered, and the press increasingly targeted women.⁸ In Sweden as elsewhere, women were considered more likely to read fiction than men and less interested in politics and current events.⁹

Fiction became an important means to attract and retain readers, widely appreciated by readers. Virtually every newspaper published novels on a regular basis or otherwise introduced fiction in their columns. Given the commercial nature of newspapers, this literature was also entirely commercial and written with no deeper purpose than to entertain and captivate readers. It often appears as superficial and stereotypical. Many Swedish authors produced novels directly for the press. Although most of these are now unread and partly forgotten, many of them were greats of their time, and some serials were republished as books and sold well.¹⁰

The range of this fiction was wide in several ways. While most of the authors were men, many, including some of the most successful, were women. However, most works were published anonymously or under nom de plume. Alongside the Swedish stories, there were also many translations, particularly from German, French and English, often by well-established authors such as August Maquet and Wilkie Collins. The scope ranged from short stories in a few issues to extensive novels that ran for many months. There was also a wide range of subjects, from historical novels to contemporary bourgeois dramas, love-stories, and satirical depictions of modern life. One common denominator, however, was that the novels were written for a broad audience with a particular focus on the rapidly growing urban middle class, generally taking a remarkable middle-class perspective. It was normally written from a man’s point of view (regardless of the author’s gender), even though fiction was considered especially important for attracting the growing female readership.

The large amount of serial fiction requires a systematic approach. As a first step, I have conducted a rough inventory of the material. Then the choice of examples for the article was based on two guiding principles. First, empirical evidence is limited to the daily press.¹¹ While more extensive, the daily press is also more accessible due to digitisation. Secondly, I refer first and foremost to Swedish originals. What I call the body flâneur appeared in both Swedish originals and translations. By primarily using Swedish originals, I aim to show that he was a method actively used by Swedish authors, and thus an expression of Swedish bourgeois culture. However, I also refer to translations in the article. I do this mainly to further illustrate the arguments I make based on Swedish originals. However, there are other reasons to pay some attention to translations. Firstly, they show that the body flâneur, like Swedish bourgeois culture in general, was not unique but a European phenomenon. Secondly, it is important to point out that readers encountered the body-biased gaze through many different texts, both Swedish and translated.

Albeit the dailies in Sweden were few in comparison with countries such as Germany or Britain, there were still tons of them, together publishing several dozens of serials every year. In terms of methodology, this mass of serials has led to yet another delimitation: For reasons of efficiency, the study is limited to 1850–1890. This is not because the body-flâneur disappeared thereafter, but because it was the golden age of serialised literature. While the daily press exploded in size in the 1890s – at the turn of the century there were more than ten daily newspapers in Stockholm alone – fiction at the same time became a proportionally less prominent feature of the daily press.

Before the Swedish daily press was digitised from the mid-2010s, it was virtually impossible to work comprehensively with the serial fiction.¹² This is why there are no studies on serial fiction for the period when it was most frequent. Ingemar Oscarsson’s 1980 thesis Fortsättning följer (Eng: ‘To be continued’), which still is the existing standard work in the field, limits itself to the period before 1850, when the newspaper market was much smaller and fiction less common.¹³ Digitisation has enabled systematic searches of most of the Swedish nineteenth-century dailies, but they need to be done systematically and carefully, complemented by inventories of a more traditional nature: browsing and reading large amounts of press has been necessary to identify gaps and shortcomings in the searches carried out.

To get a grip of the body flâneur, I first searched the digitised press to identify and analyse scenes where men looked at women, by searches on singular and combined key words, such as verbs signifying looking, seeing, watching, and admiring; nouns for women, the female body and body parts; and terms connoted to appearance and beauty.¹⁴ It was clear from this first step that there existed an easily recognisable, often stereotypical way of describing women’s bodies and appearance based on certain keywords, such as rose mouth, shiny black hair, lily-white hands, alabaster-white neck, rounded calf, Cinderella foot, etc. As a control step, I have read eighty randomly selected texts, both originals and translations, to detect descriptions that, for example through unique word choices, fall outside of the searches.

The body flâneurship largely involved detailed descriptions of women’s bodies. Thus, empirical examples need to be quite extensive, while space is limited, reducing the possible amounts of quotes and examples. I present a limited number of representative examples of the body flâneur, found in the systematic searches, using the endnotes for further cases. One of these examples, the refined body flâneur Mr. Klöfwerfelt’s detailed ocular inspection of his cousin Jacquette, is used as a more recurring point of reference for various aspects of the literary body-biased gaze, for several reasons: it was written by a well-established Swedish author, it was published already in 1850, thus setting the tone as an early example, and it was particularly detailed.

The article studies fiction but is not a study in the history of literature, as I intend neither to discuss in detail the authors of the various examples, nor to analyse the examples as components of the larger works of which they were part. Instead, I follow in the footsteps of such scholars as Margaret Beetham’s, Jennifer Phegley’s and Kristine Moruzi’s studies on the Victorian press and its readers, discussing the production of gendered ideals and norms within the nineteenth-century press.¹⁵ I want to highlight the body flâneur as a viable method for describing beauty ideals, and prescribing gendered behaviours when it came to looking and being looked upon. While every author had his or her specific intention when adding a component of body-biased gaze, I study this textual everyday lookism as a cultural phenomenon.

The connoisseur gaze of the body flâneur

The serial ‘A young Stockholm Woman’ (Swe: En ung Stockholmska) was published in the short-lived Stockholm daily Allmänna Tidningen 1852–53, written a few years earlier by the priest and well-established Eugene Sue-epigon Julius Axel Kiellman-Göranson.¹⁶ In a ball scene, the male protagonist Klöfwerfelt gets the opportunity to dance with his cousin Jacquette, the daughter of a Judge. In a pause, they sat down, and he could take a closer look at her. Kiellman-Göranson let Klöfwerfelt’s gaze wander over Jacquette’s body, starting with the foot: ‘The tip of a small foot, the ideal foot of a Stockholm girl, rested on a stool below the sofa’. He raised his eyes, ‘sneaking slowly from the beautiful foot, quite slowly, up towards the perfect shape of a knee’, on which Klöfwerfelt stopped for a second. Looking at this shape, visible through a thin, white muslin dress, he pondered upon the beauty of a knee albeit hidden from view: ‘It formed an angle without name in mathematics, which do not concern itself with such beautiful angles’.

Klöfwerfelt lifted his eyes further, passed Jacquette’s waist, unlaced but still slender, and landed, since it was a ball, on Jacquette’s more bare parts. ‘The slow gaze fell as if trembling over a pair of bare arms, of the colour of the jasmine flower, not daring enough to linger on her hands […], with fingers that Byström’s goddesses would have adored’. Before his death, Johan Niclas Byström (1783–1848) had been Sweden’s foremost sculptor and a major Stockholm celebrity.

Jacquette’s shoulders were bare too: ‘these fields, white as snow lilies’ sloping down towards a ‘valley between two snow-white hills’. Klöfwerfelt then stopped at ‘the blossoms of the face’. Here, the ideal was smooth skin and a combination of white and red.

With what shall I compare this dazzling complexion? The whiteness of snow is too dead, even that of lilies is too cold. It was undeniably white, the eye said so, but only the outermost part was truly white, the inner vision seemed to find beneath it a slight strange shift of an unmentionable colour, which Ehrensvärd, when he draws the Italians, oddly enough calls green, which others prosaically call yellow, but which is nothing more than a faint glimmer of inherent fire and power. If I were to compare this warmth, this unmentionable colour of life, then it would not be that which my external eyes saw, but that colour, which nowadays only the eye of the imagination sees, the white purple so famous in ancient times.

The quote contains another reference to art, Carl August Ehrensvärd’s Italian studies from the late eighteenth century, well known to all educated Swedes. It seems as if words were almost lacking to describe the perfect white skin of Jacquette, the ‘white purple’ of the old masters being quite the paradox. Kiellman-Göranson/Klöfwerfelt was less eloquent on the red, stacking adjectives: ‘But the mouth was of genuine deep, dark, red, royal purple’.

Klöfwerfelt’s stroll across the beauty-scape of Jacquette was coming towards its end. He looked at the hair which Jacquette, perhaps warm from dancing, had let out: ‘The curls, black with a gold base, not fastened in the usual way at the nape, fell freely around the head, and crowded together in countless numbers’. And then a final stop: ‘The eyes, the most beautiful in creation, were blackish blue like the night above the lilies of Persia and burning like the day above them’. He forgot himself and could not say anything, indulging in ‘mute spectatorship’. But Jacquette had a dazzling white coup de grace to give: ‘Then the dark purple lips opened, and the whiteness of the small teeth won a brilliant victory’.

This flourishing depiction of a beautiful woman’s body had a twofold meaning. It was a fictitious stroll of the gaze across a particular woman, manifesting the right of men to inspect female bodies, and it was an actual account of current female beauty ideals, sprinkled with aesthetic value words. Art was represented by Byström and Ehrensvärd. The colours were given pretentious connotations: the paradoxical white purple was ancient, the red was royal, the dark Persian. Klöfwerfelt was a body flâneur, a method for Kiellman-Göranson to describe a beautiful woman in an educated yet sexualising manner, pointing out the self-evident right of men to use the body-biased gaze in social life. Below, I will return to Jacquette’s response to being looked at.

I base the analogy between the body flâneur and the more renown flâneur of the city streets on this educated, aesthetically erudite gaze. The first times the word flâneur was used, in France at the turn of the nineteenth century, it referred to an idle man wandering the streets. Over time, however, the word took on a more positive meaning, and by mid-century it referred to the educated bourgeois man who strolled the city streets, guided not by his idleness but by his powers of observation and his curiosity about the possibilities of the modern city.¹⁷ Already in 1829, Balzac referred to flânerie as a science and as the gastronomy of the eye, an expression that captures the essence of the flâneur and of the educated male gaze.¹⁸ Like the flâneur of the city, the body flâneur was an educated connoisseur. An erudite language was necessary to show that the onlooker could evaluate aesthetically both art, nature, and women, and that the depiction of a woman’s appearance was an educated judgement, far from crude or vulgar.¹⁹

In the short story ‘Fortune Favours the Brave’ (Swe: Lyckan står den djärve bi) by J.G. Blomqvist and printed in 1866, a beautiful woman was described in detail: ‘sky blue eyes, alabaster white neck, purple mouth, Cinderella feet’. Her figure was particularly impressive, ‘this straight, slender, yet ample stature like the mountain pine’, it was ‘such as we imagine the ivory statue of Pygmalion’.²⁰ The use of the word alabaster can serve as an example. The word denoted pale white skin, while having clear aesthetic connotations, suggesting the white marble and plaster of antiquity. It had long been in use in Swedish poetry, denoting ideal female pallor since the seventeenth century.²¹ The anonymous novel ‘My rival’ (Swe: Min rival) published in Stockholms Aftonpost 1850, used both the alabaster white and the Cinderella reference in a scene where the novel’s protagonist was looking at the young Dora. She did not live up to the ideals of beauty, as she had blue eyes, full lips, an equally full bosom and a slim waist but ‘far from alabaster white hands and Cendrillian small feet’.²² In a novel entitled ‘The Beautiful unknown [woman]’ (Swe: Den sköna okända) in Carlskrona Weckoblad 1855, the lieutenant Frökensköld, on the other hand, looked at a woman who was one of the most beautiful he had ever seen:

A purple mouth, cheeks of morning dawn, a forehead of snow, eyes of forget-me-nots, alabaster neck, swandownsbosom,²³ ivory fingers, and teeth of pearls, and hair like a night around a rose garden.²⁴

Beauty was dressed in a learned, poetic language that excluded the vulgar but left room for erotic imagination. The alabaster, along with words such as sylphlike, Greek, roses, lilies, purple, protruding foot, curls, etc., provided an aesthetic description of beauty also in a long description in which a woman was closely watched by a young man hidden behind a tree, in the anonymous ‘Different opinions’ (Swe: Olika åsikter), published in Blekings-Posten 1864. She was delightful to watch:

That her forms are charming, we can see from a distance, and that a small, neat foot protrudes from under the clothing is certain; the other is probably just as small and well formed. Silence! now she turns her face here. Alas! gentle powers of God guide my pen, that it may describe – the indescribable! Certainly one can speak of the luxuriant dark, soft, shiny hair hanging in rich curls around the well-shaped alabaster-white neck, of the fine Greek profile, of the roses and lilies of the cheeks, of the glowing purple of the lips, of the forget-me-not of the eyes, of the sylphlike figure, of the graceful movements of the small white hands, all this can be described, but the expression that lay above it all, the heavenly gaze radiant with the innermost goodness – trying to paint this is impossible.²⁵

The poetic made possible the educated description of beauty, but beauty also inspired poetry, as in the novel ‘Wilhelm von Braun’s leather couch’ (Swe: Wilhelm von Brauns skinnsoffa) by the pseudonym Lars Johan (1869). There, two men watched a 17-year-old girl whose hair, eyes, nose, mouth, cheeks and even waistline made her look like a little fairy, ‘conjured up, to instantly set the inspiration of the poet aflame’.²⁶

If one adds to such Swedish originals many translated works where men allowed the educated eye to examine women, it is evident that Swedish readers often could consume ocular inspections of women. An example is found in the short story ‘The good seine [a type of fishing-net]’ (Swe: Ett godt Notvarp), written by the Spanish writer Pedro Antonio de Alarcón. In his description, de Alarcón did not refer to art but to nature, to flora and fauna. The protagonist gazed at a blonde woman, graceful, well-rounded but more slender than a willow branch, ‘from the waist up she seemed to be a bouquet of flowers’:

What a bosom, what shoulders, what a neck! And what hips, what gait, what rocking of the head! White as snow, shimmering as an evening in May, fresh as the air on these hights, yearning for love as a quail in a cage, with a mouth and a veiled look and a hand and such a rounded arm and a skirt and a little bodice and a golden braid and a little foot like that, of which Salvator, the poet of Granada, says: ‘From here to heaven!’²⁷

Art was just as prevalent in the translated works as in the Swedish ones. In the French novel Tolla, the beautiful Tolla was observed, and her figure compared to that of ancient statues. Her beauty was of the kind that discouraged the sculptors because of their inability to capture it.²⁸ The art of painting could also be invoked. In the anonymous English novel ‘Fighting oneself’ (Swe: I strid med sig self), which ran in Nya Dagligt Allehanda in 1880, a woman’s body was described from head to toe, starting with her hair, which was ‘of that peculiar colour that the old masters were fond of painting, brown in the shade, golden yellow in the sun’.²⁹

‘The descendant of the crusader’ (Swe: Korsriddarens ättling) by A. de Bernard, published in Svenska Tidningen 1855, described how a man observed an oriental beauty with an alabaster-white neck, feet as small as a child’s, a gaze glowing like the sun. Even the nostrils were described, as ‘moving and widening, like a noble Arabian steed’.³⁰ In ‘The man with the three hairs’ (Swe: Mannen med de tre håren) by the German pseudonym C. Dauer, published in Malmö Handels- och Sjöfarts-Tidning 1880, the protagonist Brinckhoff described a coquettish woman with as much detail as he could muster: the neck was swan-like, the bosom was so alabaster-white and swelling that even a cold-hearted Joseph would have caught fire, the chin was rosy, the mouth cherry-red, and the cheeks white as snow. Her feet were those of a child, and her dress revealed ‘the beginning of a calf, delightfully rounded and beautiful’. The hands, of course, were lily-white. The overall verdict was that not even a Titian could have painted something so beautiful.³¹

There were some depictions of lower-class women. Though many beauty ideals, such as the lily-white hands, were reserved for the upper layers of society, simpler women could sometimes offer a better sight than middle-class women in general. This was the case in a novel by Swedish author and journalist Janne Damm, published under the pseudonym J. van D – e in his own daily Malmö Handels- och Sjöfarts-Tidning in 1853, in which the protagonist gazed at a peasant girl:

A fine silver chain held the bodice together, leaving the chest open and allowing the viewer to see a glimpse of the magnificent orbs, which were only imperfectly hidden by the snow-white linen; the arms were bare well above the elbow, the skirts did not jealously hide every part of a small foot and a delightful calf; in a word, as a peasant girl she was considered extraordinarily well dressed.³²

The choice of poetic words could change when describing a simple rural woman, as in the anonymous ‘Great-Kalle’s wedding bonds’ (Swe: Store-Kalles wigselband). There, the rich peasant Kalle observed a beautiful berry picker, with a mouth as red as ‘ripe lingonberries’, not cherries or roses.³³

In a translated serial in Folkets Röst published the same year by the popular French writer Paul de Kock, a working girl was looked upon. First, her adorable face was scrutinised in detail:

at once piquant and pleasant, modest and coquettish. Fine, though irregular features, a small mouth with pink lips, white shining teeth; a pretty nose, round chin, small ears, and eyes, which were so dark and expressive – though shadowed by long agate-coloured eyebrows – that it was very difficult to see them once, without wanting to see them again soon.³⁴

To this beautiful face could be added a better than average stature, a well-rounded leg, and a well-shaped and small foot, which was not a characteristic of female workers but of the bourgeois woman. Thus, the male protagonist was looking at a ‘really beautiful girl, whatever her station might be’. Like every connoisseur, the body flâneur based his evaluation on ideals, with minimum requirements and optimum standards. They were certainly created as signifiers for women of the higher classes, but the body flâneur was not as narrow-minded as not to recognise and gaze upon the beauty of women of other classes as well.

The body flâneur and the right to stare

The body flâneur’s gaze, such as Klöfwerfelts, on a woman was deliberate and premeditated. In the short story ‘A small travelling adventure’ (Swe: Ett litet resäfventyr), a student in medicine secretly observed a woman. Her appearance was described in detail and stereotypically (oval face, white complexion, blushing cheeks, red swelling lips, blue eyes, etc.), whereupon the student’s powers of observation were noted: ‘All this had not escaped the notice of our future doctor, who greedily followed the unknown beauty with his eyes’.³⁵ But there could be a point where the premeditated gave way to a loss of control. When Klöfwerfelt had consumed Jacquette’s image in its entirety, the experience of beauty was so strong, he forgot himself, lost the ability to speak and fell into ‘mute spectatorship’. In other words: he stared. And in that moment, Kiellman-Göranson activated Jacquette, she ceased being just an object, but a person using a strategy for being stared at and momentarily reversing the balance of power: exactly at the point when Klöfwerfelt was at his weakest and the educated aesthetic judgement turned to staring, she struck him with her white smile.

Jacquette’s behaviour seems to fall in line with results within psychological research, showing that women sometimes exploit the body-biased gaze of others. People develop strategies to deal with being stared at, as ways of both submitting to norms and benefiting from them.³⁶ To some extent, the body flâneur was a means for discussing the norms and rights of staring. In her study Staring: How we look, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson shows how staring and being stared at is the strongest but also the most ambivalent way of looking in terms of power. In most cultures, there are strict norms regulating staring. In Western culture, most people are not allowed to stare, some are allowed to stare under certain circumstances, some may find themselves being stared at occasionally, others constantly. But everyone stares now and then, struck with amazement or astonishment in front of the unknown, the unexpected, the out of the ordinary.³⁷

Garland-Thomson emphasises that staring is always an unequal relationship but that it needs not be reduced to one between perpetrator and victim.³⁸ The Klöfwerfelt case shows just that: the man, superior, lost control, but he had a right to stare, while Jacquette was certainly not a victim but knew how to tactically use her smile. The body flâneur worked as a tool for emphasising the right of men to stare when facing beauty. Klöfwerfelt was not the only one in nineteenth-century fiction that experienced female beauty so strongly that he stared rather than gazed. Such was the reaction of Kåre, a Viking in Constantinople, when he was given the opportunity to scrutinise a Byzantine princess.³⁹ Such was the case also with Erik, protagonist of a historical novel from the 30 Years War by Axel Sundberg, published in 1873. When he saw the beautiful Maria, motionless in a light white garment in the dazzling moonlight, he was so struck that he stood ‘for a minute in mute admiration’, before he recovered and was able to give proper greetings.⁴⁰

When Lieutenant Frökensköld looked at the woman mentioned above as the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, he nothing but stared and, in a way both cinematic and comical to us, unconsciously dropped his cigar in the gutter, ‘where it lay as an incense offering for the most beautiful thing God created’.⁴¹ A similar scene was played out in the story ‘The Balloon’ (Swe: Ballongen) in Post- och Inrikes Tidningar 1860, which described a Swede travelling by train through Belgium, where he by coincidence came to sit face to face with a beautiful Englishwoman. He looked at her and at the same time tried not to look at her:

To do what I could, I decided to close my eyes, but in vain – I saw through my eyelids the image of the enchantress, and after an hour’s journey I found myself staring incessantly at my seductive vis-à-vis.⁴²

As Garland-Thomson points out, being caught staring is often associated with shame. The body flâneur, however, did not need to be ashamed precisely because of the competency of flâneurship. To be caught doing something so inappropriate as staring at a woman, and often in a tête-a-tête situation between strangers such as the one with Erik and Maria, was a serious social transgression, but for the body flâneur, it was of no consequence. He only lost control when going through a truly sublime experience of beauty, and why should an educated and knowledgeable man not lose his composure when facing the sublime?

Again, the same theme was also present in translated serials. A man who was stunned by a woman’s beauty to such an extent that he could only look at her in ‘mute admiration’ was Holger Friis, protagonist of a novel by the Danish writer Beatus Dodt which appeared in Dagens Nyheter in 1876. Friis observed the countess Breitenfeldt from a distance, gazed upon her almost black hair that fell in rich curls, her high white forehead, finely shaped nose, dark eyes that looked out over the sea, her well-shaped mouth ‘behind whose full and healthy lips a row of white teeth shone’, and her ‘fine, pleasing figure’. He fell into such admiration at this sight of beauty that he was only able to recover his senses by a force of will: ‘At last he tore himself free from the spell’ and approached the countess.⁴³ The same loss of control happened to Brinckhoff in Dauer’s novel ‘The Man with the Three Hairs’. He ‘stared at this enchanted apparition, as if it had really been a picture created by the hand of an artist’. The protagonist in James Grant’s novel ‘In England and on Crimea’ had a hard time not staring at a beautiful woman, with pale skin, alabaster white hands, shining black hair, and so forth.⁴⁴ In ‘A dream of youth’ (Swe: En ungdomsdröm) by German author August Kühne, a man looked at a woman: ‘My eye was sort of magically glued to her features, I literally devoured her with my eyes’. He knew it was not the right thing to do, ‘yet I could do nothing but stare at her incessantly’.⁴⁵

The educational project of the body flâneur

The body flâneur, as we have seen, was a literary device for describing women as eroticised objects of beauty, without becoming vulgar and crude: objectification was dressed up in an educated, aesthetic language. It was probably effective at a time when visual representations were still rare in the press. There, images of beautiful women hardly existed. But the body flâneur was also an educational project, and in a double sense. First, he taught readers, both female and male, what the ideal female body looked like and how it should be detailed in words, but also that the woman was a natural object of scrutiny, and a field of expertise. Secondly, he pinpointed the normative behaviours of the female starees, teaching women how to respond to men’s looking and staring.

So far, this article has dealt with the first aspect. In short, the body flâneur gave important lessons in what Laura Mulvey once called the female ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’.⁴⁶ The descriptions form a dictionary of beauty, of which body parts were important from a beauty perspective, and of how they should look to be highly valued; how to let the foot protrude in order to look small, how the hands should be moved, when a smile could be appropriate, how the hair should fall, etc. Not everyone could have deep blue eyes or an alabaster white neck, but everyone could do something to meet the expectations of educated men. In this way, the body flâneur is a formidable example of how the male gaze divide the woman’s body into sections.⁴⁷ Many studies have shown that this body bias is characteristic of objectification; it assesses the body in parts, each one based on a beauty template specific to that particular part.⁴⁸

The second aspect of the educational project was that the reader was presented with conceivable female reactions to being stared at. Jacquette was not a child but had obviously been stared at by men before, and she knew how to exploit their weaknesses and go for a blinding white knock-out. But that knowledge also made her, in the eyes of a decent reader, a woman of less commendable qualities. This was perfectly clear in Dauer’s ‘The Man with the Three Hairs’. Brinckhoff’s staring at the coquettish woman provoked her to respond with her eyes, ‘the rays of which struck the young man and set his blood in a more violent surge, causing some confusion in his thought’.⁴⁹ This was indeed the behaviour of a coquette. As Ellen Bayuk Rosenman has pointed out, the coquette caused concern because of her social skills, seductiveness and self-interest.⁵⁰ Although the Swedish noun kokett (Eng: coquette) was further away from prostitution than for instance the French coquette, the lines were sharply drawn neither between a beautiful, fashionable woman and a coquette, nor between a coquette and a demi-monde. Thus, it was up to decent women themselves to maintain the boundary with the coquette, and they were not supposed to be skilled in meeting a man’s gaze, and even less so, to exploit it.⁵¹

In ‘Out there on the countryside!’ (Swe: Derute på landet!) by Axel Krook, published in Jönköpingsbladet 1857, young Carl scrutinised the beautiful Amanda from behind a branch, but he revealed himself, Amanda saw him and ‘blushed deeply at the sudden sight of a stranger’.⁵² Sven Borg was a Swedish nobleman who took refuge in the wilderness in A.F. Åhlgren’s historical novel ‘The Adventures of Sven Borg’ (Swe: Sven Borgs äfventyr). There he had the opportunity to observe a beauty named Adina, an ‘unearthly creature’ with her colours of rose and lily, sky-blue eyes, and fluttering curls. When she saw him looking at her, she blushed.⁵³ When Great-Kalle addressed the berry picker in ‘Great-Kalle’s wedding bonds’, she replied in a timid voice while her tanned cheeks were coloured red with a lively blush.⁵⁴

Blushing was the ideal reaction to men’s staring. As shown by Ruth Yeazell, the blush was often a signifier of modesty, innocence, and purity of heart.⁵⁵ It had great narrative power in nineteenth-century novels, considered as an authentic expression of emotions which could not be feigned. From the end of the eighteenth century, it became, in Paul White’s words, ‘above all a mark of modest beauty in public and print’.⁵⁶ Research on blushing in nineteenth-century literature mostly deals with the English language, and again, Swedish originals were not original in any way. In ‘The Brothers’ (Swe: Bröderna) by the German author Adolf Wildbrandt (1873), Karl watched Annette without her noticing him for some time, reading in the garden. As he approached, the leaves rustled, she stood up, ‘looked at him in astonishment and a warm blush ran down her cheeks’.⁵⁷ In the novel ‘Braunsberg the Charcoal Burner’ (Swe: Kolaren Braunsberg) by the French writer and theatre director Alphonse Royer, which ran in Stockholms Dagblad in 1855, a baron met a young woman on a stroll in Bois de Boulogne. She was beautiful and innocent like an angel, eyes deep blue like the sky of the Orient, of a slender figure, with forms as fine and round as if they were cast by the hand of a master. He looked at her ‘with mute admiration’, she happened to meet his gaze, blushed and looked away.⁵⁸

Blushing and looking away meant acknowledging the order of power inherent in the gaze and confirming the unwritten rules of seeing: Men were allowed to look, to scrutinise, even to stare; women had to accept that they would be gazed upon. When blushing, the women opted out of more active practices of looking such as Jacquette’s, and reduced the stare to the perpetrator-victim relationship that Garland-Thomson suggests it does not have to be. In this way, these fictional stories came to confirm female subordination, either by the counterstrategies of the coquette or the blushing of decent young women.

The body flâneur: a misogynist custodian at work

In this article, I have highlighted a phenomenon or a type in nineteenth-century fiction, the body flâneur, the man who knew how to let his gaze wander expertly over a woman’s body and make judgements about the appearance of its various parts. I have coined this textual everyday lookism body flâneur because of the kinship between this fictious man and the flâneur of the city. They not only coincided in time but also had a lot in common: The nineteenth-century flâneur was the male, privileged spectator wandering through the different parts of the city to attain a more complete picture of urbanity and modernity; the body flâneur was the male privileged spectator who let his gaze wander over the woman’s body to attain a more complete image of beauty and who knew how to anchor his impressions in an aesthetic knowledge.⁵⁹ The flâneur’s way of experiencing the city was, in Richard Sennett’s words, the male bourgeois privilege of obtaining ‘a right to the city’; the body flâneur, who was a bourgeois man, obtained a similar right to the woman’s body.⁶⁰

By opening the article with social-psychological research on objectification theory and the body-biased gaze, and with media research on the process of normalisation, I wanted to connect the body flâneur to the larger discussion about the maintaining of a gendered hierarchy of power through everyday practices of lookism, by which women are diminished. Studies have shown that the body-biased gaze with its division of the female body into parts has been an important component in the objectification of women, which in turn has been central to the female self-objectification that is said to characterise modern consumer society. One could perhaps object that the detailed body examinations were a kind of reverse of realism, an expression of a literary ideal that could describe in detail the appearance of people – however, it was a sexualised description not matched by any similar descriptions in the press of men’s bodies.

Furthermore, I claim that one purpose with the body flâneur was to evoke an image of a beautiful woman in accordance with the beauty ideals of the time in a time when visual representations were uncommon. In this way, the body flâneur was a textual product of the emerging modern visual culture for which the better-known city flâneur soon became a symbolic figurehead. Descriptions of beautiful women were characterised by aesthetic stereotypes, rather than realism, the women lacked inner life, and few connections were made, as in aesthetics, between outer and inner beauty. The observed women rarely had any thought-activity or any agency other than that they responded to or provoked the man’s scrutiny, they spoke little, they hardly moved, they were surfaces on which the male gaze wandered, examples of John Berger’s powerful formulation in Ways of Seeing (1972): ‘Men act, women appear’.⁶¹

The philosopher Kate Manne has argued in the book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (2019) that sexism and misogyny must be understood together but as separate things. Sexism is an ideology that affirms and reinforces unequal gender roles by portraying them as natural and true. It is the motivating force behind patriarchy, which is presented as a natural consequence of equally natural differences between the sexes. Misogyny is, in Manne’s words, the executive force, the ordering power of ideology: ‘The law enforcement branch of the patriarchy’.⁶² Misogyny should not be limited to outright hatred or hostility against women, but as a system that rewards those women who uphold the norms oppressing them and that punishes those who violate them. Most men do not hate women, but men and women act unconsciously, carrying out the watchdog work of misogyny in their everyday actions embedded in a sexist culture.

Inspired by Manne’s thinking, I imagine that a law enforcement branch not only punishes crime but warns, is ever-present and works pre-emptively, and that a normalised and ongoing reduction of women is a central component in the maintenance of sexist ideology and its assumed truths – at least of the Swedish nineteenth-century bourgeois sexist ideology. The body flâneur as an expression of this law enforcement was a method, in a time poor on visual representations, to reproduce the notion that a woman’s value lay in her appearance. He reduced women to a set of body parts, each of which could not be judged in any other way than by how they appeared, and he served to educate women both in self-objectification and in being able to properly respond to men’s stares and gazes. The body flâneur as a literary phenomenon was not just the educated connoisseur he was portrayed as, but also a custodian of the patriarchy.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Leif Runefelt

Leif Runefelt, PhD in Economic History and a professor in the History of Ideas at Södertörn University, Sweden, is specialised in the Swedish history of consumption and consumer culture during the transition from early modern to modern society, ca 1700–1920. Among fields of studies are press advertisements, 19^th-century entertainment, and fashion.

Notes

1. Walkowitz, ‘Urban Spectatorship’.; Letourneux, ‘Flâneur, sensibilité esthétique’, pp. 29–31; The research on the flâneur is vast; for a recent discussion, see Philpotts, “Dickens, the Flâneur.

2. Hollett et al., ‘Body Gaze as a Marker’, p. 2759.

3. Fredrickson and Roberts, ‘Objectification Theory’; references in Moradi and Huang, ‘Objectification Theory and Psychology’, and in Hollett et al., ‘Body Gaze as a Marker’.

4. See for instance seminal works such as Berger, Ways of Seeing; Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure’; Pollock, ‘What’s Wrong with “Images of Women”?’; Ellyson and Dovidio, Power, Dominance, and Nonverbal Behavior, pp. 129–49.

5. ‘Lookism’, in Chandler and Munday, A Dictionary of Media; Mason, ‘What’s Wrong with Everyday lookism’, pp. 315; Granleese, ‘Lookism’.

6. The research is extensive, but three examples are Grabe, Ward and Shibley, ‘The Role of the Media’; Rousseau and Eggermont, ‘Media Ideals’; and Sokolova, Kefi and Dutot ‘Beyond the Shallows’.

7. Fredrickson and Roberts, ‘Objectification Theory’, p. 176; Cortese, Provocateur, ch. 4; Ward, ‘Media and Sexualization’.

8. Gustafsson and Rydén, Den svenska pressens historia; Larsson, En annan historia.

9. Larsson, En annan historia, pp. 27–31; Casteras, ‘Reader, Beware’, 7; Phlegley, Educating the Proper Woman Reader, pp. 5–7.

10. Such authors include Johan Jolin, Marie Sophie Schwartz, Josefina Wettergrund and Jon Olof Åberg.

11. By daily press, I mean newspapers that were published several times a week.

12. The database for Swedish digitized press is owned by The Swedish National Library; https://tidningar.kb.se/.

13. Oscarsson, ‘Fortsättning följer’.

14. Such as alabastervit*/alabasterhvit* (alabaster white), askungefot*/cendrillonfot* (Cinderella foot), liljehvit*/liljevit* (lily white), rosenröd* (rose red), words related to lips, eyes, hair, shoulders, bosom, arms, hands, waists, calfs, feet; rodnad* (red, blush), blick* (look), etc.

15. Beetham, A Magazine of her Own; Phlegley, Educating the Proper Woman Reader; Moruzi, Constructing Girlhood.

16. [Kiellman-Göranson], ‘En ung Stockholmska’, Allmänna Tidningen, December 16, 1853. All translations from Swedish are my own.

17. Murail, ‘Envisioning Dickens’ City’, pp. 58–59; Walkowitz, ‘Urban Spectatorship’.

18. Balzac, Physiologie du mariage, 40.

19. A similar connoiseurship on art as well as on femininity developed in Britain around 1800 is discussed in Bermingham, ‘The Aesthetics of Ignorance’, pp. 13–18.

20. J.G. Blomqvist, ‘Lyckan står den djerfwe bi’, Halmstadsbladet, March 6, 1866.

21. ‘Alabaster’, Svenska Akademiens Ordbok, 2a (on the poetic use of the word), 2b (in particular on the female body), https://www.saob.se/artikel/?seek=alabaster&pz=1.

22. ‘Min rival’, Stockholms Aftonpost, March 11, 1850.

23. ‘Swandownsneck’ (Swe: Svandunshals) and ‘Swandownsbosom’ (Swe: Svandunsbarm) were established expressions for describing ideally white, smooth necks and bosoms, ‘Svandunsbarm’, Svenska Akademiens Ordbok, https://www.saob.se/artikel/?seek=svandunsbarm&pz=1#U_S14717_113522.

24. ‘Den sköna okända’, Carlskrona Weckoblad, May 30, 1855.

25. ‘Olika åsikter’, Blekings-Posten, December 9, 1864. See also Evelyn, ‘Små skizzer ur Stockholmslifvet’, Östgöta Correspondenten, August 20, 1870; ‘Ett litet resäfventyr’, Smålands-Posten, December 18, 1872.

26. Lars Johan, ‘Wilhelm von Brauns skinnsoffa’, Nya Wermlandstidningen, March 6, 1869.

27. Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, ‘Ett godt notvarp’, Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfarts-Tidning, August 17, 1878; for a similar reference to flora, see ‘Den hemliga depeschen. Novell’, Post- och Inrikes Tidningar, September 22, 1855.

28. E. About, ‘Tolla’, Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfarts-Tidning, June 19, 1855.

29. ‘I strid med sig sjelf’, Nya Dagligt Allehanda, June 10, 1880.

30. A. de Bernard, ‘Korsriddarens ättling’, Svenska Tidningen, December 20, 1855. See also August Maquet, ‘Den sköna Gabriella’, April 16, 1856; James Grant, ‘I England och på Krim’, Nya Dagligt Allehanda, May 27, 1876.

31. Dauer, ‘Mannen med de tre håren’, Malmö Handels- och Sjöfarts-Tidning, May 1, 1880.

32. [Damm], ‘Halfbröderna’, Malmö Handels- och Sjöfarts-Tidning, August 16, 1853; see also ‘Ett äfventyr på landet’, Norrköpings Tidningar, September 8, 1852.

33. ‘Store-Kalles wigselband’, Hallands-Posten, January 23, 1882.

34. Paul de Kock, ‘En gradpasserare’, Folkets Röst, June 29, 1853.

35. ‘Ett litet resäfventyr’, Smålands-Posten, 18 Dec. 1872.

36. Hollett et al, ‘Body Gaze as a Marker’.

37. Garland-Thomson, Staring, pp. 33–45.

38. Ibid., 10.

39. ‘Kåre i Miklagård’, Nya Dagligt Allehanda, January 28, 1874.

40. Sundberg, ‘På Konungens bud’, Grenna Tidning, May 14, 1873.

41. ‘Den sköna okända’, Carlskrona Weckoblad, May 30, 1855.

42. ‘Ballongen’, Post- och Inrikes Tidningar, July 2, 1860.

43. Dodt, ‘Holger Friis’, Dagens Nyheter, May 22, 1876. The title appeared only where the novel began, May 6, 1876.

44. Dauer, ‘Mannen med de tre håren’; James Grant, ‘I England och på Krim’.

45. [Kühne], ‘En ungdomsdröm’, Bohusläns Tidning, 21 September 21, 1876.

46. Mulvey, ‘Visual pleasure’, p. 19.

47. Kaschak, Engendered Lives, p. 113.

48. Fredricksen and Roberts, ‘Objectification Theory’; Gervais, Vescio and Allen, ‘When What You See is What You Get’, pp. 6–12; Hollett et al, ‘Body Gaze as a Marker’; Bernard et al., ‘Body Parts Reduction’, with references.

49. Dauer, ‘Mannen med de tre håren’.

50. Bayuk Rosenman, ‘Fear of Fashion’.

51. Gedin, ‘Får jag lov’, pp. 75–76. On the blurred line between the coquette and the prostitute, see e.g. Coons, ‘Artiste or Coquette?’; Smith, Berlin Coquette”, pp. 8–20.

52. Axel [Krook], ‘Derute på landet! Af Axel’, Jönköpingsbladet, January 31, 1857.

53. A.F. Åhlgren, ‘Sven Borgs äfventyr. Svenskt original’, Fäderneslandet, August 8, 1868.

54. ‘Store-Kalles wigselband’, Hallands-Posten, 23 January 1882

55. Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty.

56. White, ‘Reading the Blush’; O’Farrell, Telling Complexions, 4–5.

57. Wildbrandt, ‘Bröderna’, Lunds Weckoblad, May 24, 1870; see also Gonzalès, ‘Den hämnande maken’, Östgöta Correspondenten, October 15, 1853.

58. Royer, ‘Kolaren Braunsberg’, Stockholms Dagblad, November 20, 1855; see also Detlef, ‘Hermance’, Dagens Nyheter, October 2, 1874, 103.

59. Walkowitz, ‘Urban Spectatorship’, p. 205.

60. Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, p. 137.

61. Berger, Ways of Seeing, p. 47.

62. Manne, Down Girl, pp. 78–9.