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Flânerie and the Ghosts of War: Hidden Perspectives of Edith Wharton's ‘The Look of Paris’

This essay makes use of the controversial trope of the ‘invisible flâneuse’ in its attempt to give critical visibility to Edith Wharton's wartime article ‘The Look of Paris’, and to point out the hitherto unnoticed connections that exist between this documentary text and two of her supernatural tales. What links Wharton's ghosts to her experience of war is that they both represent a felt rather than a seen reality, and it is this fact which opened up the possibility for a symbiotic relationship between her war journalism and her ghost stories. The essay argues that the introduction of martial law in August 1914, which had pushed Wharton out of her car and onto the pavement, had also offered her the liberty to become a kind of wartime flâneuse, with the opportunity to observe the defamiliarised city from the vantage point of the streets at a unique moment in modern history. Her ceaseless walks across Paris resulted in compelling descriptions of the mute and deserted capital, which general mobilization had turned into a ghost town. The looming presence of a heavily censored war within a silent and incongruously serene urban landscape gives rise to a number of phantasmagoric images which have left discernible traces in ‘Kerfol’ and in ‘All Souls’’. The same motifs of silence and emptiness that mark her portrait of a city in suspended animation reappear in these tales, suggesting the existence of a hidden link between the author's wartime experience and two of her most celebrated ghost stories.