In 1841, the French journalist Louis Huart proposed “a new definition of man” in his book-length study of manners Physiologie du Flâneur (5): “Man rises above all other animals only because he can stroll” (7). Pitting his anthropology of the flâneur against all previous philosophical accounts of the human, he amusingly distinguished the human urban stroller from the monkey, the bear, the dog, and the ox (7). The fact that Huart should define flânerie as an essentially human activity is part and parcel of a traditional representation of the city, which, since Aristotle's political conception of the polis, has persistently been thought of as a distinctively human environment. Excluding slaves, women, animals, and all that is not man, the Aristotelian polis delimits the political sphere of citizenship. In his challenging article “From Animal Life to City Life,” Simon Glendinning destabilized the urban anthropocentrism underlying Aristotle's Politics, and set about reconceptualizing the “urban nomad” as a wanderer within an open, democratic space (28). This demotic spirit of urban nomadism could be traced back to earlier representations of flânerie, starting with Baudelaire's comparing of the flâneur to several animals in “The Painter of Modern Life” and his praise of the “chien flâneur” in “Good Dogs.” The presence of the animal in the emergence of flânerie as an aesthetic discourse reveals, against Huart's essentialist distinction, an imperceptible ontological displacement at work in the practice of “street-haunting.”

In order to grasp the political stakes of this ontological blur, I would like to examine the figure of the tortoise in Virginia Woolf's essays on London. Reworking the traditional tortoise imagery of human self-centered subjectivity, Woolf stages a chance encounter with real tortoises in “Oxford Street Tide” (1932), which momentarily questions the anthropocentric focus of the urban stroll, as elusive links interweave between the essayistic persona, the consuming flâneuse, and the commodified tortoise.