The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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Jane Rendell
sentations served to reinforce the role of female employees as the site of desire
in the bazaar. Rambling texts speculated on the improbable chastity of
these demure matrons, representing them not as female subjects but as objects
for the projection of male lust, their bodies on display to men, in parts.
Lady Agar Ellis was “said to have the finest neck and shoulders of all the
ladies who go to court, her lips are thick and pouting”; the Widow of
Castlereagh had “a noble Grecian face, and a remarkably small foot”; and
Lady Francis F——e was “greatly admired—but particularly her beautifully
shaped arm which she displays naked, nearly up to the shoulder.” 44
The importance of visual consumption—the delight in the gaze
and the exchange of looks—played a critical role in constructing the social
space of these pleasure houses of commodity consumption. Not all observes
approved: “All the worth-less elegance of dress and decoration are here displayed
on the counters in gaudy profusion. ... The Bazaar, in a word, is a
fashionable lounge for all those who have nothing to do except see and be
seen.” 45 In visual representations of bazaars, the objectifying function of the
male gaze was reinforced by positioning women as the focus of the look
within the space of the image. Within the material place of the bazaar,
women were located as the main attraction, at booths organized into easily
traversed aisles, behind tables full of merchandise on display.
In places of commodity consumption, as in other public spaces, the
visibility of women implied their sexual availability, whether through intrigue
or through prostitution. The active display by prostitutes of their
own bodies—in windows, on streets, and by adopting indecent attitudes,
signs, and invitations to attract the attention of passengers—suggested to
the male viewer that any woman on display in the public realm was also
available for visual, if not sexual, consumption. 46 In Fanny Burney’s The
Wanderer, the heroine, a working woman, notes the careful and exploitative
positioning of women in retail spaces such as millinery shops, creating “images
of advertisement in a manner that savours of genteel prostitution; the
prettier girls are placed at the window to attract male customers and dalliers.
The labour is treated as a frivolity, and the girls are being taught to sell
themselves.” 47
Removed from the everyday world of the city, and constructed as
liminal zones where desires were played out, the bazaar conveyed sexual excitement
to the rambler by emphasizing the “feminine” as screen for projecting
fantasy. Bazaars were used as pickup zones or for setting up sexual
liaisons of a clandestine if not economic nature, and the women who occupied
these places were both chaste and lewd, prostitutes and nonprostitutes.
It was the rambler’s inability to decipher the “true” sexual identity of a
woman from her appearance that titillated him. The frivolity and decorative