The Suburban, the Modern and 'une Dame de Passy'

Abstract

Despite the size and constant growth of the body of work on the concept of modernity and the modern city, there has been little discussion of an area of the city which was indubitably a site of modernity: the middle-class suburb. In this paper, I intend to consider the reasons for this omission; to examine one particular Paris suburb, Passy, in the sixteenth arrondissement; and to suggest that this suburb played a determining role in the production of Berthe Morisot, who lived there from the 1850s until her death in 1895. The many and substantially differing models of the city which have been proposed from perspectives as wide-ranging as geography, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and statistics share several characteristics: their focus is on the city centre as the site of real interest; they seldom engage with the concept of the city as gendered; and in consequence, they inevitably privilege the masculine. Ideas such as those of Georg Simmel in his article 'The Metropolis and Mental Life',2 often cited in the literature of art history, are characteristic of the emphasis that is placed on the city centre. Simmel's is an evolutionist view, in which the ultimate city is the one which is most heterogeneous, most fragmented, and in which the metropolis nourishes two forms of individualism, individual independence and the elaboration of individuality itself.3 His ideas were developed by later sociologists such as Louis Wirth, and have come to dominate the discourse of urbanism. Where the city is regarded, as it is in such frameworks, as heterogeneous, exciting, productive of and preserving greater individualism, and concerned with 'cultural' values, discussion about the suburb assumes an oppositional role: it is perceived as homogeneous, dull and philistine. As Linda McDowell has noted with particular reference to urban theory, this may be ascribed to the fact that: