“Urbanism” or the condition and experience of urban living received
intensified attention with the arrival of modernity, the Industrial revolution,
and the attendant expansion of major cities. For modernists the rapid transformation
of city life and the greater concentration of people in the metropolis signaled
more than the usual associations: crowded living conditions, pollution, personal
anonymity, the breakdown of the extended family into smaller social units,
more regimented and impersonal working conditions and (on the less dire side)
convenience, modern modes of transportation, and increased accessibility to
public institutions (usually housed in major cities). These associations, as
I suggest, remain relatively familiar to city dwellers and non-city dwellers
alike into the twenty-first century. In addition to these, then, many of the
major figures typically labeled “modernist” in literature and the
arts as well as in the social sciences tried to go beyond surface manifestations
to examine aspects of urban experience and urban psychology which fundamentally
distinguish them from those that follow from traditional and rural modes of
living. The renowned German sociologist Georg Simmel considered a range of
the consequences for the individual of living in an urban environment in the
essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903). For Simmel urban
life is radically different from life in small towns, rural areas, and the
newly emergent suburbs; urban life is so different, he argues, that it requires
entirely distinct categories of behavior and human character to describe that
experience. Without necessarily knowing of Simmel’s work, many of the
modernist authors concerned with urban life (Henry James, Jean Rhys, Virginia
Woolf, James Joyce, etc.) shared his basic premise of the radical difference
of urban experience and often dramatized through their fictions the conditions
he explored as a social scientist. Woolf’s provocative declaration that “in
or about December, 1910, human character changed” may refer in large
part to the changes brought about by urban experience.
Simmel’s immediate objective is to account for what he calls the “psychological
basis of the metropolitan type of individuality”. First, this basis “consists
in the intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and
uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli.” “With each crossing
of the street,” moreover, “with the tempo and multiplicity of economic,
occupational and social life, the city sets up a deep contrast to small town
and rural life with reference to the sensory foundations of psychic life.” Woolf
seems to portray a similar experience in her description of Clarissa Dalloway,
the title character of Mrs. Dalloway (1925), as she walks through the streets
of London early in the novel. Clarissa and the crowd of people about her are
disoriented by the unexpected appearance of skywriting. They look up in incomprehension—“The
sound of an aeroplane bored ominously into the ears of the crowd.” Only
retrospectively—recovering from the initial shock of a new stimulus—do
they realize (comfortingly?) that it was an advertisement for toffee that was
being printed across the London sky. They are perhaps relieved to know it is
not an air raid such as those of World War I that killed 2,300 Londoners.
If a new type of individual, with a new psychology and a new sensory apparatus,
emerges from urban centers such as London, Paris, Dublin, and Berlin, its prime,
symptomatic manifestation is found in a new set of attitudes. A recurrent attitude
that Simmel describes (and one of the descriptive terms his essay popularizes)
is “the blasé attiude,” defined as “an incapacity .
. . to react to new sensations with the appropriate energy”: this attitude
of general indifference derives, according to Simmel, directly from urban experience.
The indifference, that is to say, is precisely a product of overexposure to external
stimuli (such as advertising stimuli). Simmel concludes, “There is perhaps
no psychic phenomenon which has been so unconditionally reserved to the metropolis
as has the blasé attitude. The blasé attitude results first from
the rapidly changing and closely compressed contrasting stimulations of the nerves.” For
British modernists specifically (excepting Joyce whose consistent setting is
Dublin), the concerns surrounding urbanism were tied to the realities of life
in London, the first major European city to be extensively industrialized. The
city experienced rapid population growth; the number of people living in the
city reached approximately 2.5 million in 1851, the year of London’s Great
Exhibition which celebrated the British Empire’s commercial power, and
then 6.5 million at the beginning of the new century. Health problems (especially
cholera outbreaks) and poverty plagued the city in the first decades of the twentieth
century. The historian Samuel Hynes maps the city in the Edwardian years (1901—1910)
along the lines of the enormous imbalance in wealth: “The poor were more
wretched and more numerous than at any other time in English history, and the
rich were richer and more conspicuous in their luxuries. The extreme gap between
penury and ostentation, between the East End of London and the West End, was
an unavoidable social fact.” Socially conscious writers and journalists
of the time, Hynes further notes, referred to this as “the crime of poverty.”
Hynes, Samuel. The Edwardian Turn of Mind. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1968.
Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.”