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Abstract
My dissertation explores the ways in which American and British expatriate representations of Paris in the 1920s and 1930s intersect with the formation of expatriate identity. I examine works by Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald in the light of later writings by Djuna Barnes and Jean Rhys from the 1930s that interrogate many of the assumptions about expatriate identity and the metropolis made in the former writers' work. Hemingway and Fitzgerald produce expatriate texts that map trauma occasioned by the technological horrors of World War One onto Paris, while Barnes and Rhys see Paris as a site of apprehension at the threat of fascism and a new war whose chief victims would be the marginalized in European society.
The first chapter, “Modernist Rooms and Expatriate Identity,” argues for a shift from the drawing room to exterior space as the site of significant social and psychological negotiation as we move from the nineteenth century into early twentieth-century narratives, and explores what occupies this vacated interior space. My second chapter, “Negotiating with the City: The Liminality of Parisian Cafés,” draws extensively on the historical and cultural development of the Parisian café from the eighteenth through the early twentieth century, suggesting that expatriate writers use cafés as liminal spaces that allow both engagement and withdrawal from the urban environment.
Chapter three, “Mapping the City: The Expatriate in the Crowd,” examines how expatriate writers both utilize and diverge from nineteenth-century French conceptions of the flâneur figure as they map ethical values onto public space. Chapter four, “Expatriate Travel through Paris: Placelessness in Motion,” positions expatriate representations of urban travel within larger discourses of anxiety about rapid motion, and argues that expatriate journeys through Paris abstract characters from their surroundings, while emphasizing urban space as both limited and confining. The final chapter, “Twilight of the Idols: Returning to the Place of Expatriation,” deals with narratives of reassessment where writers judge and reshape their expatriate experiences.
