Demystifying the Inter-war Rive Gauche - Representation of Commercialized Urban Culture in The Left Bank

Demystifying the Inter-war Rive Gauche

  This paper purports to examine the ways in which the modern city and the world of commercialized urban culture are envisaged in Rhys"s The Left Bank. It  considers, in particular, the author"s tackling of the issue of the commodification of bohemian lifestyle in the supposedly liberal quarter of Montparnasse of Paris of the 1920s, suggesting that her representation of the city is essentially at odds with the city delineated in the fiction and memoirs of mainstream modernist writers and especially the American expatriates, who tended to define inter-war Paris as a gay, glamorous epicentre of the Jazz Age. Unlike them, Rhys was prone to delve into and unmask the grim aspects of modern existence trapped in that specific commercial district. She thus calls into question the nature of the capitalist culture, engaging us to reconsider the strains and tensions inherent in urban modernity.