Apartment Stories () von Sharon Marcus

In urban studies, the nineteenth century is the "age of great cities." In feminist studies, it is the era of the separate domestic sphere. But what of the city's homes? In the course of answering this questionApartment Stories provides a singular and radically new framework for understanding the urban and the domestic. Turning to an element of the cityscape that is thoroughly familiar yet frequently overlooked, Sharon Marcus argues that the apartment house embodied the intersections of city and home, public and private, and masculine and feminine spheres.

Moving deftly from novels to architectural treatises, legal debates, and popular urban observation, Marcus compares the representation of the apartment house in Paris and London. Along the way, she excavates the urban ghost tales that encoded Londoners' ambivalence about city dwellings; contends that Haussmannization enclosed Paris in a new regime of privacy; and locates a female counterpart to theflâneur and the omniscient realist narrator—theportière who supervised the apartment building.

List of Illustrations 

Acknowledgments 

Introduction 

PART ONE: OPEN HOUSES
I. Seeing through Paris, 1820-1848 
2. Balzac's Spatial Relations 

PART TWO: THE CITY AND THE DOMESTIC IDEAL
3. The Haunted London House, 1840-1880 

PART THREE: INTERIORIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS
4. Enclosing Paris, 18 52-18 So 
5. Zola's Restless House 

Notes 
Bibliography 
Photograph Credits 
Index