The Metropolis and Mental Life in the Novel

The work of the early sociologist Georg Simmel provides unparalleled insight into the complex subjective consequences of the growth of an increasingly objective modern culture. This article provides a close reading of Simmel's famous essay, "The Metropolis and Mental Life," to argue that the novel is the sustained realistic treatment of mental life in the large context of the money economy encapsulated in the idea of the metropolis. Simmel's multi-faceted reading of "mental life" in the metropolis—its intellectualistic quality, calculating and precise nature, the inability to feel, investment in intensity and uniqueness, freedom and attendant loneliness in the face of impersonal distance—permits us to read the diverse novel experiences of subjective life we begin to see represented in the new genre we call the novel as manifestations of the deeply contradictory experience of a metropolitan modernity.