Conclusion: ‘Look, let’s start all over again. What’s she like?’
The conclusion offers the following provisional definition of la Parisienne: a type of which atypicality is the dominant feature; a type whose identity is continuously displaced or deferred, simultaneously reaching back to her earliest manifestations in the nineteenth century and forward to future manifestations which will both affirm and rework the iconography of the type. The further turn of the screw for the difficulty of defining la Parisienne as a type is that this difficulty is not in spite of her iconography but is in fact built into it. This apparent contradiction is accounted for within iconography itself as a methodology, the two aspects of which are stability and mutability. Since a type is only a type because of recognisable motifs, certain motifs must be established which have both universal, and particular or historical validity. One of the ways iconography may respond to its dual imperatives of stability and mutability is by constructing a cycle of films featuring a certain type, and the conclusion reveals that this book goes some way toward constructing what might be called a cycle of Parisienne films.