Bildungsroman

MOVEMENT ORIGIN Bildungsroman is the name affixed to those nov- els that concentrate on the development or edu- cation of a central character. German in origin, c. 1766 ‘‘bildungs’’ means formation, and ‘‘roman’’ means novel. Although The History of Agathon, written by Christoph Martin Wieland in 1766– 1767, may be the first known example, it was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meis- ter’s Apprenticeship, written in 1795, that took the form from philosophical to personal devel- opment and gave celebrity to the genre. More than any other type of novel, the Bil- dungsroman intends to lead the reader to greater personal enrichment as the protagonist journeys from youth to psychological or emotional matur- ity. Traditionally, this growth occurs according to a pattern: the sensitive, intelligent protagonist leaves home, undergoes stages of conflict and growth, is tested by crises and love affairs, then finally finds the best place to use his/her unique talents. Sometimes the protagonist returns home to show how well things turned out. Some Bil- dungsromans end with the death of the hero, leaving the promise of his life unfulfilled. Tradi- tionally, English novelists complicate the protag- onist’s battle to establish an individual identity with conflicts from outside the self. German nov- elists typically concentrate on the internal strug- gle of the hero. The protagonist’s adventures can be seen as a quest for the meaning of life or as a vehicle for the author’s social and moral opinions as demonstrated through the protagonist.

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The Bildungsroman was especially popular until 1860. Its German affiliation, however, caused anti-German sentiment during the world wars to contribute to the demise of its influence, along with the emergence of a multitude of modern experiments in novel writing. Nonetheless, James Joyce wrote his Bildungsroman, A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, in 1916, and the genre has continued to be adopted, with distinguishing var- iations, by writers of many nationalities.

REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS Charlotte Bronte¨ (1816–1855) Charlotte Bronte¨was born in Yorkshire, Eng- land, on April 21, 1816, the third of six children. Her two older sisters died in childhood, and Bronte¨became very close to her remaining younger siblings, brother Branwell and sisters Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (Time & Life Pictures / Emily and Anne. In 1846, Bronte¨and her sisters Mansell / Getty Images) published a collection of poetry under the pseu- donyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, and although the collection was not well received by critics and readers, the three women continued his first success as a journalist and comic writer to write. By 1849, Bronte¨had lost her three of the Pickwick Papers (1836–1837). However, beloved siblings—Branwell from complications his deep social concerns found expression in a of heavy drinking, and Emily and Anne to tuber- rich intensity and variety in his later works. By culosis. Her writing career, however, was taking the time of his death from a paralytic stroke at off with the success of Jane Eyre (1847), an age 58 on June 9, 1870, Dickens had written excellent example of the female Bildungsroman. many novels, including A Christmas Carol, She married Arthur Bell Nichols, her father’s Oliver Twist, and A Tale of Two Cities. curate, in June 1854 and died less than a year later, on March 31, 1855, either from tuberculo- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe sis or from complications caused by pregnancy. (1749–1832) Born on August 28, 1749, in Frankfurt, Ger- Charles Dickens (1812–1870) many, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe became One of the greatest British writers of all time, one of Europe’s most well-known and versatile Charles Dickens was a Victorian novelist who writers. Noted for his lyrical poetry, his influen- chose the Bildungsroman form for at least two of tial novels, and his dramatic poem Faust, Goethe his most famous works: David Copperfield also made substantial contributions in the fields (1849–1850) and Great Expectations (1860– of biology, music, and philosophy. He wrote the 1861). Born in Portsmouth, England, on Febru- first comprehensive history of science. In 1795, ary 7, 1812, Dickens grew up in London. His he published Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, father was a navy clerk who went to debtors’ a novel that is considered a prime example of the prison when Dickens was twelve. Forced to go Bildungsroman. In addition, Goethe profoundly to work in a shoe dye factory, Dickens lived affected the growth of literary Romanticism and alone in fear and shame. These feelings led to introduced the novella. He died in Weimar on the creation of his many orphan characters and March 22, 1832, at the age of eighty-two. his sympathy for the plight of the working class that made him the first great urban novelist. James Joyce (1882–1941) Although he was able to return to school and As a poet and novelist, James Joyce brought eventually clerked in a law firm, Dickens found marked change to modern literature. Born in

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Dublin, Ireland, on February 2, 1882, Joyce after her eighth birthday, an event and a rela- moved frequently as a child because of his tionship that proved a strong influence in her life father’s drinking and financial difficulties. Joy- and work. Plath showed early interest in writing, ce’s classic Ku¨nstlerroman (novel of an artist’s keeping a journal beginning at the age of 11. development), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Plath was an ambitious poet but suffered from Man, portrays a hero who is a character blend of depression and suicidal tendencies. After gradu- Joyce and his father. Despite the Joyce family ating from Smith College in 1955, Plath attended situation, the novelist received a good education Cambridge University on a Fulbright scholar- at a Jesuit school. But like his hero in A Portrait, ship. At Cambridge, Plath met poet Ted Hughes Joyce later rejected religion, family, and his and the two were married in 1956. Their relation- home country, living most of his life on the Euro- ship was tumultuous, as documented in their pean continent. However, he wrote almost exclu- poetry and letters. They had two children sively about Dublin. Joyce felt that being an together before separating in late 1962. A few artist required exile to protect oneself from sen- timental involvements and that he could not months later, on February 11, 1963, Plath write about Dublin with integrity and objectivity committed suicide. Although she had published unless he went away. A Portrait established the only a handful of books during her lifetime, modern concept of the artist as a bohemian who Hughes—who was still legally Plath’s hus- rejects middle-class values. It also set the exam- band—edited and posthumously published Plath’s ple for a number of modern Irish Bildungsro- large amount of previously unpublished poetry mans in which heroes achieve their quest when and letters. She is known as a poet of the Con- they come to believe that alienation from soci- fessional generation. Her semi-autobiographical ety, not finding one’s place in the social order, is novel, The Bell Jar is a Bildungsroman, although the mark of maturity. Joyce died in Zurich on it does not closely follow all of the usual Bil- January 13, 1941, when he was only 59fifty-nine dungsroman conventions. years old, but his innovations in literary organ- ization and style, particularly his use of stream- Mark Twain (1835–1910) of-consciousness technique, secured his unique Mark Twain is known as one of America’s lead- place in the development of the novel. ing realists, native humorists, and local colorists. He was a master in the use of folklore, psycho- Thomas Mann (1875–1955) logical realism, and dialects. Born Samuel Considered the leading German novelist of the Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, on twentieth century, Thomas Mann was born in November 30, 1835, he died of heart disease in northern Germany on June 6, 1875. However, the city he had long made his home, Hartford, after 1933, he lived in either Switzerland or the Connecticut, on April 21, 1910. Twain produced United States because of his opposition to the not one but several classics, including what some Nazis. By then he had already won the Nobel believe to be the greatest American novel, The Prize for Literature in 1929. His masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), a pica- The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg), was writ- resque and satirical Bildungsroman. Probably ten in 1924 and is a Bildungsroman, as is a later more than any other writer, Mark Twain pro- work, Doctor Faustus (1947). The overall theme vided a uniquely American, and usually comic, of Mann’s works is the breakdown of civilization. portrayal of the Bildungsroman hero. Sadly, Mann presents this theme in The Magic Mountain Twain’s satire became bitter as his personal trag- through a story about the patients in a Swiss edies and financial reverses led to the disillusion- sanatorium. Doctor Faustus is a Ku¨nstlerroman ment and depression that cloud his later writings. in which the protagonist is an artist who makes a pact with the devil to achieve creative vitality. The Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813) story ends tragically and parallels Germany’s Whenever the Bildungsroman is discussed, pact with Hitler to restore national vitality that Christoph Martin Wieland, who was born in ends in destruction. Mann died of phlebitis near Germany on September 5, 1733, is mentioned Zurich on August 12, 1955. as the writer of The History of Agathon, the precursor novel to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) Apprenticeship. A translator whose work reflects Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the Enlightenment, the early eighteenth-century on October 27, 1932. She lost her father shortly period also known as the Age of Reason, and

66 Literary Movements for Students, Second Edition, Volume 1 Bildungsroman whose style shows rococo influences, Wieland Bell Jar, in which she describes the events that translated twenty-two plays by Shakespeare into led to her nervous breakdown. One month after German (1762–1766) and also translated the clas- the English publication of this book in 1963 sical writings of Horace and Lucian. Many of under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, Plath Wieland’s own writings are set in Greece, includ- committed suicide. The novel was published in ing his Die Geschichte des Agathon (1766–1767, England under Plath’s name in 1966 and in the translated into English as The History of Agathon United States in 1971. [1773]). In an early instance of publishing Ger- man literary periodicals, Wieland edited the jour- Great Expectations nal Der deutsche Merkur (The German Mercury). Great Expectations, published serially in 1860 Wieland died on January 21, 1813. and 1861 by Charles Dickens, follows the tradi- tion of the Bildungsroman. The young protago- nist, Pip, leaves his rural home to become a gentleman and win the girl of his dreams. While REPRESENTATIVE WORKS most Bildungsroman heroes have to make their own way, Pip has a mysterious benefactor who The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn provides the wealth that Pip thinks will make Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckle- him happy. However, in the course of finding berry Finn was published in 1884 in England and his true values, Pip comes to realizes that happi- Canada and in the United States a few months ness comes not from money but from the appre- later, in 1885. Like the Bildungsroman hero, ciation of good friends, regardless of their social Huck leaves home to find an independent life, status, and from personal integrity. This novel has a surrogate father in Jim, is in conflict with has become an all-time classic that is still his society, and reaches maturity when he required reading in many high school curricula. repents his treatment of Jim and puts fairness and friendship over expected behavior. Invisible Man Though considered by some to be a master- Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man was published in piece of American literature, The Adventures of 1952 and won the 1953 National Book Award. Huckleberry Finn initially scandalized reviewers Ellison’s first novel, it expresses in metaphorical and parents who thought it would corrupt young language the Bildungsroman theme of searching children with its depiction of a hero who lies, for one’s identity. The nameless black protago- steals, and uses coarse language. In the last half nist, looking for his identity, comes to the real- of the twentieth century, the condemnation of ization that he has been living the roles prescribed the book continued on the grounds that its por- for him by white society. But once he steps out- trayal of Jim and use of the word ‘‘nigger’’ are side the assigned sphere, he becomes ‘‘invisible’’ racist. While some justify the book as a docu- to a dominant culture that does not recognize his mentation of the racial notions prevalent at the individuality. Employing symbols of the tradi- time of its writing, the novel continues to appear tions of the frontier, the black community, and on some lists of books banned in schools across music, Invisible Man achieved international fame the United States. and remains one of the most important American works of the twentieth century. The Bell Jar Although Sylvia Plath is well known as a poet, Jane Eyre her autobiographical Bildungsroman is one of Charlotte Bronte¨’s Jane Eyre, published in 1847, the best-known works in modern American lit- is one of the first Bildungsromans with a female erature. Published in 1963, The Bell Jar tells the protagonist. In this Victorian English novel, the story of Esther Greenwood, a student editor on female hero is constrained by social expectations an internship at a women’s magazine in New determined by gender-specific beliefs. At age ten, York City. It follows the standard Bildungsro- Jane is sent to residential school where she man pattern of the young person who goes to the acquires skills she later uses as a governess big city to pursue professional aspirations. But and a village schoolteacher. In its use of natural there is no traditional happy ending. The psy- elements and the supernatural, the novel is chological anguish of Plath’s later poetry is both romantic and Gothic. Jane Eyre is a Bil- related to the confessional revelations of The dungsroman in that it traces Jane’s development

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

 Image Entertainment produced James Joy-  One of many versions of Charles Dickens’s ce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Great Expectations was produced in 1999 by in 1979 and released it on video in 2000. It WGBH Boston Video. It is three hours long starred Bosco Hogan and Sir John Gielgud. on a two-tape set and stars Ioan Gruufudd,  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man can Justine Waddell, and Charlotte Rampling. also be found on a Blackstone Audiobooks  Great Expectations is also available as an recording made in 1995 and read by Freder- audio book from a several distributors. ick Davidson. It is ten hours long. Audible.com has a 1987 production, nar-  There are several film versions of Jane Eyre. rated by Frank Muller, which runs for six- A recent A & E Entertainment adaptation of teen hours and forty minutes. Blackstone the Charlotte Bronte¨book, starring Saman- Audiobooks carries a nineteen-hour, thirty- tha Morton and Ciaran Hinds, was released minute version read by Frederick Davidson. on video in 1998. The 1944 production from Twentieth Century Fox starred Orson Welles,  The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Joan Fontaine, and Margaret O’Brien and produced a four-part miniseries of Bronte¨s departed significantly from the novel. Jane Eyre in 2007. Directed by Susanna  Jane Eyre is also available as an audio book White, it stars Ruth Wilson as Jane and from Audiobooks.com. Read by Maureen Toby Stephens as Rochester. This miniseries O’Brien, it is over twenty-one hours long. was released on DVD by Masterpiece Theater Another recording, done by Blackstone in 2007. Audiobooks in 1994, is nineteen hours long  A biographical film about Plath’s life, Sylvia and is read by Nadia May. was released in 2003, starring Gwyneth Pal-  Blackstone Audiobooks produced Jude the trow and Daniel Craig and directed by Obscure in 1997. Read by Frederick David- Christine Jeffs. Frieda Hughes, daughter of son, it is sixteen hours long. Plath and Hughes, famously denounced the  Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man was recorded film and its makers, claiming that they only as an unabridged audio book in 2001 by sought to profit from her mother’s death. As Audiobooks.com. It is six hours in length of 2008, Sylvia was available on DVD from and read by Joe Morton. Universal Studios.

from a dependent child to a mature and inde- Bridge, contributed autobiographical elements pendent woman. The novel dramatizes the love to Jane Eyre, her first published work of fiction, affair between Jane and Edward Rochester, who which was an immediate success. is married at the time they meet. Rochester keeps his insane wife sequestered in his estate, and after Jude the Obscure she dies, he and Jane marry. Charlotte Bronte¨ Thomas Hardy introduced into Victorian liter- was attracted to the married headmaster of the ature the concept of fatalism. This belief assumes school in Brussels where she went to study that humans are subject to arbitrary and random French and to teach in 1842–1843. This forces, such as chance and timing, which shape unhappy experience, along with the author’s their destinies. Jude the Obscure, published in memories of early school years at Cowan’s 1895, received widespread criticism because it

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waitress. A still-admired The famous 1935 film version of this obsessive and tragic love affair starred Bette Davis and Leslie Howard.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man James Joyce’s masterpiece is Ulysses, but his autobiographical Bildungsroman is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published in 1916. When Joyce’s hero Stephen Dedalus grows up, he says farewell to his home country and to his family and religion as well. The Norton Anthology of English Literature describes this novel as portraying ‘‘the parallel movement toward art and toward exile.’’ This novel of rebellion insists that the artist is an outcast and that his alienation is a necessary component of his being creative.

Sons and Lovers Another autobiographical Bildungsroman, Sons and Lovers was D. H. Lawrence’s third and most notable novel. Published in 1913, it is the coming- Mark Twain (AP Images) of-age story of Paul Morel, the son of a coal miner father and a controlling and ambitious mother who gives up on finding any fulfillment in her marriage. She turns her possessive attention to her children, especially Paul. The resulting strug- attacks the Anglican Church, the elitist admis- gle for sexual power and individual identity sions policies of Oxford University (called causes Paul difficulties in finding his professional Christminster in the novel), and the rigid laws place and establishing a healthy relationship with regarding marriage. As a Bildungsroman, the a woman his own age. This novel dramatizes maturation story follows Jude Fawley’s route some of the psychological points Freud explored to destruction from what Hardy called in his under the label Oedipus complex. preface ‘‘the tragedy of unfulfilled aims.’’ Faw- ley, by trade a stonemason, has spiritual and Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship intellectual ambitions that are thwarted by his Published in 1795 by Wolfgang von Goethe as exclusion from the university and his disastrous Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, this prototype of involvement with two women, the vulgar Ara- the Bildungsroman was translated into English bella and the intellectual Sue. He marries the first by Thomas Carlyle in 1824. With this book, and has one child with her; he does not marry the Goethe established the Bildungsroman as a second, and he has two children by her. Tragedy novel of personal rather than philosophical overwhelms Jude when his oldest child kills the development for the main character. His hero younger ones and hangs himself. Jude himself wanders through a series of love affairs, friend- dies miserably, an alcoholic. ships, and occupations before settling down to marriage and responsible adulthood. Goethe’s Of Human Bondage model was emulated by many notable writers and has had a strong influence on the develop- Like so many autobiographical Bildungsro- ment of the novel. mans, Of Human Bondage (1915) draws from the unhappy early years of its author, W. Som- erset Maugham. A popular twentieth-century English novelist, Maugham was a physician THEMES who abandoned medicine to write plays and novels. The hero in Maugham’s most famous Coming of Age and Apprenticeship novel is a medical student with a clubfoot who Goethe’s Bildungsroman appropriately uses the falls in love with a promiscuous Cockney word ‘‘apprenticeship’’ in its title because one

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may also be in other areas, such as learning social graces, conducting business affairs, and gaining integrity in relationships. TOPICS FOR FURTHER Identity and the Self The protagonist of the Bildungsroman has a STUDY unique talent. Part of the maturation process requires discovering this talent and figuring out  Among the books that you have read, is how to use it. The journey and experiences of the there one that you think would fit in the hero are intended to provide an opportunity to Bildungsroman classification? Explain why examine the inner self and clarify important it is a Bildungsroman, citing its character- goals and how to pursue them. As part of the istic features. self-discovery, the hero gets a new perspective on  Research the sociopolitical climate of Ger- his/her relationships with other people. In other many in 1795 and then describe how this words, facing the complexities of the adult world climate may or may not have influenced causes the protagonist to learn about others and the birth of the Bildungsroman genre. about himself. Thus, the Bildungsroman is a  List several German authors and their psychological novel in which the main character works that continued the tradition of the evolves toward mature self-awareness. Bildungsroman in their country in the nine- teenth and/or twentieth centuries.  Find an example of a Bildungsroman in a Journey culture not traditionally associated with the In Bildungsromans the hero leaves home on a genre, for example, a Japanese, Indian, or journey or quest. Usually, the protagonist leaves Chinese work, and explain how this work is a rural setting to travel into the wider world of a version of the Bildungsroman in that the city. In this way, the character encounters a culture. larger society that tests his or her mettle. The physical journey initiates change, and change  Explain how the Bildungsroman is similar to brings growth. a psychological novel or a picaresque. Pro- vide definitions of the genres and give exam- ples of representative works. Love Finding the right love is a component of the quest as it is enacted in the Bildungsroman. The movement into adulthood begins with sep- aration and often resolves in maturity with adult distinguishing factor of the genre is the learning connection. In some cases the character must process that brings the protagonist from child- negotiate among potential partners in order to hood into adulthood. As a coming-of-age novel, discover the appropriate one. The formalization the Bildungsroman focuses on the main charac- of that relationship may constitute the final ter’s apprenticeship. These experiences place the event in the novel. character near older practitioners whose roles as models the character either emulates or rejects. Search for the Meaning of Life Education In the Bildungsroman, the novel of develop- The Bildungsroman is a novel of formation or ment, the hero develops through experiences development. These terms imply that the Bil- that assist in clarifying the character’s mature dungsroman is also a novel about education, values. Growing up involves the search for uni- yet not necessarily in the narrow sense of the versal truths. For Victorians, the universal Erziehungsroman (novel of educational devel- truths concerned achieving middle-class values, opment). Life is an education, and the process marrying, and settling down as a responsible of growing up as chronicled in the Bildungsro- citizen. But to writers like Joyce, these truths man is a series of experiences that teach lessons. concerned the artist’s alienation and the neces- The protagonist’s education may be academic; it sary rejection of middle-class values.

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STYLE narrative are secondary to dialogue. Using dia- logue to carry the story makes the reader feel Audience more of a witness to an actual scene. The reader The Bildungsroman does not just tell a story. It knows little more than the hero has learned from involves the reader in the same process of educa- talking with others and thus makes the same dis- tion and development as the main character. The coveries as the protagonist as events happen. aim is to affect the reader’s personal growth as well. However, at some point in the narrative, the reader may be in disagreement with the protago- nist. Realizing that the hero has made a mistake MOVEMENT VARIATIONS in judgment, the reader, in effect, learns from the situation before the protagonist or otherwise American Novels compares his/her own morality against the The American style of the Bildungsroman is a moral of the story that the hero eventually learns. combination of the German Bildungsroman and the Spanish picaresque. The American Bildungs- Character roman follows the pattern of moral growth for the In the Bildungsroman, the focus is on one main protagonist as he discovers his identity in conflict character. The structure of the Bildungsroman is with social norms. Blended into the story is the to follow this one character from youth to adult- picaresque element of the hero being as a traveler hood. Other characters exist in the story, of who has an outsider’s perspective on what he course, but only in roles that have some kind of encounters. Two American classics exemplify tie or relationship that contributes to the growth this structure: Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and development of the protagonist. With this and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. concentration, it is then possible for the reader to become engrossed in the maturation process of Picaresque the hero and learn the same life lessons. A picaresque novel, which is Spanish in origin, is a humorous tale about the adventures of a Chronicle roguish hero. The first known picaresque was A Bildungsroman is the chronicle, or record of the anonymously published novel Lazarillo de events, of the protagonist from youth to adult- Tormes (1554). The popularity of picaresque hood. However, it is not an unbiased record, but novels spread to Europe during the seventeenth more like a diary recording the life of a young and eighteenth centuries, as exemplified by clas- person on the way to self-understanding and sics such as Daniel Dafoe’s Moll Flanders (1722). maturity. Consequently, the Bildungsroman uses a chronological time period to follow the English Novels hero from year to year. In an English Bildungsroman, the protagonist is often a poor orphaned boy whose goal is to Conflict become a cultured gentleman of means. As part Growing up and finding one’s purpose in life is of his self-education, he moves from his provin- difficult. There are many pitfalls, mistakes, and cial home to an urban setting. While the German forces beyond one’s control along the way. Bildungsroman emphasizes internal conflicts These conflicts between the protagonist and within the main character, the English Bildungs- fate, or nature, or others, or self are part of the roman uses the outside world to threaten the process of maturation that the Bildungsroman hero’s quest for identity. Many English Bildungs- chronicles. Each crisis the hero endures helps to romans draw from the author’s own experience. deepen his self-knowledge and strengthen or challenge his moral fortitude. Multiple conflicts Entwickslungroman are essential to the credibility of the Bildungsro- Another name for Bildungsroman is the general man as a reflection of the real life experience. term Entwickslungroman, or novel of develop- ment. This name applies to novels constructed to Dialogue follow the personality development of the Dialogue is the conversational interaction among protagonist. However, it is sometimes reserved the characters of a story. Since the Bildungsro- for only those works that describe the hero’s man is focused on the main character, plot and physical passage from youth to maturity without

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delving into his psychological progress. In other calling and to master his craft. Whether he words, Bildungsroman-type novels that pay less journeys from city to city or from rotation to attention to the hero’s intellect and emotions rotation within the same hospital, his quest is the same. than more fully developed works fit into the category of Entwickslungroman. Two examples of this subgenre are Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith and Samuel Shem’s The Erziehungsroman House of God. Meaning ‘‘novel of education,’’ this variation is a more pedagogic form of the Bildungsroman. Military Subgenre Not only is it more concerned with the formal In this variation of the Bildungsroman, the pro- education and training of the protagonist, but tagonist enters the military as a young man. His the novel also intends to teach certain lessons path of discovery causes him to leave home, not about values to the reader as well. necessarily for a city but for wherever the mili- tary sends him. Through the rigors of training Female Protagonist and combat, the hero is challenged not only to The female protagonist of a Bildungsroman find himself as a person but to find out how good encounters problems specific to growing up he is as a soldier. female in a male-dominated world. Early female Bildungsromans with female protagonists mostly Social Protest Subgenre follow the traditional pattern that the mature The Bildungsroman may be a work of social female sees marriage as her fulfillment. Intellec- protest when its female or male hero is a dispos- tual and social development is often achieved sessed or marginalized person. The female Bil- through the mentorship of a knowledgeable and dungsroman may concern itself with gender sophisticated man. In some early nineteenth- issues in a patriarchal society, as in Jane Eyre. century female Bildungsromans, the female’s In other cases Bildungsromans explore the diffi- education occurs through an older and wiser hus- culties of growing up as a member of a minority band. Later novels portray women entering mar- group and may involve the fight for civil rights. riage as the culmination of the mutual growth Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man belongs to this that occurs in a loving relationship. group. Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple combine female While a male protagonist in a Bildungsro- and minority issues interwoven in works of man may meet his pivotal crisis in the course of social protest. his professional career, the female protagonist’s turning point may result from a romantic entan- Zeitroman glement. Her journey of discovery may be more This variation of the Bildungsroman blends the internal, or psychological, than that of her male development of the era in which the hero lives counterpart. with his or her personal development. The pro- Ku¨nstlerroman tagonist thus serves as a reflection of his or her times. This type of novel provides an interesting This form of the Bildungsroman focuses on the study of the effects of historical context on char- development of the artist. In this case, the protag- acter. For example, Stephen Crane’s The Red onist achieves a place and opportunity in which to Badge of Courage dramatizes the effects of practice his or her art. Thus, graduating from being a Civil War soldier on the protagonist. apprenticeship not only ends the formative stage of life but also establishes the destiny that the hero has sought. Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist HISTORICAL CONTEXT as a Young Man,andThomasMann’sDr. Faus- tus are examples of this type. Development of the Novel Beginning in the early eighteenth century, long Medical Subgenre narratives began to be written in prose. The As defined by Anne Hudson Jones for Lancet,in modern novel developed in England with Daniel this subgenre Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flan- . . . a young physician, often but not always an ders (1722). These works were followed shortly intern or resident, sets out to find his special by Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and

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COMPARE & CONTRAST

 1700–1800s: Christoph Martin Wieland and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe develop the  1700–1800s: As a sign of maturity, the tradi- Bildungsroman, but the novel is still in its tional male protagonist in the Bildungsroman infancy as a literary form until the 1800s, is a person who finds his place in society and when it begins to be used widely in Ger- takes a responsible role in society. many. The genre also includes some of the 1900s–Today: As a sign of maturity, the finest works of English, French, and Amer- modern protagonist is just as likely to reject society and live in isolation as to accept a ican authors such as Jane Austen, Charles role in the mainstream. Dickens, Charlotte Bronte¨, Thomas Hardy, Gustave Flaubert, Mark Twain, and Kate  1700–1800s: Bildungsromans with female Chopin. protagonists slowly begin to appear, but the heroine is restricted by the domestic parame- 1900s–Today: Continuing as a relevant genre ters of the times and seeks her education for novelists, Bildungsromans are written by through a knowledgeable man and marriage. English-speaking authors such as James 1900s–Today: Female protagonists in the Joyce, W. Somerset Maugham, D. H. Law- Bildungsroman gain the freedom to explore rence, J. D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Toni various paths to self-discovery and may find Morrison, Philip Roth, and Alice Walker. fulfillment outside the home and marriage.

Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a marked a literary watershed that came to be Foundling (1747). These novels were highly epi- known as the beginning of the Romantic period. sodic plot-driven stories. In Germany in 1766– The Victorian Age spanned the years of Queen 1767, Wieland wrote The History of Agathon, the Victoria’s reign, from 1837 to her death in 1901. first example of a Bildungsroman. Then in 1795, The era of greatest popularity for the Bildungs- Goethe produced Wilhelm Meister’s Apprentice- roman, the nineteenth century, thus spanned the ship. The term Bildungsroman was coined in Romantic and Victorian periods in literature. 1817 by Karl von Morgenstern but not com- This time of economic and political turbulence monly applied until about 1870. The genre flour- saw repeated wars in Europe and social and ished through the middle decades of the mechanical transformations wrought by the nineteenth century, both in England and the Industrial Revolution. Germany got its first con- United States. The historical novel, developed stitution in 1816. At the same time that several by Sir Walter Scott, was written also by Dickens European countries strengthened their colonial and others. The popularity of the Bildungsro- territories. man genre waned in the early twentieth century, According to the Norton Anthology of Eng- but variations of the form continued to be writ- lish Literature, perceptive Victorians suffered ten throughout the twentieth century. from a sense of ‘‘being displaced persons in a world made alien by technological changes Cultural Climate which had been exploited too quickly for the In 1789, the French Revolution began, followed adaptive powers of the human psyche.’’ With by the Reign of Terror from 1793 to 1794 and the the Industrial Revolution came the rise of the Napoleonic period from 1804 until 1815. In 1798 middle class that gradually took control of the in England, Wordsworth and Coleridge pub- means of production, especially in England and lished Lyrical Ballads, the preface to which the United States. Many middle-class Victorians

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wanted the stability of a set of rules to live by. Readers demanded guidance and edification from literature. The Bildungsroman, noted for exemplifying middle-class standards, met their needs. Often times, its hero went from the lower working class to respectability as a gentle- man. Along the way, he reviewed his values and usually concluded that a settled middle-class life- style was the best choice. By the end of the Victorian period, writers were seeking more realism. Victorian values and self-assurance gave way to pessimism and stoi- cism. The French promoted a bohemian lifestyle that scoffed at notions of respectability. Novel- ists began experimenting with the time structure of their works, and stream-of-consciousness began to be written. As a genre so tied to con- vention, German influence, and orderly chronol- ogy, the Bildungsroman lost popularity as twentieth-century literary interests and innova- tions led elsewhere. Still, James Joyce chose the Bildungsroman form for his masterpiece A Por- trait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916, and Illustration by Frederic W. Pailthorpe from the genre is still popular. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (Pailthorpe, Frederic W., illustrator. From Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens. Dodd, Mead & Company, 1942) CRITICAL OVERVIEW

Regarding Bildungsromans, critics discuss whether novels other than the German ones written in the much of Goethe’s Bildungsroman that he trans- strict tradition of Wilhelm Meister’s Appren- lated the work in 1824 and also wrote a parody ticeship qualify as examples of the genre. of it. After Carlyle, other English writers took up Purists argue that the Bildungsroman is so the genre. The great twentieth-century German intertwined with German philosophical and lit- novelist, Thomas Mann, also wrote a Bildungs- erary heritage that the form does not occur in roman (The Magic Mountain) and considered other languages. Others find common elements Goethe’s novel one of the three greatest events in many novels. of that era alongside the French Revolution and publication of Fichte’s Theory of Science. With- It is commonly held that Goethe’s novel had out doubt, it was a popular form of the novel in widespread influence. For example, Ehrhard Bahr wrote for the Reference Guide to World the nineteenth century, but when World War I Literature: began and critics continued to link the genre to the German tradition, it faded in popularity. Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship had a great influence on the Romantics and the history of Two studies of the Bildungsroman are Mar- the German novel. It provided, so to speak, the tin Swales’s The German Bildungsroman from blueprint for all subsequent German novels. Wieland to Hesse and Jerome Hamilton Buck- Early commentaries on the novel occur in cor- ley’s Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from respondence between Friedrich Schiller and Goethe, in the letters by Wilhelm von Hum- Dickens to Golding. The first book argues that boldt and Christian Gottfried Ko¨rner, and in the genre is purely German; the second book Friedrich Schlegel’s 1798 essay ‘‘On Goethe’s finds a number of Bildungsromans in English Meister.’’ Goethe’s novel became a prime literature. The contrast between these two example of Romanticism. important critical works summarizes the debate Thomas Carlyle, a highly influential British over the Bildungsroman. Those who believe that historian, writer, and social critic, thought so the genre is used in other cultures often re-

74 Literary Movements for Students, Second Edition, Volume 1 Bildungsroman examine novels classified under other genres to prove the influence of the Bildungsroman on structure. Regarding the genre, critics analyze Scott’s Waverly, Emily Bronte¨’s Wuthering WHAT Heights, and Plath’s The Bell Jar. Some critics assign particular books to the genre; others spec- DO I STUDY ify subgenre based on certain characteristics— NEXT? comic, female, black, Chicano, etc. Others debate whether early female bildungsroman  The Bildungsroman is popularly used in Sci- can be called feminist. In an 1995 article for ence Fiction, especially perhaps in young adult Essays in Literature, Denise Kohn argues that Science Fiction. For example, Orson Scott Jane Austen’s novel Emma is, in fact, a Bildungs- Card, famous author of juvenile books, wrote roman because the titular character learns to the Bildungsroman Ender’s Game,whichis grow into her role as a lady. Emma is also a also classified as a military Bildungsroman. feminist novel because Austen’s notions about The book demonstrates the application of a what traits define ladyship emphasize intelli- long-standing genre to futuristic stories. gence and compassion over passivity.  Just as there is a category for black Bil- Bernard Selinger, in a 1999 article for Mod- dungsroman, there are books such as San- ern Fiction Studies, says that the Bildungsroman dra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street continues to interest both authors and critics. In that are classified as Chicano Bildungsro- his opinion, critics of the genre tend to move mans. Also qualifying as a female Bildungs- between seeing the genre as concerned with the roman, selections from this book can often integration of the hero into society or with be found in high school literature texts. The regarding the hero as alienated. This kind of House on Mango Street is worthy of study as criticism reflects the flexibility of the genre in another use of the Bildungsroman in a cul- the hands of skilled novelists throughout the ture other than German or British. literary world who know that each person’s  The picaresque novel is one of the oldest development has its own outcome. forms of the novel. Don Quixote,writtenby Miguel de Cervantes in 1605, and Huckle- berry Finn can be classified in both catego- ries, picaresque and Bildungsroman. Study CRITICISM the picaresque to learn about this other Lois Kerschen quest genre. Kerschen is a freelance writer and the director of a  Geta LeSeur’s book Ten Is the Age of Dark- charitable foundation for children. In this essay, ness compares the Bildungsroman as used by Kerschen counters the argument that the Bil- African- American authors to that of African dungsroman is strictly a German form of the West Indian authors. LeSeur finds that novel by citing examples of the genre written in African- American Bildungsromans concen- other languages. trate on protest whereas the West Indies Bil- Repeatedly, the Bildungsroman is defined as dungsromans depict the simplicity and a ‘‘German’’ form of the novel. Without doubt, innocence of childhood even under the diffi- the genre originated in Germany and became cult circumstances of poverty. This book and commonly used in that country. However, for the novels it describes give insight into the some critics to maintain that the genre is still unique experience of children of color even as predominantly, if not exclusively, German defies they establish the commonality of the com- logic. Martin Swales, an oft-quoted authority on ing-of-age experience for all people. the Bildungsroman, says in his book The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse that ‘‘The Bildungsroman, both in theory and in practice, is little known outside Germany.’’ Hans Eichner remarks in his ‘‘Reflection and Action: Essays on is useful only when it is applied to the relatively the Bildungsroman’’ that this collection ‘‘very small number of novels that are clearly in the strongly suggests that the term ‘Bildungsroman’ tradition of Wilhelm Meister.’’

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London with the goal of becoming gentlemen. The Victorian middle-class work ethic demanded that the hero learn a trade and earn his way to AMONG MODERN NOVELS, THE VARIETY THAT success. Dickens’s Pip is an exception in that he CAN BE CLASSIFIED AS BILDUNGSROMANS SEEMS has a benefactor and in that he rejects the expected lifestyle of marriage and success. The ENDLESS. . . . NO DOUBT EXAMPLES COULD BE FOUND English Bildungsroman explores external and IN NEARLY EVERY CULTURE IN THE WORLD. OF internal conflicts. George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss (1860) and Middlemarch (1871), and Char- COURSE, THERE WOULD BE DIFFERENCES UNIQUE TO lotte Bronte¨’s Jane Eyre (1847) dramatize the EACH CULTURE AND TIME PERIOD, BUT THE BASIC female quest for development in an oppressive environment. CONCEPT OF THE BILDUNGSROMAN IS EVERYONE’S In Ireland in 1916, James Joyce wrote the STORY.’’ quintessential Ku¨nstlerroman in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The use of the Bil- dungsroman form continued among recent Irish writers as a political novel according to Kristen Morrison in ‘‘William Trevor,’’ an article for the In fact, the term Bildungsroman is applied Twayne’s English Authors series. Morrison says to many novels. While it is not a dominant genre, that William Trevor’s Fools of Fortune (1983) it has a universal appeal because it deals with the and Nights at the Alexandra (1987), Brian universal experience of growing up. The quest to Moore’s The Mangan Inheritance (1979), and become a responsible adult and find one’s place John Banville’s Birchwood (1973) and Mefisto in the world is so difficult that readers have (1986) are all written in this bildungs/political sustained interest in this topic. Following the mode. In the typical Bildungsroman, the hero difficulties of the protagonist in a Bildungsro- reaches maturity when the character assumes a man, readers trace the arduous journey toward responsible role in society. However, in these maturity and learn from the growth process Irish variations of the form which focus on a observed in the text. sociopolitical situation, ‘‘alienation, not integra- As every student of literature learns, a well- tion , is the mark of [the protagonist’s] hard-won written story has certain basic elements: plot, maturity.’’ character, point of view, setting, tone, and style. In the United States, Dickens’s contempo- Any one of these elements can be emphasized rary Mark Twain also made use of the Bildungs- over the others. In the case of the Bildungsroman, roman. James E. Caron, in an article for the character is the primary focus. Furthermore, the Modern Language Quarterly, makes the case structure of the story tends to follow the standard that three of Twain’s works can be classified pattern: introduction, rising action, climax, fall- as comic Bildungsroman: Old Times on the ing action, and denouement. Along the way, the Mississippi, Roughing It, and Innocents Abroad. reader can expect the characters to show some Twain’s masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn, is a pica- development. If they do, they are dynamic, or resque Bildungsroman. In 1925, Joyce’s contem- round; if they do not, they are static, or flat. porary Sinclair Lewis published Arrowsmith,a What distinguishes the Bildungsroman from medical Bildungsroman, and won the Pulitzer other novels is the concentration on the develop- Prize. Anne Hudson Jones says in ‘‘Images of ment of the main character from youth to adult- Physicians in Literature: Medical bildungsro- hood. This focus makes the genre distinctive mane’’ that ‘‘In the best tradition of the Bildungs- yet connected to many variations written in roman, Arrowsmith’s efforts to find his life’s other languages. Despite particular debates on work include many false starts and much travel the genre definition, many agree that the term and relocation.’’ Another famous American Bildungsroman can be applied to novels of author, Philip Roth, repeatedly uses elements development. of the Bildungsroman, most notably in The In Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield Ghost Writer and in Zuckerman Bound.As (1849) and Great Expectations (1861), the pro- with Twain works, these works are comic tagonists are self-educated orphans who head to Bildungsromans.

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The female Bildungsroman challenges the assumption that the protagonist is a male. After Jane Austen, the woman in a Victorian Bildungs- roman faces new objectives and uses different strategies. Like their male counterparts, these protagonists express independent thought and seek to pursue their own talents. They may end up married, but sometimes pursuit of a partner confounds their development, as seems to be the case with Maggie Tulliver in Mill on the Floss. In the hands of nineteenth-century Ameri- can female novelists, the Bildungsroman contin- ued to work within the bounds of social acceptability but gave the heroine even more liberties. A spinster could have a rewarding life. If marriage comes, it is after the establishment of independence. But the heroine grows up sur- rounded and protected by women, so reality was purposely skirted to provide a suitable envi- ronment for the ideas suggested in Little Women, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and Five Little Peppers. Then Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) defied convention and revealed the inner A scene from a film production of The Bell Jar, dissatisfaction and feeling of entrapment of a based on the novel by Sylvia Plath (The Kobal married woman. Among modern female Bil- Collection / The Picture Desk, Inc.) dungsromans, all the limits are stretched and challenged. Two American novels, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, are examples of the Bildungsroman format infused Among modern novels, the variety that can with unique feminine and modern questions. be classified as Bildungsromans seems endless. The Bildungsroman is often a work of social For example, there are a multitude of interesting protest because it privileges the experience of the and popular works in Science Fiction. Other outsider, the one who is marginalized and dispos- examples include works in the 1950s and 1960s sessed. It tends to examine dominant culture from from three French women novelists (Franc¸oise the point of view of one who is excluded or Sagan, Franc¸oise Mallet-Joris, and Claire Etch- oppressed. Thus, as the protagonist struggles to erelli) and three Francophone African novels claim identity and status in the context which (Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure denies that status, the reader has the opportunity [1961], Camar Laye’s The Dark Child [1953], and to reevaluate the tacit assumptions of the major- Mongo Beri’s Mission to Kala [1957]. No doubt ity. This reassessment takes place while the reader examples could be found in nearly every culture is invited by the text to identify with the one the in the world. Of course, there would be differ- society excludes. So the novel of protest locates ences unique to each culture and time period, but the reader on the outside of the context the reader the basic concept of the Bildungsroman is every- actually inhabits and this new location clarifies one’s story. questions about social belief and assumption. Source: Lois Kerschen, Critical Essay on the Bildungsro- man, in Literary Movements for Students, The Gale In the black Bildungsroman Invisible Man Group, 2003. (1952), Ellison’s protagonist comes to realize that he has no identity outside the white defini- tion of who he is. At the same time, the reader Denise Kohn gains insight into slavery and the dehumanizing In this essay, Kohn argues that Jane Austen’s effect of bigotry. Toni Morrison’s Song of Solo- novel Emma was written to be both entertaining mon (1977) and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and morally instructive. The article asserts that (1982) explore both feminist and minority issues. Emma becomes a lady through the course of the

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their hands to Austen—white gloves are not nec- essary—and politely pretend interest in the notion of ‘‘ladyhood,’’ then they may develop a THE DOMESTIC NOVEL HAS BEEN HARD FOR fuller understanding of Austen as an artist. One MANY CRITICS TO READ AS A GENUINE NOVEL OF of Austen’s greatest achievements in Emma is that she writes a novel of education—a bildungs- DEVELOPMENT BECAUSE IT OFTEN DOES DEPICT A roman—that instructs her readers to decon- WORLD WHERE ‘VIOLENCE IS RARE AND struct the pervasive images of ‘‘ladyhood’’ created by her period’s conduct-book writers. RELATIONSHIPS APPEAR SAFE.’’’ Austen resists the view of a ‘‘lady’’ as passive and self-less and redefines the highest ideals of ‘‘ladyhood’’ as self-assurance, strength, and compassion through the depiction of her her- oine, Emma. Such a reading of the novel, how- novel and that this makes the novel a domestic ever, not only shows how Emma redefines female bildungsroman. ideals but also how the novel redefines the Emma can be a problematic novel for bildungsroman within the context of early the modern reader—especially for the feminist nineteenth-century domestic values. reader. On the one hand, feminist critics have lauded Jane Austen for her critique of the mar- In The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, riage market and exposition of the problems of Mary Poovey defines the ideal lady in the late female independence in the late eighteenth and eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a early nineteenth centuries (Green, Johnson, ‘‘demure young woman, with eyes downcast Kirkham, Poovey). The growing emphasis on and lips pressed into a faint and silent smile.’’ creating a canon of women writers has led Both male and female authors of popular con- many feminist readers to latch onto Austen duct books of the period define a lady primarily with fervor because she is a woman writer who through what she must lack: personal agency, has long enjoyed a fine critical reputation despite ambition, desire, and vanity (Poovey 4–36). the sentimental and damaging myth of ‘‘gentle- Indeed, women’s self-denial and self-sacrifice Janeism’’ (Trilling 29). On the other hand, fem- were crucial elements in the emerging ideal of inist readers have also raised disturbing ques- the Victorian house angel. While in the early tions about Austen (Booth, Company 420). eighteenth century a lady was defined as ‘‘a While Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar find woman of superior position in society,’’ by the that her novels are subversive in nature, they nineteenth century the term was used to denote a also believe that her novels depict ‘‘the necessity ‘‘woman whose manners, habits, and sentiments of female submission for female survival.’’ have the refinement characteristic of the higher Ironically, one way for the modern reader, ranks of society’’ (qtd. in Sangari, 715). In other feminist or not, to deal with the problems of words, the term ‘‘lady’’ moved from one that reading Emma is to approach the novel as a described only class to one that described behav- lesson on manners—more specifically—as a les- ior. In the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century son on ‘‘ladyhood.’’ Modern readers, of course world of a rising middle class and declining are not usually interested in instruction on the upper class, social status and survival often characteristics of a ‘‘lady.’’ But this becomes a depended not only on money but also on problem in reading Austen because she was writ- manners—those culturally constructed markers ing to a population of readers in a time and a that define community membership. The prob- place for whom the attributes of a lady were lems of shifting social classes exist even in important. Another problem in reading Emma Emma’s home of Highbury. The Coles and Mrs. is that modern readers often eschew didacticism Elton are purchasing prestige while Miss Bates, in literature; Austen, however, expected that a who as daughter of the former rector was a novel could ‘‘gratify the cravings of the imagina- ‘‘fringe’’ member of the upper class, is losing pres- tion and provide moral instruction’’ (Poovey tige to poverty. During a period of what seemed 182). To do justice to Austen, modern readers like class chaos to many Britons, readers increas- must be willing to meet her at least halfway on ingly turned to the rising artistic form of the novel her own territory. If readers are willing to extend to find narrative guidance for their behavior.

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While Emma at the beginning of the novel is are paired and re-paired as teachers and stu- a ‘‘lady’’ because her family as rural landowners dents. The story unfolds in the second paragraph are part of the upper class, it is not until the final of the novel as we learn about Emma’s loss of part of the novel that she learns to balance power Miss Taylor, an ‘‘excellent woman as governess, and propriety in order to better fulfill behavioral who had fallen little short of a mother in affec- ideals of a ‘‘lady.’’ Emma, however, fulfills Aus- tion.’’ But by the end of the second paragraph, ten’s artistic and social ideals—not the hegem- we learn that Miss Taylor had ceased ‘‘to hold onic ideals of the conduct-book authors. Austen’s the nominal office of governess’’ to Emma long novels and letters show her critique of a social ago, and the two had lived together as ‘‘friend system that required female subjection; even and friend.’’ Later in the novel, Knightley sug- Wayne Booth believes that Austen ‘‘in her gests that Emma, not Miss Taylor, was the real everyday life’’ believed that men and women teacher of the two. The theme of education—and were equal (Company 430). Indeed, the well- the decentering of authority—continues. Emma known portrait of Austen drawn by her sister teaches Harriet. Harriet repeatedly teaches offers visual evidence that Austen and her Emma, who is a slow learner, the dangers of family did not subscribe to the narrow definitions teaching. Jane, who must become a governess, of a ‘‘lady’’ celebrated by their culture: Austen is teaches Frank compassion. Frank asks Emma to drawn with her arms folded assertively across her choose and ‘‘educate’’ a wife for him. Of course, chest, looking off to the side with a serious look he does not know that Emma has already taken in her eyes and a stern set to her mouth. And as this project upon herself, and she does not know she herself was not portrayed as a ‘‘proper lady,’’ that Frank has already chosen his wife. Knight- Austen in Emma never portrays her heroine as ley and Emma both teach each other about reflecting the image of the ‘‘lady’’ as passive and social respect and kindness. She learns to appre- demure. Margaret Kirkham finds that Austen in ciate Miss Bates and Robert Martin; he learns to Emma mirrors the Enlightenment feminist stance appreciate Harriet. Mrs. Elton tries to teach of Mary Wollstonecraft on male and female Emma the role of the fashionable married equality. Claudia Johnson believes the character woman and the importance of travel and of Emma ‘‘defies every dictum’’ about female barouche-landaus. And Mr. Woodhouse tries, deference preached by the conduct books. vainly, to instruct everyone about the goodness Katherine Sobba Green does not specifically dis- of gruel. cuss Emma but argues that Austen overturns the The novel’s theme of education and devel- ‘‘tropic commodification’’ that defined women in opment is also signified by Emma’s place within the turn-of-the-century ritual of courtship and the genre of the bildungsroman. In nineteenth- marriage. And although Poovey also does not century England, the bildungsroman, also called discuss Emma, she believes that Austen’s later the novel of development or apprenticeship, was works emphasize the conflict between individual ‘‘frequently the equivalent of the Renaissance desire and social institutions. Austen, Poovey conduct book, insofar as one of its recurrent says, shows the danger of ‘‘unchecked individu- themes is the making of a gentleman,’’ writes alism’’ and how the individual can both exist Jerome Buckley in his influential study The Sea- within and reform social institutions. So while son of Youth (20). But in the case of Emma, which the character of Emma is a celebration of female has a female protagonist, it is the making of a individualism and power, Austen also shows how ‘‘lady’’ that becomes the recurrent theme. And Emma abuses her power by crossing the thresh- though Buckley has been crucial in the definition old of propriety and domesticity in her manipu- of the English bildungsroman, ironically, he lation of Harriet and insensitivity to Miss Bates. declares that Emma is not a bildungsroman. By the end of the novel, however, Emma as a Buckley’s definition of the novel of development character is strengthened by her experience, gain- has been criticized as predominantly based upon ing greater social and self-knowledge. As Aus- male perspectives by feminist critics, who have ten’s portrait of an ideal ‘‘lady,’’ she is strong worked to define the tradition of the female and assertive but is also more caring and sensitive bildungsroman. And yet, many of the female to others. paradigms for the genre do not precisely fit The comic plot structure of Emma would Emma, either. The main problem in recognizing also encourage readers to interpret the novel as Emma as a bildungsroman is that the genre has a social lesson. Throughout the text, characters always been associated with the theme of the

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journey or quest. And Emma is the antithesis of the problems of an androcentric psychology in the novel of quest: it is a domestic novel. defining female development apply equally to the problems of an androcentric theory of the Emma, then, can be considered a domestic bildungsroman in defining the domestic novel of bildungsroman, which in turn, makes it another female development: possible paradigm for the female bildungsro- man—especially those of the eighteenth and While the truths of psychological theory have nineteenth centuries. For most British and blinded psychologists to the truth of women’s American women in these periods, especially experience, that experience illuminates a world those in the upper and middle classes, the domes- which psychologists have found hard to trace, a territory where violence is rare and relation- tic setting was the only one usually open for ships appear safe. The reason women’s experi- personal growth and development. The popular ence has been so difficult to decipher or even courtship novels of the period, which were often discern is that a shift in the imagery of relation- also domestic in their concerns, were part of a ships [from hierarchy to web] gives rise to a ‘‘social imperative to legitimize women’s self- problem of interpretation. actualization as affective individuals’’ (Green The domestic novel has been hard for many 14). The belief that women, and thus domestic critics to read as a genuine novel of development novels about women, are not associated with because it often does depict a world where ‘‘vio- development because they are framed by domes- lence is rare and relationships appear safe.’’ ticity is part of a cultural hegemony that views What seems to be the safety of the world of male experience as normal and female experi- domesticity—compared to the world of the ence as abnormal or Other. The use of male quest—has caused both male and female readers development as a standard to measure female to dismiss the domestic setting. But heroines development culminates in the theories of such as Emma do have to overcome obstacles Freud, who defined women by their anatomical in order to become adults, and these obstacles differences from men. Nancy Chodorow’s belief, are often domesticated or different versions however, that females usually develop through of those that heroes face on their quest for ‘‘relation and connection’’ to other people while independence. The domestication of personal males usually develop through separation has obstacles does not, however, make these obstacles reshaped twentieth-century understanding of anylessrealorlessdangerousfortheheroine.The female development (qtd. in Gilligan, 7). text of the domestic novel simply places personal The psychological studies of Carol Gilligan, obstacles in a different context. It is also crucial to which support Chodorow’s theories of male and realize that the development of the domestic her- female development, can help to reshape an oine differs from the development of the hero understanding of the bildungsroman. In A Differ- because female development is based upon a ent Voice, Gilligan explores differences in views of definition of self within a web of personal relation- morality and the self, and the association of these ships. Although the domestic heroine must different views with men and women in her stud- achieve intellectual independence and self-under- ies of psychological development. While other standing to become an adult, she does not want to psychologists, such as Freud, Jean Piaget, Erik physically and emotionally sever herself from fam- Erikson, and Lawrence Kohlberg, have also ily and friends. Gilligan’s comments about the found differences in male and female develop- problems of female development apply as well to ment that are similar to Gilligan’s findings, these the problems of the domestic heroine, who must psychologists have tended to describe male psy- balance ‘‘the wish to be at the center of connection chology as ‘‘normal’’ and female psychology as and the consequent fear of being too far out on the deviant (Gilligan 7–22). In her studies of women, edge.’’ And, of course, the domestic setting itself is Gilligan reshapes theories of human development a web of personal connections in which relation- by showing that women tend to view the world shipsandthehomehavegreatvalue.Asaresult, and their relationships as a web of interdepend- the quest novel and the domestic novel are shaped ence, and men are more likely to view the world by radically different codes. The hero of the quest and relationships as a hierarchy. While men tend wants to leave home to discover his true self; the to define themselves through independence, heroine of domesticity does not want to leave women tend to define themselves through rela- because she wants to discover her true self within tionships (Gilligan 8). Gilligan’s comments about her home.

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Gilligan’s findings that women are more frequently see Emma’s devotion to her father as likely than men to view the world as a web of an example of society’s restrictions on women interdependence restructure the reader’s under- and imply that Emma’s decision to live at home standing of Emma’s devotion to her father and after her marriage is a sign of her lack of growth, her hatred of travel, which is a domesticated ver- such criticism overlooks the importance of inter- sion of the quest. The trip to Boxhill is, not sur- dependence inherent in female development and prisingly, a failure from the point of view of the domestic novel. Such criticism is also part of Emma, who as a domestic heroine, has little desire a cultural definition of women that denigrates to leave her home or the community of Highbury. them because of their differences from men. Emma also looks with derision at Mrs. Elton, Reading Emma as a domestic bildungsro- whoisassociatedwithtravelthroughoutthe man is no longer difficult once cultural defini- novel. Mrs. Elton instigates the trip to Boxhill, tions of apprenticeship, work, and growth are defines herself socially by a travelling coach, and broadened to include typical female experience suggests that Bath is the place to meet marriage- as well as male experience. So while Buckley able men. Austen herself is reputed to have dis- claims that Emma is not a bildungsroman, the liked Bath intensely (Poovey 209–210, Kirkham novel actually fulfills most of his major criteria. 61–65), which increases the significance of her Emma certainly fits Buckley’s first characteristic negative portrayal of Mrs. Elton, a Bath bride of a bildungsroman: ‘‘A child of some sensibility whose marriage is marked by monetary motives. grows up in the country or in a provincial town, Mrs. Elton, a woman who talks incessantly of where he finds constraints, social and intellec- travel,isusedasafoilagainst the more domestic- tual, placed upon a free imagination’’ (Buckley centeredEmmatoexemplifysillyprideandself- 17). Emma is bored at the beginning of the novel; ishness. Emma, too, may seem silly and selfish in she is a ‘‘clever’’ young woman who is ‘‘in great the first volume of the novel, but Emma’s character danger of suffering from intellectual solitude.’’ gains stature in comparison with Mrs. Elton And like many characters in a bildungsroman, because Emma’s interests and values are firmly Emma rebels against authority. In the first chap- rooted within her own community. ter, she quietly but openly rejects the meek The fact that Mrs. Elton lives in an ugly advice of her father and the stronger authority house while Emma lives in an attractive one of Knightley, who warn her not to make any also reflects both women’s relationship to the more matches after her successful pairing of opposition between travel and domesticity in Miss Taylor and Mr. Weston. Unlike the pro- the novel. Mrs. Elton cannot become the heroine tagonists of most bildungsromane, however, of Emma because her love of ostentatious travel Emma, does not leave home to learn in the city and her search for a husband outside her own because the home is the setting of the domestic community illustrate her lack of support for the novel. But Emma does fit Buckley’s next crite- domestic values which shape the novel. Mrs. rion because she experiences two love affairs, Elton, though she is female, is an outsider and ‘‘one debasing, one exalting’’ that demand ‘‘the cannot understand the domestic code of High- hero[ine] reappraise his [or her] values,’’ as bury and Hartfield, which values the home as the shown through her mistaken, humiliating love place of affection and happiness. The example of for Frank and her true, satisfying love for the Eltons is important because it illustrates that Knightley. The ‘‘search for a vocation’’ is also Austen does not characterize all people as fol- an important characteristic of the bildungsro- lowing gender-based behavioral models. Within man (Buckley 18) that is evident in Emma’s Highbury, both Knightley and Mr. Woodhouse development once readers expand their view of share the domestic-based values found in Emma, work from the traditional definition as ‘‘paid Mrs. Weston, and Miss Bates. The Eltons, how- labor outside the home’’ to ‘‘unpaid labor inside ever, practice a sham domesticity based upon the home.’’ Emma’s duties as a daughter and as ostentation. They seek to prove their affection the family manager are her work—and it is work for one another and their home through unre- that she refuses to reject or devalue at the end of strained vanity and selfishness, constantly call- the novel. Her marriage and her attempts to ing attention to themselves and their emotions. arrange other marriages are also significant Augusta Elton can never fulfill Austen’s ideals of aspects of her work within the community a ‘‘lady’’ because she can never overcome her because marriage and motherhood were female own individual selfishness. And while readers careers during this period. While the modern

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reader will find Austen’s depictions of female personal epiphany instead of a progressive proc- work limiting, one must also remember that she ess of formal schooling. After she learns about was writing within the tradition of domestic real- Frank and Jane’s engagement and Harriet’s love ism. To have Emma assume work outside of for Knightley, Emma realizes that with ‘‘unpar- traditional options for upper-class nineteenth- donable arrogance’’ she had ‘‘proposed to century women would have violated the qualifi- arrange everybody’s destiny.’’ It is at this point cations of the domestic and realistic plot. in the novel that Emma learns one of the most valuable lessons of ‘‘ladyhood’’—respect and While Emma matches the significant charac- care for other individuals. teristics of Buckley’s definition of a bildungsro- man, it also matches some crucial aspects of In the beginning of the novel, Emma takes paradigms for the female bildungsroman. pride in the fact that she had helped to make a Annis Pratt notes that in the novel of develop- match between Miss Taylor and Mr. Weston. ment the young woman’s tie to nature is impor- Although Knightley discredits her role, Emma tant in her psychological growth. Throughout explains that she has taken an appropriate the novel, events and Emma’s resulting moods middle-ground as matchmaker, ‘‘something are associated with nature. It suddenly snows, between the do-nothing and the do-all.’’ Her ruining a dinner party, the night Mr. Elton explanation of her role seems reasonable: she shocks Emma with his money-motivated mar- ‘‘promoted Mr. Weston’s visits,’’ gave many riage proposal. On the day Emma learns about ‘‘little encouragements,’’ and ‘‘smoothed many Frank and Jane’s engagement, the ‘‘weather little matters.’’ Emma’s success as a match- added what it could of gloom’’ as a ‘‘cold stormy maker, however, leads her to abuse her power rain’’ destroys the natural beauty of July. The next day, however, ‘‘it was summer again’’; sig- as she exchanges her role as social facilitator to nificantly, this is also the day that Knightley become a social manipulator. She tries to realign proposes to Emma in the garden. ‘‘Never had Harriet’s affections and soon believes she can judge the exquisite sight, smell, sensation of nature, everyone’s true emotions.Whenshetriestobethe tranquil, warm and brilliant after a storm, been ‘‘do-all’’ and force others to follow her own plans, more attractive to her,’’ the narrator says. And Emma crosses the threshold of Austen’s depiction though nature in Emma may sometimes be sur- of the ideal ‘‘lady.’’ Her ‘‘kind designs’’ for Harriet prising, it is always the safe, domesticated nature lead her to the grossest unkindness—the belief that of the English village, never the violent, raging she can re-create Harriet on and off the canvas. nature of the gothic English moors. Emma’s desire for social control also causes her snobbery to the Martins and her rudeness to Miss The compound structure of Emma’s last Bates.HersnobberytotheMartinsismorally name—‘‘Woodhouse’’—and the link between reprehensible to the modern reader, but it was ‘‘wood’’ and nature and between ‘‘house’’ and also reprehensible to nineteenth-century readers. domesticity also mark the novel’s link to the Trilling writes that the ‘‘yeoman class had always tradition of the bildungsroman and the domestic held a strong position in English class feeling, and novel. The symbolic link between domesticity at this time especially, only stupid or ignorant peo- and nature in her surname is mirrored in the plefeltprivilegedtolookdownuponthem.’’And name of her home—Hartfield—which carries a Emma’s treatment of Miss Bates at the picnic is double connotation as a natural place for deer made to seem doubly heartless by Miss Bates’s and as a home of the heart. And as nature is quiet acquiescence. domesticated in Emma, so is the archetypal role of the greenworld lover, who often plays a And yet, though Emma sometimes acts in an prominent role in the novel of female develop- unconscionable manner, the reader is well aware ment (Pratt 22–29). Knightley, who is associated that she is not without a conscience. It pricks her with farming and orchards, plays the role of throughout. For instance, after Harriet meets Emma’s greenworld lover, yet he is a domesti- Robert Martin at Ford’s, Emma realizes that cated version of the mythological Pan or Eros she ‘‘was not thoroughly comfortable’’ with her who usually endangers the female heroine (Pratt own actions. At the end, though, Emma has 22–24). Knightley’s domesticated ties to nature changed enough to think that it ‘‘would be a make Emma’s sexual growth safe within the great pleasure to know Robert Martin’’ and hap- novel. And as typical in many female bildungs- pily attends the wedding. She apologizes to Miss romane, Emma’s education culminates in a Bates and befriends Jane Fairfax. She learns to

82 Literary Movements for Students, Second Edition, Volume 1 Bildungsroman treat others with tenderness and to respect their novels end in marriage, these marriages show personal privacy and autonomy. She learns to the heroine’s ‘‘achievement of maturity, not the reject both the roles of a ‘‘do-nothing’’ and a victory of a man.’’ In Emma, Austen adds a sim- ‘‘do-all.’’ At the end she considers a future ple yet crucial twist to the conventional marriage match between Mrs. Weston’s daughter and one plot: Knightley abdicates his seat in the county, of Isabella’s sons, but her matchmaking is no his own place of authority, to live in Emma’s longer dangerous because she now realizes the home—her own seat of authority. The knight problems caused by the abuse of power. She has does not carry off the princess. The gentleman learned a lesson: a lady is not a bully. But Emma does not place the lady within the shrine of his learns an equally important lesson: a lady is not a own home. weakling. Unlike so many nineteenth-century heroines, she does not confuse kindness to others At this point in the novel, readers should with fear of others and subjection of self. At the have learned to step back and try to construct end of the novel, she is still able to say to Knight- characters and reality through a multiplicity of ley, ‘‘I always deserve the best treatment, because perspectives. Just because Emma sees Knightley Ineverputupwithanyother.’’ as a superior being while she is in the first flush of her self-reproach and awakened desire does not Emma’s awareness of her own ‘‘unpardon- mean that the reader is also supposed to see able arrogance’’ allows readers to continue their Knightley as a superior being. Such readings empathetic construction of her character. Emma overlook the important fact that Knightley, like has learned to balance power and propriety, Emma, has publicly embarrassed himself through reflecting Austen’s ideal of a lady as a woman a misreading of the true relationship between who is strong but not manipulative. Knightley’s Jane and Frank. Knightley pays a great deal of proposal follows soon after, and at this point in attention to Jane and extols her virtues through- the narrative Austen inserts those well-known out the novel. After Knightley orders his carriage lines: to take Jane to the Coles’ dinner party, Knight- What did she say?—Just what she ought, of ley’s attention to Jane is put in a new light when course.—A lady always does.—She said Mrs. Weston tells Emma she believes Knightley enough to show there need not be despair— may marry Jane. Later Knightley, in an unchar- and to invite him to say more himself. acteristic loud and public voice, inquires ‘‘partic- In this passage, the narrator mocks readers’ ularly’’ about Jane in a conversation with Miss expectations for a love scene (Booth, Company Bates through a window. No wonder Emma 433–34). Such mockery is possible, though, begins to wonder if Knightley is in love with because at this point Austen’s portrait of Jane. Of course, even at this point in the novel, Emma has educated the reader about the attrib- the reader is quite aware that Emma is not always utes of an ideal ‘‘lady.’’ Austen creates what a reliable interpreter of reality, but this time Wolfgang Iser calls ‘‘a gap in the text,’’ so the Emma’s views are corroborated by others and ‘‘reader’s imagination is left free to paint in the evidence in the text. When she warns Knightley scene.’’ This freedom is a test of the reader’s thathe‘‘mayhardlybeaware...howhighly’’he learning process. From the text’s comparisons values Jane, the forthright Knightley becomes and contrasts of Emma with Harriet, Jane, Isa- suddenly engrossed upon buttoning his gaiters. bella, and Augusta Elton, we are to have learned Emma’s view is also given credence when Knight- what are the best attributes that make up the ley admits that Mr. Cole suggested that his atten- most admirable type of ‘‘lady.’’ tion to Jane had prompted speculation about the nature of their relationship. After Knightley’s proposal, many modern readers such as Gilbert and Gubar have trouble So while the secret of Jane and Frank’s in their construction of Emma’s character. It is as engagement plays a joke upon Emma, it also— if they continue to see Emma solely through her for a while—becomes a joke upon Knightley. own self-critical thoughts instead of trying to con- And in an age when ‘‘making love’’ to a struct her through the text as a whole. Booth woman meant simply calling upon her and counteracts this reading by stating that readers praising her publicly, it is hardly surprising often ‘‘succumb morally to what was simply that Knightley’s attention to Jane has caused required formally’’—a plot that ends in marriage. rumors. These type of rumors, as nineteenth- And Poovey argues that although Austen’s century readers clearly understood, could be

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especially socially damaging to a single woman In the face of Emma’s faults, some critics like Jane, who is also beautiful and impoverished. have deemed Jane as the ‘‘good’’ character in Knightley clearly understands Jane’s precarious the novel. Booth believes that ‘‘Jane is superior social position and even criticizes Frank for send- to Emma in almost every part of the book’’ ing her the piano, yet he does not seem aware that (Rhetoric 249). Though the ‘‘narrator is non- his praise of Jane could also cause her social committal toward Jane Fairfax,’’ Booth writes, embarrassment. And although Knightley ‘‘the author can be inferred as approving of her denounces matchmaking, he does play match- almost completely’’ (‘‘Distance’’ 182). Harold Bloom, who criticizes Booth for giving Jane cen- maker by trying to ascertain whether Harriet is ter stage, still believes that the ‘‘splendid Jane a suitable mate for Robert Martin. Knightley’s Fairfax is easier to admire’’ than Emma. Adena own matchmaking attempts backfire, much like Rosmarin echoes these ideas when she says that Emma’s, because his personal attentions to Har- Jane is ‘‘too good and too distant to be a good riet make her believe he loves her. In short, character.’’ While Jane is certainly too distant to Knightley is not, as he has traditionally been be a good character, it seems doubtful that she is portrayed by critics, a paragon of personal judg- actually ‘‘too good.’’ Her love for Frank, who ment. He, like Emma, is deceived by the differ- lacks personal strength and continually treats ences between his own perceptions and reality. In her with foolish inconsideration, calls into ques- constructing Knightley’s character, critics also tion her own character. And most notably, she overlook the fact that he apologizes to Emma shares the same fault as two of the other female for his previous paternal role. He tells Emma, characters: passivity. Like Isabella and Harriet, ‘‘It was very natural for you to say, what right Jane’s passivity allows others to control her. She has he to lecture me? . . . I do not believe I did you submits to Frank’s thoughtless treatment of her any good.’’ Their mutual worship is simply Aus- until his public flirtations with Emma force her ten’s depiction of the first flush of romantic love, to capitulate into the ‘‘slave-trade’’ of the gov- not a sign that Knightley is infallible. erness market. While Jane, like Isabella and Har- riet, is undeniably a ‘‘lady,’’ she cannot embody Knightley is the only one to criticize Emma Austen’s highest ideals of ‘‘ladyhood’’ because (besides Emma herself) in all of Highbury because she is too passive, too demure, and too much he is the only one who is her intellectual equal. like the ‘‘proper lady’’ of the conduct books. Their marriage offers her insurance against the ‘‘intellectual solitude’’ that endangers her at the While reading Emma as a lesson on lady- novel’s beginning. But as much as Emma loves hood might seem at first a superficial approach Knightley, she will not leave her father, a point to the novel, in the end, such a reading increases that Knightley understands and respects. After the complexity of the portrait that Austen has they agree to live together at Hartfield, Emma painted of Emma. This reading also depicts thinks of Knightley as a ‘‘companion’’ and a Emma in a more favorable light than many tra- ‘‘partner.’’ This equality is reinforced by Mrs. ditional analyses. Through the novel’s portrayal Weston’s reflections, who happily considers the of Emma, readers learn what Austen considered marriage as ‘‘all equal’’ without ‘‘sacrifice on any to be the ideal attributes of a ‘‘lady’’—and some side.’’ Emma’s love of her father and her desire to of those attributes may surprise modern readers. live at Hartfield should not be interpreted as an A lady, like Emma, is not ‘‘personally vain’’ and example of female submission to patriarchy. Mr. has no ‘‘taste for finery.’’ She speaks her own Woodhouse has never had any control over mind. She is strong. She is intelligent. She is Emma; Hartfield has been the site of her inde- artistic. She learns from her own mistakes. She pendence. The first Mrs. Weston was unhappy cares about and for her family. She is willing to marry—but marriage must meet her own terms. because she could not at the same time be ‘‘the This is a definition of a ‘‘lady’’ that most modern wife of Captain Weston and Miss Churchill of readers—even feminists—could live with. This is Enscombe.’’ Yet Emma solves the dilemma of the even a definition that some feminists would see loss of female identity that was inherent in most as a definition of a feminist. nineteenth-century marriages. She will continue to be Miss Woodhouse of Hartfield, to be mis- Like Austen, who was afraid that Emma was tress at her own home [as she] take[s] on the role a ‘‘heroine whom no one but myself will much of Mrs. Knightley. like’’, reading Emma as a lesson in ‘‘ladyhood’’ is a

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cast of mind is characterized by prodigious learnedness and long-windedness, by an unre- lieved spiritual profundity that transforms any- ABOVE ALL ELSE, IT CAN DIFFERENTIATE OUR thing and everything into a mystical disquisition. AWARENESS OF HOW THE NOVEL CAN CONVEY AND W. S. Gilbert is not alone in his reservations about the German mind. George Henry Lewes, EXPLORE THE LIFE OF THE MIND, FOR THE in his pioneering work Life and Works of Goethe BILDUNGSROMAN IS NOT SIMPLY AN ALLEGORICAL (1855), at one point defines the German cast of mind by asking his readers to imagine that a SCENARIO OF PHILOSOPHICAL POSITIONS AND Frenchman, an Englishman, and a German VALUES.’’ have been commissioned to write a treatise about the camel. The Frenchman, after a brief contemplation of the animal in question, writes a feuilleton in blameless French which, however, critical approach that most modern readers will adds nothing to the general knowledge of not like. But such a reading also helps to explain the camel. The Englishman spends two years the continuing popularity of Austen inside and observing camels and produces a bulky volume outside academia. The dialectic between female full of facts and scrupulous observation—but power and female propriety continues to act as a devoid of any overall idea or conceptual frame- divisive force in twentieth-century America just as work to hold the dossier together. And the Ger- it was in nineteenth-century England. One of the man, despising French frivolity and English great strengths of Emma, for both nineteenth- empiricism, retires to his study, there ‘‘to con- and twentieth-century readers, is Austen’s por- struct the Idea of a Camel from out of the depths trait of a lady who learns to compromise between of his Moral Consciousness. And he is still at it.’’ power and propriety to live within her community without compromising herself. Now of course Lewes—himself the most persuasive advocate of German culture generally Source: Denise Kohn, ‘‘Reading Emma as a Lesson on and of Goethe in particular—had no intention of ‘Ladyhood’: A Study in the Domestic Bildungsroman,’’ damning the German tradition lock, stock, and in Essays in Literature, Vol. 22, Spring 1995, pp. 45–58. barrel. But it is interesting that he raises the notion of the appalling learnedness of the Ger- Martin Swales man mind in the prefatory paragraphs of his In the following essay, Swales explores German discussion of Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Bildungsroman to identify inherent problems in Lehrjahre. In introducing this work, he speaks of ‘‘character and selfhood’’ in the novel. the German’s fondness for plunging ‘‘into the At one point in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The depths.’’ ‘‘Of all the horrors known to the Ger- Mikado the ruler of Japan shares with the audi- man of this school,’’ Lewes continues, ‘‘there is ence his vision of a judicial system in which there no horror like that of the surface—it is more would be perfect consonance between punish- terrible to him than cold water.’’ ment and crime. The crimes which he chooses I think I had better come clean at the outset as test cases seem mercifully lightweight—which and admit that it is my purpose to examine contrasts engagingly with the ghoulishness of the (among other texts) that novel of Goethe’s proposed remedies. One criminal who provokes that elicited from Lewes the prefatory apology the Mikado’s ire is the bore, and it is decreed that of the camel parable. Moreover, I shall be look- he be condemned to listen to ing not at one novel but at several, for I wish to A series of sermons examine that German novel genre—the Bil- By mystical Germans dungsroman—which would seem, alas, to be Who preach from ten till four. the perfect corroboration of the Mikado’s As far as I am aware, W. S. Gilbert is not notion of the German-tradition-as-punishment. here pillorying any particular tradition within The Bildungsroman, the novel of personal growth German theology; rather, he exploits the happy and development, has traditionally been seen as coincidence that Germans rhymes with sermons the German counterpart to the realistic novel of to draw upon English skepticism about German England, France, and Russia. My enterprise—as culture generally and to suggest that the German is appropriate for a German topic—immediately

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raises a number of theoretical problems. First— the genre which, as it were, put the term on the and most obvious—one asks why one needs to map with a vengeance. The capricious history of bother with literary genres at all. Clearly there is the term itself should not, however, blind us to no reason why the critic should not establish any the fact that the genre to which it refers existed as conceivable genre for the purposes of comparison a particularly respected—and respectable— and contrast. We could envisage the novel of adul- form of novel writing throughout the German tery, of bankruptcy, of aviation, and so on. Such a nineteenth century. If there is an identifiable model of a genre would, I suspect, have no legit- terminus a quo, it is in my view to be found imate pretensions to historical status; it would around 1770 with the publication of the first simply be a heuristic tool, a grid that allows the edition of Wieland’s Agathon in 1767 and of critic to select a number of texts for analytical and Friedrich von Blanckenburg’s Versuch u¨ber den comparative purposes. But this notion of the the- Roman (Essay on the Novel) in 1774. Blancken- oretical—or, as I would prefer to call it, taxo- burgs theoretical work grew out of his enthusi- nomic—genre should not prevent us from asm for Wieland’s novel; for him (as also, realizing that there is also such a thing as the incidentally, for Lessing) Agathon marked the historical genre. coming of age of the novel form. Wieland’s nar- rative, in Blanckenburgs eyes, transformed the Tzvetan Todorov outlines the vital issues traditional novel genre by investing it with a new when he points out that the concept of genre or psychological and intellectual seriousness. Aga- species is one taken from the natural sciences but thon over and over again engages the reader in that ‘‘there is a qualitative difference as to the debate about novel fictions; in the process it meanings of the term ‘genre’ or ‘specimen’ depend- repudiates the romance, which so long-windedly ing on whether they are applied to natural things fuses love story and adventure novel, and or the works of the mind.’’ He continues, ‘‘in the it repudiates the moral constancy, the interpre- former case, the appearance of a new example does tative transparency, of traditional novel char- not necessarily modify the characteristics of the acters. For Blanckenburg, Wieland’s signal species . . . the birth of a new tiger does not modify achievement resided in his ability to get inside the species in its definition,’’ whereas in art ‘‘every a character, to portray the complex stuff of work modifies the sum of possible works, each new human potential which, in interaction with the example alters the species.’’ outside world, yields the palpable process of It is important to recognize that the literary human Werden, of growth and change. By this species or genre is, then, a historically evolving means artistic—and human—dignity and cohe- thing and that the mechanism of that evolution is sion was conferred on the sequence of episodic the interlocking of—in T. S. Eliot’s terms—tra- adventures which novel heroes, by tradition, dition and the individual talent. In other words, underwent. not all genre constructs are simply foisted on the The Bildungsroman was born, then, in spe- individual works after the event by eager schol- cific historical circumstances, in a demonstrable ars in quest of a taxonomy. Rather, the historical interlocking of theory and praxis. It is a novel agency of the genre constitutes, in Hans Robert form recognizably animated by the Humanita¨t- Jauss’s term, that ‘‘horizon of expectation’’ with sideal of late eighteenth-century Germany in reference to which each individual work is made that it is concerned with the whole person and in the context of which each individual unfolding in all his complexity and elusiveness. work is received by its contemporary—and sub- It is a concern shared by Humboldt, Goethe, sequent—audience. The work activates these Schiller, and many others, and the discursive or expectations in order to debate with them, to theoretical formulations of the idea (and ideal) refashion, to challenge, perhaps even to parody of Bildung are legion. But it is important to them. Herein resides the clement of newness, the remember that what concerns us here is a genre individuality which is at one and the same time of the novel, not a theoretical or cultural tract. the modification and the transmission of the And the novel makes certain demands in respect literary genre. of plot and characterization that prevent the What, then, is a Bildungsroman? The word concern for Bildung from being articulated at a was coined in the second decade of the nine- purely conceptual level. Indeed, this is part of the teenth century, but some fifty years elapsed problem. The serious novel may be born with the before Wilhelm Dilthey’s famous discussion of advent of the Bildungsroman, but there remains

86 Literary Movements for Students, Second Edition, Volume 1 Bildungsroman a certain bad conscience, as it were. For the reality. His comments tell us much about the novel, it seems, retains that questionable legacy Bildungsroman in that it is precisely this novel of having to do with events, adventures, epi- form that is animated by the dialectic of poetry sodes—all of which militate against human and and prose. And the uncertainty is nowhere more poetic substance. The need constantly to reha- urgent, as Hegel himself saw, than with regard to bilitate the novel form is expressed with almost the vexed question of the novel’s ending. When monotonous unanimity by German novel theo- Hegel formulates the essential theme of the novel rists throughout the nineteenth century, and it is as the conflict ‘‘between the poetry of the heart nearly always couched in the same terms as a and the resisting prose of circumstances,’’ he sets concern for poetry within the traditional prose of the seal on virtually all German thinking about the novel. The danger with the novel is, appa- the novel for the rest of the century. And his rently, that it all too readily backslides into an specter, or, to be more respectful, his Geist,can irredeemably prosaic condition. The paradig- still be clearly felt in Luka´cs’s Die Theorie des matic statement is to be found in Hegel’s Romans of 1912. Aesthetics. I have already stressed that the Bildungsro- This novelistic quality is born when the man is a novel form that is concerned with the knightly existence is again taken seriously, is complex and diffused Werden, or growth, of the filled out with real substance. The contingency hero. How, then, is this process intimated narra- of outward, actual existence has been trans- tively; how does it embody the dialectic of formed into the firm, secure order of bourgeois ‘‘poetry’’ and ‘‘prose’’? In its portrayal of the society and the state. . . Thereby the chivalrous character of these heroes whose deeds fill recent hero’s psychology the Bildungsroman operates novels is transformed. They stand as individu- with a tension between a concern for the sheer als with their subjective goals of love, honor, complexity of individual potentiality on the one ambition or with their ideals of improving the hand and, on the other, a recognition that prac- world, over against the existing order and prose tical reality—marriage, family, a career—is a of reality, which from all sides places obstacles necessary dimension of the hero’s self-realiza- in their path. . . . These struggles are, however, tion, albeit one that by definition implies a lim- in the modern world nothing but the appren- ticeship, the education of the individual at the itation, indeed constriction, of the self. The hands of the given reality. . . . For the conclu- tension is that between the Nebeneinander (the sion of such an apprenticeship usually amounts ‘‘one-alongside-another’’) of possible selves to the hero getting the rough spots knocked off within the hero and the Nacheinander (the him. . . . In the last analysis he usually gets his ‘‘one-after-another’’) of linear time, of practical girl and some kind of job, marries, and activity, of story, or personal history. In one becomes a philistine just like all the others. sense, then, the Bildungsroman undeniably has This is a crucial passage. And it is crucial in something of the rarefied epic of inwardness (the its all-pervasive ambivalence. On the one hand, ‘‘mystical sermon’’) that has alienated its English Hegel affirms the seriousness of this kind of readers in particular. It can tend to dissolve the fiction, it being synonymous with the novel’s lived chronology of a life into some providential ability to anchor the time-honored epic pattern scenario of symbolic patterns and recurrences. It in modern bourgeois reality. In this sense Hegel can at times come perilously close to espousing seems to offer his approval of the process by what J. P. Stern has called ‘‘a chimerical free- which a somewhat fastidious, idealistic—in a dom—as though somehow it were possible not to word, ‘‘poetic’’—young man is licked into enter the river of experience that flows all one shape by the ‘‘prose’’ of bourgeois society. On way.’’ It can be less than strenuous in its recog- the other hand, Hegel also seems to be saying nition of the chain of cause and effect within that there is something debased—and debas- practical living and of the integrity and moral ing—about this process. That the highest wis- otherness of those characters with whom the dom of the novel and of its latter-day knightly protagonist comes into contact. On occasion adventurer should reside in the acquisition we can feel that these characters exist, so to of wife, family, and job security seems a sorry— speak, not in their own right but for the educa- indeed philistine—reduction of the grand model. tive benefit of the hero: that they are significant What is particularly suggestive for our purposes insofar as they are underwritten by a potentiality is the extent to which Hegel perceives the novel as slumbering within him. This is as much as to say hedging its bets in respect of prosaic, bourgeois that these characters are part of a providential

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decor whose raison d’eˆtre is to be found in their frequently that the reader must ask if he will relatedness (in a sense that can vary from the ever know and reliably understand him. literal to the metaphorical) to the hero. But all He seemed by turns [nach und nach] a pious this is only part of the truth about the Bildungs- idealist, a Platonist, a republican, a hero, a roman. For what the major novels of the tradi- stoic, a voluptuary; and he was none of these tion show is not achieved goals, not comfortable things, although he at various times passed solutions, but at best directions, implications, through all these phases and always a little of intimations of the possible, which are shown to each robbed off on him. It will probably con- be no more than that. Moreover, they do not tinue like this for quite some time. reach the point of dissolving all relationship to To look back on Agathon’s life is to perceive plot, to the Nacheinander of story. They may a Nacheinander, a chronological sequence. seem to promise just such an obliteration of the Because the specific circumstances of Agathon’s flow of resistantly linear experience. But they life change, Agathon himself changes. Yet he is cannot deliver the goods; they do not break always potentially the sum total of all these faith with the ‘‘prose’’ of the novel form and ‘‘phases,’’ of all these possible selves—and of write an epistemological or aesthetic treatise. In many others. In other words, Agathon’s true E. M. Forster’s words, ‘‘Yes, oh dear yes, the self can only be conceived of as a Nebeneinander, novel tells a story,’’ and the story is made up not as a clustering of manifold possibilities, of which simply of beneficent experiences that welcome at any given time he can only realize (in both the ‘‘poetry’’ of the individual’s inwardness; senses of the word) a small proportion. Hence hence the tension I have spoken of, a tension the narrator’s irony: in one sense, the signifi- which is sustained and narratively enacted— cance of the Nacheinander, of the plot sequence and not resolved. The grasping for clarity and is relentlessly called into question, but in another losing it, the alternation of certainty of purpose sense the hero does have a story which is some- with a sense of being swept along by the sheer how his and nobody else’s. And stories need randomness of living—these are seen to be the endings. Wieland here has recourse to the fiction very stuff of human experience and to be such of there being an original Greek manuscript on meaning and distinction as men are able to which his account is based. This manuscript ends attain, as the Bildungsroman is able to affirm. with a typically novelistic (which is to say, The novel, then, is written for the sake of the improbable) happy ending, which Wieland journey—and not for the sake of the happy end- both appropriates and undermines. His irony ing which that journey seems to promise. allows him to have his cake and eat it too: to tell a novel and to mount a critique of the expect- This, then, is a sketch in necessarily broad ations inherent in novel convention. Hence the strokes of the implications inherent in the Bil- happy ending, that epistemologically simple dungsroman as a historical genre. I want now to foreclosure of the process of human growth comment briefly on six major texts from within and self-discovery, is consistently undermined that tradition. Specialist readers will, I hope, by the narrator’s irony. forgive me if these are but somewhat impression- istic interpretative sketches. I have tried else- Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1796) where to provide the detailed argument both on operates with a comparable irony. Wilhelm the theory and on the praxis of the genre. I am leaves his bourgeois home and seeks experiences here concerned with the implications the genre that promise an adequate extension of his per- has for an understanding of the European novel sonality. He is for some time attracted to the theater, a realm which clearly allows him to as a whole; therefore, the individual text receives widen both actively and imaginatively his expe- less than its due. rience. But gradually he grows out of this phase Wieland’s Agathon (1767) operates with a of his life and finds himself more and more profusion of narrative commentary, which on drawn to the Society of the Tower. The Society occasion reaches the proportions of a barrage. of the Tower is made up chiefly of aristocrats, Over and over again the narrator reminds and it is a world devoted to human—and us that Agathon is not the usual novel hero; humane—wholeness. In many ways the Society the typical protagonist should be both morally of the Tower would appear to be the goal of andepistemologicallyaconstant,aknownquan- Wilhelm’s quest, for it seems to reconcile indi- tity throughout, whereas Agathon changes so vidual limitation and human totality, practical

88 Literary Movements for Students, Second Edition, Volume 1 Bildungsroman activity and inherent potential, or—in Hegel’s I went first via Switzerland to Italy; to Venice, terms—the prose of the practical world and the Florence, Rome, Naples, Syracuse, Palermo, poetry of the individual heart and imagination. Malta. From Malta I took a ship to Spain, which I crossed from south to north with In an appropriately dignified ceremony Wilhelm many detours. I was in Gibraltar, Granada, is admitted to the Society of the Tower; he Seville, Cordoba, Toledo, Madrid, and many receives a parchment scroll full of wise sayings, other lesser towns. . . . I had been absent for one he learns that the boy Felix is indeed his son. and a half months less than two years. It was Finally the words of graduation are pronounced again spring when I returned. over him: ‘‘Hail to thee, young man. Thy appren- For the first time in this lengthy novel, expe- ticeship is done.’’ We know that all the members riences are recounted which would commonly be of the Society of the Tower have contributed the regarded as interesting and exciting. Yet these history of their apprenticeships, their Lehrjahre, details are reduced to a mere list, to an empty, to its archive. The title of the novel refers to the cataloging baldness which is never applied to the hero’s apprenticeship, and his very name—Meis- things and modest activities of the Rose House, ter—promises the attainment to mastery. We the dwelling of Risach, the mentor figure. The should, then, by rights have reached the end of description of the world tour exudes an unmis- the novel. Indeed, our expectations seem to be takable inertia. Heinrich tells us, ‘‘I had been speedily confirmed, for our hero approaches life absent [ich war abwesend gewesen] for one and with a new mastery and certainty of purpose. He a half months less than two years,’’ and this decides that Therese is the appropriate wife for explains the deadness of the list. The places vis- himself and mother for Felix, and he proposes to ited represent an exile from the centrality of the her. But this action, alas, turns out to be a com- Rose House, an interlude of inauthenticity, of plete error, from whose consequences he is ‘‘being away from being.’’ It is therefore under- shielded by pure good fortune. It comes, there- standable that, after what amounts to a package fore, as no surprise that our hero feels cheated; tour avant la lettre, Heinrich returns home with so do we, and so, one suspects, did Goethe’s relief. But then he always returns with relief to contemporary readers, on whose taste for novels the Rose House, for it is within that world that of secret societies Wilhelm Meister clearly draws, everyday objects and modest, recurring human without, as it were, delivering the goods. Goethe, activities can be celebrated with a human (and it seems to me, is, like Wieland before him, narrative) affirmation that serves to highlight mounting a critique of traditional novel expect- the emptiness of the world tour. Stifter’s art is ations precisely in order to set up a narrative pitted, therefore, against common expectations irony that both validates and calls into question of human and narrative interest. It is this which the epistemological assumptions behind such makes Der Nachsommer the painstaking yet expectations. We note that there is something incandescent litany that it is. strangely discursive and wordy about the Society Der Nachsommer is a novel written against of the Tower (it displays, for example, a some- history in a dual sense: against social and political what schoolmasterly fondness for wise sayings history, in that no narrative interest is dis- and maxims). The Society may be dedicated to played in the changes and frictions within the concept of human wholeness, but it is not the mid-nineteenth-century Austrian society; against embodiment of that wholeness. Nor does it con- personal history, against story and plot, in that fer inalienable possession of wisdom on the Heinrich’s experiences ultimately all dissolve into aspiring (but struggling) protagonist. The law a sublime stasis—hence the relative unimpor- of linear experience, the Nacheinander of plot, tance attached to the naming of the hero. In continues out beyond the promised goal. So how Hegel’s terms, Stifter’s novel does reconcile the does the novel end? Like Agathon before it, it poetry of inward values and the prose of out- closes with a happy ending which is undercut by ward, practical activity. It is also the one novel irony as fairy-tale ease and stage-managed prov- in the Bildungsroman tradition that resolves the identiality take over. tension between Nebeneinander and Nacheinander. At one point toward the end of Adalbert But it can do so only by confining the story to a Stifter’s Der Nachsommer (1857, translated as number of simple, practical activities underwritten Indian Summer) the hero—we wait a long time by an urgent—almost hectoring—sense of human before we discover that his name is Heinrich and artistic wholeness. The tone is one of sacra- Drendorf—undertakes a world journey. mental pedantry; the difficulty attending upon the

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attempt to write an unproblematic Bildungsroman Finally, a few brief comments about two in fact serves to intimate the increasing tension to twentieth-century Bildungsromans. Thomas which the genre is prone, a tension which can be Mann’s Der Zauberberg (1924, The Magic Moun- exorcised only by converting the novel into a tain, 1927) chronicles the experiences undergone monolithic litany. by a young man in the course of a seven-year stay in a sanatorium. These years, it is suggested, con- Gottfried Keller’s Der gru¨ne Heinrich (1880, stitute a journey into self-knowledge, a Bildungs- translated as Green Henry) is concerned, like so reise, whose goal, it would seem, is to be found in many of the major Bildungsromans with an the chapter entitled ‘‘Snow,’’ in which Hans Cas- artist, or more accurately, with someone of artis- torp has a dream vision of the wholeness of man, tic potential. Heinrich Lee tries throughout his of a totality which is not only greater than all early years to replace reality with the alternative antinomies but which is also humane, affirmative world of his imaginative and fictive capacities. In in its relationship to the living process. No reader the course of the novel, we see how he succumbs can fail to sense the crucial importance of these increasingly to that dualism which is so much of insights. And yet the goal of Castorp’s quest, once his own making. What Heinrich is unable to glimpsed, once formulated, is forgotten as he perceive is that reality—even the modest reality stumbles back through the snow to the sanato- of a Swiss peasant community—is sustained not rium. The vision, the complete perception of just by pragmatic allegiances and practical human totality, exists outside ordinary time; it accommodations but also by an inward, imagi- can be glimpsed as in a dream; it can be formu- native assent which rounds out the modest facts lated discursively, but it cannot be possessed as an and experiences into an all-embracing human abiding and effective recipe for everyday living. totality. Because he cuts himself off from such The Nebeneinander cannot halt the Nacheinander human fulfillment, Heinrich condemns himself of Castorp’s experience; his personal history con- to an increasingly lifeless existence. His art suf- tinues on its wayward path until he is caught up in fers too, in that it is either a dissociated fantasy the events of that other Nacheinander to which he with no enlivening relationship to the objective has paid such scant attention—world history. For world or a painstaking copy of physical details at the end of the novel, the ‘‘problem child of life’’ with no overall imaginative conception to sus- (Sorgenkind des Lebens) finds himself plunged tain it. Heinrich returns to Switzerland at the end into the holocaust of the First World War. of the novel, becoming a ‘‘somewhat melancholy and monosyllabic civil servant.’’ The rhythm of Mann’s novel in many ways recalls that of Wilhelm Meister; the seeming Keller’s novel is grounded in the disjunction Grails of both novels—the Society of the within the protagonist’s experience of the prose Tower, the snow vision, both of which entail a of concrete circumstances on the one hand, and perception of man as a humane totality—do not of the poetry of the heart’s potential on the come at the end of the novels in which they other. The narrative perspective is all-important occur. In both cases the hero emerges on the here; the second version of the novel is sustained other side of the goal, feeling not really any the in the first person throughout. The recollecting wiser. Both expressions of human totality have voice of Heinrich the narrator is able to docu- in common a certain discursiveness, a limitation ment precisely the disjunction I have referred to to the conceptual postulation of totality, which above—and to suggest the alternative (but unre- is relativized by the demands of the hero’s alized) possibility that there need be no such ongoing experience. What, then, do we make of absolute gulf between poetry and prose, between Hans Castorp, our mediocre—mittelma¨big— the complex inwardness, the Nebeneinander of protagonist? He is, I would suggest, mediocre the inner man and the Nacheinander of his actual in the precise sense of Mittelma¨big, ‘‘middle living in the realm of human society. The tension way.’’ He is undistinguished by any dominant that is so characteristic of the Bildungsroman characteristic or capacity; he is the point at becomes here a dualism; moreover, Keller’s which the other characters in the novel, all of novel suggests with an urgency rare in the genre them so much better-known quantities than the dangers of such unfocused idealism. There is, Hans Castorp, intersect. He is, as it were, over- in this sense, a moral astringency to Keller’s endowed with potentiality. And yet the novel debate with the Bildungsroman tradition which does not allow him to become simply a static so informs his own creation. cipher for the complexity of man, for he is also

90 Literary Movements for Students, Second Edition, Volume 1 Bildungsroman a Person, an ordinary individual who, like all of thematic center of Hesse’s text; and the conflict us, has to live his (and nobody else’s) life. between the Nebeneinander (the Castalian striv- ing for universality and totality) and the Thomas Mann’s employment of the Bil- Nacheinander (of Knecht’s story) is the measure dungsroman tradition in this novel is the meas- of the novel’s engagement with the Bildungsro- ure of his urgent need, under the impact of the man tradition. 1914–18 war, to review his own and his country’s intellectual tradition. A similar critical urgency The foregoing has been a somewhat rapid is, in my view, the source of Hermann Hesse’s review of the theory and practice of the German partly skeptical, partly affectionate employment Bildungsroman from about 1770 to 1943. I want of the genre in his last novel, Das Glasperlenspiel in conclusion to inquire into the implications of (1943, The Glass Bead Game)—where the pres- this novel tradition for the European novel in sure of historical events comes from the turmoil general. Let me begin by clarifying one or two of the 1930s. The novel is narrated by an inhab- issues. In quantitative terms the Bildungsroman is itant of Castalia, an ivory-tower region domi- by no means the only kind of novel to come out of nated by intellect and meditation, who in the Germany in the period with which I am con- first few pages of his account makes derogatory cerned. Nevertheless, it must be said that most remarks about the bourgeois fondness for biog- German novel writing of distinction does in some raphy. Such an interest in the individual and his form or another partake of this genre. I know it is life story is, he argues, symptomatic of a declin- nowadays fashionable within the curiously neo- ing culture. Castalia, on the other hand, is sus- positivistic enthusiasm for Rezeptionsgeschichte tained by the principle of suprapersonal service; (the history of the reception of a work) to say it has its center of gravity in that model of syn- that scholarly inquiry should be concerned not chronic universality, the Glass Bead Game, with literary quality but with the demonstrable which, in its very abstraction from the specific, history of reading habits within a given society. the individuated, the particular, creates a sce- But it seems to me difficult to avoid the issue of nario for the total play of all human values and literary quality—for the simple reason that no experiences. However, the experiences with amount of Rezeptionsgeschichte will alter the fee- which the narrator is crucially concerned are bleness of a novel such as Freytag’s Soll und those of one man—Josef Knecht (the name, Haben (1855) when compared with, say, Dom- meaning, roughly, servant, is, of course, a con- bey and Son. Moreover, as a number of critics trastive echo of Goethe’s Meister). Knecht joins have shown recently, the 1830s and 1840s in the Castalian province and becomes its supreme Germany witnessed a consistent—but ulti- exponent and servant as Master of the Glass mately unavailing—attempt to direct the novel Bead Game. But he then leaves Castalia, because away from the Bildungsroman, away from the he can no longer accept the abstraction and dominant presence of Wilhelm Meister and bloodlessness of the province’s values. In its toward a more socially and historically aware striving for spiritual totality, Castalia is hostile novel (after the manner of Walter Scott). The to the ontological dimension that is history. But preeminence of the Bildungsroman can be Knecht, through his encounters with Pater Jaco- gauged from the fact that it was not confined bus, comes to perceive the truth of history—to simply to serious novels for the adult market. In perceive that Castalia itself is, like everything 1880 there appeared a novel in the German else, a historical phenomenon. At the same time language which must be accounted one of the he realizes that he too is a historical phenom- supreme best-sellers of all time. It has been enon in the sense that he has a personal history, translated into dozens of foreign languages, it that he lives, not in timeless abstraction, but in has been filmed and produced in television serial- the chronological specificity of choice, of cause izations, and its readership apparently numbers and effect. In other words, he learns that he has a some forty million. If you are still wondering story, that his experiences are inalienably what I am talking about, let me give you the enshrined in the Nacheinander of a lived life. title. It is, of course, Heidi by Johanna Spyri. All this is faithfully reported by the narrator— But this, let me hasten to add, is not the correct without his ever modifying that Castalian ideol- title of that amazingly successful book; for the ogy with which he begins his account and which first volume of Heidi’s adventures is actually Knecht’s life so manifestly calls into question. It entitled Heidis Lehr-und Wanderjahre. All of is here that we find in my view the narrative and which, I suppose, goes to show that not every

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novel in German which partakes of the Bildungs- consequences of the German reverence for roman tradition has to be a sermon by a mystical inwardness are indicated in Bruford’s book German who preaches from ten till four. and have been underpinned in a recent article by R. Hinton Thomas, in which it is shown that Let me add a further word in justification of the notion of Bildung—with its central concept this novel tradition. W. H. Bruford, in a study of of the organic personality—could be, and was, the term Bildung, has suggested many of the transferred into the sphere of social and politi- ways in which it speaks of the characteristic cal debate in Germany, and became part of the limitation of the German middle classes in the stock vocabulary of German conservatism on nineteenth century; the inwardness of the values which Nazism was later to draw. These are esteemed, the fastidious aversion to practical pertinent insights. But neither Bruford nor affairs, to politics, the sacramental pursuit Thomas are concerned in any thoroughgoing of self-cultivation; all these factors bespeak way with the Bildungsroman, which is after that well-known phenomenon, the deutsche all, a vital part of the tradition they explore. Misere, which has been identified as the And I want to insist that the Bildungsroman is lack of bourgeois emancipation in nineteenth- precisely a voice from within the German intel- century Germany. The specific social and eco- lectual tradition which can command our nomic circumstances that obtained and their assent and respect—because it does not offer impact on German cultural and intellectual unequivocal certainties, unreflected values, but life have been acutely analyzed by a number of embodies the difficulties of those aspirations distinguished commentators. Moreover, one which, in their theoretical and discursive for- should add that the nineteenth-century situa- mulation, can prove so forbidding for English tion is part of a larger legacy which is bound readers. In other words, if we want to look for a up with the particularism of the Holy Roman critique of Bildung, the Bildungsroman is an Empire, with its tangle of small principalities. obvious and eloquent starting point. Moreover, The lack of a unified national arena, of a focus, it seems to me that many of the features of the a metropolis where the spiritual issues of the age Bildungsroman that allowed it in the past to be could find palpable enactment helped to pro- relegated to the periphery of the European duceasituationinwhichthenationexistedas novel tradition—with the familiar sigh of relief an inward—or, if not inward, then at least cul- that it was yet another example of the pathology of tural and linguistic—unit, rather than as a dem- the German mind—are now part of our experience ographic entity. One can register all this as a of the twentieth-century novel. I have in mind the shortcoming, as something that in linguistic self-consciousness of the Bildungsroman, its discur- terms militated against there being an energetic siveness and self-reflectivity, its narrative oblique- language of public (and journalistic) debate. ness, its concern for the elusiveness of selfhood, its But the lack produced as its corollary a certain dialectical critique of the role of plot in the novel— gain, a language that could explore inward and all these things are not merely German (that is, elusive experience with an assuredness and provincial) excesses; they are the staple diet of the differentiation rare in other European lan- modern novelist’s unease in respect of the form he guages. Such a language, usually associated has inherited. All of this makes it very tempting to with religious or mystical experience, became a engage in some polemical historicism—and to sug- potent contribution to the autobiographical gest that the Bildungsroman, precisely because it and biographical narrative form with the articulates the unease of a society not easily at home advent of the complex phenomenon of secula- in the bourgeois age, speaks particularly forcefully rization in the second half of the eighteenth to our age, when that unease is so very apparent. century. The pietist, confessional mode is that inward quest for the soul’s vindication which so We are, I suspect, all familiar with the argu- often entails an awareness of sinfulness as a ment that the novel expresses the contradictions precondition of spiritual distinction. Such con- of bourgeois society, that it has its roots in, to cerns (at once thematic and linguistic), in their quote Raymond Williams’s phrase, the ‘‘creative secularized form, clearly gave the Bildungsro- disturbance’’ generated by the norms of that man part of its characteristic impetus. Now all society. Or to put the matter another way, the this may be, to English observers, an inauspi- modern novel (and we must remember that, in cious climate for the emergence of the modern terms of simple chronology, the Bildungsroman novel in Germany. The dangerous historical tradition in Germany coincides with the rise of

92 Literary Movements for Students, Second Edition, Volume 1 Bildungsroman the novel as a European phenomenon) is born heavyweight, not to say teutonically mystical. under the astrological sign of irony. Ernst Behler For Hegel, of course, every aspect of human has shown that irony as we know it came into experience was reducible to that ironic field of being as the expression of a decisive change in force in which mind and facts, idea and actuality sensibility which occurred in the late eighteenth intersect. century. He argues that up until this time irony Let me then turn to less heady versions of was a stable rhetorical device (by which a the argument about irony and the novel. It has speaker intimated the opposite of what he was been shown, most cogently by Ian Watt, that the saying). But with Friedrich Schlegel irony breakthrough in sensibility that makes the novel became enriched by the complex dimension of possible in the eighteenth century has to do with an author’s relationship to his own creation. It a perception of the specific nature of experience, was for this kind of irony that Schlegel praised with the individuality and particularity of the Wilhelm Meister (at the same time wondering if vital criteria which determine significance and Goethe would understand what he meant). And truthfulness. In other words, in respect of narra- he was referring to irony as a structural princi- tive forms, the eighteenth century witnesses the ple, irony which issues in a kind of self- breakdown of a stable, public rhetoric in favor of reflectivity in the novel. If the ground of that a private language in which the narrator appeals irony is the dialectic of the creative, inward to the reader’s own experience as epistemologi- potential of man on the one hand and on the cal authority. Wolfgang Kayser and others have argued that the birth of the modern novel is other the necessary donne´e of finite, palpable linked to the emergence of an overtly personal experience, then we can see that such irony is narrator. In theoretical terms, this entails a repu- the articulation of vital issues inherent not only diation of the romance in favor of some more in the novel form but also in aesthetics, in phi- truthful (that is, unstable and personal) mode of losophy, in history. This is perhaps why Hegel, narrative discourse. Let me take an example in his comments on the novel, was so ambivalent from Ian Watt’s discussion of Moll Flanders. precisely about the ironic constellation which he Watt points out the irony which results from a was expounding, why, when he incorporated discrepancy between the experiences narrated references to a novel into his Pha¨nomenologie and the kinds of values which the successful des Geistes, they were to Diderot’s Le Neveu de Moll, as recollecting narrator, espouses. He Rameau. For in this work Hegel perceived the then goes on to ask how far this irony is, as it situation of a mind unwilling to serve the values were, an articulated situation, or how far it is of society but unsure of its own integrity, seeking largely unreflected in the sense that the irony is to realize itself in the complex modalities of its there for us, the readers, but not for the charac- estrangement from the objective world. Lionel ters. He concludes that the latter is the case, that Trilling has superbly shown how Diderot’s novel Moll Flanders ‘‘is undoubtedly an ironic object, and Hegel’s gloss on it are central to any under- but it is not a work of irony.’’ With this assess- standing of the issues of selfhood, sincerity, ment I would agree. And I want to borrow authenticity in their (and our) time. In the nov- Watt’s categories and to risk a somewhat large el’s oscillation between potentiality and actual- generalization. If much English novel writing is, ity—and it was that oscillation which Hegel saw as would commonly be argued, realistic in spirit—that is, sustained by the imaginative as constitutive of Bildung—it enacts the deepest concern to recreate and thereby to understand spiritual issues of its age. Moreover, we would society, its pressures, its economic and moral do well to remember that Hegel was not alone in sanctions, its institutions and norms—then it is his admiration of Le Neveu de Rameau. It a fiction that operates with what J. P. Stern has claimed both the interest and the active engage- called the ‘‘epistemological naivety’’ of realism. ment of the translation process from none other The social context is taken as given—it is so than Goethe himself. This would, at the very much the donne´e of the novelist’s art that it is least, suggest the improbability that Goethe’s not the subject of epistemological scrutiny. Now own Wilhelm Mister is an unproblematic pil- of course, in documenting the clash between grimage toward human wholeness and fulfill- individual values and social norms, between per- ment. But perhaps it might be felt that all this sonal aspirations and the actuality of society, the talk about irony is becoming rather realistic novel does not emerge with stable,

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reassuring assessments of the way its characters epic, then it has something to tell even English live, move, and have their being. Indeed, it is one readers about the inherent potentialities of the of the hallmarks of the realistic novel as we know novel form. Moreover, we should not forget that it that it reveals the jostling norms of the social English novel theory changes in the second half and moral situation which it so persuasively of the nineteenth century, moving away from the evokes. But the realistic novel is concerned to unambiguous commitment to realism towards a reflect the jostling—rather than to reflect on the greater concern for what Arnold called ‘‘the norms themselves. The result is the novel as application of ideas to life.’’ Stang and Graham ‘‘ironic object.’’ And this I take to be as true of have both highlighted the emergence in the 1880s Defoe as it is of Balzac or Dickens. But I want to suggest that the Bildungsroman, although it may of the so-called novel of ideas or philosophical display a whole number of naivete´s, does not romance. If the English novel theory of the 1750s suffer from epistemological naivete´. It is highly (in the famous remarks of Dr. Johnson and self-aware in respect of the interplay of values Fielding) had repudiated the romance, by the which it so unremittingly explores and articulates 1880s the wheel had come full circle. And, as within the hero’s experience. Hence, its irony is Elinor Shaffer has recently shown, a novel such qualitatively different; it is irony as structural as George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) is vitally principle; it is the novel whose self-awareness informed by a complex indebtedness to Goethe, generates the ‘‘work of irony’’ (in Watt’s sense). to Wilhelm Meister, to the particular tradition of Here we arrive at the central objection to the higher (that is, mythological) criticism in Ger- German novel tradition: its lack of realism. many; and thereby the strenuous moral concern There are two points I wish to make in answer of the English novel tradition interlocks with a to this charge. First, it seems to me a falsity to mythopoeic consciousness, with a density of spi- assume that the novel has to be wedded to the ritual and cultural reflectivity which sustains— tenets of literary realism in order to be truly a and is sustained by—the lives which that novel novel. A number of recent studies of the novel chronicles. have shown that the genre can appropriately be a I hope I have said enough to suggest that the self-conscious form in which referentiality of Bildungsroman should no longer be dismissed as import is anything but the be-all and end-all. a narrowly German exercise in the novel mode. Moreover, it has been suggested that the realistic For it is, in my view, a narrative genre that raises novel is but one, historically circumscribed, pos- problems to do with character and selfhood in sibility within a much more durable and contin- the novel, to do with plot, to do with the rela- uous tradition. Second, I want to insist that the tionship between narrator and reader which can concerns of the German Bildungsroman arc rec- enrich our understanding of the possibilities of ognizably part of the overall situation of the the novel form. Above all else, it can differenti- nineteenth-century European novel. The conflict ate our awareness of how the novel can convey between individual aspirations and the resistant and explore the life of the mind, for the Bildungs- presence of practical limitations is as much a roman is not simply an allegorical scenario of theme within, say, the Victorian novel as it is philosophical positions and values. No other within the Bildungsroman. But with a difference. novel form is so engaged creatively by the play Within the framework of literary realism, this of values and ideas; yet at the same time no other conflict finds palpable, outward enactment, novel form is so tough in its refusal to hyposta- and human growth and development is plotted tize consciousness, thinking, insight as a be-all on a graph of moral understanding; whereas in and end-all. (Hence that insistent presence of the the German novel tradition, the tension between Nacheinander on which I have laid such empha- Nebeneinander and Nacheinander is essentially a sis.) No other novel has been so fascinated by the debate about the coordinates of human cogni- creative inner potential in man—hence its fond- tion, and the issues raised arc epistemological ness for artists or cryptoartists as protagonists— rather than moral, are embedded in the narra- yet no other novel has seen the artistic sensibility tor’s (and reader’s) capacity for reflectivity. If as one involving a whole set of epistemological the German Bildungsroman is a legitimate problems that are not susceptible of easy, prac- voice within the European novel as bourgeois tical solutions.

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Now of course, this concern for the life of Morrison, Kristen, ‘‘William Trevor,’’ in Twayne’s Eng- the mind is not confined only to the novel in lish Authors on CD ROM, G. K. Hall, 1997, p. 2. German literature. English readers have often ‘‘Plath Film Angers Daughter,’’ in the BBC News, Feb- felt that German culture generally is heavily ruary 3, 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/ philosophical (shades of the Mikado’s objec- 2720021.stm (accessed May 6, 2008). tions!). There is much truth to this—but it can Sachs, Andrea, ‘‘Q&A with Frieda Hughes,’’ in Time, also gravely mislead. And I want to insist that March 13, 2007, http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/ German literature is philosophical not in the 0,8599,1598800,00.html (accessed May 6, 2008). sense that it has a philosophical scheme which Selinger, Bernard, ‘‘House Made of Dawn: A Positively it wants to impose but rather in that it asks after Ambivalent Bildungsroman,’’ in Modern Fiction Studies, the place of philosophizing, of reflectivity, in Spring 1999, pp. 38–40. living. Ultimately its finest products always sug- Swales, Martin, ‘‘Bildungsroman as a Genre,’’ in The gest that consciousness and being are inextrica- German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse, Princeton bly intertwined; that consciousness is not a realm University Press, 1978, p. 36. serenely encapsulated from the stresses and ‘‘Sylvia Plath,’’ in Poets.org, http://www.poets.org/ strains of living. poet.php/prmPID/11 (accessed July 13, 2008). Source: Martin Swales, ‘‘Irony and the Novel: Reflections ‘‘Sylvia Plath (1923–1963),’’ in Modern American Poetry, on the German Bildungsroman,’’ in Reflection and Action: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/plath/plath. Essays on the Bildungsroman, edited by James Hardin, htm (accessed July 17, 2008). University of South Carolina Press, 1991, pp. 46–68.

FURTHER READING

SOURCES Buckley, Jerome Hamilton, Season of Youth: The Bil- dungsroman from Dickens to Golding, Harvard University Abrams, M. H., ed., ‘‘James Joyce: 1882–1941,’’ in The Press, 1974. Norton Anthology of English Literature, 5th ed., Vol. 2, A study of the Bildungsroman in British liter- Norton, 1986, p. 2021. ature that reviews a dozen major novels and several minor ones, this book shows the wide ———, ed., ‘‘The Victorian Age: 1832–1901,’’ in The variations achieved in the genre. Norton Anthology of English Literature, 5th ed., Vol. 2, Norton, 1986, p. 919. Castle, Gregory, Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman, University Press of Florida, 2006. Bahr, Ehrhard, ‘‘Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship: Over- Castle provides a unique review and analysis of view,’’ in Reference Guide to World Literature, 2nd ed., English and Irish Bildungsroman novels in the edited by Lesley Henderson, St. James Press, 1995, p. 3. context of modern ideas and modern writing ‘‘The Bronte¨s,’’ in The Bronte¨ Parsonage Museum &Bronte¨ styles. Society, http://www.bronte.info/index.php?option=com_ Deck, Alice A., ‘‘Ten Is the Age of Darkness: The Black content&task=view&id=42&Itemid=30 (accessed July Bildungsroman,’’ in African American Review, Vol. 33, 17, 2008). Issue 1, Spring 1999, pp. 159–161. Caron, James E., ‘‘The Comic Bildungsroman of Mark This article is a review and synopsis of Geta Twain,’’ in Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. 50, June LeSeur’s book that examines the successful use 1989, pp. 145–72. of the Bildungsroman genre by black authors in the United States and the Caribbean. ‘‘Charlotte Bronte¨: An Overview,’’ in The Victorian Web, http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/bronte/cbronte/ Kontje, Todd Curtis, The German Bildungsroman: His- bronteov.html (accessed July 13, 2008). tory of a National Genre, Camden House, 1993. This book is a critical overview of the Bildungs- Eichner, Hans, ‘‘Reflection and Action: Essays on the roman from the 1790s to the 1990s. Kontje Bildungsroman,’’ in the Journal of English and Germanic examines the history and culture surrounding Philology, Vol. 92, No. 2, April 1993, p. 294. the origin of the genre, the connection of the Jones, Anne Hudson, ‘‘Images of Physicians in Litera- genre to German nationalism, the reaction of ture: Medical Bildungsromane,’’ in Lancet, Vol. 348, critics during the fascist period, and the even- Issue 9029, September 14, 1996, p. 734. tual use of the genre throughout world literature. Kohn, Denise, ‘‘Reading Emma as a Lesson on ‘Lady- hood’: A Study in the Domestic Bildungsroman,’’ in Kornfeld, Eve, and Susan Jackson, ‘‘The Female Bildungs- Essays in Literature, Vol. 22, No. 1, Spring 1995, p. 45–58. roman in Nineteenth-Century America: Parameters of a

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Vision,’’ in Journal of American Culture,Vol.10,No.4, Minden, Michael, The German Bildungsroman: Incest and Winter 1987, pp. 69–75. Inheritance, Cambridge University Press, 1997. This article discusses Rebecca of Sunnybrook This book offers a critical examination of the Farm and several other examples of the female genre that considers social, psychological, and Bildungsroman with the premise that these gender themes. Each chapter discusses a different works about women by women created a unique German novel’s plot, themes, and scholarly world for women and sent a distinctive message. criticism.

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