"The Only Flying Turtle Under the Sun," the Bildungsromon in Contemporary Women's Fiction

"The Only Flying Turtle Under The Sun," The Bildungsromon in Contemporary Women's Fiction by Rebecca Smith In Marge Piercy's novel Small Changes, Beth, one of the two main characters, finds herself trapped in a marriage that she had been conditioned to think was all she wanted from life, but that she his gaze. His anger was muted but actually discovers to be stifling and growing. She was something that deadening. Beth analyzes her husband was not working as it was supposed Jimbo's reaction to her dissatisfaction to. He was still trying to fix it. and her own fear in this excerpt from Soon he would lose his patience. the book: Then would he return it or break it? She felt caught in the gray web of One night as she lay trying to fall asleep beside him she remembered from a wild turtle would make a something from the summer when she child laugh. Threatened, they had was ten. One Saturday at a company a shell they could draw into and picnic . she had found a box tuck up inside. They were cautious turtle. He had a beautiful shell, and long-lived. No one could divided into sort of shingles above teach a turtle to do tricks. They and polished wood on the bottom. were quiet and could be mistaken They brought him back and made a for something not really alive, a home for him in the yard. They put rock or piece of wood. Sometimes up a chicken-wire fence and built a they aroused sadism in people. No house of broken bricks. All day the great power had ever marched out to conquest under the emblem of a turtle went round and round the (1) chicken wire, butting his head turtle. against the fence and standing up awkwardly on edge and flopping over When her mother, mother-in-law, sisters, backward trying to escape. and friends align with her husband in Round and round the fence Roxy went attempting to shame and cajole her into making a trail in the dust and roll• "acting right," (p.40) she realizes that ing like a sad tank through the she is alone; she is the only champion water dish and over the lettuce and under the turtle banner. She plans and grapes they had put down, and around executes an escape from her cage. For aga in. the first time in her life as a daughter and wife, as she sits in the plane that During the next week she kept think• is taking her away, she senses the de• ing of the turtle. She was the tur• lights of freedom: "She clasped her tle going round and round the chic• hands and joy pierced her. She was ken wire searching for a way out. wiry with joy and tingling. How But she did not want Jim to take her beautiful to be up here. How beautiful back where he had found her because was flight and how free. She was that was a prison too. She studied the only flying turtle under the sun." herself as turtle. Turtles were not (p. 46) glamorous creatures. They were slow but dogged. Maybe it took This particular image of "flying" is them a long while to get someplace, echoed in Erica Jong's Fear of Flying even to figure out where they when the heroine Isadora White Stoller- wanted to go, but then they kept man Wing determines to leave her particu stubbornly at it. They were not lar, current cage: beautiful but they carried what they needed. They were not particu• I thought of all the cautious good- larly brave and the idea of running girl rules I had lived by—the good student, the dutiful daughter, the books of literary terminology. M.H. guilty faithful wife who committed Abrams defines the Bi1 dungsroman as a adultry only in her own head—and I novel of "formation" or "education," decided that for once I was going tracing "the development of the protagon• to be brave and follow my feelings ist's mind and character as he passes no matter what the consequences- from childhood through varied experiences ... I thought of D.H. Lawrence --and usually through a spiritual crisis running off with his tutor's wife, — into maturity and the recognition of or Romeo and Juliet dying for love, his identity and role in the world."(3) of Aschenbach pursuing Tadzlo through plaguey Venice, of all the Holnjan's definition is even more decis• real and imaginary people who had ive in attributing gender to the genre: picked up and burned their bridges [A BiIdrungsroman is] A novel which and taken off into the wild blue recounts the youth and young man• yonder. I was one of them! No hood of a sensitive protagonist who scared housewife, I. I was fly• (2) is attempting to learn the nature ing. of the world, discover its meaning and pattern, and acquire a phil• Fear of Flying by Erica Jong and Smal1 osophy of life and "the art of Changes by Marge Piercy, both published 1iving."(4) in 1973, are two of the growing number The standard examples include Goethe's of novels by contemporary women writers Wilhelm Master's Apprenticeship, Mann's that detail the growth of major women The Magic Mountain, Dickens' David Cop- characters toward personhood, outside perfield, Butler's The Way of Al1 Flesh, the confines of stereotyped roles. The Joyce's Portrait of the Artist, Maugham's list also includes Memoi rs of an Ex- Of Human Bondage and Wolfe's Look Home• Prom Queen (1972) by Alix Kates Shu 1 man, ward Angel. The Diviners (1974) by Margaret Laurence and Lives of Girls and Women (1974) by Obviously missing from this historical Alice Munro. listing, and implicitly absent from con• sideration in the definition, are the These five novels mentioned fit into the comparatively few, but nonetheless power• classification of the Bi1 dungsroman or ful, apprenticeship novels written in the the "apprenticeship novel," heretofore past by women: Olive Schreiner's The largely a male domain. The past limita• Story of an African Farm, Dorothy tion of this genre to the artistic Richardson's PiIgrimage and Virginia presentation and analysis of the develop• Woolf's Orlando. Indeed, in the past, ment and maturation of males is indicated apprenticeship novels by women were in• by the standard definition given for the frequent. In the works of the great term in both Holman's and Abrams' hand• women writers of the past, such as Jane Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot or loging of wrongs based on gender was Mrs. Gaskell, women protagonists usually nearly complete and women were ready to are shown to reach physical and emotional move to the next phase—the establishment maturity, at which point they find the of positive alternatives to the existing only possible identity, role or pattern obviously bad situation. A result was 1 1- for their lives by fitting themselves in• the proliferation in the 970's of Bi to the existing social structure, usually dungsroman in which sensitive female through a conventional marriage. Women protagonists encounter the attempts of in these earlier novels, by virtue of society to force them into stereotypical their bodies, frequently had a single and roles as they move from childhood through quite obvious identity as wife and mother, adulthood; they alternate between accep• tance, the path of least resistance and However, with the re-emergence of femin• rebellion; but finally they must attempt 1960 ism in the 1s came strong emphasis to live in the world on their own terms, for the first time, actually, on the fact so they suffer through to a new, authen• that forces besides biology most signifi• tic, human role. cantly shape a woman's fate. For example, Naomi Weinstein examined and attacked the This pattern is quite observable in the -1970 psychological conditioning of women in new post 's genre of the female Bil- the now-classic "Psychology Constructs dungsroman. The protagonists are excep• the Female." Eva Figes revealed the in• tionally intelligent and perceptive, in a herent flaws in the existent Western so• society that generally undervalues these cial structure in Patriarchial Attitudes. qualities in a female. For example, Following in the footsteps of the early Sasha Davis in Memoirs of an Ex-Prom feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, many Queen is accused by her friends of being studies such as the Canadian Status of a "brain": Women report have explained how the "Come on, admit it," said another existing sexist economic structure con• friend. "You have to be a Brain trols the lives of women. The resurgence to get into those Eastern colleges 1960 of feminist activity in the 's caused 11 — many women to perceive and then to attack "That's not true " I began ex• (5) the sexual inequality and injustices so citedly. evident in all areas of society, as in Del Jordan in Lives of Girls and Women Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, MMlett's is the second brightest person in her Sexual Politics, Greer's The Female class and is taken on encyclopedia- Eunuch and Shulamith Firestone's The selling trips by her mother because she Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist can remember an extraordinary number of 1 1 -(6) Revo ution. Al of these had been pub- facts. Similarly, Morag Gunn in The 1970. lished by By that time the cata• Diviners, Isadora in Fear of Flying, and both Beth Phall and Mariam Berg in would get the degrees and I who Small Changes are, ironically, made to would get the jobs.(p.

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