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Copyright by Laura Catherine Beerits 2017 The Dissertation Committee for Laura Catherine Beerits Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Still Unfolding: Paths to Womanhood in the New American Bildungsroman Committee: Coleman Hutchison, Supervisor Elizabeth Cullingford, Co-Supervisor Mia Carter Heather Houser Wayne Lesser Still Unfolding: Paths to Womanhood in the New American Bildungsroman by Laura Catherine Beerits, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2017 Dedicated in memory of my brother Jon, who cheered me on loudly and is deeply missed each day. Acknowledgements This is a dissertation about coming of age—about who we are, where we’ve come from, and where we still want to go. I want to take this opportunity to give thanks to the people who’ve helped me on my own various paths of development, academic and otherwise. Thanks, first and foremost, to my brilliant, demanding, and insightful dissertation committee—Liz Cullingford, Cole Hutchison, Mia Carter, Heather Houser, and Wayne Lesser. You spent hours with my words, you helped me see and make connections, and you pushed me to keep going, even as I wrote most of this dissertation 2000 miles away from Austin. Thank you. To my parents, Chris and Ellen—thank you for your love and for supporting me in countless tangible and intangible ways. I could not have done this without you. To my brother Matthew and sister-in-law, Heather—thank you for the visits, texts, cat pictures, and shared meals. To my nephew, Adam—you are a sparkle of a human, the best kid I know. Thank you for brightening all of our lives. Thanks also to the Scarpino family, who welcomed me warmly from the moment we met and cheered me on as I wrote this dissertation. My brother Jon encouraged me with his love, his enthusiasm for life, and his blind confidence in me. It remains unfathomable to me that he is not here to see me finish, but that I finished is entirely for him. v Graduate school connected me with some of the loveliest people in the world. To my Texas spirit sisters, Brianna Jewell and Yvette DeChavez—thank you for getting me through, and most of all, for the fun and love. Brianna, my original Austin adventure partner, I treasure all of our long talks and weird nights. Yvette, my long-distance writing buddy until the very end, we have always just understood each other—I am so grateful for you. To Sally Treanor and Jenny Howell, my fellow first semester TAs turned dear, dear friends, thank you for always being willing to read my work and for helping me fix sentences when they didn’t make sense. Thanks to the DeMott/Wenzl family for their friendship and kindness. Thank you to Alejandro Puyana and Tinisha Hancock for supporting my long-distance dissertation progress by housing me and drinking wine with me during my visits back to Texas. To my lifelong friends Jocey Florence, Christina Galvez, Joanna Hatt, and Danielle Emery—thank you for everything. Thank you for calling to check in, for flying to Texas to see me, and for sending scarves, flowers, hot chocolate mix, writing music, good luck charms, and friendship. And finally, to Sam Scarpino, thank you for sitting down next to me at a crowded party on a very hot Texas night all those summers ago. In the acknowledgements to his dissertation, Sam noted that we had been dating for exactly 1 year; now, as I finish mine, we’ve been married exactly 1.5 (to the day). Thank you for the adventures, the meals and cups of tea, the unwavering confidence in my abilities, and most of all, for the love. vi Still Unfolding: Paths to Womanhood in the New American Bildungsroman Laura Catherine Beerits, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2017 Supervisors: Coleman Hutchison and Elizabeth Cullingford This dissertation examines generic trends and ideological innovations in contemporary women’s coming-of-age narratives in the United States. Through a comparative genre study, I illuminate and interpret a number of key revisions within the genre since the late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century classics, including a radical shift in the endings of many recent texts. I show that today’s female bildungsroman subject is ethnically, racially, and socioeconomically diverse, and that she is getting older. She has an overall broader sense of educational and professional opportunity, and more relaxed attitudes toward sexuality and marriage than protagonists in the past. These shifts have implications for today’s narrative endpoints, and as I demonstrate throughout this dissertation, many recent female bildungsromane have conclusions that are conspicuously open-ended and future- oriented, rather than ending in marriage, death, or disillusionment. Contra Franco Moretti’s 1987 claim that “A Bildung is truly such only if, at a certain point, it can be seen as concluded: only if youth passes into maturity, and comes there to a stop” (26), authors today often eschew traditional endpoints for their female protagonists, suggesting vii and often celebrating the opportunity for protagonists’ further development and personal exploration. This kind of flexible, “in process” narrative resolution reflects, I argue, a contemporary view of development as a continual experience, rather than a discrete stage that is confined to youth. Implicit in the view of development as an ongoing process is a sense of hopefulness. Though that hope may be tentative, it marks many of today’s texts, even those that feature traumatic conditions and hardship. In this dissertation, I show that the shift to flexible, open endings is borne out across a diverse group of texts from the past decade (2006-2016): Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone (2006), Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011), Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot (2011), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013), Susan Choi’s My Education (2013), and Patricia Park’s Re Jane (2015). In each of my three chapters, I explore generic revisions by focusing on a classic bildungsroman trope— education, migration and mobility, and social class. Contemporary modifications to these tropes correspond to revisions in the ways that today’s female protagonists view themselves in the world. While these texts remain identifiable as bildungsromane and are connected to the generic tradition in key ways, this body of texts also reconceptualizes the sites, timelines, and goals for female development and identity formation today. viii Table of Contents Introduction: Coming of Age in the 21st Century— New Sites, New Routes, New Timelines for Women ..................................1 Chapter Overviews ...............................................................................29 Chapter 1: The Education Americans— Knowledge & Identity in The Marriage Plot and My Education .............34 The Marriage Plot—Deconstructing Literature, Love, and Loss ........47 My Education—for “Love is tutelage, after all” ..................................70 Education and Experience: Higher Ed, Deeper Romance, Longer Paths ...............................................................................91 Chapter 2: The New Americans— Immigration & Identity in Americanah and Re Jane ..............................96 Americanah—From African to Black to Americanah .......................104 Re Jane—Rewriting Jane Eyre, Remapping American Womanhood ..............................................................................136 Immigration, Mobility, Mutability, and New Happy Endings ...........152 Chapter 3: The Invisible Americans— Poverty & Identity in Salvage the Bones and Winter’s Bone ................156 Salvage the Bones—Loss, Stopgaps, and the Winds of Wreckage ....170 Winter’s Bone—Frozen Land, Frozen Growth ..................................195 Deep Poverty, Bildung, and Fragments of Hope ...............................214 Coda: On Connection and Revision .................................................................220 Bibliography .......................................................................................................230 ix Introduction Coming of Age in the 21st Century— New Sites, New Routes, New Timelines for Women In the 2012 pilot episode of the HBO television series Girls, Hannah, a recent college graduate working an unpaid publishing internship in New York City, is stunned when her visiting parents tell her they are cutting off their financial support of her “groovy lifestyle.” Indignant, she responds by declining to see them again before they leave, explaining that her life is already packed with other, more important responsibilities: “I have work, and then I have a dinner thing, and then I am busy—trying to become who I am” (“Pilot”). While we are meant to laugh at Hannah’s conception of her quest for self-development as a heavy burden, and perceive her quest as a self- indulgent privilege, both the scene and the show cater to viewers’ longstanding appreciation of coming of age as an important and fascinating process, one that Hannah describes, with feeling, as people becoming who they are. This dissertation explores how the process of identity formation is represented in the literature of this contemporary moment, particularly in narratives about American women. In order to assess what is universal and what is distinct about these narratives, I compare them to well-known coming-of-age stories from the genre’s long history. How is