Female Bil Dungs Roman

The Female "Bildungsroman": Calling It into Question Author(s): Carol Lazzaro-Weis Source: NWSA Journal, Vol. 2, No.
1 (Winter, 1990), pp. 16-34 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4315991 . Accessed: 30/04/2014 13:17
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The Female Bildungsroman: Calling It into Question

Carol Lazzaro-Weis
For the most part, genre theory has been viewed by feminist critics with suspicion for several well-founded reasons. Women writing in literary traditions dominated by male writers are particularly prey to those destructive feelings of inferiority and vulnerability that Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have termed the "anxiety of authorship."' Therefore, one could argue, that women critics working in genre criticism, long dominated by male critics who have used it to establish a primarily male canon, are surrounded and negatively influenced by the male judgments, expectations, criteria, and prejudices generic categories harbor. One cannot deny that since most generic conventions are based on or lead to generalizations about a "universal" sensibility, traditional generic categories have always ignored gender issues that feminist critics have fought so hard to bring to the fore. Furthermore, although rigid theories of generic classification have been, in Fredric Jameson's terms, "thoroughly discredited by modern literary theory and practice," attempts to historicize and temporalize generic categories, including his own, have made no serious effort to incorporate women's writings, except perhaps under the rubric of flawed imitations, or worse yet, secondary genres.2 Nancy Miller uses the table of contents to two volumes of a recently published French literary history, Litte'rature franpaise, to illustrate this point.3 If women's literary works are now appearing in such anthologies, the use of generic classifications has had the paradoxical effect of again
Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent to Carol Lazzaro-Weis, Honors Program, Southern University, P.O. Box 11355, Baton Rouge, LA 70813. 'Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-CenturyLiterary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 51. 2Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), 105. 3Nancy Miller, "Authorized Versions," French Review 61 (Winter 1988): 405-13. A longer version of this article can be found in Yale French Studies, no. 75 (Fall 1988). Miller draws her examples from Rene Pomeau and Jean Ehrard, eds., De Fenelon a Voltaire, vol. 5 of Litterature francaise (Paris: Arthaud, 1984) and Michel Delon, Robert Mauzi, and Sylvain Menant, eds., De L'Encyclopedieaux Meditations, vol. 6 of Litteraturefrancaise. NWSA Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1, Winter 1990, pp. 16-34. 16
The Female Bildungsroman
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making them invisible. Rather than appearing in the table of contents by name, works of seventeenth-century women writers such as Madame de Lafayette, and Madame de Graffigny are found under rubrics such as the "Roman sentimental" and other less important genres of the socalled Classic Age. To many, it seems it is not worth taking the risk of reinforcing male prejudices about women's writing when using traditional generic categories. Despite this general disapproval of generic criticism, the rubric Bildungsroman and all of its variants have managed to gain some theoretical currency among feminist critics, at least on this side of the Atlantic.4 When the term entered the ranks of feminist criticism in the 1970s, it proved most useful in analyzing the ways in which nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women novelists had represented the suppression and defeat of female autonomy, creativity, and maturity by patriarchal gender norms. According to Annis Pratt, the female Bildungsroman demonstrates how society provides women with models for "growing down" instead of "growing up," as is the case in the male model.5 Likewise, in their introduction to a series of articles on the female Bildungsroman, editors Marianne Hirsch, Elizabeth Langland, and Elizabeth Abel view Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out as emblematic of earlier manifestations of the genre.6 Woolf's heroine Rachel, after a voyage to exotic South America, contracts a fever and dies, thus providing an escape from her engagement, a "confining social world and . . . a female body that frustrates her spiritual and artistic cravings."7 Lest this be considered too negative an image of the genre, these critics change Pratt's raison d'etre of the genre's female version and emphasize that the essays in the collection concerning contemporary narrative prose demonstrate that women writers now use the genre to expand and/or challenge its formal and thematic limits to "emerge triumphant."8 The tendency to speak in more positive terms concerning women's use of the Bildungsroman is found again in Joanna Frye's Living Stories,
4The Kiinstlerroman,where the women's growth is documented through her development as an artist, is another popular category among American feminist critics. See, among others, Susan Gubar, "The Birth of the Artist as Heroine: (Re)production, the Kuinstlerroman Tradition, and the Fiction of Katherine Mansfield" in The Representation of Women in Fiction, ed. Carolyn Heilbrun and Margaret Higonnet (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 19-59. 5Annis Pratt, Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 14. 6Elizabeth Langland, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Abel, eds., The VoyageIn: Fictions of Female Development (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1983), 3-19. 7Hirsch, Langland, and Abel, eds., The VoyageIn, 3-4. 8Hirsch, Langland, and Abel, eds., The VoyageIn, 17.
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Telling Lives.9 Although Frye agrees with Langland, Hirsch, and Abel's analysis of Virginia Woolf's novel, she argues that it is their definition of the genre that destines it, for the most part, to recount failure. Whereas those three critics stress the belief "in a coherent self (although not necessarily an autonomous one); (and) faith in the possibility of development . . ." as two main tenets of the genre, in her own analysis of Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Frye argues that the narrating "I" of both texts challenges the idea of a coherent feminine self that a patriarchal society attempts to impose upon women by representing the protagonist engaged in multiple roles and formulating multiple self-definitions.'0 Frye is not arguing that a coherent self could not exist. Rather, women need to play multiple roles as part of the strategy to subvert the self imposed upon them from the outside and to move toward the development of an autonomous female identity." Frye's informative analysis rests on the theory that each character can create and understand his/her own personal reality, which would be different from another's but equally valid. Although the theory of multiple realities does allow Frye to interpret the female protagonist's actions as being more subversive than they originally seem, this same theory brings with it some paradoxical limitations. The real danger, as Jean Grimshaw points out, is that any theory that argues for the equal validity of all perspectives and realities with the intention of claiming that understanding is determined by gender (i.e. only women can understand certain experiences which are essentially incommunicable to men), is ultimately incapable of providing the means for conceptualizing the oppression and the domination of one group by another. '2 Therefore, although Frye and others would argue for the necessity of recounting female experiences as part of the struggle for political and social change, the positing of categories of experience that men cannot understand leads to a kind of political defeatism, for men have no reason to be listening in the first place. The reduction of oppression to a personal psychological state or feeling that is only important to that particular individual could ultimately be used as a justification of the status quo. Frye's dependency on the theory of multiple realities, which is itself ultimately based in the humanist tradition for which the subject is the ultimate source of all knowledge, could explain why, on several occasions, her otherwise excellent arguments for the ability of the Bildungsroman
9Joanna Frye, Living Stories, Telling Lives (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985). '?Hirsch, Langland, and Abel, eds., The Voyage In, 14. Frye, Living Stories, 80. "Frye, Living Stories, 83. '2See Jean Grimshaw, Philosophy and Feminism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
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protagonist to control her own world take on the appearance of an apology for the representation of this lack of ability in many texts. To learn how to collaborate with the patriarchy publicly in order to achieve some measure of private success (Frye's term here is "protective coloration") is not necessarily a new type of victory for women or one many feminists would applaud as progress. Despite her differences with the editors of The Voyage In, Frye still defends the Bildungsroman as a blatantly representational form that has a "decided place for the experiential base of feminist criticism . . . and clear relevance to the urgency of female self-definition."'3I Bonnie Hoover Braendlin defines the form in similar terms when she states that the Bildungsroman viewed theoretically reflects "an author's desire to universalize personal experience in order to valorize personal identity."'94 It would appear that most critics who use the term female Bildungsroman view it as one of the last bastions for the defense of an experientiallybased feminist critique, one based on the belief in the possibility and necessity of the representation in writing of women's experience and with the goal of finding a new definition of female identity. Notions of a coherent self, the possibility of representation, and finally, one of the most basic tenets of feminism, the belief that "women's truth-in-experience-and-reality is and always has been different from men," have, however, all been attacked by male and female supporters of deconstructive criticism.15 Feminist deconstructionists dismiss experientially based politics as being inherently reactionary and incapable of recognizing one's constant complicity with existing patriarchal structures. As Jane Gallop puts it: "The politics of experience is inevitably a conservative politics for it cannot help but conserve ideological concerns which are not recognized as such but are taken for the 'real.' "16 Given the rather broad acceptance of the latter's criticism, one is justified in asking if the Bildungsroman should go the way of the rest of generic criticism, having been the last vestige of an outmoded humanist method of criticism. If not, how can the term or genre still be a useful, analytical tool for feminist critics and writers of personal histories? The problems inherent in the use of the Bildungsroman as a form for women's writing and as a critical, theoretical tool go even deeper than the recent debate among critics over concepts of the self, of experience, and the possibility of representation. The Bildungsroman is a form that
'3Frye, Living Stories, 79. "4Bonnie Hoover Braendling, "Bildung in Ethnic Women Writers," Denver Quarterly 17 (Winter 1983): 77. "5Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Women and Modernity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 147. ' Jane Gallop, "Quand nos levres s'&rivent: Irigaray's Body Politics," Romantic Review 74, no. 1 (1983): 83.
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is neither Anglo-Saxon nor French, but German. One standarddefinition of the form goes as far as to call it the form of the German novel that "like no other form of art is able to reveal the decisive, essential features If that does not seem to be an ideal women's of the German character."'I7 writing should try to imitate, Jeffrey Sammons further complicates the issue by arguing that the idea of the Bildungsroman, at least in the nineteenth century, is more a critical myth than a reality.'8 In his review of those novels commonly classified as Bildungsromane, Sammons has little difficulty showing how far these authors were from Goethe's optimism and flexible social context.'9 Depictions of alienated, failed types predominate and the form rapidly became less concerned with the depiction of social problems than with the problems involved in selfknowledge. Even this process, however, more often than not is left incomplete as the protagonists retreat from society into isolation or selfdestruction through union with nature. Sammon's article is, in part, a response to Martin Swales, who, rather than questioning the generic rubric as Sammons does, argues that to solve the dilemma of the Bildungsroman, as critics like to do, is to destroy the form.20 For the term to be valid, the central problem of the Bildungsroman could only be irresolution and alienation. What is integral to the Bildungsroman, he correctly observes, is its questioning of the narrator's and ultimately the reader's capacity for reflexivity and its concern to articulate the values and assumptions upon which human experience rests.21 The "male" Bildungsroman, at least in its German manifestations, seems somewhat similar in goals and results to its "female" equivalent which, as Hirsch, Langland, and Abel observe, typically substitutes inner concentration for active accommodation, rebellion, or withdrawal. Al'7Hans Heinrich Borcherdt, "Bildungsroman," in Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturgeschichte, 2d ed., ed. Werner Kohlschmidt and Wolfgang Mohr (Berlin: DeGruyter, 1958), 174-78. '8Jeffrey Sammons, "The Mystery of the Missing Bildungsroman or What Happened to Wilhelm Meister's Legacy?" Genre 14 (Summer 1981): 229-46. '9Sammons, "Mystery of the Missing Bildungsroman," considers the following nineteenthcentury Bildungsromane: Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1800); Joseph von Eichendorff, Ahnung und Gegenwart (1815); Eduard Mbrike, Maler Nolten (1832); Gustav Freytag, Soll und Haben (1855); Adalbert Stifter, Der Nachsommer (1857); Wilhelm Raabe, Der Hungerpastor (1864); and Gottfried Keller, Der Grine Heinrich (1854-55). 20Martin Swales, The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978). 21Swales, German Bildungsroman, 98-102. In his concluding chapter, Swales mentions that the works of many contemporary women writers, such as Doris Lessing, could be called Bildungsromane because of their affinities with the tradition. However, since he believes that the Bildungsroman is, and should be primarily thought of as a German genre, he claims women should come up with another term. Many of Swales's main ideas are found in his article, "The German Bildungsroman and The Great Tradition" in Comparative Criticism,ed. Elinor Shaffer (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 91-105.
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ienated social outcasts with the potential to self-destruct, due to overwhelmingly crippling relationships with nature and religion, are characteristics shared by many female protagonists of the form.22 To be sure, the originators of the Bildungsroman were interested in problems of representation, the relationship of the individual to the group, and questions of subjectivity, which they saw in social as well as aesthetic terms. Women writers, like their male counterparts, have traditionally turned to the Bildungsroman not to subvert its structures but rather to flaunt the contradictions in the form which critical theory has tried to explain away. All writers of Bildungsromane call for the right to describe experience in epistemological rather than teleological terms. Thus, it is no surprise that, in the 1970s, the form was used to defend the right of feminist and women authors to describe their own reality and to legitimize these experiences and their differences to those of men.23 The visceral grappling with identity that characterizes so many of the so-called Bildungsromane of the 1970s celebrates the slogan "the personal is political," that is, the need to show that personal structures are created and indeed controlled by the patriarchy and its political values. As Teresa de Lauretis, however, points out, although this slogan was meant to launch a critique of the political, all too often it came to mean "the personal instead of the political."24 The need for theory has become the most commonly voiced concern among American feminist critics. It is no longer possible to divide along the boundaries of the Atlantic those critics who accept theory as the only way to express resistance and revolt, and those who argue for an essentialist, experiential view of feminism. Many American feminist critics accept Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva's critique that a liberal or cultural feminist ideology, as it is sometimes called, which praises an undifferentiated and essentialized feminine nature, reflects the same desire for a totalizing and stifling discourse of power as the systems it purports to displace.25 However, if the advantage of deconstruction's critique of the social construction of
22For a discussion of the relationship of women to nature in the female Bildungsroman see Pratt, Archetypal Patterns, 16-24. 23For a good example of how both critics and writers used the category Bildungsroman in the late 1970s and early 1980s although only German feminist literature is discussed, see Sandra Friedan, Autobiography: Self into Form: German Language AutobiographicalWritings of the 1970's (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1983). 24Teresa de Lauretis, "Feminist Studies/Critical Studies: Issues, Terms and Contexts" in Feminist Studies, Critical Studies ed. de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 9. 25Derrida's harsh judgment sums up his position very clearly: "Feminism is nothing but the operation of a woman who aspires to be like a man. And in order to resemble the masculine, dogmatic philosopher, this woman lays claim . . . to truth, science and objectivity." Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Allen Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 31-32.
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subjectivity and its effectiveness in exposing power relationships expressive of sexual, racial, and class oppressions has been acknowledged by most feminist critics on this side of the Atlantic, then its proponents have been consistently attacked for leaving individual intentionality or agency totally at the mercy of another set of globalizing systems, those of structure and discourse. For feminists eager to get beyond discourse to political action, deconstruction's power, upon closer inspection, harbors serious pitfalls. Despite their respective differences, Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault (like Jane Gallop) agree that, if the category "woman" is to aid in the defeat of logocentrism's oppressive power, it cannot exist other than as a negative void or lack, a disruptive, linguistic force. In her attack on the position that the category feminine is a fiction that all feminist criticism must strive to dismantle, Linda Alcoff provocatively points out that such a denial of gender difference colludes with the supposedly outdated liberal, humanist position that we are all alike under our superficial differences.26 On this point, deconstruction threatens to make gender a non-issue in a way that is as unacceptable as the genre critics who, perhaps more unknowingly, did much the same thing.27 Indeed, it is difficult to argue for changes in women's social status if the category "women" does not exist. For Alcoff and others, poststructuralist demands for a demystifying, thus wholly negative critique along with a theory of the ultimate indecidability of all texts, appear to leave little place to envision and justify social change.28 Feminist critics suspicious of the power and value of poststructuralist criticism outside the sphere of discourse have centered their critique around two major issues. Teresa de Lauretis cites the denial of the importance of experience in poststructuralist feminist theory as a major impediment. Her own well-known definition of experience as "the process by which subjectivity is constructed . . . by one's personal engagement in the practices, discourses, and institutions that lend significance (value, meaning, and affect) to the events of the world . . ." is an attempt to displace the term experience from the personal to the theoretical level, to place it at the service of a sophisticated analysis of subjectivity.29 For de Lauretis, no essential female subjectivity is to be uncovered or recovered. By shifting away from a belief in an unmediated representation of experience to one of experience as a "process of signification,"
26Linda Alcoff, "Cultural Feminism versus Poststructuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory," Signs 13 (Spring 1988): 420. 27For a contrasting view of how psychoanalytical deconstruction can recognize these differences, see Kaja Silverman's revision of the theories of Freud and Lacan in The Subject of Semiotics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 126-93. 28Linda Alcoff, "Cultural Feminism versus Poststructuralism," 420. 29De Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics,Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 182.
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de Lauretis acknowledges deconstruction's belief in the structuring power of belief systems. Her theory constantly poses the question of whether or not there actually is such a thing as female experience, an experience which would be neither essentialist nor a negative absence. An integral part of her critique is the definition of identity as a point of departure, a role one has to play to bring various cultural forces to the fore. De Lauretis's subject is not, like Derrida's, divided in language, but rather it is at odds with it. Identity is made up of "heterogeneous and heteronomous representations of gender, race and class . . . an identity that one insists on as a strategy."30 In other words, self and identity are by no means understood as repositories of a continuous and stable female essence. Instead, they are seen as series of shifting positions within specific material and discursive contexts. The second major accusation leveled against deconstruction's philosophy, especially its psychoanalytic bent, is its ultimate lack of historicism in practice. Some critics believe this again directly results from deconstruction's denial of gender. Again the criticism is fueled by a fear of an innate conservatism in deconstructionist politics. Mary Poovey faults deconstruction's emphasis on negative, subversive language for ignoring specificity and the historical process; she writes: "If we cannot describe why a particular group came to occupy the position of the 'other' or how its tenure in that position differs from the effect such positioning has on other groups, we have no basis on which to posit or by which to predict any other state of affairs. We have no basis, in other words, for political analysis or action."'" By insisting on the importance of material contexts, de Lauretis is careful to give her theory a specific, historical basis and cites as an example an essay by Chandra Mohanty and Biddy Martin.32 The article analyzes Minnie Bruce Pratt's essay on home and identity.33 Mohanty and Martin praise Pratt's writing for its exemplary questioning of the "all too common conflation of experience, identity, and political per30De Lauretis, "Feminist Studies, Critical Studies," 9. 3"Mary Poovey, "Feminism and Deconstruction," Feminist Studies 14 (Spring 1988), 61. For a critique similar to our own of deconstructionism and feminism, see Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, "Social Criticism without Philosophy: An Encounter Between Feminism and Postmodernism," in Universal Abandon: The Politics of Postmodernism,ed. Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 83-104. Fraser and Nicholson state: "A postmodernist reflection on feminist theory reveals disabling vestiges of essentialism, while a feminist reflection on postmodernism reveals androcentrism and political naivete." They term postmodernism's conceptions of social criticism "anemic," 84. "Chandra Mohanty and Biddy Martin, "Feminist Politics: What's Home Got to Do with It?" in Feminist Studies, Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis, 191-212. "3"Identity: Skin, Blood, Heart" in Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectiveson AntiSemitismand Racism, Elly Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Barbara Smith (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Long Haul Press, 1984), 9-63.
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spective."34 Pratt situates her speaking subject in relationship to racism, which she examines in spatial and temporal terms more than psychological ones. Pratt's essay, based on her experience living in a ghetto in Washington as a white woman, becomes a feminist critique of the self and community. Likewise, her personal history undermines the idea of a continuous, unified self or identity and deconstructs the consoling power and appeal of these notions. Pratt's essay provides us with a model of how the category Bildungsroman can still be an effective critical tool after a belief in stable identities and representation is, if not gone, at least, seriously in doubt. Home and community have become very important themes in the 1980s for many of the wrong reasons. Overwhelming nostalgia in what is often called a time of retrenchment has become a force which puts all radical and liberal ideas on the defensive. What better place is there to examine these factors than in the form that idealizes home and community as well as youth? Franco Moretti argues that the main conflict in the Bildungsroman is the myth of modernity with its overvaluation of youth and progress as it clashes with the static teleological vision of happiness and reconciliation found in the endings of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister and even Jane Austin's Pride and Prejudice.35 The classical Bildungsroman includes a tendency to make people feel at home with their prejudices and less likely to change. Its characters cannot grow as they claim to desire. Rather, they are constantly setting up limits for themselves so that they can return to a former state of affairs where maturity would be possible and the self would be less besieged. Nostalgic bereavement of loss, always a part of the definition of the form, takes on a new relevancy in the more recent manifestations of the genre. Nostalgia, loss, home and community, and the generation gap, spoken predominately in terms of the mother-daughter relationship rather than the father-daughter conflict of the 1970s, are all themes which characterize the more recent exploitations of the Bildungsroman tradition by women writers. By representing the attempts of the besieged subject to reconstitute community and identity in problematic terms, as well as its constantly frustrated desire to represent the unrepresentable, the form contributes to the theorizing of experience. In de Lauretis's terms, such works offer an analysis of how the speaking/writing self is engendered as a female subject.36 By thematizing the problem of the appeal of such reactionary roles, they contribute to the theorization of the relationship between subjectivity, meaning, and value.
34Moranty and Martin, "Feminist Politics," 192. 35Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987), 3-72. 36De Lauretis, Alice Doesn't, 14.
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Finally, it is important to note that since the Bildungsroman tradition has always represented conflicts between individual agency and society, subjective and social structures, it is a form that is particularly wellsuited to continue the ongoing debate between cultural feminists and poststructuralists. Susan Wells discusses how the Bildungsroman tradition has always been shaped by debates over the forms of representation, typicality, and indeterminancy in narrative.37 Although Wells herself is not interested in feminist debates per se, her hermeneutical theory of the dialectics of representation, informed by the works of Theodor Adorno, Jurgen Habermas, and Wolfgang Iser, is formed as a counterargument to the same aspects of the theories of Foucault and Derrida that bother cultural feminists. Wells begins her theoretical discussion by arguing that interpretation is dependent upon intersubjectivity, which she defines not as "an abstracted relation between an immaterial reader and a generalized writer, but rather, in Mikhail Bakhtin's terms, as instancing that dialogical ground that is the only space where languages reveal themselves in their specificity. ..."38 Intersubjectivity, then, is the condition for saying anything in the first place. It is a rhetorical relationship among the reader, writer, and the text that changes according to the historical position of all three elements. According to Wells and de Lauretis, to exclude the communicative and properly intersubjective grounding of language, as some poststructuralists do, is to render arbitrary the reader's search for reference and the desire to represent and to understand representation, all of which enter into the motivation to read.39 In Wells's context, language does not operate without the intervention of human subjects; it can only derive from it. Intersubjectivity is a rhetorical concept that "locates the relation of power and discourse within communities of speakers and hearers. It asserts finally the power of speakers to transform the discourse that they
enact."40
This is not to say that the speaker or hearer is always capable of communication, interpretation and/or transformation. For Wells, the dialectic of representation in any text centers on the interplay between those aspects of the text that connect it with the lived world, which she places under the rubric "typical," and those that resist interpretation, called "indeterminate." The domain of the typical register includes
37Susan Wells, The Dialectics of Representation(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). 38Wells, Dialectics, 5. 59Wells is criticizing Paul De Man's theories of reading in Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietszche, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979) and Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of ContemporaryCriticism(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). 40Wells, Dialectics, 14.
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relations between individuals and groups, the location of the text in history, and intersubjectivity as an interpretative ground. Usually, the main themes of the Bildungsroman belong to the typical register whose function it is to present the text as a transparent and natural reality. The indeterminate, on the other hand, refers to how the work represents itself as a text. It is in the realm of the indeterminate in which the illusion that the text is representing a world outside itself is dissolved. The indeterminate register emphasizes the basic paradox in all representation, which is that "representations are not objects . . . but enter into their full existence when their material being as marks on a page has been swallowed up and forgotten, and they have become thoughts in the mind of the reader." Significantly, in the Bildungsroman, the most "typical" of all questions, the relation between individuals and groups provokes one of two answers from the indeterminate register: "socially critical answers, in which the individual attempts to transform or transcend social relations, and utopian answers, in which social relations are beneficently arranged to foster the growth of the protagonist."'4' Since critical and utopian impulses proceed by negation and abstraction, they belong to the indeterminate register. The power of the Bildungsroman form and its present relevancy to the critical debates lie in the fact that the form has always exposed the tensions, contradictions, and difficulties involved in linking problems of subjectivity and representation to the criticism of social and political structures. The form itself is based on an unresolved dialectic between its intent to represent experience and its negative critique of social and political structures which, as Wells confirms, undermines that very goal if only, paradoxically, to achieve an objective postmodernists and feminists share: to reveal the intents and purposes of the ideologies that underlie previously universally accepted truths. The Bildungsroman also serves as an example of the difficulty of representing philosophical ideas in a literary text. Wells observes that in the philosophy that is said to inform the Bildungsroman, the dichotomy between the self as subject and as object is somehow erased.42 However, in the literary form itself, this is not the case. In the Bildungsroman, indeterminacy is part of the genre's theme and purpose, which is the representation of conscious human self-formation. In creating him/ herself as an object, the protagonist must undergo a process of alienation in order to achieve self-consciousness. The total alienation of many
4'Wells, Dialectics, 50, 141. 42Wells points out that the dichotomy between internal and external were seen by German classical theorists as expressions of the same thing. Much of this was done by asserting that the self as subject, influenced by art, could transcend the specialized individuality caused by contemporary culture. See Wells, Dialectics, 139.
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nineteenth-century Bildungsroman protagonists indicated the victory of one register over the other and a breakdown of the dialectic. It is, however, in the interaction between the two that the reader sees relations being formed in their historical and discursive context. This critical, deconstructive examination of the self, one's surroundings and one's subjectivity, found by Wells to be typical of the dialectics of representation in the Bildungsroman, is indeed the one we have seen proposed by many feminist critics to circumvent the seeming dead-end of deconstruction. Significantly, it also characterizes several fictionalized stories of female development that have appeared since 1980 in Italian literature, all of which include feminist critiques of home and community. Althenopis, by Fabrizia Ramondino, and Ginevra Bompiani's Mondanita are two of many texts in which this dialectic functions.43 Althenopis is the story of a gradual disappearance of a young girl behind the object sign woman. The form is a chronological, sometimes poetic, but mostly realistic rendering of a childhood in a Neopolitan, petit bourgeois family. Althe'nopisbegins during World War II, when the narrator's family is forced to take refuge in the grandmother's residence in Santa Maria del Mare to escape the bombings and continues into the late 1970s. The viewpoint of the narrating child is not simply a technique to reveal the corruption of the adult world. The narrator speaks as a remembering adult who now wants to unearth those structures that lead to her final alienation. The text itself is an inquiry into how this estranged narrating consciousness is being formed. The novel is divided into three parts that correspond to childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Physically, the narrator describes herself in typifying terms: as a darker-skinned Italian, she is not capable of commanding any special consideration in a culture that idolizes blonds. The first mythical image she deconstructs is that of her grandmother. For the young child, this energetic woman, always dressed in black, who seemed to emanate light although she wore no jewelry, was a person of epic proportions. In spite of wartime rationing, she managed to cook many sugary delights for the children, an ability which only incurred the wrath of the narrator's parents who disagreed with her unscientific and exaggerated approach to food. The narrator's mother, always depressed and constantly reading, seemed distant to the child who much preferred the earth mother image projected by the grandmother. This mythical aura, however, is eventually tarnished when the narrator be4'Fabrizia Ramondino, Althenopis (Turin: Einaudi, 1984). The English translation published by Carcanet editions is done by Michael Sullivan. Ginevra Bompiani, Mondanitd (Milan: La Tartaruga, 1980). All the following translations from Italian and German are my own.
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comes old enough to understand that the grandmother was irresponsible and had squandered the family fortune. The chapter ends with a discussion of the relationship between older people and children as observed during visits of the narrator and her friends to a nearby retirement home. The children make fun of the elderly who strike back with their own mean practical jokes causing the narrator to comment that the derisive relationship between the two widely separated generations was really their way of playing with one another. This activity, however, was conditioned by the similarities in the marginal status of the children and the elderly. Although these reflections provide a socio-cultural backdrop to the grandmother, her image retains something of the unexplainable and indeterminate in the narrator's memory. From the grandmother, the narrating voice proceeds to the outside world, the piazza where basic social relationships are established early in life. The majority of the chapter titles in Part 1 (e.g. the piazza, the house, the paths, the villas, the sidewalks) emphasize the extent to which geography, architecture, and demography play an active role in the construction of the narrating voice. The economic structure of the town is mirrored in the position of the houses on the piazza: only the rich can directly face the center. How other parents handled their children, such as if they are made to work at home, or if they are beaten, is a subject of obvious interest to the narrating child. The treatment of the other children, which, of course, is a reflection of their socio-economic level, appears to the child narrator to be determined by the position of their houses. These spatial relationships also spark the beginnings of the narrator's realizations of her own differences from the other children, something she initially refuses. From the piazza, the narrator reenters her grandmother's house. The analysis proceeds metonymically, a common procedure of the typical register, to explain further the grandmother's character, and at the same time, the frustrated reactions of her own mother. The narrator's horizon widens as the children explore the paths ("I sentieri") that take them to the country where they can observe the family and play rituals of peasants. From there, the voice goes to the villas of the rich where, through the grandmother, the narrator's family can still gain occasional entry. The narrator continually makes generalizations concerning those people she meets. Despite the seeming superficiality of these theorizations, such as the observation that poor children play more spontaneously than rich children whose play is always structured and more conscious, they serve to demarcate the historical and social position of the narrator, that of a petit bourgeois child in wartime Italy. The narrator uses these partial theories to elucidate relationships she had already begun to discuss. The observation, for example, that the rich relatives served very little food in contrast to the peasant belief that
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abundant food reflected wealth is a cause for more reflection upon the adversarial relationship between the mother and grandmother on that subject. This relationship is analyzed in terms of their identifications (or attempted identifications) with the contradictory ideologies of different classes. Although these generalizations place the characters in typifying and understandable categories, they expose the various ideologies as being humanly created myths and not eternally representable truths. Nostalgia for the mythical stability provided by the family and the childhood community informs the narrating voice throughout. By exposing the diverse politics of identity formation, the narrator refutes the possibility, even the desirability, of a return to any of these previous childhood states. In the longest chapter in Part 1 entitled "Zio Alceste" (Uncle Alceste), the narrator examines the supposedly stable female community to find that it is precisely here that many patriarchal values are transmitted and internalized. Zio Alceste who still lives with his mother occasions much jealousy on the part of the other aunts who measure their worth according to how long they can keep their children, especially their sons, at home. In essence, the matriarchy mimics male expectations of women and, in so doing, perpetuates its subservient status. The female community admits only married women; unmarried ones have no identity. Educated women arouse even less interest. The family story that the grandmother's sister was one of five women in the last century to achieve a university degree is greeted with remarks that her pretentiousness probably explains why her daughters could not find husbands. Like the narrator's mother, most of the women have suffered from some undefined and incapacitating type of illness during their reproductive years, which passed only when they achieved the status of grandmother. The realm of the matriarchy is indeed akin to Moretti's preindustrial world. The need of these women to establish strong identities motivates their acceptance of patriarchal limits in exchange for freedom and more importantly, their refusal to develop. Indeed, in the matriarchy, it is impossible to become anything. The highest possible honor is to be born into it. Men are excluded as well from this inverted or perverted power structure unless they have failed in some way and thus pay for entry into the oppressed. The devastated husband of one of the aunts, for example, who had run away with another man receives as much sympathy as the wayward aunt receives criticism. As the family prepares to return to Naples at the end of Part 1, the narrative becomes replete with signs of imminent growth and development. Watching her girlfriends removed from school to do housework or get married, the narrator is relieved to be escaping at this time from what she recognizes as a stifling female destiny. With the unexpected death of her father, however, independence and development are stopped
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as the narrator and family must go to live with relatives. Accordingly, the narrator finds it more difficult to recount her life in a chronological, developmental way. In Part 2, the narrator becomes frightened of the implications of her method of describing herself and others solely in terms of functional relationships. As a result, she is determined to stabilize this perpetual movement she seems to represent ("Quel muoversi nel mondo, sono jo").44 This attempt to stabilize identity predictably meets with little success. In Part 2, the psychological and the poetic, that is the indeterminate, take precedence. The narrator's reluctance to leave adolescence is expressed in several hallucinatory paragraphs. Footnotes, which appear throughout the book to explain language usage, customs, and historical events become even more prominent, accentuating the growing gap between the two registers. This gap, in turn, reflects the increasing inability of the narrator to control and understand her main discourse. Toward the end of Part 2, an answer comes to the narrator in an epiphanic scene based on the tolli leggere motif. Opening a book at random under the shade of a tree in the garden, the narrator finds these verses: La clef que tu cherches n'est pas la jette-toi dans la vie et tu la trouveras.45 Motivated by these words, the narrator leaves for university, feeling, in her own words, invincible. Traditionally, however, epiphanic moments in the Bildungsroman do not translate into obvious, material gains.46 In Part 3, the narrator returns home as a third person, omniscient narrator seemingly denied of all subjectivity. The brief third part is entitled "Bestelle Dein Haus." This German citation, identified in the text as coming from one of Johann Sebastian Bach's cantatas, is followed by a quotation from Brahms's Deutshes Requiem announcing the final transformation to take place at the Last Judgment.47 In Althe'nopis,there are two final transformations. The narrator witnesses the regression of her mother to a childlike
44Ramondino, AlthInopis, 180. (This constant movement in the world is me.) Althenopis, 220. (The key you are searching for is not here. Go out into life and you will find it.) 46Swales, German Bildungsroman, and Sammons, "Mystery of the Missing Bildungsroman," give several examples of how protagonists in the Bildungsroman claim to have learned some essential truth. Usually, however, this knowledge neither applies to nor produces any drastic change in the lived world of the protagonist. 47"Bestelle dein Haus: Denn wir haben keine bleibende Statt, sondern die zukunftige suchen wir. Siehe, ich sage euch ein Geheimnis: wir werden nicht alle entschlafen, wir werden alle verwandelt werden und dasselbige plotzlich, in einem Augenblick, zu der Zeit der letzen Posaune." (Prepare your house: . . . Because we do not live in a stable city we will look to the future for one. I have a secret to tell you. Not everyone will die, but everyone will be changed, in an instant, in the flash of an eye, at the sound of the trumpets of the last judgment.)
45Ramondino,
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sexuality that she gleefully expresses giggling "I am a baby" whenever she is reprimanded for touching her genitals. This transformation plays ironically on the Bildungsroman's idealization of youth and turns it into a feminist attack on the patriarchal oppression of female sexuality.48 The second metamorphosis, that of the first person narrating voice to the third person, represents the narrator's retreat behind the sign Daughter now only speaking to her Mother in terms of signs and not words.49 The critique of the bourgeois family continues in purely spatial terms now that the indeterminate narrating consciousness has seemingly been eliminated. The bathroom, the dining room, the living room metonymically subsume and represent the secret motivations in the petit bourgeois family. The realism of Honore de Balzac has returned, and the final chapters are presented as a realistic, transparent picture of the southern Italian petite bourgeoisie. The retreat to a third person narration seems to be an admission that there is no mature female identity that can be represented at this time. The indeterminate, however, is still very active in this last paragraph. The daughter has not completely divorced her emotions from her review of the deterioration of her mother and the family as the title of the last chapter, "Die mit Tranen saen, werden mit Freude ernten," implies.50 Criticism, which operates through negation and abstraction, is part of the indeterminate register and reflects the alienation of the protagonist. Here, however, this alienation is a deliberate placing of the narrating voice in a typifying and socially prescribed position, that of the Daughter, as the uppercase letters in the text indicate. The ensuing criticism, which shows the indeterminate still at work to challenge the typical, represents a knowing alienation, one that affirms for some feminist critics, "our right and our ability to construct and take responsibility for, our gendered identity, our politics, and our choices."'51 The indeterminate harbors other possibilities of freedom from what is being represented. Clearly the narrator is no longer in the same historical and discursive situation of her mother, and with the passing of these
48This theme runs throughout Althenopis. As a child, the narrator observed that, at country festivals, only children and older, overweight women were allowed to dance openly. Since both groups were either too old or too young to be seen as sexual beings, the narrator concludes that this is an example of the patriarchy's monitoring of female sexuality. Likewise, the illnesses of many petit bourgeois women during their reproductive years is seen as a result of their inability to express themselves as autonomous sexual beings. The illness was a way to rationalize this impotency. 49Ramondino, Althenopis, 233. "Ormai non si parlavono piui con le parole, la Figlia et la Madre, ma per segni." (They no longer spoke with words, the Daughter and the Mother, but through signs.) The words mother and daughter are capitalized in the text so as to emphasize their object status. 50(Those who sow with tears will reap with joy.) 5'Linda Alcoff, "Cultural Feminism," 432.
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humanly formed structures one can hope for change. Thus, if the Bildungsroman does not specifically represent cultural change, and it cannot be said that any positive alternatives are represented, it does have the power to force the reader to reflect upon how his/her ideas concerning the typical, that is the real, have changed, and how these ideas continually challenge limits. Whereas the ending in Althenopis provides a socially critical, albeit negative rejection of the typical register, the utopian variant emerges in the parodic versions of the Bildungsroman. Although the Bildungsroman is generally considered a sober, realistic genre, the parodies of it that can be seen in Gunter Grass's Blechtrommelhave their counterparts as well in Italian feminist literature. Ginevra Bompiani's satirical Mondanita (Worldliness) links the traditional Bildungsroman goal of representing the coming to consciousness of the protagonist by making that step synonymous with her refusal to play the "transcendent Other" for her husband. Sophie must accept Simone de Beauvoir's well-known challenge to women that they become the bearers of life's existential meaningless and refuse the many myths and representations man has created of women to assure himself of meaning.52 The climax of the story comes when the protagonist Sophie, who had been abandoned by her husband Nikki in a mosque in Istanbul during a family vacation at the beginning of the narrative, receives an explanatory letter from him. Nikki justifies his abandonment of his wife by accusing her of refusing these roles: "because you are the woman who offers to death the sacrifice of presence I want to find my death, not my life. . . .53 The traditional secluded place where the protagonist goes to contemplate her past and find herself is, for Sophie, a run-down French chateau, inherited by her cousin Isadore, an effeminate snob, who, like his dusty chateau, never quite made it to the desired social register. The chateau is inhabited by a cast of characters who permit comical digressions on themes such as the forms women's writing should take. Sophie's review of her past predictably unleashes overwhelming feelings of nostalgia prompting her to return to her home and family. The return trip is a disappointment as Sophie fails again to relate to her now symbolically blind mother who, she realizes, had inculcated in her the rule of servitude more than anything else. Sophie leaves again with the words of her aunt ringing in her ears. During her visit, Sophie had accused this aunt of complicity with the patriarchy: "You have accepted the game, with
52Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxieme sexe (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). Most of these ideas are found in Part III entitled "Les Mythes." For a good discussion of de Beauvoir's attack on the concept of women as the "other" who assures meaning, see, among others, Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 23ff. "Bompiani, Mondanita, "Perche tu sei la donna che offre alla morte il sacrificio della presenza . . . lo voglio ritrovare la mia morte, non la mia vita," 82.
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all its rules, including that of treason."54 Her aunt sharply retorts, "I believe happiness is being invited to play the game."55 From Greece, Sophie returns to meet her husband and son in Paris. The encounter, however, never takes place because Sophie mysteriously disappears after an epiphanic moment in which she realizes she must accept her new (feminist) role of representing the nothingness her husband so fears. In her place, the two find a yawning black cat with whom her son Hannibal immediately falls in love and takes home. Sophie's cousin remarks that the cat, who will play the game in a different manner, will teach Nikki the "mystery of presence."56 As can be expected in such a parodic structure, the overt fictionality of the text is underscored by the fact that primarily ideas are being represented. Enmeshed, however, in improbable voyages, magical happenings, and transformations, one finds the same dialectic between the typical and the indeterminate, although it appears to be reversed. In the parodic Bildungsroman, it is the exaggerated typical register that flaunts the fictional nature of the text. Comical types such as Hermie Nicholson, the English writer who quotes Jane Austin to prove that we do not need passions or her young autobiographer who does a structural analysis on Hermie's texts and finds out they are all the same, are characters that undermine the very idea of typicality. Indeterminate themes such as women as presence, as acceptors and promulgators of the philosophy and meaninglessness of life enter the realm of the real and the concrete when Sophie becomes a cat, who throughout the narrative was a symbol of presence. Sophie's metamorphosis indicates the triumph of an imaginary utopia that resolves momentarily the Bildungsroman conflicts by reordering society, here to feminist desires. The indeterminate represents the triumph of the imaginary which, in this text, becomes real. Still, however, Sophie's metamorphosis, like the narrator's retreat to the third person in AltheInopis,is a refusal to attempt to represent any stable female identity. In both texts, this denial of the possibility of representation highlights one of the basic contradictions in the form, that is its idealization of limitless possibility and its restricting goal of maturity, and exploits it for a feminist purpose. Likewise, the interplay between the typical and indeterminate register in both texts exposes all ideologies as being humanly created and fallible and thus constantly in need of revision. In The Power of Genre, Adena Rosmarin argues that
54Bompiani, Mondanita, 96. "Lei ha accettato il gioco, con tutte le sue regole, compresa quella del tradimento." 55Bompiani, Mondanita, 97. "lo credo che consista (la felicita) piuittosto nell'essere invitati a giocare." 56Bompiani, Mondanitt, 109.
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genre itself, which has always been linked to some representational theory of knowledge, needs to be recognized as a rhetorical construct used by critics and readers alike to serve a specific, explanatory purpose of thought.57 Recent use of the Bildungsroman to reconceptualize the mother-daughter relationship, to deny the existence of stable identities, and to unmask the social structures that determine experience attest to the fact that several women writers have already understood this use of generic forms. Is there such a thing as a female Bildungsroman? Probably not, which is why it has been necessary over the years for many women writers and critics to invent one. And they will most likely continue to do so since the questions surrounding the relationship between experience, subjectivity, and social structures are far from being resolved.
57Adena Rosmarin, The Power of Genre (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).

Female Bil Dungs Roman

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Female Bil Dungs Roman

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The Female "Bildungsroman": Calling It into Question Author(s): Carol Lazzaro-Weis Source: NWSA Journal, Vol. 2, No.

The Female Bildungsroman: Calling It into Question

The Female Bildungsroman

The Female Bildungsroman

The Female Bildungsroman

The Female Bildungsroman

The Female Bildungsroman

The Female Bildungsroman

The Female Bildungsroman

The Female Bildungsroman

The Female Bildungsroman

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