The Bildungsroman is a genre of prose fiction that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the main character(s) from adolescence to adulthood. The traditional Bildungsroman originated in Germany and in his book Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding, critic Jerome H. Buckley outlines the features of the genre and traces its development. Buckley states that the Bildungsroman is usually a novel about a sensitive boy, who grows up with certain constraints placed upon him by his continuously hostile parents, especially his father. His parents oppose his ambitions and his first schooling is frustrating for him. As he tries to make sense of his surroundings he goes through complicated confrontations with the outer world. He eventually moves away from home, usually to a city, and seeks a real education. During this time he goes through two love affairs: one debasing and the other exalting. He also experiences painful soul searching which transforms him into a mature young man. It is only after this that he may visit his parents to display his success and the good judgment of his choice.
In a traditional Bildungsroman the protagonist is almost always male but between the late 18th and 19th century, the number of Bildungsroman novels with female protagonists increased. An example of a novel that contains some characteristics of the classical Bildungsroman is Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, which Jeanette Winterson references in her novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (Oranges). The presence of a female protagonist is a feature that both Winterson’s novel and Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus share with Jane Eyre. Despite the fact that these novels deviate from and challenge Buckley’s male centred definitio...
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...e Only Fruit p.94
Gamallo, Subversive Storytelling p.123
Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit - Introduction p.xiii
Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit - Introduction p.xiv
Susan Z. Andrade, ‘Adichie’s Genealogies: National and Feminine Novels’ in Research in African Literatures. p.94
Bibliography
Jerome Hamilton Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding Harvard University Press, 1974.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus. Fourth Estate, 2013.
Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Vintage, 2001.
Research in African Literatures. Volume 42, Number 2 (Summer 2011).
Ruth O. Saxton, The Girl: Constructions of the Girl in Contemporary Fiction by Women. New York: St. Martin's, 1998.
[Date accessed 14 December 2013]
In today’s society, gender issues are often discussed as a hot topic. In literature, feminist views are used to criticise “societal norms” in books and stories. Two popular pieces by authors Kolbenschlag and Hurston paint two very different views on women. One common assumption in the use of a feminist critical perspective is that gender issues are central. Kolbenschlag who wrote the literary criticism “Cinderella, the Legend” would most likely disagree with this statement, she feels that women bare greater burdens in society and are more largely affected by social norms.
Irigaray, Luce. "This Sex Which Is Not One." Feminism: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndle. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1991.
... Jerilyn, and Ellen Silber. Women in Literature: Reading Through the Lens of a Gender.
This paper argued that the mother in Jamaica Kincaid’s short story “Girl” is loving towards her daughter because the mother is taking time to teaching her daughter how to be a woman, and because she wants to protect her in the future from society’s judgment. Kincaid showed that the mother cared and loved her daughter. The mother wants her daughter to know how to run a home and how to keep her life in order to societies standards. Alongside practical advice, the mother instructs her daughter on how to live a fulfilling
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre entails a social criticism of the oppressive social ideas and practices of nineteenth-century Victorian society. The presentation of male and female relationships emphases men’s domination and perceived superiority over women. Jane Eyre is a reflection of Brontë’s own observation on gender roles of the Victorian era, from the vantage point of her position as governess much like Jane’s. Margaret Atwood’s novel was written during a period of conservative revival in the West partly fueled by a strong, well-organized movement of religious conservatives who criticized ‘the excesses of the sexual revolution.’ Where Brontë’s Jane Eyre is a clear depiction of the subjugation of women by men in nineteenth-century Western culture, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale explores the consequences of a reversal of women’s rights by men. This twentieth-century tradition of dystopian novels is a possible influence, with classics like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 standing prominence. The pessimism associated with novels of this genre—where society is presented as frightening and restrictive—exposes the gender inequality between men and women to be deleterious.
A. Women in Modern America: A Brief History. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1974. Glaspell, Susan. A. Trifles. Making Literature Matter: An Anthology for Readers and Writers. Ed.
According to “The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language”, the word “feminity” is defined as “the quality or condition of being feminine or a characteristic or trait traditionally held to be female.” Further speaking, feminity is formed by various socially-defined and biologically-created gender roles played by women influenced by a number of social and cultural factors. For example, the traditional gender roles of women include nurturer, birth giver, homemaker and caregiver. However, marked by a series of women's rights movements starting from the 19th century, women’s gender roles, as well as the ways how society and men perceive women, have been largely changed. This significant change, described as a process of female awakening, was widely reflected in many contemporary literature works. This essay will specifically focus on the construction of feminity in two short stories, “Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway and “The Stoy of an Hour” by Kate Chopin through examining how the authors define “feminity” in their treatment of female characters.
Hader, Suzanne. "The Bildungsroman Genre." The Bildungsroman Genre: Great Expectations, Aurora Leigh, and Waterland. The Victorian Web, 21 February 2005. Web. 6 April 2014.
The Bildungsroman genre entails a character’s formative years and his or her development from childhood. The characters from this type of novel recall, in detail, past relationships and experiences that impacted the characters growth, maturity, and exemplar for their relationships with other characters. An important component to Bildungsroman novels is the concentration on the characters childhood (Gottfried & Miles, 122). In Jane Eyre and David Copperfield, both characters childhoods were despondent. Both characters experience the loss of a parent: Jane is a literal orphan; David’s loss is metaphorical, then literal. When Jane Eyre begins, Jane has already lost both parents and is under the guardianship of her aunt, Sarah Reed. Reed and her children, Jane’s cousins, are abusive to Jane and never accept Jane as family. Jane has lost both parents and with the death of her uncle, Sarah’s husband and an advocate for Jane, Jane is without any caring relationship. In addition to being without affection, Jane must endure torment. It is this lack of adoration that leads Jane to seek acceptance throughout her life, while attempting t...
Hobsbaum, Philip. A Reader’s Guide to Charles Dickens. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972.
Throughout American Literature, women have been depicted in many different ways. The portrayal of women in American Literature is often influenced by an author's personal experience or a frequent societal stereotype of women and their position. Often times, male authors interpret society’s views of women in a completely different nature than a female author would. While F. Scott Fitzgerald may represent his main female character as a victim in the 1920’s, Zora Neale Hurston portrays hers as a strong, free-spirited, and independent woman only a decade later in the 1930’s.
Buckley, Jerome Hamilton. Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1974.
In Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie attempts to use history in order to gain leverage on the present, to subvert the single story stereotypes that dominate many contemporary discourses on Africa. Written in the genre of historical fiction, Adichie’s novel transcends beyond mere historical narration and recreates the polyphonic experiences of varying groups of people in Nigeria before and after the Civil War. She employs temporal distortion in her narrative, distorting time in order to illustrate the intertwining effects of the past and present, immersing deep into the impact of western domination that not only catalyzed the war, but continues to affect contemporary Africa. In this paper, I will analyze her portrayal of the multifaceted culture produced by colonialism – one that coalesces elements from traditional African culture with notions of western modernity to varying degrees. I will argue that Adichie uses a range of characters, including Odenigbo’s mother, Ugwu, Olanna and Kainene, to each represent a point in a spectrum between tradition and modernity.
In this article author (Lorna) have been constructing of the female Bildungsroman, which means whose principal subject is the moral, psychological, and intellectual development of a usually youthful main character or development. Jane Eyre has all the determining characteristics of a traditional Bildungsroman. The plot of this novel is based on stages of growth and development. Jane's advancement from her position as teacher to private governess signifies an important development in her life. In the title ‘the self-constructed heroine’ means something that different from other heroines, like external circumstances such as wealth or status. At each moment in the novel, Jane is faced with a serious moral or emotional decision. Lorna wants to describe the different phases of life of Jane, which she faces in her life at every moment from the starting of Gateshead. Also, How Jane develops, her self-reflections become more sophisticated, and she becomes more able to benefit from them in her molding of her own life. Jane gains many pieces of knowledge about herself. She desires intellectual as well as emotional stimulation, and that her self-control often gives her control over others.
Throughout literature’s history, female authors have been hardly recognized for their groundbreaking and eye-opening accounts of what it means to be a woman of society. In most cases of early literature, women are portrayed as weak and unintelligent characters who rely solely on their male counterparts. Also during this time period, it would be shocking to have women character in some stories, especially since their purpose is only secondary to that of the male protagonist. But, in the late 17th to early 18th century, a crop of courageous women began publishing their works, beginning the literary feminist movement. Together, Aphra Behn, Charlotte Smith, Fanny Burney, and Mary Wollstonecraft challenge the status quo of what it means to be a