Bildungsroman

The German term Bildung has religious, philosophical, and political associations. Sixteenth-century Pietistic theology used the term to refer to the Christian’s cultivation of the image of God. Natural philosophers from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries adopted the term to refer more generally to the development of the capacities within an organism. It also referred to freeing the German people from a political system in which small feudal states vowed allegiance to the Holy Roman Empire.

German philologist Karl Morgenstern combined Bildung with roman, meaning “novel,” and coined the term Bildungsroman in the early nineteenth century to refer to the “novel of formation.” According to Manfred Engel in 2008, German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) used the term in an 1870 biography, Das Leben Schleiermachers (The life of Schleiermacher), and subsequently popularized the term as a more general designation of novels in a 1905 collection of essays, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (Poetry and experience). Genres related to the bildungsroman include the Entwicklungsroman (“novel of development”), Erziehungsroman (“novel of education”), and Künstlerroman (“novel about the artist”), which focus on the maturation of the protagonist. The Oxford English Dictionary credits the 1910 Encyclopedia Britannica with the first English use of bildungsroman, which then came to mean “a novel that has as its main theme the formative years or spiritual education of one person.” Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–96; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1824) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) is widely accepted as the prototypical bildungsroman.

Brief History

Although tales of the foolish youth who leaves home to enter the larger world in search of adventure and acquires wisdom through difficult experiences is rooted in folklore, the nineteenth-century bildungsroman was heavily influenced by Goethe, whose character Wilhelm provided the model of the protagonist: a sometimes foolish innocent who, through a series of mistakes and with the help of others, achieves maturity and finds his place in the social order. The Victorians adapted Goethe’s model for their purposes and expanded the definition of the bildungsroman in the process. In contrast to the more narrowly defined German bildungsroman, the nineteenth-century English bildungsroman was represented in a variety of forms that shared certain traits. Among these common factors were the protagonist who was literally or metaphorically orphaned; a quest motivated by the loss of a parent and the accompanying loss of faith in past values; a journey from a rural to an urban world in which money was prominently featured; tests of the protagonist (frequently involving money and love); internal conflicts ending in a burst of life-altering clarity that James Joyce (1882–1941) later termed an “epiphany”; and an ending often ambiguous or ambivalent. The bildungsroman also frequently contained autobiographical elements. Although some novels classified as bildungsromans included more of these characteristics than others, the genre continued to be a “novel of formation” that charted the protagonist’s development from childhood through a series of experiences (usually involving a spiritual crisis) into maturity and identification of his or her place in society. Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860–61 serial; 1861 book) and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) are among the best-known examples of the English bildungsroman. Gustave Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale (1869; A Sentimental Education, 1898) and Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir (1830; The Red and the Black, 1898) are often cited as classic French bildungsromans. Some scholars consider nineteenth-century American novels such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) to be bildungsroman, but others argue that American novels are concerned with specifically American, nationalistic themes and fall outside the genre.

Many literary theorists insist that the bildungsroman as a genre disappeared in the early twentieth century. Others declare such a view as narrow and illusory. They point to such modernist experiments with the genre as James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914–15 serial, 1916 book), with its Hungarian Jewish and Irish protagonist, and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), with a four-hundred-year-old protagonist who is alternately male and female. They argue that the recognition of adolescence, empirically and theoretically, as a unique period of life, influenced bildungsromans that address the sense of alienation characteristic of that life stage, as in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963). Other scholars insist that the novel of formation has been re-energized by authors from marginalized groups. The bildungsroman of the twentieth century reflects a diversity of experience that encompasses women, LGBT people, immigrants, and other minority groups.

The Bildungsroman Today

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, the relationship between the individual and society that is central to the bildungsroman has been complicated by issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Traditionally, society in the bildungsroman was patriarchal, reflecting middle-class values and ideals, often from an imperialist perspective. Society in these traditional texts expected humble submission from those outside the white male heterosexual norm. In any contest between society and marginalized characters, society won. Increased diversity in authorship has led to texts that resist rather than submit to societal norms and challenge accepted dichotomies such as past and present, native and foreign. The creation of selves in the contemporary bildungsroman weaves together the personal, the familial, the historical, and the political. The coherent, autonomous subject may be under attack generally in postmodern literature, but feminist and postcolonial authors continue to use the bildungsroman to attest and bear witness to the complex subjectivity of their protagonists—and, by extension, themselves and those they represent.

In The House on Mango Street (1984), a bildungsroman by Mexican American writer Sandra Cisneros (1954–), the narrator Esperanza must not only escape from the limitations home imposes, a convention of the genre, but also negotiate in a world where race, ethnicity, and gender restrict her options. In Annie John (1985) by Jamaica Kincaid (1949–), the mother-daughter conflict is inextricably linked to the subject-colonial society conflict. The protagonist defies the pattern of a life circumscribed by gender, class, and race and breaks from the strictures of the familial and the political.

Postcolonial writers have appropriated the bildungsroman and revised it to such a degree that some have suggested that the “postcolonial bildungsroman” has become a new genre. Indigenous writers have used the form to reveal the destruction of a culture and to reclaim history and identity. For these writers, the bildungsroman has been a vehicle of survival. Within popular culture, the term is now so broadly defined that reviewers have labeled novels ranging from Middlesex (2002), a chronicle of immigration, assimilation, and intersex identity, to Never Let Me Go (2005), a science-fiction novel that has been termed “posthuman,” to the Harry Potter fantasy series as bildungsromans.

Bibliography

Boes, Tobias. Formative Fictions: Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Bildungsroman. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2012. Print.

Bolaki, Stella. Unsettling the Bildungsroman: Reading Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011. Print.

Deppman, Jed. “James Joyce: From Hero to Author of the Bildungsroman.” James Joyce Quarterly 49.3 (2012): 527–55. Print.

Engel, Manfred. “Variants of the Romantic ‘Bildungsroman’ (With a Short Note on the ‘Artist Novel.’” Romantic Prose Fiction. Ed. Gerald Ernest Paul Gillespie, Manfred Engel, and Bernard Dieterle. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2008. 263–95. Print.

Fraiman, Susan. “Is There a Female Bildungsroman?.” Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. 1–31. Print.

Jeffers, Thomas L. Apprenticeships: The Bildungsroman from Goethe to Santayana. New York: Palgrave, 2005. Print.

Kontje, Todd. Private Lives in the Public Sphere: The German Bildungsroman as Metafiction. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1992. Print.

LeSeur, Geta J. Ten Is the Age of Darkness: The Black Bildungsroman. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1995. Digital file.

Riquelme, John Paul. “Modernist Transformations of Life Narrative: From Wilde and Woolf to Bechdel and Rushdie.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 59.3 (2013): 461–79. Print.

Summerfield, Giovanna, and Lisa Downward. New Perspectives on the European Bildungsroman. London: Continuum, 2010. Digital file.