AngloAmerican Literature

The Bildungsroman as a subgenre of the novel

The Bildungsroman is a subgenre of the novel that has inspired very little critical consensus: the first problem seems to be the one of defining what a "coming of age" novel is and even how to name it, since we can find several synonyms of Bildungsroman (German). In Italian, we have "Romanzo di formazione," which is a definition that is not common in the English-speaking world, where we mostly find an alternative definition ("Coming of age" or "apprenticeship" novel).

The core of the debate or controversy of what a Bildungsroman is revolves around a restrictive vs. flexible notion of this subgenre of the novel. Generally speaking, by Bildungsroman we mean a narrative about a young person who faces challenges of growing up, of becoming an adult. It is a narrative that depicts the journey of a young person, of a youth towards maturity, not only from an age point of view, a purely anagraphic growth, but also from a moral, psychological, and intellectual point of view. It talks about how people achieve adulthood or the impression of having reached adulthood.

The state of maturity is achieved by means of the interactions with the external world, between the inner world of a person and the external world. So there is a sort of dialectic relationship between the social sphere, in which the individual is placed, and the private sphere. This means that in Bildungsroman, what is especially relevant are the interactions, encounters with significant people who make an impact on the protagonist’s life and therefore his/her emotional attachment, journeys in the sense of shifting from one space to another and discovering new milieus, new places, but also specific events which have a particular impact on the protagonist’s growth.

Debate on the definition of Bildungsroman

Another definition also adds the importance of the protagonist’s reconciliation between his/her individual aspirations, dreams, and desires and the demands of social conformity. The problem about these definitions is when we are faced with the necessity to find what a correct, true Bildungsroman is: the critical debate has been very much concerned with the problem, which in fact has no solution, of finding the true Bildungsroman.

The narrative of the growth of an individual, the passage from youth to maturity, the experience of becoming an adult is a universal narrative that we can find replicated in countless contexts from daily life to the Western traditions, ancient texts (The Bible, which is full of people achieving adulthood, but even the very story of Christ told by the Gospels has elements of the Bildungsroman, if we identify it with a generic narrative which tells the story of how you become an adult person). The problem is that of identifying a historical origin and progression for a specific genre (the novel), which in its terms has a history in the European tradition.

The urtexts

Within the European tradition, we can talk about German literature and culture in the first place. The birth of the Bildungsroman is deeply implicated with the historical and cultural German Enlightenment of the second half of the 18th century. There is some controversy about what is the first novel among the first: some people claim that Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795-1796), whereas other people claim that there is an older novel, preceding that text, which is Christoph Martin Wieland’s The Story of Agathon (1766-1767), which could be identified as the very first coming of age novel to date.

There is some debate about dates and authors, but in general, we can say that more critics are inclined to favour Goethe’s novel because of its cultural impact, the influence that Goethe as a literary figure and its novel had exerted on the European tradition having the possibility to deeply influence other national literature among which the Italian, the French ones.

Integration and national narrative

One of the main issues around which the critical debate revolves and also is offered by Goethe’s urtext is that of integration. In the end, somehow you become a good citizen, a good father: there is a change in status also by means of confronting the problem of beginning a career, becoming a worker, finding your place in society: you integrate in society.

Another key issue is that of national narrative, that is involved by many Bildungsroman, but what is the connection between somebody who learns to cope with the reality and the need of finding a place in society and national narrative? There is an idea of a self that is constructed in order to create something that is not just important to yourself but to society at large, because at some point you need to fit into society. So the connection with national narrative can be explored through this point of view, the idea that the integrated individual which is also a functioning member of the state — the nation needs good citizens in order to be healthy, and in a way, the narrative of the growth of the individual in this term also serves the purposes of strengthening the nation, but on the other hand, simultaneously the Bildungsroman may offer a critical perspective on what the relationship between the individual and the nation can be (especially with reference to American society, where there is a powerful model of the self-made man, which values wealth and personal success on anything else).

The concept of Bildung

The third key issue is the Bildung, the German word "Bild" has the same German roots of the verb "to build" with a much wider range of associations not just with the building, the construction, but also with the notion of image, painting, figure, which connects with the aesthetic sphere. Because of these associations, it has clearly to do with the cultivation of an aesthetic awareness of the individual. "Bildung" is clearly untranslatable in English or in any other language: it is so deeply entrenched in German culture and incredibly rich as a concept that we cannot translate it: this is the reason why we couldn't talk about Bildungsroman outside of Germany.

This is another controversy: the possibility of extending the understanding of coming of age novels. Those critics who stress the historicity of the Bildungsroman tend to claim that this genre is exclusively German and legitimately national as Thomas Mann once claimed. What is the risk of an extreme position in the case of a broader perspective? There could be too many narratives, novels that might have an aspect relatable to the Bildungsroman, but at the same time, the category would be too loose, that is unusable. We want some specificity within a wider understanding of a notion. The idea is that of keeping the attention on some fundamental characteristics that allow us to talk about the Bildungsroman and make this narrative distinct. The problem will be identifying the characteristics that are flexible enough but that at the same time distinct enough.

Jerome Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding (1974)

Jerome Buckley is one of the most influential critics among those who chose to pursue a wider understanding of the Coming of age novel outside Germany. In this book, he started from Wilhelm Meister, using that as a prototype of the coming of age novel, but then focused his attention on English literature. The problem becomes that of identifying some distinctive traits that are connected to the prototype but that at the same time somehow become something else that deals with English literature.

The Bildungsroman in its pure form has been defined as the "novel of all-around development or self-culture" with "a more or less conscious attempt on the part of the hero to integrate his powers, to cultivate himself by his experience." He used quotation marks because he is quoting another author, a woman critic who in the 1930s wrote a book on the German Bildungsroman starting from Goethe.

We go back to the idea of the impact of the relationship between the internal and external worlds has upon the individual, the focus is on the inner side and on the potential for self-cultivation that the experiences made by the protagonist have on his life. There is a problem about the rhetoric in this definition or the form in which this discussion is set: nowadays no critic could write a passage similar to this in a critical essay simply because the problem of the universal masculine has been debated for decades by now: we need to be more inclusive when we talk about a generic figure of the protagonist, we cannot think that we can only refer to it as a masculine figure. To make this genre more inclusive is a major issue that has been debated starting from the 1970s, also because there are many important Bildungsroman told from a female point of view (i.e. Jane Eyre) but critics tend to generalise in the masculine because masculine narratives are simply more frequent.

Buckley goes on to establish what he calls "the broad outlines of a typical Bildungsroman plot" and the effectiveness that he reaches in this attempt to cover a very wide ground is considerable and explains why Buckley is referred to over and over in the Bildungsroman studies. What is the identity of the typical coming of age novel?

"A sensitive child grows up in the provinces, where his lively imagination is frustrated by his neighbors’—and often by his family’s—social prejudices and intellectual obtuseness. School and private reading stimulate his hopes for a different life away from home, and so he goes to the metropolis, where his transformative education begins. He has at least two love affairs, one good and one bad, which help him revalue his values. He makes some accommodation, as citizen and worker, with the industrial urban world, and after a time he perhaps revisits his old home to show folks how much he has grown."

Buckley identifies the protagonist of a typical Bildungsroman plot with a child who is endowed with a keen imagination and a deep sensibility, born in a provincial town, so with a perspective that is somehow marginal and that in his/her original milieu encounters some obstacles and experiences a series of constraints both social and intellectual. These constraints are especially lived by means of his/her imagination, so the constraints are referred to by means of how he/she projects them in his imagination.

Generally speaking, this protagonist deals with a conflict at a family level because especially the father, but not necessarily, manifests some hostility to his/her attempt to make his/her imagination prevail to his individual desire. The family generally proves to be antagonistic to his/her ambitions. Then there is the element of the school and culture: the protagonist experiences some frustration also with respect to former schooling, because it doesn’t nourish his/her thirst or anger for something more than what his/her milieu has to offer, doesn’t nourish his/her imagination up to the expectations or desires although it may offer some stimuli and because of the deep discontent that at some point he ends up experiencing, the protagonist decides to leave his/her milieu and breaks through.

Generally, the protagonist moves from the margins of the small town to the big city that in English novels is represented by London (American novel: New York City). There is this big conflict between the province on one hand, the limitations of the province, of the small town and the opportunities, the adventures, the unknown represented by the big city and the encounters that you can have there. Once the protagonist has moved to the metropolis, his/her transformative education begins, because there where nobody knows him/her, he/she can be born again, develop an individual or independent identity. The protagonist usually has love affairs in the metropolis: Buckley distinguishes between an exotic loving affair and an unhappy one, a disappointment that helps him/her reappraise his/her values.

Because of these new experiences and psychological development, the protagonist is able to start making this accommodation, the end towards which the coming of age narrative aims at — accommodation as a citizen, a worker starting a profession, deciding to marry, settle down, coming to terms with the industrial urban world (typically in English novels there is this conflict between the countryside and the industrial urban reality represented by the big cities), after sometimes we may find the return of the protagonist to his/her small village or town, where after all these experiences, changes that had happened both in his life from an external point of view and from an inner perspective, is able to demonstrate to those who remained that he/she is somebody else, not the old person that they used to know and that he/she had acquired some wisdom or even success, and therefore he/she is able to show folks how much he/she has grown.

A female protagonist

What is the problem of adapting these master plots if we talk about women? Society’s expectations and material conditions — not just assumptions, beliefs, what people expect, the role model to conform to, but also reality, like very limited material access to a set of places (schools, means of transportation since it was not expected for respectable women to travel on public means of transportation, also in terms of professions that were open to women, they weren’t chosen freely but somehow they were forced upon them because their family wasn’t wealthy enough to provide for them). Perhaps to identify a master plot that may make it possible for women's narrative to fit, then we should write something completely different.

There is a critic who is not convinced of the need to talk about a specific Bildungsroman for women characters and who thinks we can still talk about an overall genre that includes female narrative — Franco Moretti in "Il romanzo di formazione"/"The way of the world" (1987). Moretti doesn’t distinguish between a female and a male narrative and only focuses upon the development of the genre in three literary traditions: German, British, and the French ones.

The dominant form in 19th-century literature

According to Moretti, the Bildungsroman is not a subgenre at all: it might have been born as a subgenre of the master genre of the novel, but has become the form that has dominated 19th-century literature, the golden age of Western narrative. Why was this form capable of becoming so representative of an entire epoch? In Moretti’s opinion, there is a key vision for that and he talks about it in the Bildungsroman as a symbolic form. All the great classics of the 19th century are Bildungsroman novels, so it is not a subgenre, but it is dominant because what we consider masterpieces of that tradition are Bildungsroman for a reason that is understandable and extends their influence up to our own age, that it the centrality of youth, the center stage is occupied by a young person. Europe comes to identify with the perspective of a young person and modernity itself becomes a narrative of a young person’s development. The novel ends when the protagonist has become an adult, so what is interesting is that the value becomes being young.

Polyandric personality

The issue of a young person at the center of the Bildungsroman narrative has been characterized by a polyandric personality. This is one of the claims of Moretti. The very way in which the self of the protagonist is approached and represented in the novels (he talked about the 19th forms, which established the form upon which the others will follow) — the idea that the self portrayed in the coming of age novel is a sort of ensemble, complex made of contradictory elements that may be inconsistent sometimes, so the idea that the personality of the protagonist is not necessarily coherent and consistent but made of conflicting, contradictory elements, which tend to exert their power and influence upon the external world in the sense that everything that happens outside the protagonist is attracted to this magnet, to this core that is the protagonist’s personality and it is absorbed, changed by means of experiences in order to become something that serves the protagonist’s development.

It is interesting to observe this dynamic from this point of view because we understand that what changes is the balance between the inside and outside and we can better understand the importance of narrating the growth of the person from an individual perspective, which becomes somehow tentacular, because it absorbs everything that happens on the outside and everything that is outside the protagonist’s personality becomes a means to nourish the personality itself. The protagonists of Bildungsroman are prepared to be unsatisfied. The growth of these protagonists never ends, it is a continuous process. There is an origin story for this personality too and Moretti is very clear about that: this is an outcome of European culture of late 18th century, the very concept of personality so understood is born in this period (even the semantic meaning of the term changes in this period). The idea that every single individual is unique and therefore the protagonists, despite being mainly a middle-class man or woman (common people), is so exceptional that an entire narrative can be devoted to exploring his/her experience.

The Bildungsroman and the possible application to the American context

For a very long time, the Bildungsroman didn’t thrive in the American literary culture, but it wasn’t even part of its literary tradition. The development of literature in the USA has a story of its own.

The historical facts

• 1492: For centuries, it has been described as the discovery of North America by European explorers, and that has been recently questioned in terms of the possibility of describing this event as a discovery: it was not a discovery but an invasion, an intrusion from European settlers of the American continent.
• 1607/1620: Two colonial models: foundation of the colony of Jamestown in Virginia on the Atlantic coast in the South; the foundation of the Puritan colony of Plymouth in Massachusetts. Several colonies had already sprung out on the territory.