A History of the Bildungsroman

Abstract

For Mikhail Bakhtin, looking back across the development of the European novel during the Second World War, the Bildungsroman is a subset of a group of novelistic forms that mediate a relationship to the historical real. The Bildungsroman, for Bakhtin, is unique in its proper situation of individual emergence within historical time. Exemplified by Goethe in the fragment of Bakhtin's work that has survived, it presents the individual 'no longer within an epoch, but between two epochs, at the transition point from one to the other. The transition is accomplished in him and through him. He is forced to become a new, unprecedented human being.' 1 For Franco Moretti, the Bildungsroman mediates the relation between individual desires and socially determined identities, necessitated by the proliferating instabilities that characterise the bourgeois epoch: 'In all its diverse manifestations, the Bildungsroman has always held fast to the notion that the biography of a young individual was the most meaningful viewpoint for the understanding and the evaluation of history.' 2 These two related perspectives on the development of the European novel, though fifty years lie between them, share a common reduction. They idealise an individual for whom gendersex is not fully a component of social struggle.This reduction becomes most obvious in Moretti's reading of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, a novel he determines to be 'infantile' and 'fairy-talelike' (187). For Moretti, Jane's flight from Thornfield is not a stage on her journey to self, her experience of competing narratives of femininity and intellectual life, but a specifically English failure of the novelistic form. 'Any Bildungsroman worthy of the name would have had Jane remain among the needles of Thornfield . . .. facing the imperfect, debatable and perhaps incorrect nature of each fundamental ethical choice' (188). The implication is clear: 'fundamental ethical choices' do not include the 239