Queering gender in contemporary female Bildung narrative

Abstract

The paper explores, in the context of feminist discussions about the Bildungsroman, a contemporary British novel that offers shocking images of female coming of age at the turn of the millennium. Queering gender and introducing male elements into the heroine's process of maturation, the analysed novel appears to raise questions about the continuous relevance of the feminist distinction between male and female version of the genre. The paper however argues that although significantly rewriting both female Bildung and pornographic narratives, Helen Walsh's Brass can still be read as a variation of the female Bildungsroman and an example of its contemporary developments.Keywords female Bildugsroman, male Bildungsroman, feminism, Helen Walsh, genderqueer IntroductionMaturation understood as the "development of an innate genetic potential under the influence of a particular geographical and cultural setting" (Summerfield and Downward, 2010, p. 2) is a relatively recent concept promoted within the humanist tradition which, from the eighteenth century onwards, has shaped the modern conception of selfhood. 1 The large number of literary representations of maturation that appeared during the Age of Enlightenment and the two centuries of its legacy reveal much about changing perceptions of the individual's inner world and its interaction with society. While at the beginning, the narratives of personal development possessed a high measure of thematic and structural idiosyncrasies which often formed the basis of rather narrow definitions of the Bildungsroman as a novel about a young middle-class man, the growing complexities of nineteenth-and twentieth-century society brought diversifications of the genre. The rising need to consider gender, class, ethnicity, race and sexuality in literary representations of maturation and in critical studies about them shows that both writers and critics realize that the traditional humanist idea of an internally developing individual as a unified, masculine, white, middle-class self no longer corresponds with the awareness of the complexities of personal development in the contemporary world.