Margaret Atwood and the Female Bildungsroman

Ellen McWilliams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351919937
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Examining Margaret Atwood's work in the context of the complex history of the Bildungsroman, Ellen McWilliams explores how the genre has been appropriated by women writers in the second half of the twentieth century. She demonstrates that Atwood's early work - her own 'coming of age' fiction, including unpublished works as well as The Edible Woman, Surfacing, and Lady Oracle - both engages with and works against the paradigms of identity which are traditionally associated with the genre. Making extensive use of unpublished manuscripts in the Atwood Collection at the University of Toronto, McWilliams uncovers influences that shaped Atwood's fashioning of identity in her early novels, paying particular attention to Atwood's preoccupation with survival as a key symbol of Canadian literature, culture, and identity. She also considers the genre's afterlife on display in Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and Moral Disorder, in which the formulations of selfhood and identity in Atwood's early fiction are revisited and developed. Atwood emerges as a writer who self-consciously invokes and then undercuts the traditions of the Bildungsroman, a turn that may be read as a means of at once interrogating and perpetuating the form. McWilliams's book furthers our understanding of subjectivity in Atwood's fiction and contributes to ongoing conversations about the role gender and cultural contexts play in reframing generic boundaries.

PART 1
Margaret Atwood and the Canadian Female Bildungsroman

Chapter 1
The Coming of Age of the Female Bildungsroman

The German Bildungsroman: Origins, History, and Controversies

Any attempt to study the relationship of a work of literature to a given genre necessitates an investigation into the history of, and expectations borne by, that tradition. In other words, in order to locate a text (or set of texts) in relation to an extended discourse, an appreciation of the paradigms of that discourse is essential: it can allow us to develop a reading that identifies a tenable relationship between text and tradition, although we must also be wary of resorting to crude extractions of meaning or grasping at tenuous connections. The problem is that every genre inevitably proves to be beset by uncertainties and contradictions, and the Bildungsroman is no exception; indeed, it might be said especially to frustrate any attempt at a working definition. Dictionary entries, which usually encapsulate the genre as the chronicle of a young man’s development and striving towards maturity, fail to acknowledge the controversy that surrounds the tradition, and are therefore incomplete. Thus, while many critics use the term without reference to its complex history, to bypass this controversy, and launch into a reading of Margaret Atwood’s novels as female Bildungsromane, would be to isolate the term from its heritage. It would also be to miss precisely the complexity of the genre on which Margaret Atwood builds. This book will show how Atwood is a writer interested in the complexities and contradictions of the genre, not one who unthinkingly takes on the straightforward dictionary definitions just mentioned. It is exactly because the term is so loaded with meanings from the past that its application needs to be made with some acknowledgement of those templates. While this may not guarantee a solution to the problems posed by the Bildungsroman, it at least establishes a point of reference in contextualizing and analyzing more recent developments in the tradition and, furthermore, illuminates Atwood’s contribution to the reconceptualization of the genre.

The problems with defining the Bildungsroman – even if we for a moment limit our attentions to its German context – are nicely summarized by Todd Kontje in his helpful study The German Bildungsroman: History of a National Genre: “at least three factors combine to produce the history of the Bildungsroman over time: the changing reception of the old literature, the production of the new, and the effort to situate the new literature in the context of the growing literary tradition” (13). An appreciation of these three elements is crucial to any effective strategy for approaching the Bildungsroman. It entails a delicate balancing act of keeping a keen revisionist eye on the works of literature that constitute the early canon of the genre, while simultaneously focusing on the anxious relationship between more recent Bildungsromane and the prototype; it involves a chronological survey of the genre and related critical approaches, and an investigation of the status and validity of the Bildungsroman as a genre. It is with this in mind – and in order to establish more firmly what is at stake in Atwood’s evocation of the Bildungsroman – that I briefly sketch the history of the genre and revisit the key critical questions that surround it.

The political and social developments of eighteenth-century Germany are very often highlighted by historians as the cornerstones of the modern era in German society, providing the conditions that allowed the development of the Bildungsroman as a distinct literary genre. As described by Todd Kontje, in nineteenth-century readings of the early tradition, the idea of Bildung was appropriated as a national as well as individual model of development:

The literary historians transferred the concept of Bildung from the individual human being to the national literature, which records the ripening of the German spirit. Thus, the Bildungsroman becomes the privileged genre of German literature: the organic development of the hero toward maturation and social integration reproduces in miniature the movement of German literature towards its maturity, and this literature in turn, is to inspire the unification of the German nation. (The German Bildungsroman 28–9)

Thus, clear links were established between literary and national conceptions of Bildung.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795– 96) is at the centre of the German tradition, as well as the tradition as it spread throughout the world, and as such it holds a highly privileged position in literary history. It is an epic record of human experience at a pivotal time in Germany’s history and casts a formidable shadow over all subsequent developments in the Bildungsroman genre. In Bildungsroman studies, all roads lead back to Wilhelm Meister and his odyssey to maturity. Every writer who attempts a Bildungsroman and every scholar of the genre pays homage to Wilhelm Meister as the archetype. Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship marked a turning point in the genesis of the genre, exerting an influence over all models of the Bildungsroman that followed in its wake. The novel chronicles the experience of a young man, the “unfledged merchant’s son” (2) that we meet at the beginning of the novel, who leaves his comfortable but limiting bourgeois surroundings to pursue his dreams of working in the theatre. His passion for the theatre is appropriately inspired by a childhood toy, a puppet theatre, which sows the seeds of his enthusiasm for the dramatic arts. Wilhelm’s poetic sensibility is offended by the apparent crassness of his merchant father’s commercial interests and he imagines himself as “The Youth at the Crossroads” of the title of one of his early literary efforts (18). While he sees his engagement with the theatre as a means of momentarily escaping his bourgeois origins and indulging in an alternative fantasy life he soon becomes disillusioned and withdraws from theatrical life. However, in spite of his disappointment and failed ambition, he is reassured by a stranger who he meets (a disguised member of an aristocratic circle – his secret mentors in the course of his journey of self-discovery) that “everything that happens to us leaves its traces, everything contributes imperceptibly to our development” (257). With full ceremony, Wilhelm is eventually issued with a “Certificate of Apprenticeship” and the seal of approval of his collective of guardians: “Hail to you, young man. Your apprenticeship is completed, Nature has given you your freedom” (304). He is finally restored to his son Felix (the product of a passionate but thwarted love affair) and becomes engaged to the beautiful and worthy Natalie, and the novel concludes, full of promise that harmony has been restored.

If Wilhelm Meister is the blueprint for the Bildungsroman, then it can be argued that every subsequent manifestation of the genre engages with the original of the species. In his essay, “The German Bildungsroman for Nonspecialists: An Attempt at Clarification”, Jeffrey Sammons provides a succinct synopsis of the ebb and flow of the Bildungsroman: “the German Bildungsroman emerges in the late eighteenth century, flourishes briefly in the age of Goethe and Romanticism, goes largely underground in the nineteenth century except for a handful of scattered examples … and then re-emerges in the modernist neo-Romantic revival in our own century” (32). Bildungsromane, of course – as we shall see in detail throughout this book – do not always slavishly follow Goethe’s model. The nineteenth century in Germany saw a considerable increase in novels that interrogated the genre through irony and parody, most notably in the suggestively titled The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr (1820–22) by E.T.A Hoffmann, the full title of which reads The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr (together with a fragmentary Biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler on Random Sheets of Waste Paper), which contains deliberately teasing chapter headings such as “My Youthful Experiences”, “My Apprentice Months”, and “Beneficial Consequences of a Superior Education”. A satiric twentieth-century relative to Hoffmann’s novel, appeared in the form of Robert Musil’s modernist monument The Man Without Qualities, which he started writing in 1924 (it was published in its most complete form in 1978). It would seem that, by this point, far removed from the sincerity of Wilhelm Meister and his earnest journey of discovery, the Bildungsroman was being tested and challenged by self-conscious, experimental parodies of the form. Coupled with the fact that the novel as a whole, in the early decades of the twentieth century, faced a new challenge in the form of literary modernism – one that was highly suspicious of realist narratives – the Bildungsroman must have appeared particularly under siege.

However, rather than being abandoned as a historical curiosity, the genre underwent, in the first instance, a (highly regrettable) rebirth in the context of Nazi Germany, where the genre’s close association with nation-building was given a new and sinister dimension (Mayer, Der Deutsche Bildungsroman 272). Decades later, Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959) would respond to this in a revolutionary contribution to one of Germany’s most important and valorized literary categories. It conveys the unfolding events of the Second World War from the perspective of an unlikely Bildungsheld, Oskar Matzerath, who, as stressed by Kontje, “like Wilhelm Meister and Heinrich Lee before him … is a child of his century: a drummer, a cripple, and an idiot” (The German Bildungsroman 59). Oskar Matzerath’s macabre, fantastical, and frequently sacrilegious adventures are far removed from the idealism of his literary predecessors. Narrating his life story from a lunatic asylum, he describes the unfolding events in Germany and Poland between the 1920s and the 1950s to the accompaniment of his tin drum. Here, parody of the Bildungsroman climaxes in a grotesque fantasy based on the premise that “there are no more individualists, because individuality is a thing of the past” (3). The key conventions of the Bildungsroman are exploded, particularly in Oskar’s determined refusal to grow beyond the height of a three-year-old: “I remained the precocious three-year-old, towered over by grownups but superior to all grownups, who refused to measure his shadow with theirs, who was complete both inside and outside, while they, to the very brink of the grave, were condemned to worry their heads about ‘development’…” (46). The Tin Drum, excoriating as it does the genre’s privileging of individual progress and “development”, should surely have been a nail in the coffin of the Bildungsroman. This subversive assault has divided critics; it has been viewed by some as marking a decisive end to the genre and by others as self-consciously sustaining it. For example, while Hans Magnus Enzensberger, in an essay on Günter Grass first published in 1959, cites The Tin Drum as a prime example of the genre, thus ratifying Martin Swales’s insistence that “even the non-fulfillment of consistently intimated expectation can, paradoxically, represent a validation of the genre by means of its controlled critique” (12), David Miles, in dramatic contrast, suggests that Grass’s novel signals an end to the Bildungsroman as “The figure of the dwarf on the cover of Grass’s novel, characteristically more clown than Bildungsheld, seems to be mocking his entire literary parentage of the last two hundred years – the picaros, the confessors and the various tragicomic inversions of both” (990). And yet it proved to be a tenacious animal, as it was to find a new creative expression in socialist engagements with the genre.

One of the most pointed Socialist renegotiations of the classic model of the Bildungsroman is Ulrich Plenzdorf’s The New Sorrows of Young W (1973), which engages explicitly with Goethe’s literary sensation The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). The New Sorrows of Young W charts the growing disillusionment of the son of a factory director with the repressive, paranoid realities of life in the GDR. In its turn, this surge of interest in the Bildungsroman reanimated a number of critical debates about the nature of the genre and its defining features.

Even though, for some time, the Bildungsroman seemed a genre on the brink of extinction, interest in its usefulness as a literary category has seen it undergo varied and sometimes unexpected revivals. Ultimately, for the purpose of literary critics, the most useful, inclusive definition of Bildung can be taken as a physical, intellectual, or indeed spiritual process of cultivation and transformation. This extends to definitions of the Bildungsroman as a literary term and underpins most interpretations of the genre.

As will be addressed in the next section, feminist and other readers have been, at times, vociferous in their objections to the genre on account of its often unapologetic investment in masculine, bourgeois ideologies. I would like briefly to consider how iconoclastic arguments made in favour of abolishing the term are fuelled by the problematic closeness of multiple varieties that prove to be central, rather than peripheral, to the genre as a literary category. It is also necessary to take into account the debate as to whether the term should be applied only in a German context and if and how it might be seen to be relevant to other national literatures – this is an issue which is discussed in detail in the following section, where it will be argued that this German model has much to say to other national literatures.

Notwithstanding the slightly unfortunate disciplinary finger-pointing, Frederick Amrine cuts to the crux of potential problems with classifying the genre when he challenges that:

if one takes “Bildung” in its strict and limited historical sense, then nothing is a Bildungsroman – not even Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre; but if one takes it in the loose sense, something like “development of the protagonist,” then everything is a Bildungsroman. Either horn of this dilemma alone would be sharp enough, but we have arrived at an even worse impasse, and must face both: German Departments having effectively rejected the strict definition, English Departments have sallied forth to champion the vague. (127)

Critics have responded to this in different ways, dividing into what look like two directly opposed schools of thought. Jeffrey Sammons is at the forefront of the lobby to have the Bildungsroman purged from literary terminology:

it seems clear that if the term is to be applicable to the whole universe of discourse of general literature, the claims made for its peculiar Germanness in its initial introduction dissolve. One may be tempted to ask, what of it? Well, one consequence, it seems to me is to introduce an uncontrollable arbitrariness into the usage of the term that, in turn, raises the question why we should retain it at all. (34–5)

James Hardin concurs when he suggests that the term be replaced with something free from the burden of the ideologies of a past age (x). Over time, different critics have gone in search of and canvassed for a more appropriate alternative term. Hartmut Steinecke has suggested Individualroman [Novel of the Individual] (94) as a more neutral substitute for Bildungsroman while Norbert Ratz makes a similar attempt with his coinage Identitätsroman [Novel of Identity] (4). In his essay “Zum Deutschen Antibildungsroman” [On the German Anti-Bildungsroman] (1974), Gerhart Mayer introduces the idea of an Antibildungsroman, claiming that it would allow the critic to make reference to the genre whilst maintaining a distance from its troubled history (41–6). The problem with the Antibildungsroman, however, is that it suggests a pointed and conscious confrontation with the genre when most re-workings in parody and irony tend to be more subtle than this implies. Another difficulty with these arguments is that they risk losing the distinction of a highly fecund literary and critical term; the Bildungsroman has developed a palimpsest of meanings, one that cannot be easily erased. Far more helpful, then, are Francois Jost (125) and Lothar Köhn (87–8), both of whom stress the usefulness of the term. Jost is especially reluctant to issue the “death certificate” (125) of the Bildungsroman, a position that resonates with Todd Kontje’s undogmatic idea of the Bildungsroman as an “umbrella concept” (xi). As will become apparent, Kontje’s and others’ allowing arguments in relation to the term are particularly relevant to the application of the term to literature in English, given that many important studies of novels that engage with the genre are published in Britain or the United States, and, indeed, concern English novels (see the following section). Also, in the field of Bildungsroman scholarship, both in a Germanist context and in relation to other literatures, British and North American critics such as Jerome H. Buckley, Martin Swales, Todd Kontje, and James Hardin have emerged as key contributors to the debate. It would seem, then, that the genre is more suited to migration than previously imagined and that it retains – and perhaps extends – its importance as a creative and interpretative category when removed from its native origins. As I will explore later in this chapter, evidence of this transnational aspect of the genre can be found in the increasingly diverse applications of the Bildungsroman as a literary category, perhaps most unexpectedly in relation to women’s writing and the feminist reclamation of female literary history.

All of these issues lead back to the same question of how the genre can be applied in a way that is convincing without yielding to too rigid or too vague a definition. The most helpful advice offered, in this case, comes from Martin Swales:

I want to insist that the genre works within individual fictions in that it is a component of the expectation to which the specific novels refer and which they vivify by their creative engagement with it. The degree to which the expectation is or is not fulfilled is not the criterion for participation in the genre construct. As long as the model of the genre is intimated as a sustained and sustaining presence in the work in question, then the genre retains its validity as a structuring principle within the palpable stuff of an individual literary creation. In other words, the notion of a genre must, in my view, operate as a function of the imaginative literature written with reference to that concept; it is not a petrified, extraliterary thing. (12)

Swales’s reading of genre as a site where literary conventions and expectations are contested finds sympathy in Tzvetan Toderov’s assessment of “The Origin of Genres”:

The fact that a work “disobeys” its genre does not mean that the genre does not exist. It is tempting to say “quite the contrary”, for two reasons. First because, in order to exist as such, the transgression requires a law – precisely the one that is to be violated. We might go even further and observe that the norm becomes visible – comes into existence – owing only to its transgressions. (196)

This offers a more optimistic slant on apparently “disobedient” engagements with genre, one which is very relevant to the misbehaving fictions found in novels such as Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Abstract
• A Note on the Text
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1 Margaret Atwood and the Canadian Female Bildungsroman
• Part 2 A Canadian Literary Apprenticeship: Atwood’s Early Fiction
• Part 3 Towards Maturity: Atwood’s Later Novels
• Postscript: New Departures: The Life and Times of the Contemporary Canadian Female Bildungsroman
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index