0

ESCOLA DE HUMANIDADES
PROGRAMA DE PÓS-GRADUAÇÃO EM LETRAS
MESTRADO EM TEORIA DA LITERATURA

LUIZA PITREZ GRESSLER

“IT’S TIME YOU STARTED BEIN’ A GIRL”: TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, A FEMALE

BILDUNGSROMAN

Porto Alegre
2019
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PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO GRANDE DO SUL

ESCOLA DE HUMANIDADES

PROGRAMA DE PÓS-GRADUAÇÃO EM LETRAS

MESTRADO EM TEORIA DA LITERATURA

LUIZA PITREZ GRESSLER

“IT’S TIME YOU STARTED BEIN’ A GIRL”: TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, A FEMALE

BILDUNGSROMAN

Porto Alegre
2019
 2

LUIZA PITREZ GRESSLER

“IT’S TIME YOU STARTED BEIN’ A GIRL”: TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, A

FEMALE BILDUNGSROMAN

Dissertação de mestrado apresentada como

requisito parcial para a obtenção do título de
Mestre em Teoria da Literatura pelo Programa de
Pós-Graduação em Letras da Escola de
Humanidades da Pontifícia Universidade Católica
do Rio Grande do Sul.

Orientador: Prof. Dr. Pedro Theobald

Porto Alegre
2019
 3

LUIZA PITREZ GRESSLER

“IT’S TIME YOU STARTED BEIN’ A GIRL”: TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, A FEMALE

BILDUNGSROMAN

Dissertação de mestrado apresentada como

requisito parcial para a obtenção do título de
Mestre em Teoria da Literatura pelo Programa de
Pós-Graduação em Letras da Escola de
Humanidades da Pontifícia Universidade Católica
do Rio Grande do Sul.

Aprovada em _____ de ___________________ de ________.

BANCA EXAMINADORA:

______________________________________
Prof. Dr. Pedro Theobald – PUCRS

______________________________________
Prof. Dr. Norman Roland Madarasz – PUCRS

______________________________________
Profa. Dra. Maria Rita Drumond Viana – UFSC

Porto Alegre
2019
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In memory of Ita, Meiza and Polly.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost, I would like to thank CNPq and PPGL-PUCRS, for having granted
me such a rare opportunity of financial assistance, even rarer now, which has allowed me to
commit full-time to this research.
To all professors and staff at PUCRS School of Humanities, I thank you for your
inspiration, solicitude and kindness when help was needed.
I mostly express my gratitude toward my advisor, Professor Pedro Theobald, for his
attentiveness and patience throughout this journey. Without your counselling, this thesis
would not have been possible.
I especially thank Professor Norman Roland Madarasz and Professor Maria Rita
Drumond Viana for their kindness and for accepting the invitation to evaluate this work.
I would like to thank Cristina Ferreira Pinto, whose work O Bildungsroman feminino:
quatro exemplos brasileiros (1990) has paved the way for this research, as it was a primary
contact with the discussions on the Bildungsroman and an introduction to so many other
necessary studies for the development of this research.
I would like to thank my parents and my sister Alice, my family, friends and
colleagues for providing me strength to carry on. Thank you for all your love and support, you
are the best.
At last, I thank Alice, for always being there for me.
 6

The soul has moments of escape —

When bursting all the doors —
She dances like a Bomb, abroad,
And swings upon the Hours.
Emily Dickinson
 7

ABSTRACT
This master’s thesis presents an analysis of North-American author Harper Lee’s To Kill a
Mockingbird (1960) in the light of the female Bildungsroman. We aim to focus on the
theoretical definitions of the novel’s subgenre and how they feature in Lee’s novel and
possibly propose new definitions. The question that aims to be answered with this work is:
What essentially causes To Kill a Mockingbird to be categorized as a female Bildungsroman?
Scout, the protagonist/narrator in To Kill a Mockingbird, reports a period of her life which
was marked by decisive events to the girl’s personal development. Through her journey,
Scout relies on the support of her intimate relations, such as her father Atticus, her brother
Jem, and Calpurnia, the family cook, as primary references for the development of her
identity. Scout must also go through the conflicting moment in her life when social
expectations which dictate what it means to be a woman or, in her case, what it means to be a
girl, are suddenly imposed to her. At the same time, the girl observes how the trial of a black
man accused of rape by a white woman unfolds within a deeply racist community and the
combination of all these factors cause her to gradually lose her innocence. The fundamental
authors for this thesis are Morgenstern (2009), Dilthey (1997), Lukács (1998), Mann (apud
BRUFORD 2009) and Bakhtin (1986), regarding the traditional concept of Bildungsroman.
For the approach to the female literary tradition and the female Bildungsroman, Gilbert and
Gubar (2000), and Abel, Hirsch, and Langland (1983) are the main authors who
complemented the theoretical background for this research. This thesis has evidenced that the
characteristics of To Kill a Mockingbird’s narrative correspond to the definitions of the
concept of female Bildungsroman and that it might propose new definitions for the narrative
subgenre; for instance, a revision of the narrative of apprentice structure, and how a
protagonist initially raised mostly unfamiliar to the pressures of gender roles develops a more
autonomous personality than other female Bildungsroman protagonists who are raised within
the limitations of such social expectations.

Key-words: Female Bildungsroman. Harper Lee. To Kill a Mockingbird. Female Authorship.

 8

RESUMO
Esta dissertação apresenta uma análise do romance O sol é para todos (1960), da escritora
norte-americana Harper Lee, à luz do romance de formação (Bildungsroman) feminino.
Propõe-se enfatizar como as definições do subgênero do romance se configuram na obra em
questão e possivelmente apresentar novas definições. A pergunta que se objetiva responder
com o trabalho é: o que essencialmente faz com que O sol é para todos seja categorizado
como romance de formação feminino? Em O sol é para todos, a protagonista/narradora Scout
relata um período de sua vida marcado por acontecimentos decisivos para sua formação
pessoal. Ao longo de sua trajetória, Scout conta com a ajuda de suas relações mais próximas,
como o pai Atticus, o irmão Jem e a cozinheira Calpúrnia, referências essenciais para a
formação de sua identidade. Scout também precisa passar pelo conflitante momento em que
expectativas sociais que ditam o que é ser mulher, ou menina, como no caso da narradora,
passam a lhe ser impostas. Ao mesmo tempo, ela observa os desdobramentos do julgamento
de um homem negro acusado de estuprar uma mulher branca dentro de uma comunidade
extremamente racista. A combinação desses elementos leva a menina a gradualmente perder
sua inocência. Os principais autores que fundamentam este trabalho são Morgenstern (2009),
Dilthey (1997), Lukács (1998), Mann (apud BRUFORD 2009) e Bakhtin (1986), acerca do
Bildungsroman tradicional. Dentro da do romance de formação feminino, as principais
autoras que complementam a fundamentação do trabalho são Gilbert e Gubar (2000) e Abel,
Hirsch, e Langland (1983). Esta dissertação evidencia que as características que compõem a
narrativa em O sol é para todos encontram correspondência com as definições do conceito de
romance de formação feminino e que este romance pode propor novas definições para o
subgênero; como por exemplo, uma revisão da estrutura da narrativa de aprendizado, e como
uma protagonista inicialmente criada praticamente sem a pressão imposta por papeis de
gênero desenvolve uma personalidade mais autônoma em comparação a outras protagonistas
de romances de formação femininos, criadas dentro das limitações de tais expectativas
sociais.

Palavras-chave: Romance de formação feminino. Harper Lee. O sol é para todos. Autoria
feminina.
 9

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................ 10

1 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE BILDUNGSROMAN ................................................. 13

1.1 On the origin of the term ................................................................................................ 13
1.2 From different perspectives ............................................................................................ 19
1.3 Outside of German boundaries ...................................................................................... 30

2 THE FEMALE BILDUNGSROMAN ............................................................................... 41

2.1 To be a woman, a woman writer .................................................................................... 41
2.2 To become a woman in fiction ......................................................................................... 49
2.3 To behold a womanly tradition ....................................................................................... 58

3 TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, A FEMALE BILDUNGSROMAN ................................... 67

3.1 An outline for To Kill a Mockingbird .............................................................................. 67
3.2 Scout’s personal development: Analysing To Kill a Mockingbird in the light of the
female Bildungsroman ............................................................................................................. 73

CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................................... 98

REFERENCES .................................................................................................................... 100

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INTRODUCTION

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) is a modern classic of North-American

literature that narrates a period within the childhood of Scout during the 1930s in Alabama.
The novel also narrates the trial of a black man accused of raping a white woman. As it
represents a transitive period of its protagonist’s life, the novel is commonly categorized as a
twentieth-century female Bildungsroman. The narrative, of course, approaches more than one
theme and is not focused exclusively on the plot of Scout’s development: it tackles polemic
topics such as class, gender, and, specially, racism, which have caused the book to be
constantly banned from North-American schools even up to date for its use of racist terms1.
Even though To Kill a Mockingbird is almost sixty years old and a most relevant novel in
its place of origin, regarded as a modern classic, this literary work has not been frequently
studied in Brazilian academic research on literary theory2. In Brazil, To Kill a Mockingbird
was edited and translated as O sol é para todos. Its first Brazilian translation dates back to the
1960s, but in 2015, with the world publication of the novel’s original manuscript Go Set a
Watchman, a new translation of the classic novel has been published in the same year. This
reedition of Lee’s work in a new translation to Portuguese by Beatriz Horta might renew the
interest of Brazilian readership on To Kill a Mockingbird and promote new academic research
on it and, now, Go Set a Watchman as well.
Because To Kill a Mockingbird discusses different themes that make Lee’s novel such a
rich one, analyses of this work commonly approach the themes it tackles, mostly
concentrating on the debate on racial prejudice. Ware (2010) and Seidel (2010) analyse the
influences on Scout’s childhood and identity and state that the novel is fundamentally a
female Bildungsroman. These analyses, however, do not approach the novel as a female
Bildungsroman in a theoretical light.
Thus, in order not to simply attain to stating that the novel is a female Bildungsroman, it
became necessary to analyse To Kill a Mockingbird in an attempt to promote new
investigations on the work and, most importantly, to relate it to the tradition of the female
Bildungsroman by examining how its categories may apply to the narrative. To develop this
work, we start from the question, what essentially causes To Kill a Mockingbird to be

1
Available at: <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2018/02/07/a-school-district-drops-to-kill-
a-mockingbird-and-huckleberry-finn-over-use-of-the-n-word/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.52a000a330f5>
(access November 27, 2018).
2
A research on database such as Capes and Scielo found no works that approach Lee’s novel in Brazil. A
research on Google Scholar, on the other hand, found articles that approach the novel, but these articles were in
the area of Law.
 11

categorized as a female Bildungsroman? To investigate the aspects that fundamentally make

the novel an exemplar of the sub-genre, specifically within the female literary tradition, we
had to start with a research that presented the studies on the Bildungsroman.
The concept of Bildungsroman is originally related to the eighteenth-century literary
production of German culture. The central idea of these novels is to depict a male
protagonist’s formative years, specifically, how he develops internally before assuming his
role in society. Moreover, narratives of personal development commonly present
autobiographical elements from the author’s life. The term was coined by Karl Morgenstern
(2009) in 1819 and since then, the model for the sub-genre has been Johann Wolfgang
Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795-1796). Goethe’s novel narrates the
personal development of a young man who goes on a journey which promotes his interaction
with the world outside his original circumstances, a necessary process to learn about himself
and society in order to make the transition to adulthood. Studies on the Bildungsroman that
have developed since the nineteenth century by renowned authors such as Dilthey (1997),
Lukács (1998) and Bakhtin (1986), relates the Bildungsroman to the male gender. Bakhtin’s
(1986) definition exemplifies that the genre is essentially a narrative that covers the process of
becoming a man.
However, there had been many other novels which portray the development of female
protagonists as early as the nineteenth century, as the example of Charlotte Brontë’s classic
Jane Eyre (1847) attests, but they had not been approached nor even mentioned by any of
those male authors who discussed the traditional Bildungsroman. This disregard for novels of
female development clearly related to the secondary role that women have played in the
history of literary tradition. This historical undermining is inextricably associated to the
practiced patriarchal culture in Western societies, which delegated roles of passivity to the
woman and subjugated those who attempted to change this established convention.
Yet, those women writers responsible for transcribing the female experience into
literature found a way to communicate them to one another and establish a literary tradition,
as Gilbert and Gubar’s (2000) study demonstrates. The authors’ study began with the 1970s
movement of feminist literary theory which aimed to revise the history of literature in order to
bring the works of women writers to light. Additionally, these authors meant to evidence a
female literary tradition that has existed concomitantly to the masculine literary tradition,
even hough submersed, as early as the nineteenth century.
Abel, Hirsch, and Langland’s (1983) The Voyage In: Narratives of Female Development
was a necessary study which brought attention to the fact that the definitions of the traditional
 12

Bildungsroman could not simply be transferred to female novels, given that men and
women’s developments represent completely oppositional experiences. This way, the authors
and the contributors to this work aimed to revise the traditional concept of the novel sub-genre
in order to account for the female experience. As the authors attest, gender is a determinant
for narratives of development, as it modifies their structure, their psychological aspects and,
mostly, the social expectations placed upon the protagonist. Up to date, this remains as a
fundamental source for studies on the female Bildungsroman, which demonstrates the need
for further research on this sub-genre of the novel.
This master’s thesis is divided in three chapters. The first chapter presents an approach to
the development of studies on the Bildungsroman, from Morgenstern’s (2009) coinage of the
term to the contributions of Dilthey (1997), Lukács’s (1998), Mann’s (apud BRUFORD
2009), and Bakhtin’s (1986). We also present a discussion on the association between
narratives of personal development and the autobiography. Three examples of Bildungsroman
from the twentieth century are briefly presented and commented: James Joyce’s (2001) The
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, J. D. Salinger’s (2014) The Catcher in the Rye and
Stephen Chbosky’s (2009) The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
In the second chapter, we move closer to the fundamental studies for the development of
the present work. We begin with a brief study on the woman writer and discuss her social
condition and the obstacles she has been given through time. Then, we move on to present the
discussion on the female Bildungsroman, based on Abel, Hirsch, and Langland’s (1983)
study. We briefly present three examples of female Bildungsroman and observe how they also
feature autobiographical elements and relate to the concept of female Bildungsroman:
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Sylvia Plath’s (2013)
The Bell Jar.
Finally, the third and last chapter presents a brief outline of Harper Lee’s To Kill a
Mockingbird, contextualizing the novel and identifying it as a female Bildungsroman. Then,
at last, we present the analysis which aims to evidence how the concepts and characteristics of
the female Bildungsroman are featured in Lee’s novel and how this dissertation might
promote new definitions for the subgenre.
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1 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE BILDUNGSROMAN

The Bildungsroman modeled after Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s

Apprenticeship has its origins in eighteenth century Germany. This original model is
characterized for depicting the development of a man as his inner self confronts the external
world, this being a necessary confrontation in order to reach maturity. The sub-genre has been
studied since its emergence by authors from Germany and outside of it. There are oppositional
views on the sub-genre, which mostly isolate the eighteenth century German Bildungsroman
from the other novels characterized as Bildungsroman either produced in different periods of
time or coming from different cultures. Yet it is a fact that a variety of works that apply to the
category had been produced even before the model of Goethe’s novel was established. From
the nineteenth century on, the Bildungsroman has suffered modifications in its characteristics,
especially during the twentieth century, which witnessed the increase of the autobiographical
element in the narrative composition of the novel of formation.

1.1 On the origin of the term

Bildungsroman, frequently translated to the English language as “formation novel”, is a

German term closely related to Erziehungsroman (“education novel”) (CUDDON, 1998). It is
used in literary studies in reference to novels that narrate the transitional period from
adolescence to adulthood, commonly of a male character’s, depicting his process of reaching
maturity through life experiences (CUDDON, 1998). This is a summarized definition of the
term, concerning the thematic aspects that categorize worldly novels of development from
different times in history. As Flavio Quintale Neto (2005) observes, before delineating a
concept for Bildungsroman, it is necessary to understand the complexity of meaning
involving the German word Bildung.
Even though Bildung is conventionally translated as “formation” or “development”, Rolf
Selbmann3 believes it is impossible to translate the word into another word, as it best
translates into a concept (QUINTALE NETO, 2005). Yet the concept of Bildung cannot be
simplified either, on account of its multiple sides and uses. With its dual roots in Hellenistic
tradition of cultura animi (“spiritual cultivation”), which was later on applied to 1700s
pietistic education, and the Christian doctrine of men as God’s image, the concept of Bildung
3
As mentioned by Tobias Boes (2009), Rolf Selbmann is a German academic and the author of a relevant work
on the German Bildungsroman, titled Zur Geschichte des Deutschen Bildungsromans (1988).
 14

is strictly tied to the idea of education as identified in Kant’s views on pedagogy

(SILJANDER & SUTINEN, 2012). The common ground to all these facets seems to be the
sense of development.
Among these distinct origins of the word, according to Quintale Neto (2005), the one most
relatable to the concept of Bildungsroman — considering Goethe’s model, Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship (1795-1796) — is the medieval concept of Imago Dei, the Christian belief that
men were created as a resemblance of the image of God. Having lost this image in the original
sin, men could only find reconciliation with divinity in the process of becoming themselves,
meaning, the recovery of the lost image (QUINTALE NETO, 2005). The linguistic root of
Bildung reinforces this relationship: Bild means “image”, and its derivative bilden means “to
form”, “to create” (SILJANDER & SUTINEN, 2012).
In literary criticism, contrasts can also be found in the views on the Bildungsroman, and
such opposing ideas can amount to two extremities: there are critics who defend that the
Bildungsroman is exclusively a novel of the German nation, whose main concern was to
promote German thought, while others perceive it as a universal modern literary reaction to
the need of fulfilling one’s destiny outside of pre-established traditions (BOES, 2012). Even
so, these disparate currents of criticism seem to agree that the emergence of the
Bildungsroman in the second half of the eighteenth century associates to the rise of German
idealism (BOES, 2012).
To apprehend these nuances and how they have unfolded throughout the centuries, it is
essential to become acquainted with the origin of the term Bildungsroman. In the history of
Bildungsroman, Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) is the one responsible for making the term
known in literary criticism with his 1906 work Poetry and Experience, even though the
German philosopher was not the person who named this sub-genre of the novel (BOES,
2009).
Dating back to the early nineteenth century, the term Bildungsroman was actually coined
by Karl Morgenstern (1770-1852), a German philologist who exposed his conception of what
he perceived as “the most noble category of the novel” (MORGENSTERN, 2009, p. 654) in a
lecture from 1819 titled On the Nature of the Bildungsroman (Über das Wesen des
Bildungsromans)4. This was a celebratory speech on the occasion of the seventeenth

4
Boes (2009), an academic researcher on the Bildungsroman and the translator of Morgenstern’s lecture to
English, observes that the philologist had already used the term Bildungsroman in a previous lecture from 1809
titled Über den Geist und Zusammenhang einer Reihe philosophischer Romane (“On the Spirit and Cohesion of
a Number of Philosophical Novels”), self-published in 1817. However, the 1819 lecture presents a more
consistent definition of the Bildungsroman.
 15

anniversary of the University of Dorpat (present-day Tartu, Estonia) where Morgenstern was
at the time employed as a professor of rhetoric (BOES, 2012).
Morgenstern’s coinage of the term, a discovery only made in the early 1960s by Fritz
Martini5 (BOES, 2009), brings his name to be often mentioned in studies on the subject. This
lecture is of relevance not only for his coinage and the settling of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship as the model of Bildungsroman, but also for his more universal perspective on
this division of the novel, which according to Tobias Boes (2009), is surprisingly opposed to
Dilthey’s nationalistic view.
In his introduction to the lecture, Morgenstern claims that the name Bildungsroman “[had]
to [his] knowledge never been used before” (2009, p. 650), yet he mentions that some might
have previously used a different term, Familienroman (“family novel”), to allude to novels of
the kind about which he wished to speak, this being in his view a label that fell short of
defining such works. The German philologist then broadly speaks of the novel: how theorists
approximated it to the heroic epic, despite being written in prose, and how it was regarded as
epic literature since it is, after all, a fictional work that narrates a story (MORGENSTERN,
2009).
The necessity of a brand-new adequate work of theory for the genre, “written in a
philosophical spirit and with critical erudition” (MORGENSTERN, 2009, p. 650) was a
concern to the philologist, considering that in those times there were no meticulous studies on
the novel in his judgement, although he does mention Blanckenburg’s Essay on the Novel
(1774), which he considered insufficient forty-five years following its publication. What
Morgenstern (2009) requested then was a clearer examination on the divergences between the
novel and the dramatic and epic genres, both properly theorized before.
Mostly, the lecture demonstrates how these differences operate, particularly between the
novel and the epic. Nevertheless, Boes (2009) notices that Morgenstern still carried an old-
fashioned perspective with this method of comparing the novel to drama and the epic, since it
is quite similar to the way Blanckenburg structured his ideas in the previously mentioned
work which Morgenstern criticized for its insufficiency, Essay on the Novel. As in other
eighteenth century studies, Blanckenburg’s work was grounded on a “rhetorical approach”
which “…tried to give a technical account of how the new genre worked, how it differed from
established literary forms such as the epic or the drama […]” (BOES, 2012, p. 14).

5
Boes (2009) also mentions Fritz Martini’s article on the discovery of Morgenstern’s coinage, which is printed
in Rolf Selbmann’s Zur Geschichte des Deutschen Bildungsromans.
 16

Morgenstern’s brief observations concerning the differences between novel and drama
derive from a selected passage of the literary work the philologist praised the most: Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. The essence of the argument taken from Goethe’s words is
that novel and drama converge in presenting human nature and action, whereas they diverge
in terms of pace: “the novel needs to progress slowly, drama, by contrast, in a hurry”
(MORGENSTERN, 2009, p. 651). This, Morgenstern (2009) also notices, relates to the fact
that in drama the characters are presented as entirely developed beings, while in the novel
their development is expected to occur moderately throughout the narrative.
Still, a great part of his commentaries presents the contrasts between the novel and the
epic, which are summarized in three topics. The most relevant difference between the two
genres according to Morgenstern (2009) is the third and last one: in the epic, the hero’s
actions have an impact and alter the world around him, while in the novel, the world around
the hero and those who surround him influence the progress of his interior development. This
remark finally reveals the Bildungsroman, the category that in the speaker’s opinion
represents the essence of the novel genre, especially in comparison to the epic. In the author’s
words,

We may call a novel a Bildungsroman first and foremost on account of its

content, because it represents the development of the hero in its beginning
and progress to a certain stage of completion, but also, second, because this
depiction promotes the development of the reader to a greater extent than
any other kind of novel (MORGENSTERN, 2009, p. 654-655).

In this ancient thematic definition, the basic premise for the general Bildungsroman can
already be found, for it is known that in literary studies the novels of the kind are essentially
labeled as such for depicting the process of development of its main character (CUDDON,
1998). Nonetheless, Morgenstern also specified a concern with the reader’s development in
the Bildungsroman, a pedagogical view which indicates another reminiscence of an
eighteenth century frame of mind (BOES, 2009). This can relate to Morgenstern’s
predilection for Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, for as Quintale Neto (2005)
observes, Goethe believed in the idea of humanistic education through the novel and in
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship’s case the development of the young man in the principles
of Humanism transcends the narrative and aims directly at its readership.
First published in Germany between the years 1795 and 1796, Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship narrates the formative years of its eponymous character who must face the
world outside his circumstances while “mastering” his inner self in order to make the
 17

transition from young man to adult. The book had a sequel, Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman
Years (1821), written in the 1790s and published only years later.
In Apprenticeship, Wilhelm’s initial driving force in life is his love for theater, an
affection he has nurtured since childhood. His parents, however, consider this a frivolous
enthusiasm, and expect him to take a serious interest in the family’s business. When his father
asks him to travel for commercial affairs, Wilhelm sees this as an opportunity to fulfill his
dream of a life on stage. However, his lived experiences, especially of becoming actively
involved with theater, could only demonstrate his romantic ideals — his inner dispositions —
to be disparate from concrete social reality, a rough yet fundamental understanding for his
development: “From youth, I have been accustomed to direct the eyes of my spirit inwards
rather than outwards; and hence it is very natural that to a certain extent I should be
acquainted with man, while of men I have not the smallest knowledge” (GOETHE, 2000, p.
150).
This process of meeting with the unfamiliar exterior reality is related to the humanistic
idea that “man is ever the most interesting object to man” (GOETHE, 2000, p. 64), which
reflects the previously mentioned personal belief of Goethe and is key to the narrative of
Wilhelm’s development. Wilhelm’s efforts, above all things, are directed toward his self-
development, to the improvement of his personality so he can grow as a human being. In the
narrative, the portrayal of human nature in Shakespeare’s Hamlet fascinates and takes
Wilhelm to meditate upon the subject. Yet he must trespass the bounds of contemplation in
order to complete his process of apprenticeship, and this can only be achieved once he leaves
the dramatic texts behind in order to actively take part in the world: “I am abandoning the
stage: I mean to join myself with men whose intercourse, in every sense, must lead me to a
sure and suitable activity” (GOETHE, 2000, p. 274).
After all, Wilhelm thought his life had always been guided by destiny only to realize that
his development so far had been guarded (and consequently guided) by other men, the
members of a secret society which envisioned the education of young men in the principles of
Humanism. The completion of his development comes symbolically in the form of a text,
which decrees that he has finally become the man he had always been determined to be: “Hail
to thee, young man! Thy Apprenticeship is done; Nature has pronounced thee free”
(GOETHE, 2000, p. 277). As Dilthey (1997) observes, Wilhelm’s narrative comes to an end
when he meets a sense of completion for his apprenticeship and is prepared to assume his
identity, his role in society.
 18

This way, Morgenstern (2009) found the most suitable representative for his definition of
Bildungsroman in Goethe’s narrative of becoming oneself, regarding it a favorite among other
Bildungsromane. Even though, Morgenstern (2009) does not fail to acknowledge Wieland’s
Agathon (1766), a prior example of German Bildungsroman which, however, emphatically
narrates the aesthetic development of the hero, instead of his educational or religious
development (FRIEDERICH, 1951). In the philologist’s opinion, no other novel had so
successfully portrayed human development before Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship
(MORGENSTERN, 2009). Authors after Morgenstern have traditionally kept Goethe’s novel
as the model of Bildungsroman, the most relevant works among them being Dilthey (1906)
and Lukács’s (1920) studies. Thoman Mann (1923) and Bakhtin (1979)6 have also praised the
novel in their works.
Morgenstern observes how Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship “presents to us German life,
German thought and the morals of [his] time through its hero, its scenery and environment”
(2009, p. 655) and believes the modern “German environment” to be the “…most suitable for
the purpose of representing a general formation” (2009, p. 656). Boes (2012) argues that
Morgenstern’s sense of “German times” is aspirational and as far from the reality of his times
as the times of Goethe’s novel, especially because a unified Germany was inexistent then.
Still, Boes (2012) also recognizes in the philologist’s lecture a transparent romantic
nationalism, common to the times of Morgenstern’s lecture, after the Napoleonic Wars.
Another relevant remark from Morgenstern’s thoughts is that the philologist had
distinguished in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, decades before Thomas Mann had, the
connection between the narrative of personal development and the narrative of social criticism
— Bildungsroman and Zeitroman7 (BOES, 2009). Morgenstern (2009, p. 656) perceives how
it “[depicts] a human being who develops toward his true nature by means of a collaboration
of his inner dispositions with outer circumstances”.
Despite the brevity of Morgenstern’s criticism and the fact that at first it only circulated in
an obscure academic environment8, acknowledging his thoughts and definitions is necessary
for a modern panorama of the Bildungsroman. Besides Morgenstern’s establishing the term

6
Bakhtin’s considerations on the Bildungsroman were first published in Moscow in 1979; however, the material
for this study was produced between the years 1936 and 1938, as Michael Holquist (1986) reports.
7
According to the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms, “in German the term denotes a novel which is mainly
concerned with an author’s critical analysis of the age in which he or she lives” (CUDDON, 1998, p. 991).
8
As Boes (2009) observes, Morgenstern’s lecture was not so diffused specially for geographical reasons, since
he taught at a “provincial university” and the text was published in the following year in an equally “provincial
journal”.
 19

and indissolubly associating it with Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, the

philologist’s also contributes with other possibilities of approach for the Bildungsroman:

To the contemporary critic, Morgenstern’s essay, despite all its archaisms,

thus offers an approach that would connect the classical Bildungsroman to
many of the broader intellectual currents of its time: the move toward social
realism in literature and the arts, the yearning for the shared experiences of a
national community and not least the search for an adequate way to represent
the dynamic forces of history (BOES, 2009, p. 649).

Knowing now the history and specially the content of Morgenstern’s lecture, which
has not circulated in academia as much as the works of those who succeeded him, it is
essential to present the perspectives of those most acclaimed authors from the late nineteenth
and the early twentieth centuries: Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Lukács (1885-1971), Thomas
Mann (1875-1955) and Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), who have investigated and perpetuated
the Bildungsroman in literary criticism inside and out of its original German context.

1.2 From different perspectives

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, literary criticism on the
Bildungsroman began to develop not only in Germany but also outside of the novel
subgenre’s place of origin. What these authors all seem to agree is on the developmental
principle of the novel of formation. However, these authors present their thoughts from
different perspectives: the national perspective, as it is the case of Dilthey (1997) and Mann
(1923, apud BRUFORD, 2009), the aesthetic and historico-philosophical perspective, as in
Lukács (1988) and the cultural historical perspective, as in Bakhtin (1986).
It is known that the diffusion of the concept of Bildungsroman in literary criticism is
attributed to Dilthey’s Poetry and Experience, published in 1906, even though the German
philosopher had briefly mentioned the term in a previous work from 1870 titled Life of
Schleiermacher (BOES, 2009). In Poetry and Experience, Dilthey (1997) discusses the
Bildungsroman from a national standpoint, that is, in the sense of German Bildungsroman
from the late eighteenth century.
The philosopher believes self-cultivation to be a relevant characteristic of the German
Bildungsroman, for the novels of the kind “gave expression to the individualism of a culture
whose sphere of interest was limited to private life” (DILTHEY, 1997, p. 335). The novels
most prized by the author, such as Hyperion and Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, mirror
 20

the impact that Rousseau’s Emile (1762) had in Germany, as it aroused a national “interest in
inner culture” (DILTHEY, 1997, p. 335). In addition, Dilthey (1997, p. 236) discerns in
Goethe’s work traits of the German Enlightenment in his preference for inner matters rather
than external ones: “Goethe adopted as his own the most characteristic tendency of this
German Enlightenment — which was determined by [Germans’] entire history — that of
man’s immersion in himself and in the ideal of his universal nature”.
In his approach to Goethe and the relevance of his contribution to German literature,
Dilthey (1997, p. 269) observes how the poet’s own development took place “at a time when
economic life, the legal safeguards of bourgeois affairs and religious freedom were steadily
expanding in Germany”, a favorable context for his innovative poetics to flourish. This freer
environment for the expansion of one’s nature, since the decadence of Protestant values of
family and social structures found assistance in the works of literary authors from France and
England (DILTHEY, 1997).
Dilthey (1997, p. 336) also recognizes as a characteristic of the German
Bildungsroman its relationship with the ideals of Humanism, in the sense of “[…]
‘personality’, as a unified and permanent form of human existence”. In this way, he praises
the achievements of Goethe, as well as the poet’s contemporary authors, for promoting said
humanistic ideals in their novels, since “this optimism of personal development […] has never
been expressed more joyously and confidently than in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister: an immortal
radiance of enjoyment of life shines through this novel and those of the Romantics”
(DILTHEY, 1997, p. 336).
Dilthey (1997, p. 335) exposes his definition of the German Bildungsroman:

Beginning with Wilhelm Meister and Hesperus9, they all portray a young
man of their time: how he enters life in a happy state of naiveté seeking
kindred souls, finds friendship and love, how he comes into conflict with the
hard realities of the world, how he grows to maturity through diverse life
experiences, finds himself, and attains certainty about his purpose in the
world.

Moreover, the author comments on Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and how, on the
one hand, with this novel “Goethe’s goal was the story of a person preparing himself for an
active life” (DILTHEY, 1997, p. 335) and how, on the other, the narrative, as many
Bildungsromane from the same period, “…took its protagonist just to the point where he is
about to act decisively in the world” (DILTHEY, 1997, p. 343).

9
Jean Paul’s Hesperus (1795).
 21

Dilthey (1997) also argues that novels of biographical structure have been published
before, as the example of Fielding’s Tom Jones. In his opinion, however, “the Bildungsroman
is distinguished from all previous biographical compositions in that it intentionally and
artistically depicts that which is universally human in such a life-course” (DILTHEY, 1997, p.
335), again emphasizing a broader humanistic concern within the sub-genre of the novel.
Regarding the status of Dilthey in the history of Bildungsroman criticism, Boes (2009,
p. 648) argues that his “approach spawned a long tradition emphasizing the genre’s concern
with ‘inwardness’ and ‘personality’ at the expense of social concerns and interpersonal
relations”, which as previously mentioned is opposed to Morgenstern’s perception of the sub-
genre.
In Theory of the Novel, Lukács (1988) presents an essay on Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship and with this work the author demonstrates his views on what he calls the
novel of education form from a philosophical perspective. In a later preface from 1962,
Lukács (1988) mentions Dilthey’s Poetry and Experience10 as a groundbreaking work for
intellectual pursuits. In this same preface, the philosopher advises of his state of mind while
producing the text, since his motivation to write the treatise came from the outbreak of the
First World War, his position being of absolute aversion to the war and those who endorsed it:
“Thus it was written in a mood of permanent despair over the state of the world” (LUKÁCS,
1988, p. 12).
Lukács (1988) defines Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship’s theme, “aesthetically and
historico-philosophically”, as based on the individual’s interactions with society. It is “the
reconciliation of the problematic individual, guided by his lived experience of the ideal, with
concrete social reality” (LUKÁCS, 1988, p. 132), considering that the main character’s
individuality — as well as the form — finds itself in-between what the author defines as
“abstract idealism” (concerning objectivity) and “Romanticism of disillusionment”
(concerning subjectivity).
In this type of novel, this resolution between individual and social, despite the hardships
of life, “is ultimately possible to achieve” (LUKÁCS, 1988, p. 132). The abstract ideal,
guiding the character’s actions, aims to uncover “[…] responses to the innermost demands of
his soul in the structures of society” (LUKÁCS, 1988, p. 133). In other words, the conflicts of
the inner self, as the individual acts out in external reality, are necessary struggles in order to
reach maturity (LUKÁCS, 1988).

10
In the consulted edition of Theory of the Novel, the original title, “Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung”, was
translated as “Lived Experience and Literary Creation”.
 22

Concerning the hero, Lukács (1988, p. 134) argues that the character’s centrality in this
kind of narrative is simply a matter of chance, since it relies on the articulation between
“ideal” and “soul”: “the hero is picked out of an unlimited number of men who share his
aspirations, and is placed at the centre of the narrative only because his seeking and finding
reveal the world’s totality most clearly”.
The philosopher discerns a perceptible humanistic sense of harmony between abstract
idealism and Romanticism in Goethe’s novel, seeing that the development of the hero is
supposed to present not only action but also contemplation in the form he denominates “novel
of education”, a synonym for Bildungsroman:

This is why Goethe in Wilhelm Meister steers a middle course between

abstract idealism, which concentrates on pure action, and Romanticism,
which interiorises action and reduces it to contemplation. Humanism, the
fundamental attitude of this type of work, demands a balance between
activity and contemplation, between wanting to mould the world and being
purely receptive towards it. This form has been called the ‘novel of
education’ — rightly, because its action has to be a conscious, controlled
process aimed at a certain goal: the development of qualities in men which
would never blossom without the active intervention of other men and
circumstances; whilst the goal thus attained is in itself formative and
encouraging to others — is itself a means of education (LUKÁCS, 1988, p.
135).

Moreover, the author observes the existence of novels of education which tend to
portray a non-symbolic subjectivity. These novels focus on memorialist aspects rather than
more universal developmental ones, a “dangerous” approach in the philosopher’s opinion:
“The hero and his destiny then have no more than personal interest and the work becomes a
private memoir of how a certain person succeeded in coming to terms with his world”, to
which he complements by stating that this is the case of the “overwhelming majority of
modern ‘novels of education’” (LUKÁCS, 1988, p. 137).
Lukács (1988, p. 138) believes that “the completion of the process of education must
inevitably idealise and romanticise certain parts of reality and abandon others to prose”, the
latter in cases where their significance is void. However, the world that the hero achieves in
the novel must be in complete accordance to reality, and here a secondary “danger” to the
novel of education is detected, one that, as Lukács (1988, p. 139) observes, only Goethe was
able to avoid, even though partially: “romanticising reality to a point where it becomes a
sphere totally beyond reality or, still more dangerously from the point of view of artistic form-
giving, a sphere completely free from problems [...]”.
 23

At last, in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, considering all the formative aspects of

the novel of education, Goethe “[posits] a purely individual experience which may,
postulatively, have universal validity, as the existent and constitutive meaning of reality”,
although “[…] no artist’s skill is great and masterly enough to bridge the abyss” (LUKÁCS,
1988, p. 143) between artistic configuration and reality.
It is noteworthy how Lukács (1988) uses the term “reconciliation” of the individual
with the social and places it at the center of the novel of education, as a balance “between
wanting to mould the world and being purely receptive towards it” (LUKÁCS, 1988, p. 135),
while Morgenstern (2009) mentions the “collaboration” between the inner self and the
external world in the Bildungsroman, in spite of emphasizing the influence that the world and
others exercise in the progress of the individual’s development, since in his perception this is
what mostly differentiates the novel from the epic genre.
Thomas Mann, himself a Bildungsroman author11, dedicated the later years of his life
not only to the production of literary works but also to lecturing about German culture and its
politics, despite initially abstaining himself from critical-thinking on politics, which was a
common attitude to writers who had experienced the turbulence of war times (BRUFORD,
2009). It is a fact that the cultural and the political have always been by some means related to
the Bildungsroman, and similarities between what Mann argued in his speeches and Dilthey’s
(1997) thoughts on the literary sub-genre can be perceived, especially considering that both
start from a German point of view. Moreover, Walter Horace Bruford (2009) attests Mann’s
relevance as one of the leading spokespeople of German thought from the interwar period.
It must be emphasized that Mann had, in the course of his life, an unstable relationship
with politics, eventually coming to criticize those who felt indifferent to the subject
(BRUFORD, 2009). Having lived through the First and the Second World Wars and all the
political events of before and after, Mann experienced a process of “conversion”, as Bruford
(2009, p. ix) defends, starting from “a position of Romantic disdain for politics to a public-
spirited concern for the enlightenment of the German people about politics, as an essential
part of a humane life”. In his process of becoming politicized, he often relied on literature for
the support of his arguments and the shaping of his thoughts, especially for his belief in
humanitarian values (BRUFORD, 2009). As Bruford (2009, p. 226) mentions,

11
Despite having more than one novel themed on “development” of some kind, among Thomas Mann’s works,
the one that most clearly inserts itself in the category of Bildungsroman is The Magic Mountain (1924), as
supported by Bruford (2009).
 24

It is well known that Mann’s political views underwent what looks like a
complete reversal, though he often disputed this interpretation, seeing his
whole life’s effort as directed towards a fuller humane life for all. His
example may at least show how it was possible for a patriotic German
conservative to grow into a supporter of the Weimar Republic, an
impassioned opponent of Hitler and, in his last years, a convinced democrat
who, as an American citizen, deliberately lived in Switzerland and declared
himself to belong to no party but that of ‘humanity’.

In 1923, during one of his several speeches on politics12, Mann stated his belief that
the reason for German people to be so indifferent to the topic — particularly in those days and
specially in the middle-class — had its roots in the cultural “inwardness” of the nation and the
belief that “this devotion to culture is good because it tends to make [them] humane”
(BRUFORD, 2009, p. 228). Understanding that the German people could only benefit from
the combination of culture and politics, the inward with the outward, Mann admits that he
himself had only been enlightened by this ideal in recent years then, believing that the
German culture of self-cultivation would remain “incomplete” if it persisted on excluding the
political element from it (BRUFORD, 2009).
In order to support his argument that Germans are excessively concerned with inner
matters, with the subjective rather than the objective, Mann turns to literature in allusion to
the Bildungsroman, as it is to him a consequent product of this national trait, and for this
reason, the sub-genre of the novel could only have emerged in such context:

The finest characteristic of the typical German, the best-known and also the
most flattering to his self-esteem, is his inwardness. It is no accident that it
was the Germans who gave to the world the intellectually stimulating and
very humane literary form which we call the novel of personal cultivation
and development. Western Europe has its novel of social criticism, to which
the Germans regard this other type as their own special counterpart; it is at
the same time an autobiography, a confession. The inwardness, the culture
[‘Bildung’] of a German implies introspectiveness; an individualistic cultural
conscience, consideration for the careful tending, the shaping, deepening and
perfecting of one’s own personality or, in religious terms, for the salvation
and justification of one’s own life; subjectivism in the things of the mind,
therefore, a type of culture that might be called pietistic, given to
autobiographical confession and deeply personal, one in which the world of
the objective, the political world, is felt to be profane and is thrust aside with
indifference, ‘because’, as Luther says, ‘this external order is of no
consequence’(MANN, 1923 apud BRUFORD, 2009, p. vii).
12
Bruford (2009) traces Thomas Mann’s journey of political awakening in an essay titled The Conversion of an
Unpolitical Man. This specific lecture, titled “Geist und Wesen der deutschen Republik” (“Spirit and Essence of
the German Republic”), was given to republican students in Munich, in June 1923, on a tribute meeting to
Walther Rathenau, and Mann’s brief speech approaching German inwardness and the way it impacts the
people’s lack of interest in politics was a pertinent opening to discuss the Weimar Republic, the new
governmental form then, which found little support from Germans in that first moment.
 25

Mann complements by stating that to the German people the idea of including the
external matters of politics in this inner culture, “to what the peoples of Europe call freedom,
would seem to [them] to amount to a demand that [they] should do violence to [their] own
nature, and in fact give up [their] sense of national identity” (MANN, 1923 apud BRUFORD,
2009, p. vii).
In this speech, Mann also perpetuates the tradition of electing Goethe’s work as the
exemplar Bildungsroman. He focuses his analysis, however, on Wilhelm Meister’s
Journeyman Years, the sequel to Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, relying once again on the
works of German literature as a means to sustain his arguments (BRUFORD, 2009). In this
novel, after going through his formative years, Wilhelm is now concerned with the rearing of
his son and thus has awakened to external matters, the objective world (BRUFORD, 2009).
This focus on the social aspect in Wilhelm’s journey through education is what best supports
Mann’s idea of uniting culture to politics, seeing that the poetic work is

A wonderful anticipation of German progress from inwardness to the

objective and the political, to republicanism. It is a work that is far more
complete in its humanity than the German ‘Bürger’ thinks if he understands
it merely as a monument of personal culture and pietistic autobiography.
[…] It teaches us to see the element of education as the organic transition
from the world of inwardness to that of the objective; it shows how the one
grows humanly and naturally out of the other (MANN, 1923 apud
BRUFORD, 2009, p. 88).

Summarizing Mann’s views, Bruford (2009, p. 253) states that the author believed that
“to be truly humane, Germans needed to develop the political interests and capacities which
they had hitherto neglected, in their exclusive pursuit of Kultur” and that in his 1923 speech,
Mann “often comes back to this idea as his central new insight, that the political is not
opposed to humane culture, but a part of it”.
Mann’s humane attitude toward politics not only concerned his life as a spokesperson
but it also reflected on his literary works. The author’s approach to German culture and
politics directly relates to the Bildungsroman, since it is known that inwardness and
Humanism have always been constituent parts of the sub-genre, as Dilthey (1997), for
instance, earlier affirmed. This, however, is not the only visible feature in Mann’s impressions
that is relatable to the previous discussions about the Bildungsroman.
Dilthey (1997) had already observed that writers since the eighteenth century were
considered alienated from political circumstances for their preferred dedication to matters of
the inner self, and Mann, in 1923, believed this traditional “individualistic” culture, mainly
focused in the improvement of “personality”, continued then to move the German people
 26

away from social subjects, “the political world”, a problem that could only be solved when
these two aspects were merged into a unity (BRUFORD, 2009).
Proceeding from a farther geographical location and speaking from a less distant time
than his predecessors, Bakhtin (1986) presents in The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in
the History of Realism, originally written in the 1930s, a more varied perspective on the sub-
genre, not exclusively centered on the German production of Bildungsromane. Before
undertaking Bakhtin’s (1986, p. 21) thoughts on “the novel of human emergence”, to use his
expression, it is essential to consider that a great part of the Soviet theorist’s works is
unfinished and this study on the subcategories of the novel represents only the initial fragment
of one of his lost books, which would have had the same title as the study13 (HOLQUIST,
1986).
Admittedly influenced by theorists who prioritize the cultural-historical aspect in
literary analysis, such as Tynyanov (HOLQUIST, 1986), Bakhtin (1986, p. 10) presents his
division of the novel genre based on “an attempt at a historical classification of these
subcategories”: the travel novel, the novel of ordeal, the biographical (autobiographical) novel
and the Bildungsroman. As a criterion for classification, he centers on the construction of the
hero’s image and how varying principles prevail throughout this process, namely the plot, the
conception of the world, the composition and, chiefly, the degree of integration of “real
historical time” and “historical man” into the novel (BAKHTIN, 1986).
In his specific approach to the Bildungsroman, Bakhtin’s (1986, p. 19) theme is
mainly “time-space and the image of man in the novel”, more specifically, “the image of man
in the process of becoming in the novel”. A chronological list of Bildungsromane from
different times in history and places other than Germany is initially presented, starting from
Xenophon’s Cyropaedia (circa 370 B.C.) until Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1901) and
The Magic Mountain (1924), not leaving aside Russian authors Tolstoy’s Childhood (1852),
Adolescence (1854), and Youth (1857) and Goncharov’s An Ordinary Story (1847) and
Oblomov (1859) and, evidently, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, both the Apprenticeship and the
Journeyman Years (BAKHTIN, 1986).
Bakhtin (1986) acknowledges the breadth of literary examples that assign to the
subcategory and how different perspectives on what the Bildungsroman is could make his list
13
As Holquist (1986) reports, the loss of Bakhtin’s book, which he worked on from 1936 to 1938, as well as the
incompleteness of this remaining fragment are both related to the Second World War: in the first case, because
the publishing house that held the manuscripts of the book was blown up during the German invasion, and in the
second, because during the shortage days of the war, Bakhtin used the conclusive parts of the preparatory
material, still in his possession, to wrap his cigarettes. The published fragment covers only the first part of what
the book would have been.
 27

either shorter or longer, depending on the choice of view, which can be compositional,
developmental, biographical, pedagogical or chronological, and that would demand a different
division not only of the list, but of the concept of Bildungsroman:

Some scholars, guided by purely compositional principles (the concentration

of the whole plot on the process of the hero’s education) significantly limit
this list […] Others, conversely, requiring only the presence of the hero’s
development and emergence in the novel, considerably expanding this list
[…] It is clear even at first glance that this list contains phenomena that are
too diverse, from the theoretical and even from the biographical standpoint.
Some of the novels are essentially biographical or autobiographical, while
others are not; in some of them the organizing basis is the purely
pedagogical notion of man’s education, while this is not even mentioned in
others; some of them are constructed on the strictly chronological plane of
the main hero’s educational development and have almost no plot at all,
while others, conversely, have complex adventuristic plots. Even more
significant are the differences in the relationship of these novels to realism,
and particularly to real historical time (BAKHTIN, 1986, p. 20).

To present this division, the theorist primarily isolates “the aspect of man’s essential
becoming”, characteristically a trait of the Bildungsroman, from “the vast majority of novels”
(BAKHTIN, 1986, p. 20) and its corresponding subcategories. In these most common novels,
the hero is a solid figure of “static nature”, the plot, composition and internal structure of this
kind of novel determine this invariability of the hero, who Bakhtin (1986) defines as the
“constant” in the novel. The “variables”, he proceeds, concern the events of the hero’s life and
his fate, while he presents no changes and these, consequently, prevent him from emerging:
“the hero is that immobile and fixed point around which all movement in the novel takes
place” (BAKHTIN, 1986, p. 21).
This definition of the majority of novels is a means to introduce, by contrast, Bakhtin’s
(1986) definition of the Bildungsroman, a distinct type of novel that is characterized for
depicting “the process of becoming” a man, therefore, a “dynamic” hero:

Along with this predominant, mass type, there is another incomparably rarer
type of novel that provides an image of man in the process of becoming. As
opposed to a static unity, here one finds a dynamic unity in the hero’s image.
The hero himself, his character, becomes a variable in the formula of this
type of novel. Changes in the hero himself acquire plot significance, and
thus the entire plot of the novel is reinterpreted and reconstructed. Time is
introduced into man, enters into his very image, changing in a fundamental
way the significance of all aspects of his destiny and life. This type of novel
can be designated in the most general sense as the novel of human
emergence (BAKHTIN, 1986, p. 21).

However, since this emergence is not standardized and its variations are postulated by
the way “real historical time” is integrated into the novel, Bakhtin (1986) proposes to divide
 28

the novel of emergence into five types: cyclical, idyllic, biographical (autobiographical),
didactic-pedagogical and realistic-historical.
In cyclical and idyllic time, the emergence of man is possible, as they depict the
process of growing old, the passage through life’s stages of maturation and this process is
cyclical for its essential repetition in the life of each person (BAKHTIN, 1986). A variation of
this cyclical emergence, also age-related and exemplified in Wieland’s classical novel of
education, Agathon, represents the development from the fanciful idealisms of youth to sober
and skeptical maturity, where life experiences are taken for lessons, and this complex process
leads to a common conclusion: “one becomes more sober, experiencing some degree of
resignation” (BAKHTIN, 1986, p. 22).
Bakhtin’s (1986) comments on the third and fourth types are brief. In the biographical
(autobiographical) type, the emergence occurs in biographical time “through unrepeatable,
individual stages” (BAKHTIN, 1986, p. 22). This process derives from the events, actions and
circumstances of life, “the emergence of man’s life-destiny fuses with the emergence of man
himself” (BAKHTIN, 1986, p. 22). Examples of this type, according to Bakhtin (1986), are
Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850). The didactic-
pedagogical type represents a pedagogical development of the hero and is centered on a
particular ideal of pedagogy, as Rousseau’s Emile. However, some aspects from the didactic-
pedagogical type also reflect in different subcategories of the novel of emergence and can be
found in the works of Goethe and Rabelais (BAKHTIN, 1986).
The fifth type, the realistic-historical type, is the most relevant to Bakhtin (1986, p. 23)
since the development occurs in “real historical time” and “in it man’s individual emergence
is inseparably linked to historical emergence”. The previously mentioned types depicted a
static world, with changes of little impact, which served as mere scenery for the hero’s
emergence and the most recurrent lesson learned from it was that one needed to adapt and
consent to such disappointing pre-established world (BAKHTIN, 1986). In addition, Bakhtin
(1986, p. 23) observes that in these other types of novel, “man’s emergence was his private
affair, as it were, and the results of this emergence were also private and biographical in
nature”.
In the realistic-historical type, of which Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister is an example, the
emergence of man is not a “private affair” as it is in the others, but simultaneous to the
world’s emergence, the hero “is no longer within an epoch, but on the border between two
epochs, at the transition point from one to the other”, resulting on “a new, unprecedented type
 29

of human being” (BAKHTIN, 1986, p. 23) which becomes a part of an equally new historical
time.
Bakhtin (1986) closes his ideas by establishing connections between this most
important type and the others, tracing back from the origins in the classical German
Bildungsroman. The author references Wieland’s novel of education Agathon and
demonstrates that this example of cyclical time made it possible for Goethe to develop his
realistic-historical type of works. The second type of novel, as Wieland’s example, “is a most
typical phenomenon of the German Enlightenment” (BAKHTIN, 1986, p. 24). The theorist
also mentions how even this earlier example of Wieland’s is admittedly related to the
biographical novel of emergence, that is, Fielding’s Tom Jones, as Wieland himself reports in
the foreword of his Agathon (BAKHTIN, 1986).
Bakhtin (1986, p. 24) emphasizes that to grasp man’s emergence in realistic-historical
novels such as Goethe’s, “it is immensely important to consider the idea of education as it
took shape during the Enlightenment, and particularly that specific subcategory that we find
on German soil as the idea of the ‘education of the human race’ in Lessing and Herder”,
corroborating with the relationship between Bildungsroman and Humanism as established by
his antecessors.
Parallel to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, Bakhtin (1986) also considers Rabelais’s novel
Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532) a great example of the realistic-historical novel of
emergence. According to Michael Holquist (1986), Bakhtin considered the eighteenth century
Germany with its most relevant thinkers — Goethe and Kant — to be a most successful
period for the production of intellectual content, and this admiration is reflected on his
thoughts.
Bakhtin’s (1986) study attests how wide the subgenre of the novel has always been
and how it has expanded since the emergence of the German model in the eighteenth century.
A relationship can be established between what Bakhtin (1986) detects as a characteristic
“private and biographical nature” in the first four types of novel of emergence and what
Lukács (1988) criticizes in the vast majority of modern novels for the display of a non-
symbolical subjectivity in its tendency to portray “a private memoir”.
The chronological and geographical variety of literary examples and subcategories
presented in Bakhtin’s (1986) fragmental study proves not only that the Bildungsroman has
come a long way since Morgenstern’s (2009, p. 654) first impressions of this “most noble
category of the novel”, which found its best representative in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship, and Dilthey’s (1997) inclusion of the term in the canon of literary criticism,
 30

but also that complexity of meaning does not concern only the original word Bildung.
Bakhtin’s (1986) work presents a partial view of how the Bildungsroman has developed
outside of its German boundaries.

1.3 Outside of German boundaries

The list of Bildungsromane exposed in Bakhtin’s (1986) study includes the most
miscellaneous works that may adjust to the category, examples that not only vary in territorial
origins but also in chronological distance. Thus, the list testifies that novels classified as
Bildungsroman have been produced in different parts of the world as early as 370 B.C., as the
example of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia. In addition, it is known that Wieland admitted the
relationship between his Agathon (1766), which is considered one of the earliest examples of
German Bildungsroman, and Fielding’s Tom Jones, an English novel from 1749 (BAKHTIN,
1986). Moreover, Dilthey (1997) observed the impact that Rousseau’s Emile(1762) had on
German culture and, consequently, on its literary production.
Nevertheless, it is also known that theorists who have studied and defined the
Bildungsroman considered the eighteenth century German example of Goethe’s Wilhelm
Meister’s Apprenticeship as the most relevant source to elaborate their definitions.
Considering that, this section will approach Bildungsromane that have been produced post-
Goethe’s novel in countries that are foreign to Germany, as well as briefly present
commentaries on three novels of the kind that were written in the English language.
The Bildungsroman from the eighteenth century Germany in the molds of Wilhelm
Meister’s Apprenticeship would only trespass the limits of its motherland in the early
nineteenth century, and the one considered responsible for introducing the sub-genre, at least
to the English readership, is Scottish author Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), who translated
Goethe’s most acclaimed novel of formation in 1824 (CUDDON, 1998).
Bruford (2009) reports that not only German literature but also its philosophy and
scholarship began to successively expand through European and American countries by the
late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, when the Napoleonic Wars came to an end,
having a deep intellectual impact in a considerable part of these countries. Victorian English
authors readily assimilated and promoted the “good” conception of the Germany from the
times of Goethe (BRUFORD, 2009) as they found in German culture a suitable response to
the problem of materialism which followed the industrial revolution:
 31

The Victorian ‘sages’, Carlyle, Coleridge, J. S. Mill and Matthew Arnold,

for example, were greatly attracted by German ideas about culture and used
them as a counterblast to the materialism which had become rampant in this
country from the 1820s, owing to the remarkable results of the industrial
revolution (BRUFORD, 2009, p. viii).

However, once exceeding its national limits, starting from this first moment, according
to Cíntia Schwantes (2007), the Bildungsroman as it had been known from the original
German mold had its traditional features expanded, considering that it gradually began to be
assimilated by the most diverse cultures with equally diverse processes of personal
development, which consequently reflected on the structure of these novels, thus altering the
characteristics of the sub-genre in this assimilation.
At the same time, for historical reasons, in the transition from the eighteenth to the
nineteenth century, the Bildungsroman has also suffered a drastic change in its narrative: in
the first moment, the novel portrayed the development of the hero as culminating in an
optimistic result, rooted in the humanistic ideals of knowledge and self-cultivation from the
Enlightenment; in contrast, the following century proved these ideals to be nothing but
promising, leading the hero to disappointment and resignation, this way changing the
narrative tone to a pessimistic one (SCHWANTES, 2007). In the twentieth century, the
Bildungsromane are characterized for the representation of a wider variety of gender,
ethnicities and class identities through their main characters (SCHWANTES, 2007).
Succeeding Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, some examples of novels
from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries categorized as Bildungsroman for narrating the
personal development of a man are: Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (1830); Gustave
Flaubert’s Sentimental Education (1869); Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(1884); James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916); Herman Hesse’s
Demian (1919); J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1945-1946)14; and Stephen
Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999).
A common trait of the Bildungsroman that has become more evident in these
nineteenth and twentieth centuries narratives is the use of autobiographical elements in its
composition. Both sub-genres have long been related: as Mann (1923 apud BRUFORD, 2009,
p. vii) noticed, the Bildungsroman “is at the same time an autobiography, a confession”.
Dilthey (1997, p. 335) distances the earlier biographical model from the
Bildungsroman, since its artistic intention is to describe that which can be seen as “universally

14
The Catcher in the Rye was initially published in serial fomat between the years 1945 and 1946, and afterward
published in the form of a novel in 1951.
 32

human”. Lukács (1988, p. 137) detected the autobiographical element as recurrent in the
“overwhelming majority of modern ‘novels of education’”15 which, he alerted, constituted a
“danger” to the Bildungsroman, since in his opinion those novels tended to become a
narrative of “no more than personal interest” when they could have depicted a more general
exemplar process of development. Bakhtin (1986) had also identified and briefly commented
the biographical (autobiographical) type of Bildungsroman in his study, which is
characterized by the fusion of the character’s fate and his own emergence. Bruford (2009, p.
30) corroborates with the evidence of an autobiographical trait in the Bildungsroman and
complements that “there is often a large autobiographical element in such novels, so the
favourite hero is a writer or artist, not a man of action”.
On the one hand, the Bildungsroman is essentially a narrative of one’s transition from
adolescence to adulthood (CUDDON, 1998). More specifically, this transition consists of a
struggling process of one against the world and eventually results in “the reconciliation of the
problematic individual […] with concrete social reality” (LUKÁCS, 1998, p. 132) or as
Bakhtin (1986, p. 19) defines, it represents “the image of man in the process of becoming”, up
to a certain point, commonly when maturity is supposedly reached (DILTHEY, 1997). On the
other hand, the autobiography presents, in Philippe Lejeune’s (1996, p. 14, our translation)
words, “a retrospective narrative in prose that a real person makes of his or her own existence,
while focusing on the individual, particularly on the story of one’s personality”16, and it can
start from a primary childhood memory (or even before that, with the recapitulation of the
story of one’s ancestors) and extend as far as old age.
Considering these definitions, it is clear that the Bildungsroman and the autobiography
are relatable since both focus on telling the story of an individual. The latter is, however,
limited to exclusive use of first verbal person as the narrator (a real person) reports facts, lived
experiences from a vaster period of his or her life. In contrast, the Bildungsroman may use
either first or third verbal person and focuses on a specific stage of transition in its
protagonist’s life and is, essentially, a fictional narrative. John Anthony Cuddon (1998, p. 65)
observes that “during the 18th century we find there is some connection between
autobiography and the then relatively new form of the novel” and novels of the kind could be

15
More precisely, Lukács (1988) uses the term “private memoir”, however, it is known that the autobiographical
is an elementary part of the memoir, according to the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms (CUDDON, 1998).
What Lukács (1988) criticized was the problem with lack of symbolism, in the exemplar sense, in novels that
tend to emphasize the memorialist aspect.
16
Récit rétrospectif em prose qu’une personne réelle fait de sa propre existence, lorsqu’elle met l’accent sur sa
vie individuelle, en particulier sur l’histoire de sa personnalité.
 33

described as “autobiographical fiction” or “fictionalized autobiography”, definitions that

relate to the Bildungsroman.
Despite becoming more evident from the nineteenth century on, it is known that the
autobiographical element had already been present in the late eighteenth century German
Bildungsroman. According to Bruford (2009), Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship
itself is partially composed of real events from Goethe’s life, among them, his involvement
with amateur theater during the novel’s years of production:

When Goethe wrote his novel of the theatre, between 1777 and 1785, he was
busy, amongst many other things, with the amateur theatre at the court of
Weimar, doubling the role of maître des plaisirs of the Duke with that of
minister and member of the small governing council of state. Like Wilhelm,
he traced his interest in the theatre back to his grandmother’s gift of a
puppet-theatre when he was a small boy, and he had been writing plays and
reading and seeing French classical drama since boyhood (BRUFORD,
2009, p. 31).

A remarkable Bildungsroman from the early twentieth century outside the German
circle, usually categorized as a Künstlerroman (“artist novel”)17 is an example of novel of
education that admits autobiographical elements in its composition: Irish author James
Joyce’s (1882-1941) first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Facts of Joyce’s life,
such as his Catholic background, the years spent in a Jesuit school and his family life in
Ireland have all helped Joyce compose the character of Stephen Dedalus (BELANGER,
2001).
Applying innovative writing techniques to the novel, Joyce (2001) narrates the
intellectual and spiritual maturation of Stephen Dedalus — the last name a symbolic reference
to Daedalus, the mythological creator of the Cretan Labyrinth — not only through the
author’s characteristic narrative style of stream of consciousness, but also through a
discernible linguistic progress. Language is central in Stephen’s relationship with the world
and for the development of his art: his linguistic articulation develops as he himself develops
(BELANGER, 2001). In the most noteworthy first lines of the book, it is perceptible how
Joyce (2001) writes on a typical language used by adults when talking to children, using the
classic opening line of fairy tales as an indirect reference to the stage of life the character is
in:

17
According to the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms, “A novel which has an artist (in any creative art) as
the central character and which shows the development of the artist from childhood to maturity and later”
(CUDDON, 1998, p. 446).
 34

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming
down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road
met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo…
His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he
had a hairy face.
He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne
lived: she sold lemon platt (JOYCE, 2001, p. 3).

As Stephen gradually relates to the world around him, he begins questioning the
conventions of society and the doctrines of Catholic religion as they had been presented to
him. The interaction between the inner self and external reality is invariably conflictual, still
the “balance between activity and contemplation, between wanting to mould the world and
being purely receptive towards it” (LUKÁCS, 1988, p.135) is arduous but necessary to every
person’s development, and so it is to Stephen:

He went once or twice with his mother to visit their relatives: and though
they passed a jovial array of shops lit up and adorned for Christmas his
mood of embittered silence did not leave him. The causes of his
embitterment were many, remote and near. He was angry with himself for
being young and the prey of restless foolish impulses, angry also with the
change of fortune which was reshaping the world about him into a vision of
squalor and insincerity. Yet his anger lent nothing to the vision. He
chronicled with patience what he saw, detaching himself from it and tasting
its mortifying flavour in secret (JOYCE, 2001, p. 50).

Religion plays a most significant role in Stephen’s process of maturation, for even
though he is transitioning from a young boy who is a follower of the Christian doctrines he
was raised in into a young adult mainly concerned with poetical, philosophical and political
matters, his God fearing and the constant guilt of sin, especially regarding the discovery of
sexual pleasures, initially torment and restrain him from entering this new side to the world
that he is getting to know:
When the fit had spent itself he walked weakly to the window and, lifting the
sash, sat in a corner of the embrasure and leaned his elbow upon the sill. The
rain had drawn off; and amid the moving vapours from point to point of light
the city was spinning about herself a soft cocoon of yellowish haze. Heaven
was still and faintly luminous and the air sweet to breathe, as in a thicket
drenched with showers; and amid peace and shimmering lights and quiet
fragrance he made a covenant with his heart.
He prayed: […]
His eyes were dimmed with tears and, looking humbly up to heaven, he wept
for the innocence he had lost (JOYCE, 2001, p. 106).

From the early debates with his schoolmates on the works of Byron to the profounder
discussions on Aristotle at university, Stephen comes to terms with the fact that he would
never be able to achieve his artistic ambitions as a writer for as long as he remained in Ireland,
 35

deciding to leave the country for the benefit of his art. The narrative comes to an end when
Stephen is taken “just to the point where he is about to act decisively in the world”
(DILTHEY, 1997, p. 343). This way, the development of Stephen culminates in his departure,
although he continues to search for accomplishment through experience, as the reader learns
from the pages of his diary:

APRIL 26. Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays
now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and
friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life!
I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge
in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
APRIL 27. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead
(JOYCE, 2001, p. 196).

Moving forward in time, The Catcher in the Rye by North-American author J. D.

Salinger (1919-2010) is a relevant exemplar of Bildungsroman from the mid-twentieth
century, more commonly referred to as a coming-of-age novel18, another term that refers to
the novel of formation. Narrated in retrospect, the story is straightforwardly told by Holden
Caulfield, who unusually concentrates it on a short period of time of his life instead of
approaching a longer developmental period, as most Bildungsromane do. More specifically,
he focuses on the events from the previous Christmas, which begin with him being expelled
from boarding school after failing classes, as he is determined not “to tell [us] [his] whole
goddam autobiography or anything” (SALINGER, 2014, p. 3).
This late 1940s work narrated in first person introduces a shift of narrative tone if
compared to the previous example of The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, not only for
its directness of speech but also because its main character, who “was sixteen then, and [is]
seventeen now, and sometimes [acts] like [he is] about thirteen” (SALINGER, 2014, p. 11), is
not necessarily like the recurrent hero of the Bildungsroman. Joyce’s (2001) character applied
himself to the studies of poetry and philosophy in order to master his art. Salinger’s (2014)
Holden Caulfield, on the other hand, narrates his story from a pessimistic perspective about
his education or the world around him, although he does benefit from education and admires
people who are educated as well.
His seemingly tone of carelessness becomes evident in the first lines from the book,
when the character, who is staying at an unspecified institution as a result from the

18
According to the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English (HORNBY, 2000, p. 237), “to
come of/from something to be the result of something”.
 36

occurrences of the narrative about to begin, presents a mockery of the traditional narrative
style and structure of the Bildungsroman:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to
know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how
my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David
Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to
know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place,
my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything
personal about them. They’re quite touchy about anything like that, specially
my father. […] I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me
around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out
here and take it easy (SALINGER, 2014, p. 3).

It is known that the narrative told by Holden is reduced to a short period of the
character’s life, no more than weeks, yet it is possible to grasp the most essential element for
the novel of formation in this cut-out of his coming “into conflict with the hard realities of the
world” (DILTHEY, 1997, p. 335), the contemplative moment of encounter between the
inward and the outward as the individual begins to understand the principles of social
conventions. Holden’s perception of external reality is based on his own thesis that people,
especially adults, are insincere in their interpersonal relations, and this is a recurrent conflict
in the narrative — the character’s frustration with people’s “phoniness”:

One of the biggest reasons I left Elkton Hills was because I was surrounded
by phonies. That’s all. They were coming in the goddam window. For
instance, they had this headmaster, Mr. Haas, that was the phoniest bastard I
ever met in my life. Ten times worse than old Thurmer. On Sundays, for
instance, old Haas went around shaking hands with everybody’s parents
when they drove up to school. He’d be charming as hell and all. Except if
some boy had little old funny-looking parents. You should’ve seen the way
he did with my roommate’s parents. I mean if a boy’s mother was sort of fat
or corny-looking or something, and if somebody’s father was one of those
guys that wear those suits with very big shoulders and corny black-and-white
shoes, then old Haas would just shake hands with them and give them a
phony smile and then he’d go talk, for maybe a half an hour, with somebody
else’s parents. I can’t stand that stuff. It drives me crazy. It makes me so
depressed I go crazy. I hated that goddam Elkton Hills (SALINGER, 2014,
p. 17).

As Holden struggles to come to terms with his process of maturation, it becomes clear
that one of the character’s greatest concerns is innocence and its inevitable loss. Thus, one of
the few people that Holden feels comfortable to talk with is his younger sister Phoebe, who in
spite of being a child seems to have more clarity of mind about social reality than her older
brother does, as she observes that Holden never “[likes] anything that’s happening”
(SALINGER, 2014, p. 187). Phoebe is the one person to whom Holden confesses his
 37

symbolic fantasy of preventing children from falling off a cliff, to be the “catcher in the rye”,
as in his interpretation of the misheard lyrics from Robert Burns’ poem Comin’ Thro the Rye,
clearly a metaphor for his own unacceptance of the transition from childhood to young adult
life, namely his loss of innocence:

“You know what I’d like to be? I mean if I had my goddam choice?”
“What? Stop swearing.”
“You know that song ‘If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye’? I’d
like —”
“It’s ‘If a body meet a body coming through the rye’!” old Phoebe said. “It’s
a poem. By Robert Burns.”
“I know it’s a poem by Robert Burns.”
She was right, though. It is “If a body meet a body coming through the rye.”
I didn’t know it then, though.
“I thought it was ‘If a body catch a body,’” I said.
“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big
field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around — nobody
big, I mean — except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff.
What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff
— I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have
to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d
just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only
thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy” (SALINGER, 2014, p. 191).

When reaching the end of his narrative, Holden’s opinion of the ones he considered
“phony” has apparently been altered as a result from the hindsight of exposing his personal
experience, since he states that he misses those people. This retrospective of events becomes a
reflection upon his own turbulent development, as the narrative “provides an image of man in
the process of becoming” (BAKHTIN, 1986, p. 21). Holden continues an alien to reality. This
process, however, has modified by some means his understanding of social life:

A lot of people, especially this one psychoanalyst guy they have here, keeps
asking me if I’m going to apply myself when I go back to school next
September. It’s such a stupid question, in my opinion. I mean how do you
know what you’re going to do till you do it? The answer is, you don’t. I
think I am, but how do I know? I swear it’s a stupid question.
[…] D.B. asked me what I thought about all this stuff I just finished telling
you about. I didn’t know what the hell to say. If you want to know the truth,
I don’t know what I think about it. I’m sorry I told so many people about it.
About all I know is, I sort of miss everybody I told about. Even old
Stradlater and Ackley, for instance. I think I even miss that goddam Maurice,
It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing
everybody (SALINGER, 2014, p. 234).

More responsive to contemporary times, Stephen Chbosky’s (1970- ) first novel The
Perks of Being a Wallflower is another example of Bildungsroman, also commonly referred to
as a coming-of-age novel. Through a series of letters anonymously sent to an unidentified
 38

receiver, simply referred to as “friend”, Charlie, an introvert fifteen year-old, narrates the
events that have affected the process of his development. The most impacting occurrences of
his life relate to two personal losses — the death of his aunt Helen and, most recently, the
suicide of Michael, the only friend he seemed to have:

August 25, 1991

Dear friend,
I am writing to you because she said you listen and understand and didn't try
to sleep with that person at that party even though you could have. Please
don't try to figure out who she is because then you might figure out who I
am, and I really don't want you to do that. I will call people by different
names or generic names because I don’t want you to find me. I didn’t
enclose a return address for the same reason. I mean nothing bad by this.
Honest.
I just need to know that someone out there listens and understands and
doesn't try to sleep with people even if they could have. I need to know that
these people exist.
I think you of all people would understand that because I think you of all
people are alive and appreciate what that means. At least I hope you do
because other people look to you for strength and friendship and it’s that
simple. At least that’s what I’ve heard.
So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and
I’m still trying to figure out how that could be (CHBOSKY, 2009, p. 3).

Charlie develops a friendly relationship with his English teacher, Bill, who notices his
interest in reading and writing and assigns him not only the papers on the literary books for
his classes, but also extracurricular essays on other books, most of them Bildungsromane
from English and North-American literature. The teacher’s choice of novels seems to be
intentional, as Charlie realizes the thematic pattern in these books and how they are all
relatable to the moment in life he is going through. This relationship associates with
Morngenstern’s (2009) early observation that a secondary concern with the reader’s
development is implied in the Bildungsroman, the humanistic idea, then, of education through
literature (QUINTALE NETO, 2005):
Dear friend,
I have finished To Kill a Mockingbird. It is now my favorite book of all time,
but then again, I always think that until I read another book. My advanced
english teacher asked me to call him "Bill" when we're not in class, and he
gave me another book to read. He says that I have a great skill at reading and
understanding language, and he wanted me to write an essay about To Kill a
Mockingbird (CHBOSKY, 2009, p. 11).

Bill gave me one book to read over the break. It's The Catcher in the Rye. It
was Bill's favorite book when he was my age. He said it was the kind of
book you made your own.
I read the first twenty pages. I don't know how I feel about it just yet, but it
does seem appropriate to this time (CHBOSKY, 2009, p. 79).
 39

Incapable of establishing a close relationship with his father, which comes from both
sides, Charlie finds a mentor figure in his teacher Bill. The teacher not only encourages
Charlie to develop his writing skills and helps him decide to effectively become a writer, but
also reassures him to “participate” in social life, in order not to remain a “wallflower”:

I look at people holding hands in the hallways, and I try to think about how it
all works. At the school dances, I sit in the background, and I tap my toe,
and I wonder how many couples will dance to "their song." In the hallways, I
see the girls wearing the guys' jackets, and I think about the idea of property.
And I wonder if anyone is really happy. I hope they are. I really hope they
are.
Bill looked at me looking at people, and after class, he asked me what I was
thinking about, and I told him. He listened, and he nodded and made
"affirmation" sounds. When I had finished, his face changed into a "serious
talk" face.
"Do you always think this much, Charlie?"
"Is that bad?" I just wanted someone to tell me the truth.
"Not necessarily. It's just that sometimes people use thought to not
participate in life."
"Is that bad?"
"Yes."
[…] And I told him about the boy who makes mix tapes hitting my sister
because my sister only told me not to tell mom or dad about it, so I figured I
could tell Bill. He got this very serious look on his face after I told him, and
he said something to me I don't think I will forget this semester or ever.
"Charlie, we accept the love we think we deserve." (CHBOSKY. 2009, p.
26-27).
By some means, this is relatable to Lukács’s (1988, p. 135) perception of the balance
between activity and contemplation in the formative process depicted in the Bildungsroman:
“the development of qualities in men which would never blossom without the active
intervention of other men and circumstances; whilst the goal thus attained is in itself
formative and encouraging to others”.
Similarly to the main character in Salinger’s (2014) novel, Charlie also reflects upon
innocence and the impact of its loss, this seemingly a recurrent thought in the mind of the
Bildungsroman hero. In a passage that resembles Holden Caulfield’s imagery of becoming the
“catcher in the rye”, Charlie observes from a distance and meditates on the process of
development and the inevitable loss of innocence it implies:

I walked over to the hill where we used to go and sled. There were a lot of
little kids there. I watched them flying. Doing jumps and having races. And I
thought that all those little kids are going to grow up someday. And all of
those little kids are going to do the things that we do. And they will all kiss
someone someday. But for now, sledding is enough. I think it would be great
if sledding were always enough, but it isn't (CHBOSKY, 2009, p. 78).
 40

In the end, we learn that Charlie had been both physically and emotionally hurt during
his childhood, namely having been sexually abused by his deceased aunt Helen, a fact he had
repressed from his memory although it had influenced his approach to the world. Having
suffered a nervous collapse after recollecting the occurrence, he stays at a mental hospital to
be treated and seems to have matured by accepting that a person is not able to change his or
her traumatic past, “but even if we don’t have the power to choose where we come from, we
can still choose where we go from there” (CHBOSKY, 2009, p. 228). Thus, The Perks of
Being a Wallflower is a narrative of personal development since it depicts a young man who
“grows to maturity through diverse life experiences, finds himself, and attains certainty about
his purpose in the world” (DILTHEY, 1997, p. 335).
The development of the Bildungsroman, from Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship to the
most recent example of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, demonstrates that in the course of
the centuries, the sub-genre of the novel has changed, despite maintaining its essence. The
concept of Bildungsroman is proven applicable beyond its place of origin, to different cultures
and consequently different character types, even though the fundamental narrative of the
conflictual process of development significantly remains: it essentially narrates the story of an
individual who first meets with external reality. The novels and the studies discussed so far,
however, have been approached from an exclusive masculine perspective. Thus, it becomes
essential to present the concept of female Bildungsroman and some of its literary examples.
 41

2 THE FEMALE BILDUNGSROMAN

The female Bildungsroman is a tradition that revises the definitions of the male
correspondent, mostly because the social roles historically delegated to men and women are
opposed to one another. The woman writer, particularly from the nineteenth century in
England, had many social obstacles to overcome in order to publish her works and establish a
literary female tradition. The female Bildungsroman is an essential part of this tradition, and
once again, because of the different lives that men and women lead, its characteristics do not
correspond to an absolute transfer from the male characteristics of the sub-genre. Examples of
nineteenth and twentieth century novels that describe female development attest that these
characteristics needed to be evidenced, despite the similarities that both male and female
Bildungsroman might share.

2.1 To be a woman, a woman writer

The Bildungsroman is, fundamentally, a “novel of formation” or personal

development (CUDDON, 1998), originally conceptualized after the eighteenth-century
German model of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (MORGENSTERN, 2009). It is
a narrative of the experience of transitioning to adulthood, more often of a person of the male
sex (CUDDON, 1988). It portrays “the image of man in the process of becoming”
(BAKHTIN, 1986, p. 19), a process in which the inner-self must face “concrete social reality”
(LUKÁCS, 1998, p. 132), a conflictual but necessary part for this transition to be fulfilled,
with the narrative commonly coming to an end when the protagonist “is about to act
decisively in the world” (DILTHEY, 1997, p. 343). In addition, even though the
Bildungsroman is essentially fictional, the autobiographical element is commonly
incorporated to novels of the kind (BRUFORD, 2009) — as we have seen in the examples of
Bildungsroman previously commented —, and despite their basic differences, one genre
associates to the other.
Furthermore, from the nineteenth century on, once it was assimilated by different
cultures, the Bildungsroman began to describe even more diverse processes of personal
development, from multiple ethnicities, class identities and, notably, not only from the male
perspective (SCHWANTES, 2007). As we have seen, the Bildungsroman is a narrative of the
human experience of development; however, from its first manifestations and in its great
 42

majority, it is a narrative of the male experience of development. Being so, what would the
narrative of the female experience of development consist of? What would distinguish it from
its male correspondent?
Before approaching a more direct discussion on the female Bildungsroman and
presenting its characteristics and literary examples, we may begin by initially considering that
the female experience has historically been opposed to the male experience because of social,
cultural and economic conditions which have been imposed to women. Moreover, the
majority of male narratives in literary tradition presents the image of women from the male
perspective, which has effectively impacted the woman writer’s definition of herself as well
as her confidence to write, and these factors seem to be directly associated with the lesser
number of female authors in literary history. At last, this specifies the need for a revision of
literary tradition in order to approach the alternatives the woman writer found to overcome
these obstacles and write herself into fiction.
Considering that the female Bildungsroman is, fundamentally, a narrative of the
female experience of development committed to realism and often partially autobiographical,
all these factors are consequently an essential part of such narratives. Thus, it becomes
necessary to begin with a discussion on how the foundations of patriarchal society19 have
affected the female experience through time, more specifically, the life and work of the
woman writer and, on the whole, the history of literary tradition.
As Ronald Carter and John McRae (2001, p. 398) notice, “most histories of literature
talk about women’s writing as if it were somehow different from men’s writing; yet male
writers are hardly ever discussed in terms of their gender”, and its reason, the authors go on, is
solely because, historically, women were a minority among a majority of poets — and literary
critics — who happened to be men. What the authors’ observation suggests is that gender
should not be a sort of literary classification, since the male production is not customarily
approached separately in literary studies, under such rubrics as “men’s writing”, while the
female production often is.
The reason for such division, however, evidently originates from the position occupied
by women in society, for equally evident patriarchal cultural implications have long
segregated men and women and placed the man in the most advantageous position, which
seems to directly relate to the lesser manifestations of female authors in literary history. As

19
For this study, we will consider the observations on England’s society and literature, and how its impositions
have affected both English and North-American women writers.
 43

Clara Reeve20 in the late eighteenth century attested, in terms of artistic creation, “For what in
man is most respected, / In woman’s form shall be rejected” (apud CARTER & MCRAE,
2001, p. 226).
Virginia Woolf (2012) correlates this historical undermining of the work of the woman
writer with the social, cultural and economic circumstances imposed to women. An
observation of the late-1920s woman’s condition brought the author to reflect on the
restrictions that women faced. By investigating the historical position of the woman in
England’s society, the author found that such restrictions were deeply rooted in its
foundations, as history proved that the life of women from the 1400s to the 1600s involved
domestic violence and the denial of autonomy, education and, on the whole, the basic right to
speak their minds (WOOLF, 2012).
To demonstrate the depth of these constraints and how they affect female artists,
Woolf (2012) conceives the character of Judith Shakespeare, a middle-class girl who could
have been Shakespeare’s sister. Through this imagery built on facts about the Elizabethan
woman, the author argues that women born with the same artistic disposition as the English
dramatist’s would not have been able to equally develop their artistry and become renowned
authors, not because they possessed less ability to create, but because society imposed them
the aforementioned limitations (WOOLF, 2012).
While Shakespeare supposedly had all the education and opportunities necessary to
freely practice his art and become ‘Shakespeare’, these basic means for perfecting one’s craft
were not at the disposal of his female contemporary, so like her, the imaginary sister who
possessed a natural talent for writing would have remained uneducated, economically
dependent and household bound (WOOLF, 2012). This illustrates not only what women
experienced, but also Woolf’s (2012) argument that creative genius is determined, to a greater
extent than gift, by favorable economic and sociocultural circumstances, which have
historically been granted almost exclusively to men:

Shakespeare himself went, very probably (his mother was an heiress), to the
grammar school, where he may have learnt Latin — Ovid, Virgil and Horace
— and the elements of grammar and logic. […] Meanwhile, his
extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was as
adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was
not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let
alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one
of her brother’s perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in
20
Clara Reeve (1729-1807) was an English author whose best known work is the Gothic novel The Old English
Baron (1777) (CARTER & MCRAE, 2001). The quoted lines are taken from the author’s An Argument in
Favour of the Natural Equality of Both the Sexes, published in 1776 (CARTER & MCRAE, 2001).
 44

and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about
with books and papers (WOOLF, 2012, p. 61).

Despite all adversities, the woman writer still managed to somehow overcome them
and find means to produce and publish her works. As Carter and McRae (2001, p. 26) expose,
women in England have written literary works as early as the twelfth century, and such cases
as Margery Kempe’s (1373-1438), a female author who “could neither read nor write” and yet
managed to publish her book21 by dictating it to two literate men once again prove that
women have constantly struggled so their voices could be heard.
The achievements of Aphra Behn 22(1640?-1689) must also be considered. The female
author was an exception to the practiced patriarchal rule of her time, for she was not only an
important figure for the development of the novel genre in her country (CARTER &
MCRAE, 2001), but also a well-known writer who was able to financially support herself
with her art (GREENBLATT, 2006). Woolf (2012, p. 74) exalts her by stating that “all
women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn” for having paved the
way for female authors to come with her accomplishments.
The period covering the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century in
England witnessed both a considerable growth of female readership for the novel genre and a
moment of great fertility among women writers of the same, as the appraised literature of Jane
Austen (1775-1817), the Brontë sisters (Emily, 1818-1849; Charlotte, 1819-1855; Anne,
1820-1849), Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) and George Eliot (1819-1880) attests (CARTER
& MCRAE, 2001). Despite this vigorous development resulting from such creative works
produced by female minds, the woman determined to write still had to face the ever-present
hard realities of patriarchy in order to publish. As Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (2000,
p. 64) observe,

[…] the literary woman has always faced equally degrading options when
she had to define her public presence in the world. If she did not supress her
work entirely or publish it pseudonymously or anonymously, she could
modestly confess her female “limitations” and concentrate on the “lesser”
subjects reserved for ladies as becoming to their inferior powers.

Therefore, the nineteenth-century woman writer still experienced subjugation:

although she was now, in a way, a more expressive part of the male-dominant literary scene

21
The Book of Margery Kempe (date undetermined), an autobiographical piece.
22
Behn was the author of diverse fictional genres, but mostly theater and prose. She is said to have had a wider
life experience than most of the women of her times and openly approached the most varied and polemic topics
in her writing, such as female sexuality. Her best known work is the novel Oroonoko (1688), whose hero is a
“royal slave” (GREENBLATT, 2006).
 45

than she ever was, still she was placed at the disadvantageous position and could not enjoy
creative freedom the same way that male authors always did. Moreover, Woolf (2012, p. 66)
observes that “there was an enormous body of masculine opinion to the effect that nothing
could be expected of women intellectually” and “[…] even in the nineteenth century a woman
was not encouraged to be an artist”.
Carter and McRae (2001, p. 267) comment on this most socially acceptable option for
the woman writer, meaning, to attain her work to unimportant topics by concentrating on “the
sub-genres of romance, fantasy and sensation”, which were financially successful although
disregarded by literary criticism, as they avoided dealing with the more serious social matters
frequently tackled in the literature of men. George Eliot (2006) defined the works of these
women novelists as “silly novels”23 for their lack of commitment to a more intellectual
approach.
Another strategy adopted by nineteenth-century women writers, which Eliot herself
practiced, was to dress themselves up in the “cloak of maleness” (GILBERT & GUBAR,
2000, p. 65) of an ambiguous or actual masculine pseudonym. Gilbert and Gubar (2000)
expropriate Woolf’s argument to comment that this was the option for the writer who wanted
to avoid “admitting she was ‘only a woman’ or protesting that she was ‘as good as men’”
(WOOLF, 2012, p. 80), in order not to remain excluded from literary criticism appreciation.
Remarkable nineteenth-century women writers who have used pseudonyms in order to
omit their female identities are the Brontë sisters, who hid behind the ambiguous names of the
Bell brothers Acton (Anne), Currer (Charlotte) and Ellis (Emily) and, of course, George Eliot,
born Mary Ann Evans, who seemed deeply concerned with getting her novels to reach more
serious audiences (CARTER & MCRAE, 2001). Knowing the heavy burden of the female
mark, had it been attached to her work, Evans adopted not only a masculine name, but an
attempted masculine persona24 for her writing in order to escape the ‘lady novelist’ label
(GILBERT & GUBAR, 2000).
It becomes clearer that these patriarchal determinations of society have imposed great
obstacles for women writers and seem inextricably related to the secondary role that they have
played in the history of literature. The majority of male authors in literary tradition is itself
23
In her anonymously published essay Silly Novels by Lady Novelists (1856), Eliot (2006) criticized these much
unrealistic literary sub-genres adopted by a considerable number of women writers. What Eliot (2006) argued
was that these works contributed to the prejudice against women writers and negatively affected the woman who,
as herself, produced more laborious, socially-aware literary works.
24
This, however, did not prevent a most careful reader, deeply familiar with the composition of fiction such as
Charles Dickens was, from observing that the style of the author from Scenes of Clerical Life carried “womanly
touches”, as he wrote on a letter to Eliot in 1858 guaranteeing to be sure that despite the author’s male name, its
author could only be a woman (DICKENS, 2016, p. 35-36).
 46

another determinant for this historical minority of women writers because, as a result, female
authors “…had no tradition behind them, or one so short and partial that it was of little help”
(WOOLF, 2012, p. 82). As Woolf (2012, p. 74) also observed, “[…] masterpieces are not
single and solitary births”, and so “[…] the effect of tradition and of the lack of tradition upon
the mind of a writer” (WOOLF, 2012, p. 44) is vital for the case of the woman writer.
Acknowledging this fact, Gilbert and Gubar (2000, p. xxi) revise traditional literary
history in order to establish a “newly defined context of a female literary tradition”, stating
that there has been an almost imperceptible tradition for women writers which the authors
proposed to evidence, observing that women have long been communicating the female
experience in literature by their own means. As Carter and McRae (2001), they also verify the
male predominance in the adopted model of literary periodization and that, in this model,
women writers are commonly placed as exceptions to the literature produced in their times,
resulting in the separate approach that their works are given, which isolated female authors
from one another and, on the whole, from literary tradition itself (GILBERT & GUBAR,
2000).
Because of the male author’s authority proved by literary history, the image of women
crystalized in traditional literary texts almost singularly projected the male perception of the
female sex: “From Eve, Minerva, Sophia and Galatea onward, after all, patriarchal mythology
defines women as created by, from, and for men, the children of male brains, ribs, and
ingenuity” (GILBERT & GUBAR, 2000, p. 12).This way, Gilbert and Gubar (2000) observe
that the woman as written by men has been given a great deal of different “masks”, but she
was mostly confined to the “angel25 or monster” or “angel/monster” images: if the woman
was not a docile and silent (silenced) creature, she was instantly perceived as a monstrous,
rebellious “madwoman26”, although the latter could eventually be hiding under an angelic
surface. These images reflected patriarchal expectations of women and have strongly
influenced the woman writer’s image of herself, causing her to doubt her own creative
dispositions, “[f]or it is as much from literature as from ‘life’ that literate women learn they
are ‘to be dull/ Expected and dessigned27” (GILBERT & GUBAR, 2000, p. 11).

25
The “angel” image in Gilbert and Gubar’s (2000) study is based on the one found in Coventry Patmore’s poem
The Angel in the House (1854). The imagery of female perfection described in the poem, based on the poet’s
wife, represents the male ideals for the Victorian woman.
26
The madwoman or monster image in the study and its title relates to the character of Bertha Mason Rochester,
the “madwoman in the attic” in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, who Gilbert and Gubar (2000) define as the
contrasting double of the eponymous protagonist and Brontë herself.
27
Throughout their study, Gilbert and Gubar (2000) use excerpts of female poetry in order to support their
arguments. The lines “to be dull/Expected and designed” are taken from the poem Introduction, by Anne Finch,
Countess of Winchelsea (1661-1720).
 47

The authors use the example of Makarie, a character from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s
Journeyman Years, described as an angel-woman whose life was merely contemplative,
therefore, a life of no stories, especially in contrast to male characters’ active lives, those
commonly portrayed as great explorers of the world who did have stories to tell (GILBERT &
GUBAR, 2000). This way, a woman whose life diverged from what was socially expected of
her — the submissiveness of the “angel” extremity — and engaged in activities associated to
the male sex, such as writing, was immediately considered an anomaly, which pushed her to
the “monster” extremity: “[…] all characteristics of a male life of ‘significant action’ — are
‘monstrous’ in women precisely because ‘unfeminine’ and therefore unsuited to a gentle life
of ‘contemplative purity’” (GILBERT & GUBAR, 2000, p. 28). To overcome these forced
patriarchal expectations and obstacles to reach literary autonomy, the authors believe that
female writers had to “examine, assimilate and transcend the extreme images of ‘angel’ and
‘monster’ which male authors [had] generated for [them]” (GILBERT & GUBAR, 2000, p.
17).
In their revisionary process for women writers, Gilbert and Gubar (2000) use Harold
Bloom’s (1997) theory of the “anxiety of influence”28to support their arguments, a concept
which describes a male author’s “fear that he is not his own creator and that the works of his
predecessors, existing before and beyond him, assume essential priority over his own writing”
(GILBERT & GUBAR, 2000, p. 46). As the authors observe, Bloom’s theory cannot be
simply transferred to the woman writer because as they importantly attest and elaborate, the
female author would not equally experience this anxiety of influence, for the simple fact that
the majority of those influential writers were those same males who mostly recorded their
own definitions of women in literature, in a way that does not correspond to the reality of
female experience (GILBERT & GUBAR, 2000). Instead, the woman writer would suffer
from a different type of anxiety — an “anxiety of authorship”:

On the one hand, therefore, the woman writer’s male precursors symbolize
authority; on the other hand, despite their authority, they fail to define the
ways in which she experiences her own identity as a writer. More, the
masculine authority with which they construct their literary personae, as well
as the fierce power struggles in which they engage in their efforts of self-

28
Bloom (1997) proposes a theory to define how relationships of influence work among poets. The author states
that no work of poetry is essentially new, as they actually represent equivocal interpretations of the works of
earlier poets. The anxiety of influence implies that a poet does not benefit from influence; instead, it generates a
feeling that the poet can only achieve innovation and become a “strong” poet once he annuls the influential poet,
in a battle between father and son, as the myth of Oedipus and Laius. This process of anxiety develops in six
phases that would culminate in a complete “distortion” of the earlier poet’s work, and if in the end, the poet was
able to create something that could be defined as new, he would become a “strong” poet, but if the essence of his
poet/father was still perceptible in his work, then the poet would be considered “weak”.
 48

creation, seem to the woman writer directly to contradict the terms of her
own gender definition. Thus the “anxiety of influence” that a male poet
experiences is felt by a female poet as an even more primary “anxiety of
authorship” — a radical fear that she cannot create, that because she can
never become a “precursor” the act of writing will isolate or destroy her
(GILBERT & GUBAR, 2000, p. 48-49).

This way, Gilbert and Gubar (2000) praise the great efforts of English and North-
American nineteenth-century literary women, as the alternative they found to overcome this
anxiety of authorship was itself an intense process of revision. These women simultaneously
consented and rebelled against the patriarchal definitions of the literary tradition they had to
work and struggle with, “in isolation that felt like illness, alienation that felt like madness,
obscurity that felt like paralysis” (GILBERT & GUBAR, 2000, p. 51), for they did have a
story of their own to tell, even though literary tradition and society implied there was none.
A considerable number of nineteenth-century women worked with clearly limited
conditions so they could write — as aforementioned, either attain their work to ‘silly’ topics
or adopt male pseudonyms —, while others developed a literary artifice of writing stories
which carried deeper, not easily accessed meanings (GILBERT & GUBAR, 2000). Under the
surface of the seemingly ordinary female plots in their writings, they gave their own account
on themselves and secretly communicated the reality of female experience and, by doing so,
they subversively refused patriarchal definitions of women while simultaneously taking part
of the literary context dominated by male authors:

From Austen to Dickinson, these female artists all dealt with central female
experiences from a specifically female perspective. But this distinctively
feminine aspect of their art has been generally ignored by critics because the
most successful women writers often seem to have channelled their female
concerns into secret or at least obscure corners. In effect, such women have
created submerged meanings, meanings hidden within or beyond the more
accessible, “public” content of their works, so that their literature could be
read and appreciated even when its vital concern with female dispossession
and disease was ignored (GILBERT & GUBAR, 2000, p. 72).

The discovery of these “submerged meanings” within women’s texts, their own female
stories, reinforced Gilbert and Gubar’s (2000) theory that considers them in the light of a
unitary female tradition, instead of the common separate approach these writers had been
historically given. The plot which lies beneath these “palimpsestic” writings commonly
present an imagery of silence, disease and confinement, which corresponded both to the literal
and figurative female experience, and it is, in the authors’ words, “[…] a story of the woman
writer’s quest for her own story; […] of the woman’s quest for self-definition” (GILBERT &
GUBAR, 2000, p. 76), their way to escape the restrictive definitions of “angel/monster”
 49

which literary men had imposed to them. This move toward female literary authorship,
despite its hardships, is itself a “revolutionary act” and an “extraordinary accomplishment”, as
the authors define (GILBERT & GUBAR, 2000).
After struggling with the degrading limitations of patriarchal society, women writers
finally achieved a sense of literary autonomy, with their own restless efforts, and this was a
necessary struggle so that women writers to come could grasp such a reinforced tradition of
female authors (GILBERT & GUBAR, 2000). This nineteenth-century women’s strategy of
subliminally communicating their own life experiences was of extreme relevance, because
women could not have remained restricted to the unrealistic literary image men had made of
them. As Hélène Cixous (1976, p. 875) strongly argues,

Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to
writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their
bodies — for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal.
Woman must put herself into the text — as into the world and into history —
by her own movement.

As we can see, the life of a woman and the social constraints that have been imposed
to her are absolutely opposed to the life of a man and the liberty he has historically possessed,
and these implications are an important part of the fiction produced by women writers. This
relates to a primary difference between the traditionally masculine Bildungsroman and the
female counterpart, as the female Bildungsroman is, fundamentally, a narrative of the female
experience. This way, it becomes necessary to verify the female Bildungsroman’s own
definitions and characteristics, as it is evident that it must not be simply approached as an
inversion of the traditional male counterpart.

2.2 To become a woman in fiction

The above mentioned historical distinctions between the social lives of men and
women represent the first essential aspect to consider for the approach to fictions of female
experience, more specifically, the female Bildungsroman. As Gilbert and Gubar (2000, p. 43)
complement, these distinctions are signalled in the first stages of childhood and determine
different developmental courses for boys and girls, as “the male child’s progress toward
adulthood is a growth toward both self-assertion and self-articulation, […] a development of
the powers of speech. But the girl child must learn the arts of silence […]”.
 50

As distinguished social roles played by — but mostly imposed to — men and women
circumscribe personal development, we understand that the female Bildungsroman possesses
its own diverging characteristics from the traditional definitions of the sub-genre with its
foundations on the development of a male character. Again, the developmental aspirations
and course of the male Bildungsroman protagonist generally do not correspond to the female
counterpart’s aspirations and course; therefore, they are not simply transferred to female
characters, because as Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland (1983, p. 5)
observe, “[…] the sex of the protagonist modifies every aspect of a particular Bildungsroman:
its narrative structure, its implied psychology, its representation of social pressures”.
Considering that the individual’s relation to society is a central articulation to fictions of
personal development, the authors acknowledge the need for a revision of the traditional
definitions of Bildungsroman in order to elucidate the female experience (ABEL; HIRSCH;
LANGLAND, 1983).
Abel, Hirsch and Langland’s (1983, p. 5) The Voyage in: Fictions of Female
Development presents an “alternative generic model” of similarities and disparities for the
female Bildungsroman, thus standing as one of the most expansive revisionary studies on the
subject. For this reason, this section will mostly concentrate on the essays that compose the
book, as they approach varied possibilities29 for the novel of female development. On the
whole, female literary tradition has proven to be a necessary process of constant revision,
reexamining, and expanding, as Gilbert and Gubar’s (2000) study also demonstrated; this
being, as previously approached, intrinsically related to traditional male dominance in
literature30.
Abel, Hirsch, and Langland (1983, p.7) notice that “[…] when a critic identifies the
‘principal characteristics’ of a ‘typical Bildungsroman plot’, he inevitably describes ‘human’
development in exclusively male terms”. As is known, the Bildungsroman protagonist must
essentially interact with the social sphere in order to reach a certain stage in his development
when he uncovers “responses to the innermost demands of his soul in the structures of
society” (LUKÁCS, 1998, p. 133), thus entering adulthood, but “for a woman, social options

29
We observe that, even though the majority of essays in The Voyage in: Fictions of Female Development focus
on the female literary production in English, they also approach female narratives of other nationalities, such as
the work of Clarice Lispector in Marta Peixoto’s text, and female German authors, as in Sandra Frieden’s.
30
Moreover, differently from the male classic, the female Bildungsroman does not consist of a two hundred
year-old theoretical tradition. Indeed, theories of female Bildungsroman are historically recent, having developed
mostly from the crescent 1970s feminist literary criticism, precisely, from feminist critics’ discoveries of women
writers and their works (GILBERT & GUBAR, 2000), as is the case of Gilbert and Gubar’s (2000), and Abel,
Hirsch, and Langland’s (1983) vital investigations.
 51

are often so narrow that they preclude explorations of her milieu” (ABEL; HIRSCH;
LANGLAND, 1983, p. 7).
For Marianne Hirsch (1983, p. 23), the development of the woman in a number of
nineteenth-century Bildungsromane is actually an “antithesis of Bildung” in the Goethean
sense of gradual development, based on the prototype of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship.
The author observes that due to the life of passivity conditioned to women, the only possible
growth for the protagonist in these narratives would correspond to contemplative growth, or
an inward “spiritual development” (HIRSCH, 1983). Hirsch (1983) also observes that, when a
female character effectively becomes an adult to society, symbolized by marital union and
subsequent motherhood, she is taken by a conflicting feeling because her personal growth is
abruptly stopped. The nineteenth-century woman’s entrance to adulthood simply implied the
exchange of one household for another, not allowing her to freely affirm her identity by acting
out her own ambitions (HIRSCH, 1983). This way,

The plot of inner development traces a discontinuous, circular path which,

rather than moving forward, culminates in a return to origins, thereby
distinguishing itself from the traditional plot outlines of the Bildungsroman.
With this circularity, structures of repetition rather than structures of
progression come to dominate the plot (HIRSCH, 1983, p. 26).

According to Bakhtin (1986, p. 21), the male Bildungsroman protagonist is a

“dynamic hero” whose progressive changes “acquire plot significance”; here, the female
Bildungsroman protagonist would possibly be described as a “static” heroine, as she is not
able to actively participate and have an impact on the social structures that could allow those
changes to happen to her and, consequently, to the plot.
The protagonist finds herself in a paradox between “psychological needs and social
imperatives” (HIRSCH, 1983, p. 27), which makes female development for this character
circular instead of linear. She believes the return to retreat to be the only alternative for her to
resist social conventions after realizing she would never be allowed to fully develop in
exteriority as the male counterpart does. Yet social structures remain unaltered, her retreat
only has a negative impact on herself. This, according to Hirsch (1983), leads the protagonist
to a destructive path.
The only possible narrative solution for these female Bildungsromane, as the author
observes, would be the inevitable death of the protagonist, whether a figurative death of
seclusion or a literal death, commonly culminating in the protagonist’s suicide (HIRSCH,
1983). For these female characters, however, literal death is often “…described in
 52

unequivocally positive terms as a stillness, a feeling of liberation, peace” (HIRSCH, 1983, p.

41), contrary to early critical reviews that perceived these characters’ fate as a result of
neuroses, the inability to face the complexities of adult life. As Hirsch (1983, p. 28)
comments, “to adopt this view is to ignore the limited possibilities offered by their societies”.
In a way, the structure of this circular plot on female Bildungsromane partially
resembles the male Künstlerroman (HIRSCH, 1983), like the earlier example of Joyce’s
(2001) Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Hirsch (1983) comments that both narratives
prioritize inward development at the expense of outward experience. They differ, however, in
the sense that, on the one hand, the excessive inwardness of the male artist is compensated
with the mastering of his artistry, which allows him to create something from this
contemplative state that will eventually be shared with the outer world; on the other hand, for
the female protagonist, “subjectivity is not an assertion of individual identity and imaginative
power, but a dissolution, an extinction” (HIRSCH, 1983, p. 47).
Moreover, Abel, Hirsch, and Langland (1983) identify two distinctive structures in
narratives of female development31, one that shares similarities to the male Bildungsroman
plot, and another that reformulates the traditional definitions of the sub-genre’s structure. The
narrative of apprenticeship, of less occurrence among narratives of female development,
assimilates the male Bildungsroman’s characteristic course of progression, attaining to
chronological facts of the protagonist’s life from the earlier stages of life into adulthood; the
difference from the male counterpart lies, however, in the fact that the solutions offered for
the female protagonist’s development are commonly “imperfect”, as the authors define
(ABEL; HIRSCH; LANGLAND, 1983).
An exemplar female narrative of apprenticeship is Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and
even though Brontë’s heroine is given adequate formal education which would allow her to
fully develop the same way as a male hero would, when Jane reaches maturity, she takes the
path of other nineteenth-century female protagonists who “[…] learn instead to consolidate
their female nurturing roles rather than to take a more active part in the shaping of society”
(ABEL; HIRSCH; LANGLAND, 1983, p. 7). Abel, Hirsch, and Langland (1983) also
observe, however, that the gradual course of female narratives of apprenticeship in some cases
might shift and lead the protagonist to the above mentioned destructive path as defined by
Hirsch (1983).

31
Pinto (1990) observes that Abel, Hirsch and Langland (1983) opt for the broader term “development” to
approach these two narrative structures, instead of “Bildungsroman”, as the term is also suitable for the
awakening narrative, in which the character’s development is not an exact correspondent to the sense of
“Bildung”.
 53

The other structure identified by the authors is particular and most common to female
narratives: it reformulates the definitions of Bildungsroman and, consequently, contributes to
make the sub-genre broader (ABEL; HIRSCH; LANGLAND, 1983). According to Abel,
Hirsch, and Langland (1983, p. 11), the narrative of awakening describes a different kind of
development for its protagonist, one that does not follow a progressive course from childhood
onward as the female narrative of apprenticeship does, but in this case, the “development is
delayed by inadequate education until adulthood, when it blossoms momentarily, then
dissolves”.
In these novels, the protagonists are educated within romantic expectations, but are
taken by an internal revolution when meeting with concrete reality (ABEL; HIRSCH,
LANGLAND, 1983). After the emblems for female maturity of marriage and maternity
(HIRSCH, 1983) result in frustration instead of the personal realization these women expected
to achieve, their awakening is commonly presented through sparse moments of revelation or
recollection of memories, which implies a fragmental, not linear narrative (ABEL; HIRSCH;
LANGLAND, 1983). This way, the “spiritual development” that Hirsch (1983) detected in
female Bildungsromane may occur in both the apprenticeship and the awakening narratives.
Abel, Hirsch, and Langland’s (1983) observations circumscribe the distinctive
narrative structures of apprenticeship and awakening among novels of female development.
However, Susan J. Rosowski (1983) applies these terminologies to explicit a difference of
another kind. For the author, the novel of apprenticeship is a synonym for novels of male
development, and the novel of awakening, in contrast, would account for an exclusively
female sub-genre for novels of development:

The novel of awakening is similar to the apprenticeship novel in some ways:

it also recounts the attempts of a sensitive protagonist to learn the nature of
the world, discover its meaning and pattern, and acquire a philosophy of life,
but she must learn these lessons as a woman (ROSOWSKI, 1983, p. 49).

Electing Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856) as an exemplar novel of

awakening32, Rosowski (1983) corroborates with Abel, Hirsch, and Langland (1983) and
identifies these protagonists as constrained women who feel reality to be nothing but sheer
disillusionment. The same way as Hirsch (1983), the author perceives the circularity of these
32
Rosowski (1983) bases her arguments and definitions for the novel of awakening in literary works from the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Moreover, even though the author claims Madame Bovary to be a
model for such novels, she comments that the male narrator’s implied voice in Flaubert’s work narrates the
development of the protagonist from an observer’s standpoint. Differently, Kate Chopin’s equally omniscient
narrator in The Awakening (1899) would stand closer to the protagonist’s experience. Chopin’s novel resembles
Madame Bovary’s plot, however, being narrated through a female voice, it would correspond to a “high degree
of narrative sympathy” and a “distilled example” of novel of awakening (ROSOWSKI, 1983, p. 52).
 54

heroines’ development (ROSOWSKI, 1983). Complementary, Rosowski (1983) explains that

when female characters attempt to unify their expectations with the status quo, their private
selves with their socially-expected selves, commonly through the resolution of matrimony,
they realize that such union is unattainable, thus they experience an “awakening to
limitations” (1983, p. 49), represented as an interior battle of private self against public self:

Conflict is largely internal, between two selves: an inner, imaginative self of

private value is at odds with an outer, conventional self of social value.
Movement is from an initial childhood separation between the two selves to
an illusion of synthesis in marriage, followed by an awakening to the
impossibility of such a union and a return to separation (ROSOWSKI, 1983,
p. 49-50).

Furthermore, the author identifies that the awakening of the protagonist may occur
toward opposite directions: in late nineteenth-century novels it is common that the female
character awakens to turn to her inner self, retreating as a way to avoid dealing with social
life, moving from the clash with reality to the escapism of dreams and fancy; while in early
twentieth-century narratives female characters tend to awaken and move to external matters,
thus the conflict with reality for these characters causes them to abandon dreams and fancies
to often accept and commit to social roles (ROSOWSKI, 1983). Either way, the female
protagonist in the novel of awakening must, on the whole, deal with constant opposition as
she faces, in Rosowski’s (1983, p. 68) words, “[…] the dilemma of the individual who
attempts to find value in a society that relegates to her only roles and values of the woman,
ignoring her needs as a human being”.
Abel, Hirsch, and Langland (1983) also observe that male and female Bildungsroman
protagonists carry different objectives along with their developments, as a possible result from
the ways their gender identities are defined. According to the authors, traditional
Bildungsroman fundamentally “assumes the possibility of individual achievement and social
integration” (ABEL; HIRSCH; LANGLAND, 1983, p. 5) for the male character. Dilthey
(1997), Lukács (1997), and Mann (1923 apud BRUFORD, 2009) also observe that the
original goals for these heroes involved self-cultivation, the development of personality,
sometimes at the expense of interrelations, in order to achieve maturity and then actively
participate in social life. This is evident in the prototype of Goethe’s (2000) Wilhelm
Meister’s Apprenticeship, in which the protagonist’s efforts are almost exclusively directed
toward the improvement of his personality so he can grow and evolve as a human being.
 55

Revisionary feminist theories of psychoanalysis33 suggested that “the dynamics of the

mother-infant bond” (ABEL; HIRSCH; LANGLAND, 1983, p. 9) are essential to define male
and female identities, and as the mother shares a closer connection with the female child, the
male child identifies himself as a contrast to the mother, thus developing apart from her, and
consequently, in a more autonomous way than the female child. For the girl, these theories
suggested that she identifies herself as relating to the maternal figure, who is considered a
constituent part of the girl’s identity, as she believes to be an extension of her mother (ABEL;
HIRSCH; LANGLAND, 1983).
This way, Abel, Hirsch, and Langland (1983, p. 10) revise the meanings and course of
the protagonist’s development, especially in nineteenth-century female narratives, and
observe that they are, opposed to male narratives, “[…] defined in terms of community and
empathy rather than achievement and autonomy”. Since girls develop their sense of self in
relation to another from the first stages of life, in these narratives, “[…] the heroine
encounters the conviction that identity resides in intimate relationships, especially those of
early childhood” (ABEL; HIRSCH; LANGLAND, 1983, p. 11).
Gender identity might also relate to the fact that the male Bildungsroman hero easily
separates from his family to go on a journey by himself in the outer world, like Wilhelm
Meister does (GOETHE, 2000), while the female heroine tends to remain closer to her
relatives and intimate friends (ABEL; HIRSCH; LANGLAND, 1983). Mary Anne Ferguson
(1983, p. 228) evidences that these identity traits determine the narrative pattern in male and
female Bildungsromane, additionally corroborating with Hirsch’s (1983) comment on the
circularity of narratives of female development:

The pattern for the female novel of development has been largely circular,
rather than spiral: women in fiction remain at home. Instead of testing their
self-image through adventures in the outside world, they are initiated at
home through learning the rituals of human relationships, so that they may
replicate the lives of their mothers.

Because interpersonal relationships are deeply rooted in women’s identities, the

female Bildungsroman may also narrate the parallel development of one of the heroine’s
relations, thus expanding traditional definitions of protagonist (ABEL; HIRSCH;
LANGLAND, 1983). A representative of such characteristic would be Louisa May Alcott’s
(1832-1888) Little Women (1868-9), in which the protagonist’s development is accompanied

33
These studies developed between the 1970s and 1980s present alternative theories for the understanding of
female identity and its development, diverging from traditional Freudian anatomy-based definitions of gender
and sexuality, which described women in terms of inferiority to men (ABEL; HIRSCH; LANGLAND, 1983).
 56

by her sisters’: “Women characters, more psychologically embedded in relationships,

sometimes share the formative voyage with friends, sisters, or mothers, who assume equal
status as protagonists” (ABEL; HIRSCH; LANGLAND, 1983, p. 12).
Moreover, Gelfant (1983) evidences novels of development in which the leading role
is shared between a brother and a sister, as the case of Holden Caulfield and Phoebe, in
Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. The author observes that in novels of shared development
between siblings, as they grow together, gender expectations will eventually separate them,
since they must assume their identities of man and woman; yet this is often a traumatic
experience, as “[…] it destroys them because they have been too integrally a part of each
other, […] to be separated by the unequivocal sex roles society prescribes” (GELFANT,
1983, p. 154).
Gilbert and Gubar’s (2000) theory of the submerged plots that convey the true life
experiences of women, also traditional to nineteenth-century novels, is evidenced in female
Bildungsromane. Abel, Hirsch, and Langland (1983) observe that the subversive combination
of a primary plot that prescribed social expectations of women and a concealed account of the
real female experience is responsible for building narrative tensions in a number of novels of
development. This is the case of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), in which the
protagonist’s development is revealed to the reader through her recollection of past memories,
as Abel (1983) detects, or for Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (LANGLAND, 1983).
According to Langland (1983, p. 112), under the superficial reading of a conventional
female narrative where personal achievement means becoming a wife, Alcott’s classic
subliminally argues that the actual goal of a woman’s development is to find “female
fulfilment in a community of women”. Langland (1983, p. 125) observes, however, that this
possible tension built between the two plots is contradictory, as Jo, the protagonist,
“undergoes the development of an autonomous person within a female community, and then
she must leave that community and the identity she developed there to marry”. Thus, even
though Little Women prescribes the conventions of a romantic plot, the encoded message in
its secondary plot proves that the development of women’s identities strongly benefits from
interpersonal relationships: “Female growth, as Alcott sees it, takes place through integration
rather than separation” (LANGLAND, 1983, p. 127).
Finally, Abel, Hirsch, and Langland (1983) acknowledge that the female
Bildungsroman is, as female literary tradition on the whole, subject to constant revisions,
reformulations, and expansions, as much as its male counterpart, for it is also a parallel
representation of the ever-changing course of history and social norms. Complementary, as
 57

Simone de Beauvoir (2011) observes34, on twentieth-century women’s move toward

independence, their gaining the right to vote and the rising of women workers, must be
acknowledged, as it diminished the social differences between sexes, thus altering social
norms to a certain extent. However, despite these achievements, women continued to
experience subjugation of some kind:

[…] these civic liberties remain abstract if there is no corresponding

economic autonomy; the kept woman — wife or mistress — is not freed
from the male just because she has a ballot paper in her hand; while today’s
customs impose fewer constraints on her than in the past, such negative
licences have not fundamentally changed her situation; she remains a vassal,
imprisoned in her condition. […] Moreover, social structures have not been
deeply modified by the changes in women’s condition. This world has
always belonged to men and still retains the form they have imprinted on it
(BEAUVOIR, 2011, p. 813).

Still, Western societies’ advances with the opening of some doors to the woman
promote new meanings and narrative structures for fictions of female development, which
may additionally describe even more similar characteristics to the traditional male model, as
the twentieth century witnessed the transition of women — and chiefly, women writers —
from a world of limitations to a world of considerable broader possibilities, in which they can
participate more effectively: “[…] we see, in fictions of female development, a movement
from the world within to the world without, from introspection to activity” (ABEL; HIRSCH;
LANGLAND, p. 13). Moreover, as Cristina Ferreira Pinto (1990, p. 32, our version) states,
“in our times, the ‘Bildungsroman’ contributes to the validation of female individuality and to
the fulfilment of woman’s aspirations, as well as to the shaping of a society in which such
realization is attainable”35.
The female Bildungsroman is a variation of a traditionally masculine sub-genre of the
novel, and despite presenting similarities, it promotes an expansion of its model of origin, as
the narratives of women demand a revision of structures, plots, themes, and gender identities
to account for the multiplicity of the female experience. To become a woman in fiction is a
development on its own terms: a circular, inward movement, a conflict with social limitations,
a turn into seclusion and constant compromising, but mostly, restless subverting. Essentially,
women in fiction and in real life often understand their identities through relationships: that is
the foundational principle for women’s personal development in fiction and for the literary
female tradition nineteenth-century women writers envisioned and concomitantly established.

34
Here, the author speaks of the French woman.
35
O ‘Bildungsroman’ contribui hoje para a afirmação da individualidade da mulher e para a realização dos seus
anseios, assim como para a formação de uma sociedade onde isso possa concretizar-se.
 58

This way, we must observe these generic characteristics of women’s development and how
they are featured in the female literary tradition of the Bildungsroman.

2.3 To behold a womanly tradition

The studies on the female Bildungsroman have proven that within the sub-genre, male and
female narratives present significant distinctions that needed to be evidenced. Despite the
basic premise of the protagonist’s personal development of some kind as constituent of both
male and female Bildungsromane, the social factor, also common to both, implies different
experiences for men and women, which also determines different aspirations and resolutions
for characters of each gender. Thus, the outline for the “alternative generic model” which
Abel, Hirsch, and Langland (1983, p. 5) have gathered attests the existence of a female
tradition of own definitions and characteristics within the Bildungsroman sub-genre.
The period covering the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England, as
aforementioned, is historically remarkable for female literary tradition, as many relevant
works by women writers were produced during that time (CARTER & MCRAE, 2001).
Gilbert and Gubar (2000, p. xxviii) focused their theory on nineteenth-century English and
North-American women novelists and poets for finding their works “[…] powerful in a richly
significant female literary tradition”, and Abel, Hirsch, and Langland (1983) believe that
along with the novel genre, these same women writers have concomitantly revised the sub-
genre of the Bildungsroman. Thus, for this section we will consider the female tradition of the
Bildungsroman starting from the nineteenth-century English and North-American contexts in
order to present and comment how most of the definitions and characteristics of women’s
development are featured in exemplars of female Bildungsroman.
Furthermore, the three selected examples of female Bildungsroman to be discussed — one
English novel from the nineteenth century and two North-American novels, one from the
nineteenth and the other from the twentieth century — demonstrate that the autobiographical
element which Dilthey (1997), Lukács (1998), Mann (1923 apud BRUFORD, 2009), and
Bakhtin (1986) had detected in the traditionally masculine Bildungsroman is also a
characteristic of the female tradition. Bruford’s (2009, p. 30) statement that “there is often a
large autobiographical element in such novels [...]” refers to the male Bildungsroman, but it
may also apply to the female counterpart. This way, the autobiographical element might be
considered another similarity shared by both male and female traditions.
 59

In female literary tradition, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is one of the earliest examples of
partially autobiographical female Bildungsromane. Brontë, as we have seen, was one of those
women writers who covered her female identity with a “cloak of maleness” (GILBERT &
GUBAR, 2000, p. 65), publishing her work in 1847 under the name of Currer Bell. Narrated
in first person, the novel stands as a definitive literary classic and one of the prime references
among female Bildungsromane, the same way Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship
represents a prototype for the traditional male correspondents.
From misfortune to fortune, Jane Eyre’s development traces the same linear path as the
traditional male Bildungsroman, portraying the protagonist’s course from childhood onward,
thus fitting the less recurrent structure of female narratives of apprenticeship, as defined by
Abel, Hirsch, and Langland (1983). This progression, however, occurs within limited options,
specifically, within the confining options that were destined to the middle-class woman in the
Victorian Age, with the protagonist growing up to eventually assume the “female nurturing
[role]” (ABEL; HIRSCH; LANGLAND, 1983, p. 7) of governess.
Yet, as an orphan, Jane’s development involves struggling to find her place in the world
while developing her inner self, and this difficult course is what causes her to mature her
emotional and psychological sides, an aspect which again relates to traditional definitions of
Bildungsroman, as in Lukács’s (1998) observation of the hero’s development as a conflictual
but necessary process for personal growth: “I could not answer the ceaseless inward question
— why I thus suffered; at the distance of — I will not say how many years, I see it clearly”
(BRONTË, 2003, p. 11).
Jane Eyre might describe a paradoxical narrative tension of the kind detected by Abel,
Hirsch, and Langland (1983) based on Gilbert and Gubar’s (2000) theory of the submerged
plot in nineteenth-century women’s novels. Despite the seemingly conventional course of life
that Jane traces, from one household to the other (HIRSCH, 1983) — from Gateshead to
Lowood to Thornfield Hall; then from Thornfield to Moor House until she finally settles for a
socially expected life of marriage to Rochester and subsequent motherhood in the secluded
Ferndean (BRONTË, 2003) —, the protagonist is unusually autonomous for the conventional
Victorian “angel” (GILBERT & GUBAR, 2000). Therefore, Jane Eyre would possibly
represent a Victorian “monster”, an ultimate rebel in Gilbert and Gubar’s (2000) sense: “I am
no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will”
(BRONTË, 2003, p. 294).
 60

Moreover, in a most referenced passage from the novel, the protagonist takes a criticizing
tone and questions social conventions and the contrasting lives imposed to men and women,
thus conveying truth about the feminine experience as Gilbert and Gubar (2000) argue:

It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity; they

must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are
condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt
against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions, besides political
rebellions, ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are
supposed to be very calm generally; but women feel just as men feel; they
need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their
brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation,
precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more
privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to
making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and
embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them; if
they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary
for their sex (BRONTË, 2003, p. 123).

For Jane Eyre, strength to grow and to develop (and to discover) her own identity is
based on the personal relationships built throughout her journey: her friendship with Helen at
Lowood, the re-establishing of her heritage by discovering her cousins in Moor House, the
sense of family she finds in Rochester in Ferndean (BRONTË, 2003). In the end, despite the
subversive ideals implied in the novel, the protagonist’s goal in this classic female
Bildungsroman resides in “community and empathy rather than achievement and autonomy”,
as Abel, Hirsch, and Langland (1983, p. 10) determine as a distinguishing characteristic of
narratives of female development.
Moving forward in the nineteenth century and into the North-American literary
context, another example of female Bildungsroman also partially based on events from the
author’s life36 is Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Similar to Jane Eyre, the novel follows
the less recurrent path of progression in female narratives noted by Abel, Hirsch, and
Langland (1983); it covers, however, not the characters’ development starting from
childhood, but from the moment in life they are on the verge of no longer being girls, even
though they have not fully developed into women yet, hence the title (LANGLAND, 1983).
The novel is a third-person narrative that tells the story of the March sisters Meg, Jo, Beth,
and Amy, growing up as they learn from moral lessons and Christian values (ALCOTT,
2008). As previously mentioned, Alcott’s novel represents an example for a characteristic of
female novels of development, since it describes a shared development (ABEL; HIRSCH;
36
Langland (1983) comments that the events presented in Little Women are partially inspired in Alcott’s
personal experiences; her family life, however, was not as happy as the March’s, since the author had to care for
her relatives “financially and emotionally” for the most part of her adult life.
 61

LANGLAND, 1983) among the four protagonists, despite the leading role clearly falling on
the character of Jo.
Of all the March sisters, Jo is the most aware of the functioning of gender roles and the
one to whom the social conventions of being a woman — again, Gilbert and Gubar’s (2000)
“angel” image — weigh heavier. Not only the character objects gender distinctions in a
similar way as Jane Eyre does (BRONTË, 2003), but mostly refuses to act the way she is
expected to, as she is often described as “boyish”, a girl with an attitude, a non-conformist
(ALCOTT, 2008).
In the opening scene from the novel, the girls are expressing their dissatisfaction about
their works and chores, as well as the fact that they have little money to buy Christmas
presents for each other that year because their father is away, serving in the Civil War
(ALCOTT, 2008). Jo’s sisters go on to judge her masculine manners, which seem to be
extending throughout her womanhood, to which she firmly replies, in a defiant tone, echoing
that of Jane Eyre (BRONTË, 2003) in her social critique,

“I hate to think I’ve got to grow up and be Miss March, and wear long
gowns, and look as prim as a China-aster. It’s bad enough to be a girl, any
way, when I like boys’ games, and work, and manners. I can’t get over my
disappointment in not being a boy, and it’s worse than even now, for I’m
dying to go and fight with papa, and I can only stay at home and knit like a
poky old woman” (ALCOTT, 2008, p. 13).

Throughout their development, the March sisters take interests in different artistic
areas: Amy draws pictures, Beth plays the piano, Jo writes stories (ALCOTT, 2008). Yet, Jo
puts a special effort to develop her artistic gift and attempts to earn money from it, initially
hoping to become a successful writer, although writing becomes, throughout the years, a
secondary activity in her life, as she grows older and takes the job of governess when moving
to New York (ALCOTT, 2008). However, the narrative structure of Little Women and the
course of Jo’s development as a writer is rather different from the hero in Joyce’s (2001)
aforementioned example of Künstlerroman, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
The male artist intensely focuses on inner development for the benefit of his artistic
production, as Hirsch (1983) observed; therefore, his goals tend to become more
individualistic, aiming at personal achievement. On the other hand, Jo’s ambitions regarding
her gift are essentially more selfless than the male artist’s, for she sees her writing as a means
to financially support not only herself, but mostly her family and, possibly, others (ALCOTT,
2008). Jo also demonstrates her selflessness when she decides to sell her hair in order to
finance her mother’s trip to visit their sick father during the war (ALCOTT, 2008). Once
 62

again, women’s development is evidently directed toward that sense of “community and
empathy rather than achievement and autonomy” which Abel, Hirsch, and Langland (1983, p.
10) observe as a recurrent characteristic in female Bildungsromane:

The dream of filling home with comforts, giving Beth everything she
wanted, from strawberries in winter to an organ in her bedroom; going
abroad herself, and always having more than enough, so that she might
indulge in the luxury of charity, had been for years Jo’s castle in the air
(ALCOTT, 2008, p. 374).

The aforementioned social conventions which have long constrained women writers
may represent another factor for Jo’s development as an artist becoming secondary in Little
Women. The journey that Alcott’s heroine takes somehow illustrates the real-life situation of
the nineteenth-century woman writer, who often met extremely “degrading options”
(GILBERT AND GUBAR, 2000, p. 64) when it came to the conditions imposed to get her
works published. After enjoying little financial success with the publication of some of her
stories, Jo sees the opportunity at hand of earning more money by abandoning her artistic
ideals of writing ‘tales with a moral’ and working from within the sensationalist sub-genre
(ALCOTT, 2008). This used to be a historically lucrative option, as Carter and McRae (2001)
observed, even though not considered serious literature, which fell into the “silly novel” label
established by Eliot (2006): “She took to writing sensation stories — for in those dark ages,
even all-perfect America read rubbish” (ALCOTT, 2008, p. 374).
As time goes by, Jo’s writing ambitions are left aside, and according to Langland’s
(1983) aforementioned observation, her following the social prescriptions of marriage and
motherhood idealized for women, the same way her sisters do, implies a contradictory turn, as
Jo’s development through the most part of the narrative would probably lead her to a less
conventional ending. Jo’s “castle in the air” (ALCOTT, 2008, p. 374) is an absolute opposite
to what she had pictured in her early womanhood, as Jo does not become a successful writer
— although the possibility of resuming her writing one day is not discarded — and abandons
her boyish ways, growing up to wear “her gown pinned up” (ALCOTT, 2008, p. 523).
In the end, the Bildungsroman heroine remains more concerned with others than with
herself, attesting Langland’s (1983, p. 127) observation that the development of Alcott’s Little
Women is aimed at “integration rather than separation”, as Jo finds self-realization in
community, by opening a school for boys in the place she inherits from her Aunt March,
having her family constantly near her. Moreover, according to Langland’s (1983) other
previous observation, Alcott’s novel may reveal a double-plotted text in the sense of Gilbert
 63

and Gubar’s (2000) theory, which reads romantic ideals but implies a deeper sense of self-
realization in women’s communal life:

Yes, Jo was a very happy woman there, in spite of hard work, much anxiety,
and a perpetual racket. She enjoyed it heartily, and found the applause of her
boys more satisfying than any praise of the world, — for now she told no
stories except to her flock of enthusiastic believers and admirers. As the
years went on, two little lads of her own came to increase her happiness.
Rob, named for grandpa, and Teddy, — a happy-go-lucky baby, who seemed
to have inherited his papa’s sunshiny temper as well as his mother’s lively
spirit. How they ever grew up alive in that whirlpool of boys, was a mystery
to their grandma and aunts; but they flourished like dandelions in spring, and
their rough nurses loved and served them well (ALCOTT, 2008, p. 522).

The last example to be discussed moves further in time and stands as a renowned
representative of the twentieth-century female Bildungsroman: Sylvia Plath’s (1932-1963)
The Bell Jar (1963). Plath’s work is, in its essence, a narrative of awakening in the conception
of Abel, Hirsch, and Langland (1983), since the events reported in this first-person novel start
from the protagonist’s young womanhood and are presented in a fragmental structure, with
recurrent recollections of past moments. In addition, these events are known to be related to
the author’s personal experiences37; once again evidencing that autobiography may also
associate with the female Bildungsroman.
The development of Plath’s (2013) protagonist, Esther Greenwood, a girl whose
ambition to become a writer is abruptly interrupted by the evolution of a mental disorder,
relates to the 1950s and the accompanying changes of North-American society and the way
they reflect on the female Bildungsroman. Thus, women’s experience of these changes as they
consequently affect their lives (BEAUVOIR, 2011) causes the characteristics and definitions
of novels of female development to be altered, as Abel, Hirsch, and Langland (1983)
previously observed. The Bell Jar mostly portrays a shift in the female Bildungsroman
protagonist’s goals and course in comparison to those of nineteenth-century protagonists, like
the ones in Jane Eyre and Little Women. Despite these changes, the woman in the twentieth
century still experienced the burden of social conventions and subjugation (BEAUVOIR,
2011), as we have seen.
As she faces the responsibilities of adult life, Esther feels lost within the pressures of
the persistent expectations of marriage and motherhood imposed to the 1950s North-

37
Lois Ames (2013) comments that Plath relied on autobiographical elements to compose The Bell Jar and used
the pseudonym Victoria Lucas to first publish her book in 1963 for two reasons: first, because she worried that
the book would not be read as “serious” work; and second, because she made little changes in the literary
versions of her personal friends and family, mostly changing their names, so she did not want them to feel hurt
or exposed by the way she portrayed them.
 64

American woman (PLATH, 2013). Moreover, the protagonist often describes the oppression
she feels in the way female sexual freedom was judged by society: “I couldn’t stand the idea
of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one
pure and one not” (PLATH, 2013, p. 90). In what Hirsch (1983, p. 27) describes as a moment
of awakening for female protagonists, Esther experiences the clash between “psychological
needs and social imperatives”, but mostly, in her case, personal desires in contrast to those
behavioural expectations placed upon women.
Esther finds herself in the dilemma which Rosowski (1983, p. 68) observes in novels
of awakening, as the protagonist “[…]attempts to find value in a society that relegates to her
only roles and values of the woman, ignoring her needs as a human being”. When reminding
of an article about women and chastity her mother sent her in college, the protagonist
observes that the recommendations within the text neglected the woman’s personal values,
only attaining to the values of society imposed to her:
It gave all the reasons a girl shouldn’t sleep with anybody but her husband
and then only after they were married.
The main point of the article was that a man’s world is different from a
woman’s world and a man’s emotions are different from a woman’s
emotions and only marriage can bring the two worlds and the two different
sets of emotions together properly. My mother said this was something a girl
didn’t know about till it was too late, so she had to take the advice of people
who were already experts, like a married woman. […] Now the one thing
this article didn’t seem to me to consider was how a girl felt (PLATH, 2013,
p. 90).

Although constantly criticizing and objecting these expectations during the early
stages of her adult life, the oppositional gender roles and how they still delegated freedom to
the man and limitations to the woman affect Esther personally and become a larger internal
conflict in the process of the protagonist’s development (PLATH, 2013). Like Jane Eyre
(BRONTË, 2003) and Jo March (ALCOTT, 2008), Esther feels the burden of being a woman
and opposes to the idea of assuming the inferior position that society prescribed her: “The
trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling
letters” (PLATH, 2013, p. 84).
Essentially, The Bell Jar fits into the narrative of awakening structure in Abel, Hirsch,
and Langland’s (1983) sense. Esther, however, differs from the majority of female
protagonists in novels of awakening as defined by Rosowski (1983), since she develops what
might be described as a ‘premature’ awakening, occurring before marriage and motherhood
take place. Throughout her development, Esther promises herself and her long-term date
Buddy Willard that she would never follow social conventions of marrying and having
 65

children, as this would mean the end of the career as a writer she longs to build, even though
the narrative implies that later in life Esther breaks her promise and does become a mother
(PLATH, 2013).
The identity Esther attempts to develop in her early adulthood might describe an
inversion of nineteenth-century female protagonists’ goals, as her ambitions aim at
“achievement and autonomy” rather than “community and empathy” (ABEL; HIRSCH;
LANGLAND, 1983), thus incorporating male Bildungsroman goals into a female protagonist,
evidencing how social changes are featured on the female Bildungsroman and Abel, Hirsch,
and Langland’s (1983) recommendation for a constant revising of its definitions:

These seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight
A’s, but I knew that’s what marriage was like, because cook and clean and
wash was just what Buddy Willard’s mother did from morning till night, and
she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school
teacher herself (PLATH, 2013, p. 94).

However, it is known that mental illness, also a relevant subject in Plath’s (2013)
narrative, interrupts Esther’s ambitions of becoming a writer. After a long successful
academic career, Esther Greenwood begins to decease into madness when she receives a
rejection letter for a summer writing class in college, thus losing the sense of identity she had
built for herself (PLATH, 2013). The course that the protagonist’s life takes — shock therapy,
suicide attempts, retreat into an asylum — leads her to the enclosure of a metaphorical bell
jar, which describes an equally destructive path as Hirsch (1983) identified in nineteenth-
century female narratives of development.
In the end, Esther seems to recover her mental stability, although she wonders whether
“someday — at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere — the bell jar, with its stifling
distortions, wouldn’t descend again” (PLATH, 2013, p. 269). The continuing pressures of
social conventions to women and the ways in which they affect them (and their mental health)
must not be overlooked, as Hirsch’s (1983) commentary on nineteenth-century narratives of
awakening would apply to Plath’s novel.
Finally, these examples of female Bildungsroman represent the multiple possibilities
for the womanly tradition of narratives of development and how they might relate, the same
way as the traditional male sub-genre, to the author’s personal experiences, adding the
autobiographical element as an extended characteristic for the female counterpart. Moreover,
these examples attest that the female Bildungsroman not only shares similarities with the male
tradition but mostly possesses its own characteristics, which are constantly following the
 66

changes of history through time. What these three protagonists from different contexts in time
and space share is the constant need for narratives of female development to question the
oppression of the roles determined to men and women by society.
The history of women and, particularly, of the woman writer, evidences that there
have long been female stories that needed to be told. These stories of subversion and revision
give form to a relatively young but consistent female literary tradition, of which the female
Bildungsroman is a fundamental part. Female and male developments in life are essentially
different as a result of the roles that are socially determined to each sex, which causes the
literary form that narrates these processes to be equally differentiated, as the presented
examples of female Bildungsroman attest. Considering these facts and the constant need for
revision of the sub-genre’s characteristics and definitions, we propose to further present
Harper Lee’s North-American literary classic, To Kill a Mockingbird, through an analysis of
the novel in the light of the female Bildungsroman tradition, aiming to investigate how the
novel takes part of this tradition while attempting to contribute with new possibilities for the
concept of female Bildungsroman, which is constantly subject to changes.
 67

3 TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, A FEMALE BILDUNGSROMAN

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is a 1960 first-person narrative that describes a

period from the childhood of Scout, during the 1930s in a fictitious small town in
Alabama. The novel tackles such themes as race, class, gender, and loss of innocence. The
narrative is partially based on historical facts. The time Lee produced the novel must be
considered to understand the debate on racial prejudice this literary work presents, since
the 1950s rise of the civil rights movement in the United States was clearly an influence
for the author. The novel’s original manuscript was published in 2015, and it revealed the
unusual process that To Kill a Mockingbird went through. For narrating a transitive period
within the protagonist’s childhood, the novel is categorized as a female Bildungsroman.
Thus, an analysis that approaches Lee’s novel in the light of female Bildungsroman is
presented, in order to evidence how the characteristics of the subgenre are featured in the
text while attempting to contribute with new possibilities for female novels of
development.

3.1 An outline for To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel by North-American author Harper Lee, published in

1960. The first-person narrative is set during the early 1930s in Maycomb County, a fictitious
small town located in the state of Alabama. Lee’s narrator, Scout, whose actual name is Jean
Louise Finch, tells the story of a series of crucial events that marked her childhood, covering a
period of three years’ time, from the girl’s nearly six to almost nine years of age. Scout’s
observation that “enough years” had passed since those occurrences took place indicates that
the narrative facts are told in retrospect, although the time or place where the narrator is
speaking from is not specified, as Bloom (2010) observes.
Scout initially reminisces the time when her older brother Jem broke his elbow and how it
was essentially a consequence of those past events the protagonist is about to narrate. The
narrative that follows portrays the childhood adventures that Scout shares with her brother and
their friend Dill, which initially involve trying to make the town’s legendary reclusive, Boo
Radley, leave his home, while the children simultaneously uncover the hard realities of the
adult world:
 68

When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we

sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain that the
Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started
long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first
gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out (LEE, 2010, p. 3).

Those crucial events that occur as Scout grows up represent the parallel plot of the novel,
in which the children’s father, the lawyer Atticus Finch, is charged with the defense of Tom
Robinson, a black man accused of rape by Mayella Ewell, a poor white woman. Atticus, who
is presented as an honorable man of principles, must face the struggling situation that comes
to affect his personal life, as well as his children’s, for defending a black person within a
deeply racist community:
“Do all lawyers defend n-Negroes, Atticus?”
“Of course they do, Scout.”
“Then why did Cecil say you defended niggers? He made it sound like you
were runnin’ a still.”
Atticus sighed. “I’m simply defending a Negro—his name’s Tom Robinson.
He lives in that settlement beyond the town dump. […] Scout, you aren’t old
enough to understand some things yet, but there’s been some high talk
around town to the effect that I shouldn’t do much about defending this man.
It’s a peculiar case […].
“If you shouldn’t be defendin’ him, then why are you doin’ it?”
“For a number of reasons,” said Atticus. “The main one is, if I didn’t I
couldn’t hold up my head in town, I couldn’t represent this county in the
legislature, I couldn’t even tell you or Jem not to do something again.”[…]
(LEE, 2010, p. 100).

The novel’s title is taken from the following passage, when Scout is speaking to their
neighbor and friend, Miss Maudie Atkinson, and wonders why her father told her brother it
would be a “sin” to shoot a mockingbird with their rifles:

“Your father is right,” she said. Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make
music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in
corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts for us. That’s why it’s
a sin to kill a mockingbird” (LEE, 2010, p. 119).

This metaphor has been largely interpreted as a reference to the characters of Tom
Robinson or Boo Radley, therefore symbolizing innocence, while others believe it to be a
reference to tolerance, as the message in the book conveys, Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin
(2010) informs38. It may also be interpreted as a metaphor for not only Robinson’s character,
but for North-American black people in general, as Isaac Saney (2010) complements.

38
Tavernier-Courbin (2010) believes there is another meaning for this metaphor, as mockingbirds are in reality
aggressive creatures, so the novel title would possibly refer to the hypocrisy of the people in Maycomb, as
mockingbirds are not exactly the innocent creatures they seem to be.
 69

For these reasons, To Kill a Mockingbird is often approached for the themes it tackles,
namely, racism, class, gender, and, in its core, the move toward the loss of innocence as one
grows up (WARE, 2010). These rather controversial topics relate to the history of human
kind, and in particular, to the development of North-American society’s identity, which might
explain the novel’s contradictory history of both acclaim and backlash. Even though the novel
conveys a message of conscious-awareness on racism, still it starts from a white, female-
Southern perspective, which must be considered when approaching the presentation of this
theme in the novel, as Saney (2010) observes. Despite To Kill a Mockingbird’s popularity, the
use of racist terms and the representation of black people in the novel have been contested and
considered offensive, causing it to be constantly banned from North-American schools’
curriculums39.
Despite being set in a fictitious Southern town, the background for Lee’s narrative is
mostly based on facts of North-American history. The narrative action in To Kill a
Mockingbird takes place during the first half of the 1930s in a fictitious North-American
Southern town. Therefore, it represents the years of racial segregation, which is mostly
portrayed in the process of Tom Robinson’s trial and how townsfolks reacted to it. The novel
also depicts the early stages of The Great Depression. The slow-paced small town in its
decaying condition mirrors the impact of this historical moment, especially on poorer families
as the Cunninghams:

There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no
money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb
County. But it was a time of vague optimism for some of the people:
Maycomb County had recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear
itself (LEE, 2010, p. 6).

Patrick Chura (2010) observes, however, that even though the novel relates to the
Great Depression era, much of the approach to racial and social issues in the way they are
regarded by Maycomb’s more consciously aware inhabitants, such as Scout’s father, would
actually translate much of the ideologies from the novel’s time of production. Lee wrote her
novel during the 1950s, a period historically marked by the rise of the Civil Rights movement
in the United States of America.

39
Up to date, the reading of the book in North-American schools remains a controversy. As in February 2018,
To Kill a Mockingbird was banned from a school in Minnesota because the school board feared students would
be offended by the frequent use of racist language in the book. Available at:
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2018/02/07/a-school-district-drops-to-kill-a-
mockingbird-and-huckleberry-finn-over-use-of-the-n-word/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.52a000a330f5>
(accessed September 15, 2018).
 70

Chura (2010) also comments that Lee’s discussion about racism in the novel has
possibly been influenced by two controversial trials involving racial prejudice that began in
the first half of the 1950s: the Brown vs. Board of Education40 trial, in 1954, and Emmett
Till’s trial, in the following year. The latter might have been a strong reference for Tom
Robinson’s story in the novel, as Till, a 14 year-old black boy then, was murdered by two
white men for having supposedly whistled at a white woman in Mississippi (CHURA, 2010).
Moreover, the Scottsboro Trials41, which happened in the 1930s, are the most probable
influence for Lee’s novel (BLOOM, 2010), since To Kill a Mockingbird’s narrative is set in
this period, although Lee was only five years old when the trials occurred and might not have
been influenced by them, as Chura (2010) contests.
Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Alabama. As Lee’s
unauthorized biographer Charles J. Shields (2006) informs, the author was an extremely
reserved person, who made few public statements, so little is known about her personal life42.
Daughter of a lawyer, Lee herself studied in the University of Alabama’s Law School, a
course she eventually abandoned to dedicate to writing (SHIELDS, 2006). For the most part
of Lee’s life, To Kill a Mockingbird was the author’s only book, although she published a
number of essays and magazine articles, as Bloom (2010) complements about the author’s
production. The fact that Lee has given little information about herself or her work throughout
her life has led readers and critics to wonder what the actual sources for her single
masterpiece were (BLOOM, 2010).
While the author defended that the novel was essentially fictional, Bloom (2010)
comments that because Lee never revealed whether To Kill a Mockingbird was inspired in
autobiographical elements or not, many have speculated its possible connections with the
author’s personal experiences. The literary critic observes that aspects from the author’s life
find correspondence in the narrative (BLOOM, 2010). For instance, says Bloom (2010), the
portrayed space and characters are similar to those of Lee’s hometown; the same way as

40
The Brown vs. Board of Education trial, as Chura (2010) reports, was a relevant decision for the North-
American Supreme Court, as it made racial segregation between black and white students in the country’s public
schools unconstitutional.
41
Bloom (2010) informs that the Scottsboro Trials refer to the case of nine black men who were accused of
raping two white women on a train in Alabama, rape being a capital crime in the state. The men were convicted,
although there lacked evidences. Because one of the women involved dropped her charges, the accusations
became suspicious. The trials lasted until the early 1970s until one of the defendants was pardoned.
42
Shields (2006) wrote a book on Harper Lee’s life, which he defines as an “unusual” biographical piece. The
author states that because of Lee’s characteristic reserve, it was a difficult task to come up with the work on the
writer’s life. Having written the book before Lee’s death, Shields (2006) comments that the author of To Kill a
Mockingbird refused to provide information about herself to help him write her biography, and also encouraged
her family, personal friends and acquaintances not to give information about her private life to him.
 71

Atticus, Lee’s father was a lawyer; and Scout’s friend, Dill, described as a child of excessive
imagination which borders a compulsion for lying, is said to be a precise description of the
author’s best friend in childhood, the renowned author Truman Capote:

Dill was a curiosity. He wore blue linen shorts that buttoned to his shirt, his
hair was snow white and stuck to his head like duckfluff; he was a year my
senior but I towered over him. As he told us the old tale his blue eyes would
lighten and darken; his laugh was sudden and happy; he habitually pulled at
a cowlick in the center of his forehead (LEE, 2010, p. 10).

The history behind To Kill a Mockingbird’s publication and the way it has unfolded as
years have passed describes an unusual case43 in literary history criticism. In the late 1950s,
the manuscript of the novel, originally titled Go Set a Watchman, was purchased by the J.B.
Lippincott Company44. The narrative in this embryonic text is set twenty years ahead of the
time presented in To Kill a Mockingbird and depicts most of the characters from Maycomb
County and Scout as a grown-up woman (LEE, 2015), as it was later revealed.
It is known that after reading this primary version, Tay Hohoff, the editor responsible
for Harper Lee’s publication, suggested that the first-time writer should rewrite the story in a
memorialist structure to account for Scout’s childhood (SHIELDS, 2006), instead of focusing
on her young womanhood as it was originally intended. To the surprise of many readers, in
2011 was announced the rediscovery of To Kill a Mockingbird’s manuscript, which had been
considered lost for over fifty years45. Go Set a Watchman was published in July 2015, less
than a year before Harper Lee’s death, and was first announced as a sequel to the acclaimed
novel, despite actually being its first manuscript46.
However, Lee’s possible intentions with her original narrative describe a pessimistic
tone in comparison to To Kill a Mockingbird’s. In Go Set a Watchman, Scout’s admiration for
Atticus dissolves once she finds out that her father and her boyfriend, Hank, are active
members of Maycomb County Citizens’ Council, composed of men who were in favor of
white supremacist ideals (LEE, 2015). The protagonist’s grown-up version experiences the
disappointments of adult life, through the demystification of the immaculate paternal image
she carried:

The one human being she had ever fully and wholeheartedly trusted had
failed her; the only man she had ever known to whom she could point and

43
Available at: < https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/13/books/the-invisible-hand-behind-harper-lees-to-kill-a-
mockingbird.html> (accessed September 10, 2018).
44
Idem ibidem.
45
Idem ibidem.
46
Idem ibidem.
 72

say with expert knowledge, “He is a gentleman, in his heart he is a

gentleman,” had betrayed her publicly, grossly, and shamelessly (LEE, 2015,
p. 113).

The primary plot in To Kill a Mockingbird surrounding Tom Robinson’s trial and the
events that anticipate and follow it mostly addresses racial and social matters. However, as we
have seen, the narrative’s themes are plural, not restricted to this major storyline, the same
way its categorization is not limited to the social novel sub-genre. To Kill a Mockingbird is, in
its essence, a narrative of its protagonist’s personal development, therefore, a female
Bildungsroman.
The reader may often attain to this most polemic discussion that the novel presents on
the damages of racism to society, but as literary critics and scholars have observed, Scout’s
role in the narrative is not merely to report her childhood observations of the complexities in
the adult world, as her younger version is also an important agent in most of those stories.
This way, the reader simultaneously accompanies the protagonist’s gradual development
toward the final stages of her childhood as the memorialist narrative itself develops, and her
consequent internal changes resulting from those definitive years she reports characterize the
novel as a female Bildungsroman.
Kathryn Lee Seidel (2010) states that Scout’s speech implies that the protagonist may
have grown up to be neither the lady that Southern conventions preached nor an antithesis of
it, but mostly a reasonable, consciously-aware person, much due to the role that her father
Atticus plays in her personal development as a child, for his main concern is that his children
do not grow up to become intolerant adults like the people of Maycomb. For this reason,
Seidel (2010, unpaged) affirms that To Kill a Mockingbird is “indeed a bildungsroman”, and
that the movement within Scout’s development, from obscurity to enlightenment on the
problems of society, is the ideal Harper Lee conveys with her narrative: “It is Scout who
makes the journey that Lee is espousing, a journey from prejudice to tolerance, from
ignorance to wisdom, from violence to self-control, from bigotry to empathy; from a code of
honor to a code of law”.
Michele S. Ware (2010) observes that not only Atticus helps shape Scout’s identity,
but also the family cook, Calpurnia, who serves as a female role model for the motherless
child, besides being the one responsible for introducing Scout to the reality of Maycomb’s
black citizens. Moreover, Ware (2010) corroborates with Seidel (2010) and evidences that the
novel is a female Bildungsroman, specifically, a feminist narrative within the sub-genre:
 73

To Kill a Mockingbird can be read as a feminist bildungsroman, for Scout

emerges from her childhood experiences with a clear sense of her place in
her community and an awareness of her potential power as the woman she
will one day be. Admittedly, her power is limited and her authority is
circumscribed by the historical/cultural context of the novel; Lee’s portrayal
of Scout ends not in defeat but in a triumphant expansion of her knowledge,
understanding, and sympathy (WARE, 2010, unpaged).

Furthermore, Bloom’s (2010) observations that Harper Lee possibly found inspiration
in facts of her life to write To Kill a Mockingbird demonstrates that Scout’s representation is
possibly connected to the author’s image. Thus, the novel might represent another example of
the frequent association between the female Bildungsroman and the autobiography, which had
already been observed in the previously commented examples of Jane Eyre, Little Women and
The Bell Jar.
These statements and observations testify that To Kill a Mockingbird is a
representative of the twentieth century female Bildungsroman. Yet, here we must not simply
attain to these statements, but deeply examine what fundamentally makes the novel an
exemplar of the female literary tradition of the sub-genre. In order to do so, we propose to
develop an analysis of Harper Lee’s novel in the light of the female Bildungsroman studies
presented so far. Thus, we aim to uncover how the previously presented characteristics of
novels of female development may be featured in To Kill a Mockingbird, while attempting to
contribute with new possibilities for the ever-changing concept of female Bildungsroman.

3.2 Scout’s personal development: Analysing To Kill a Mockingbird in the light of

the female Bildungsroman

First and foremost, To Kill a Mockingbird is a first-person narrative of childhood

memories. The past events covering Scout’s adventures in company of her brother Jem and
their friend Dill, however, are presented in a chronological course of progression. The
narrative action, as the protagonist anticipates, begins on “[...] the summer Dill came to
[them], when Dill first gave [them] the idea of making Boo Radley come out” (LEE, 2010, p.
3). For this reason, the novel’s structure may formally associate with the female narrative of
apprenticeship that Abel, Hirsch, and Langland (1983) identified within the female
Bildungsroman sub-genre.
Yet, Scout’s memories do not represent the usual apprenticeship structure, beginning
in childhood and culminating in the protagonist’s transition to the adult world, but a cut-out
 74

version of this pattern. We assume that the narrator is a fully-grown woman with a better
understanding of her past, since “enough years had gone by” (LEE, 2010, p. 3). But she does
not tell how she became a woman, as Bloom (2010) observes: the memorialist storyline takes
the protagonist only up to a later stage of her childhood, when she is around nine years old.
Still, there is an apprenticeship within that short period of time, a transition that happens
through a gradual process of loss of innocence which was crucial for the adult woman that
Scout became. Thus, we must observe the elements that compose Scout’s life and specify how
those decisive moments in the narrative translate into the protagonist’s personal development,
her female Bildungsroman.
We may begin with the approach to Scout’s close relationships, since the ones
established in early childhood are definitive for the development of a female Bildungsroman
protagonist’s identity, as Abel, Hirsch, and Langland (1983) attest. These characters not only
help shape the protagonist’s identity, but also guide her through experiences that are
fundamental for her development. In the first part of To Kill a Mockingbird, which mainly
concerns the world of children, we are not only introduced to the narrative universe, but most
importantly, to Scout’s family. In Maycomb, the Finches are a traditionally respected family
that would belong to the town’s middle/upper class, despite having been relatively impacted
by the economic problems resulting from the Great Depression.
Scout introduces the members of her household: “We lived on the main residential
street in town — Atticus, Jem and I, plus Calpurnia our cook. Jem and I found our father
satisfactory: he played with us, read to us, and treated us with courteous detachment” (LEE,
2010, p. 6). Specifically, Scout’s family circle is composed of three members: the father
Atticus, the older brother Jem, and the woman who is possibly the closest to a mother figure
in the protagonist’s life, Calpurnia.
Scout’s mother is a faceless, almost imperceptible character: being a motherless child
since she was only two years old, she has no vivid memories of her mother to share47. The
name of Scout and Jem’s mother is not even mentioned throughout the narrative, neither does
their father ever speak of his deceased wife. Based on the little information that is given about
this character, we learn from Mrs. Dubose, an actual grumpy old neighbor in town, that “a
lovelier lady than [their] mother never lived” (LEE, 2010, p. 133), and that differently from
Scout, her older brother eventually remembers this traumatizing loss:

47
This idea is found and discussed in Ware’s (2010) analysis.
 75

Our mother died when I was two, so I never felt her absence. […] Jem was
the product of their first year of marriage; four years later I was born, and
two years later our mother died from a sudden heart attack. They said it ran
in her family. I did not miss her, but I think Jem did. He remembered her
clearly, and sometimes in the middle of a game he would sigh at length, then
go off and play by himself, behind the car-house. When he was like that, I
knew better than to bother him (LEE, 2010, p. 7).

Since Scout has not been able to develop anything closer to a relationship with her
mother, the girl does not experience the “mother-infant bond”, considered a determinant for
the female child growth (ABEL, HIRSCH, LANGLAND, 1983). Thus, the girl establishes
this dynamic relation with the immediate masculine figures of her life; namely, her father and
brother, who help shape her identity and autonomy48. Yet, the protagonist is not completely
absent from a closer female role model in her life: as Ware (2010) and Seidel (2010)
evidenced, Calpurnia is a strong, constant presence in Scout’s development. In many aspects,
Calpurnia might compensate for the gap left by the death of Scout and Jem’s mother.
Atticus acknowledges he “…couldn’t have got along without [Calpurnia] all these
years”, and the cook is regarded as “…a faithful member of [that] family […]” (LEE, 2010, p.
182) for having cooperated with the rearing of his children: “She tried to bring them up
according to her lights, and Cal’s lights are pretty good — and another thing, the children love
her” (LEE, 2010, p. 183). Calpurnia’s position in the Finch household is not merely of an
employee; she cares for Scout and Jem’s welfare in an ambiguously harsh and loving way, as
a mother would. The cook is not only responsible for feeding them, or inspecting their
personal hygiene, but also for advising and educating the children, especially on how to treat
others with dignity.
On one of the first episodes in the narrative, Scout brings attention to her poor
classmate Walter Cunningham’s lack of table manners when Jem invites him over for lunch.
It is Calpurnia who calls attention to the girl’s rude behavior. The cook attempts to elucidate
Scout that above any etiquette rule, she must first comprehend and respect the reality of
people from different classes and their habits, an important lesson for her understanding of
Maycomb’s society:

“There’s some folks who don’t eat like us,” she whispered fiercely, “but you
ain’t called on to contradict ‘em at the table when they don’t. That boy’s yo’
comp’ny and if he wants to eat up the table cloth you let him, you hear?”
“He ain’t company, Cal, he’s just a Cunningham —”
“Hush your mouth! Don’t matter who they are, anybody sets foot in this
house’s yo’ comp’ny, and don’t you let me catch you remarkin’ on their

48
Idem ibidem.
 76

ways like you was so high and mighty! Yo’ folks might be better’n the
Cunninghams but it don’t count for nothin’ the way you’re disgracin’ ’em —
if you can’t act fit to eat at the table you can just set here and eat in the
kitchen!” (LEE, 2010, p. 32-33).

Calpurnia plays an important role in Scout’s education. The protagonist reminisces

that reading was an ability which she naturally developed, not having been directly taught:
“[…] reading was something that just came to me, as learning to fasten the seat of my union
suit without looking around, or achieving two bows from a snarl of shoelaces” (LEE, 2010, p.
23). Writing, however, is something that the girl has learned from Calpurnia, who had no
formal education but was taught by one of her past employers through the same method she
applies to Scout:

It kept me from driving her crazy on rainy days, I guess. She would set me a
writing task by scrawling the alphabet firmly across the top of a tablet, then
copying out a chapter of the Bible beneath. […] In Calpurnia’s teaching,
there was no sentimentality: I seldom pleased her and she seldom rewarded
me (LEE, 2010, p. 24).

Despite initially describing Calpurnia as a “tyrannical presence as long as [she] could

remember” (LEE, 2010, p. 7), Scout realizes that little-by-little, as she grows older, the
dynamics of their relationship takes a shifting turn: “For some reason, my first year of school
had wrought a great change in our relationship: Calpurnia’s tyranny, unfairness, and meddling
in my business had faded to gentle grumblings of general disapproval” (LEE, 2010, p. 45). At
some point in the protagonist’s development, this change becomes more evident, and her
judgement on Calpurnia positively evolves: from a defiant and strict tyrant, the cook becomes
a friendly and admirable woman to Scout’s eyes.
When Calpurnia takes Jem and Scout to Maycomb’s black community church, she
reveals a part of her personal life that was unknown to the children, while simultaneously
exposing them to the other side of Tom Robinson’s trial repercussion49. This way, the cook is
expanding Jem and Scout’s worldviews and, mainly, the children’s views on their own
community50. In this episode, brother and sister question Calpurnia’s “double life”, which
refers to her contrasting language use among black people and in the Finch household, where
she talks in a more grammatically-correct register. In her response, Calpurnia indirectly
exposes to the children the hypocrisy in which the social relations in Maycomb are founded:

“Well, in the first place I’m black—”

49
Idem ibidem.
50
Idem ibidem.
 77

[…] “Suppose you and Scout talked colored-folks’ talk at home it’d be out
of place, wouldn’t it? Now what if I talked white-folks’ talk at church, and
with my neighbors? They’d think I was puttin’ on airs to beat Moses.” […]
“It’s not necessary to tell all you know. It’s not lady-like — in the second
place, folks don’t like to have somebody around knowin’ more than they do.
It aggravates ’em. You’re not gonna change any of them by talkin’ right,
they’ve got to want to learn themselves, and when they don’t want to learn
there’s nothing you can do but keep your mouth shut or talk their language”
(LEE, 2010, p. 167).

However, the evolution of Scout and Calpurnia’s relationship is paced-down by the

arrival of the children’s aunt, Alexandra, to the Finch household. A typical southern lady,
Alexandra Finch is an elitist, mostly concerned with appearances and “Old Family” values,
which she attempts to transmit to Jem and Scout. Based on her personal belief that there are
limits for the interaction with the lower classes, the aunt abruptly imposes her ruling and
disapproves the children’s proximity to the black cook. She even forbids Scout from visiting
Calpurnia’s house: “You may not.” (LEE, 2010, p. 181).
Initially a cold and distant relative who lives on the family’s land (Finch’s Landing),
Alexandra becomes a closer familial relationship of Scout when she comes to live with
Atticus and the children. After a turbulent Christmas in the Landing, when Scout physically
assaulted her cousin and Alexandra’s grandson, Francis, for calling her father a “nigger-lover”
(LEE, 2010, p. 112), Atticus’s sister convinces her brother that it is time for the rebellious
child to have a female role model in the house — meaning, a female model in her own terms,
as she clearly invalidates Calpurnia as such. Atticus consents to this intervention, mainly
because he feels guilty for his future absence at home due to his involvement with Tom
Robinson’s trial.
Alexandra’s goal with this move is an attempt to fill the maternal void in the
children’s life, especially for considering Scout’s boyish behavior erratic. Thus, the aunt
establishes an imposed “mother-infant bond” which is superficial. This bond she envisions
merely signifies perpetuating her personal definitions of femininity, as she restlessly tries to
make a little lady out of Scout: “We decided that it would be best for you to have some
feminine influence. It won’t be many years, Jean Louise, before you become interested in
clothes and boys […]” (LEE, 2010, p. 170).
Alexandra soon adapts to Maycomb and becomes an active member of that society, as
well as a friendly and kind neighbor to the community’s eyes. Scout describes her father’s
sister as one of the last specimens of classical Southern femininity, the embodiment of social
conventions for the traditional Alabama lady:
 78

She had river-boat, boarding-school manners; let any moral come along and
she would uphold it; she was born in the objective case; she was an incurable
gossip. When Aunt Alexandra went to school, self-doubt could not be found
in any textbook, so she knew not its meaning. She was never bored, and
given the slightest chance she would exercise her royal prerogative: she
would arrange, advise, caution, and warn (LEE, 2010, p. 172).

In spite of Alexandra’s fierce authority, Scout initially loathes her aunt’s presence and
does not conform to the rules she tries to impose: “Aunt Alexandra fitted into the world of
Maycomb like a hand into a glove, but not into the world of Jem and me” (LEE, 2010, p.175).
Although the aunt forces an ideal of femininity that Scout despises, in a short period of time
the girl gives in to Alexandra’s pressures concerning her clothing and manners; despite not
necessarily becoming the lady her aunt expected her to become. In the end, the blood relative
represents an actual “tyrannical presence” in Scout’s personal growth rather than Calpurnia,
as the cook develops a relationship of love and caring with Jem and her.
Despite their influence and necessity on Scout’s life, those female characters are not
the primary role models that help shape Scout’s identity throughout her personal
development. Fundamentally, Scout’s references fall upon her father Atticus and her brother
Jem. Scout presents her child version as an ultimate tomboy, who has neither girl friends nor
the desire to participate in a typical world of femininity. On the contrary, the girl prefers the
company of boys, namely, her brother and their friend Dill.
From the initial narrative focus on their childhood adventures, it becomes perceptible
that the development of Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird is not a journey that the protagonist
takes by herself, but one that is mostly shared with her brother Jem. This associates To Kill a
Mockingbird with another recurrent characteristic of the female Bildungsroman: a shared
development between siblings, identified by Gelfant (1983), for we can follow Jem’s
development parallel to Scout’s. The development of the boy character is more clearly
described, as Scout reports her childhood memories of her brother growing up as one who
observes.
Beginning on the summer Dill came to join them, when Scout was “almost six and
Jem was nearly ten” (LEE, 2010, p. 7), brother and sister spent their days in constant
company of one another. In those innocent days, their activities revolved around playing
outside, and their worries were restricted to deciding which book they would represent next:

Thereafter the summer passed in routine contentment. Routine contentment

was: improving our treehouse that rested between giant twin chinaberry trees
in the back yard, fussing, running through our list of dramas based on the
 79

works of Oliver Optic, Victor Appleton, and Edgar Rice Burroughs51(LEE,

2010, p. 9).

Scout observes that Jem and she were practically the only children in a neighborhood
of old people, so they could only rely on each other to play with. The admiration for her older
brother, despite their typical brother-and-sister fights, might have influenced the protagonist’s
boyish ways. Scout, however, not only admires her brother, but wants to be his equal. For
instance, later on that same year, Scout’s choice for a Christmas present is the same as her
brother’s: a rifle to shoot birds, not a usual object of desire for six year-old girls in
Maycomb’s context.
As Jem and Scout grow up, however, their childhood brother-and-sister bond
gradually loses strength. Scout’s first day of school symbolizes the beginning of the siblings’
separation. They had, up to that point, shared equal interests, in spite of their four-year age
gap. Jem warns her that from that day on, their lives were supposed to be divided in two: the
private and the public. This way, he teaches Scout one of her first lessons about the rules of
the grown-up children world, as she is not allowed to expose their playing hours at home to
their schoolmates:

[…] Jem was careful to explain that during school hours I was not to bother
him, I was not to approach him with requests to enact a chapter of Tarzan
and the Ant Men, to embarrass him with references to his private life, or tag
along behind him at recess and noon. I was to stick with the first grade and
he would stick with the fifth. In short, I was to leave him alone (LEE, 2010,
p. 20-21).

Still, Jem does not fail to care for Scout. Being the older brother, he takes the
responsibility of protecting and guiding his little sister. Scout’s short-temper is the absolute
opposite of Jem’s reason, as Calpurnia remarks. The protagonist observes: “She was always
[…] asking me why I couldn’t behave as well as Jem when she knew he was older…” (LEE,
2010, p. 7). Because of Scout’s violent, impulsive behavior at home, which she extends to her
school environment, Jem assumes a rational posture, an “older but wiser” air that reads
superiority, especially outside of their household boundaries. In an episode from Scout’s first
day of school, when the girl physically assaults and blames Walter Cunningham for the
supposed embarrassment he caused her, the older brother intervenes:

[…] Jem came by and told me to stop.

“You’re bigger’n he is,” he said.

51
These three authors, who used pseudonyms, wrote books directed to a young boys’ readership.
 80

“He’s as old as you, nearly,” I said. “He made me start off on the wrong
foot.” […]
I stomped at him to chase him away, but Jem put out his hand and stopped
me. […]
Jem suddenly grinned at him. “Come on home to dinner with us, Walter,” he
said. “We’d be glad to have you.”
Walter’s face brightened, then darkened.
Jem said, “Our daddy’ a friend of your daddy’s. Scout here, she’s crazy —
she won’t fight you anymore.” (LEE, 2010, p. 30-31).

At a certain stage in Jem’s development, his father-son bond with Atticus seems to
gradually replace the bond he shared with Scout. The boy demonstrates a concern with
becoming a gentleman like his father. He begins to admire Atticus’s professional history and
consequently assimilates and mimics the lawyer’s moral conduct and values. Besides, Atticus
also asks him and Scout not to respond to the verbal insults they might hear in school and in
the streets of Maycomb because he is in charge of Tom Robinson’s defence. Atticus observes
that Jem’s conduct in this situation might represent a role model for Scout, who looks up for
her brother as well: “Scout’s got to learn to keep her head and learn soon, with what’s in store
for her these next few months. She’s coming along, though. Jem’s getting older and she
follows his example a good bit now” (LEE, 2010, p. 116).
Mrs. Dubose is a neighbor who bullies the children every time they pass by her house,
which deeply bothers Jem. But his father reminds him: “‘Easy does it, son,’ […] ‘She’s an old
lady and she’s ill. You just hold your head high and be a gentleman. Whatever she says to
you, it’s your job not to let her make you mad’” (LEE, 2010, p. 133). However, after the
elderly’s constant provocations, when she says “Your father’s no better than the niggers and
trash he works for!” (LEE, 2010, p. 135), she gets on Jem’s last nerve and the boy loses his
mind, thrashing Mrs. Dubose’s garden and her precious camellias.
The offense directed toward his father is the one that finally hits him. This was mostly
expected to come from short-tempered Scout, not from calm little gentleman Jem. The boy is
clearly trying to find balance in his transition from childhood to adolescence, as he must learn
to control his emotions if he wants to become a “gentleman”. As a grown-up, Scout
comments this past episode:

In later years, I sometimes wondered exactly what made Jem do it, what
made him break the bonds of “You just be a gentleman, son,” and the phase
of self-conscious rectitude he had recently entered. Jem had probably stood
as much guff about Atticus lawing for niggers as had I, and I took it for
granted that he kept his temper — he had a naturally tranquil disposition and
a slow fuse. At the time, however, I thought the only explanation for what he
did was that for a few minutes he simply went mad (LEE, 2010, p. 136).
 81

It becomes clear that Jem follows, although secondarily, the progressive path of a
classic Bildungsroman hero. Although the actual boarders of manhood are relatively far ahead
of him, all these episodes from his development are presented as signs that Scout’s brother is
moving closer toward the adult world and leaving the younger sister behind. As
aforementioned, since Scout’s first day of school, the siblings had ceased to grow together
and started to gradually grow apart.
This traumatic separation mainly generated by gender roles expectations is inevitable
in female Bildungsromane that present the shared development between brother and sister
(GELFANT, 1983). In To Kill a Mockingbird’s case, this parting is mostly felt by the
narrator, who admits her feelings while acknowledging the brother’s importance in her young
life: “Of course Jem antagonized me sometimes until I could kill him, but when it came down
to it, he was all I had” (LEE, 2010, p. 138-139).
Their separation aggravates when Jem reaches puberty. Scout, as an observer,
describes in details the perceptible changes in her older brother’s physique and personality
when he turns twelve. On the other hand, the description of Scout’s physical development is
not as detailed as the observations on her brother’s changes. Few remarks that evidence the
protagonist’s physical growth are presented through Atticus’s comments: “You’re mighty big
to be rocked” (LEE, 2010, p.139). To the younger sister’s eyes, her brother’s transition
occurred “in a matter of weeks”:

Jem was twelve. He was difficult to live with, inconsistent, moody. His
appetite was appalling, and he told me so many times to stop pestering him I
consulted Atticus: “Reckon he’s got a tapeworm?” Atticus said no, Jem was
growing. I must be patient with him and disturb him as little as possible.
(LEE, 2010, p. 153).

Although Jem constantly reminds his tomboy sister of her female condition in the
course of their development, once he reaches a certain stage of maturity, he begins to emulate
and impose social conventions of gender to Scout. Jem becomes unrecognizable to his sister
when he starts to firmly request that she assumes her role as a girl. This moment also marks
Scout’s gradual assimilation of women’s conventions, as her feeling of abandonment by her
brother causes her to turn to Calpurnia and concentrate on a stereotypical female environment:
the kitchen.
The words uttered by Jem symbolize not only the traumatic experience of parting
between brother and sister, when they must inevitably assume their roles of man and woman
 82

(GELFANT, 1983), but also the greater conflict that marks the female process of
development, the demand to assume social conventions for being a woman:

Overnight, it seemed, Jem had acquired an alien set of values and was trying
to impose them on me: several times he went as far as to tell me what to do.
After one altercation when Jem hollered, “It’s time you started bein’ a girl
and acting right!” I burst into tears and fled to Calpurnia. (LEE, 2010, p.
153).

From that moment on, Calpurnia starts to refer to the brother as “Mister Jem”, while
reminding Scout of another of her roles: the family’s “baby”. These linguistic marks deeply
bother the protagonist as a child, for they evidence how their age gap eventually caught up
with them and how gender distinctions started to weigh upon their relationship. Scout no
longer feels she is an equal to Jem, because she is younger and because she is a girl:

“Baby,” said Calpurnia, “I just can’t help it if Mister Jem’s growin’ up. He’s
gonna want to be off to himself a lot now, doin’ whatever boys do, so you
just come right on in the kitchen when you feel lonesome. We’ll find lots of
things to do here” (LEE, 2010, p. 153-154).

Jem’s gradual familiarization with the world of adults and its functioning inevitably
bring him to reflect on and question the realities of social segregation which he has only
begun to experience. Contemplation is a necessary stage for the balance of a Bildungsroman
hero’s development, as Lukács (1998) defines. When Jem shares his thoughts on how he
perceives the structures of society with Scout, the once sensitive boy assumes a sensible
posture that contrasts his little sister’s still sensitive views52. He implies that Scout continues
to possess something he is gradually losing: his innocence. Yet, his worldviews show that he
remains a naïve boy, who clearly speaks from a limited standpoint (as well as slightly elitist),
as his younger but sharp-witted sister points out:

“[…] There’s four kinds of folks in the world. There’s the ordinary kind like
us and the neighbors, there’s the kind like the Cunninghams out in the
woods, the kind like the Ewells down at the dump, and the Negroes.”
“What about the Chinese, and the Cajuns down yonder in Baldwin County?”
“I mean in Maycomb County. […]”
“[…] Naw, Jem, I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.”
[…]
“That’s what I thought, too,” he said at last, “when I was your age. If there’s
just one kind of folks, why can’t they get along with each other? If they’re
all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other? […]” (LEE,
2010, p. 302-303-304).

52
This idea is also found and briefly approached in Bloom’s (2010) analysis.
 83

By the final stages of Scout’s and Jem’s personal growths, they barely spend time in
company of one another: they have different routines in school, and Jem, who is close to
thirteen, prefers the company of boys his age. Their back and front yard plays from that
summer they met Dill have already crystalized into those memories which Scout as a grown
woman reminisces with affection. But the siblings still had a crucial experience to share, their
“[…] longest journey together” (LEE, 2010, p. 240).
On a Halloween night which turned into a most horrifying event, Jem assumes the
responsibility of taking his little sister to school for a pageant. The protagonist acknowledges
her brother’s carrying and gentleman-like attitude: “Jem was carrying my ham costume, rather
awkwardly, as it was too hard to hold. I thought it gallant of him to do so” (LEE, 2010, p.
341). After missing her entrance at the pageant, Jem also comforts Scout: “Jem was becoming
almost as good as Atticus at making you feel right when things went wrong” (LEE, 2010, p.
347).
When returning home alone in the dark, the children are attacked by evil Bob Ewell,
the father of Mayella, who wanted revenge after Atticus exposed him during Tom Robinson’s
trial. Brother and sister are once again reunited to share a near-death experience: Jem saves
Scout, and Boo Radley saves both their lives. It is then revealed that the narrative driving
force — the story of how Jem broke his elbow — evokes a traumatic yet honorable moment
when Jem put his life at risk to protect his younger sister.
In To Kill a Mockingbird, Jem’s and Scout’s developments are symbiotic. Scout
monitors her personal growth by watching her older brother’s growth. As he grows older and
understands the world around him, Jem helps Scout to understand it as well. This potential
masculine figure represents a gender reference that is initially assimilated and reflected on
Scout’s tomboyish identity. Later on, however, as their bond loosens, this reference goes on to
demonstrate how social expectations of gender distinguish them. Finally, despite their
distance, Jem proves that the bond between Scout and him may have weakened but has not
been completely untied: from beginning to end, Jem is always there for his younger sister.
Yet, we must not forget the relevance of the paternal figure in Scout’s development.
The “mother-infant bond” that the girl lacks is not only sufficed with the presence of
Calpurnia, but specially balanced with the “father-infant bond” she shares with Atticus53.
Even though Jem is a fundamental reference for Scout’s development and is, in many aspects,
a secondary Bildungsroman hero, Atticus is an equally important model and the closest to a

53
This idea is found and discussed in Seidel’s (2010) analysis.
 84

heroic figure in the narrator’s eyes: the father is the protagonist in Scout’s tale. As we have
seen, because intimate relations are influential in the development of the female
Bildungsroman protagonist, the lead may be directed to these characters closer to her in the
course of the narrative, again according to Abel, Hirsch, and Langland (1983).
In To Kill a Mockingbird’s case, it is Atticus Finch who also plays a leading role.
Although the novel is formally divided in two parts, the two plots that compose the narrative
— one concerning the world of children and another concerning the world of adults — are not
separated, but at some point, they are crossed and juxtaposed. When the storyline in the adult
world becomes more evident, by the end of part one, the narrative focus is moderately
directed to the lawyer and the process of Tom Robinson’s trial.
Atticus Finch is a gentleman beyond his son’s perception: he is a humanist, and
therefore, respects people’s individualities; he is empathic to each person’s life story. The
father seeks to transmit these personal values to his children and to maintain himself as a role
model of such. As he teaches Scout after the first anthropological experience of her
development — the first day of school —, she should try and understand why people act the
way they act; in other words, she must learn to respect each person’s individuality, as well as
their timing:

[…] “If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with
all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider
things from his point of view—’
[…]
“Until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
Atticus said I had learned many things today, and Miss Caroline had learned
several things herself. […] We could not expect her to learn all Maycomb’s
ways in one day, and we could not hold her responsible when she knew no
better (LEE, 2010, p. 39).

The values Atticus constantly aims to transmit to Scout are an essential part for her
personal growth. On that same day, he teaches Scout another lesson which will be later on
relevant for her (and his) understanding of Boo Radley’s situation regarding Bob Ewell’s
death. Even though Atticus is considered Maycomb’s reference of a law-abiding citizen and
tries to live up to this title, he explains to his daughter that eventually, for greater goods, rules
might be reconsidered. When Scout’s teacher tells her not to read anymore because it went
against the educational system the school was trying to apply, she feels frustrated and asks her
father not to attend school anymore. Atticus proposes an agreement to her:

[…] “Do you know what a compromise is?” he asked.

“Bending the law?”
 85

“No, an agreement reached by mutual concessions. It works this way,” he

said. “If you’ll concede the necessity of going to school, we’ll go on reading
every night just as we always have. Is it a bargain?”
“Yes sir!”
[…]
“By the way, Scout, You’d better not say anything at school about our
agreement.”
“Why not?”
“I’m afraid our activities would be received with considerable
disapprobation by the more learned authorities” (LEE, 2010, p. 41-42).

Atticus believes he “… can’t live one way in town and another way in [his] home”
(LEE, 2010, p. 367), a quality which Miss Maudie observes that most people in Maycomb do
not possess, but recognizes in Scout’s father: “Atticus Finch is the same man in his house as
he is on the public streets” (LEE, 2010, p. 61). While the lawyer is clearly concerned with the
transparency of his conduct to his children and neighbors, he is at the same time reserved
about himself personally, especially with Jem and Scout.
Initially, Scout describes their father as neither excellent nor terrible, but
“satisfactory”; he is a present father who participates in their lives by playing with them and
reading to them. However, as she also attests, he “… treated [them] with courteous
detachment” (LEE, 2010, p. 6), and this is a most suitable definition for Atticus’s relationship
with his daughter and son.
When Scout sees her father taking off his coat in the middle of Tom Robinson’s trial,
she reports that it was the equivalent of seeing her father naked. This implies that Atticus was
never out of his work suit, both figuratively and literally, because he is the same person, the
righteous lawyer, at home and in the streets. This illustrates what Scout means by
“detachment” when describing their relationship: she does not know any other side to her
father’s personality or the story of his life.
The children do know Atticus, the lawyer and father well, but they know very little
about Atticus, the man, or how he became the man he is. The episode of Tim Johnson, the
mad rabid dog, evidences this fact, as it sheds a light on a fact about the father that was
unknown to Jem and Scout until then. Atticus is neither a typical father nor a typical man, so
the children at first hold little admiration for their elderly, almost inert paternal figure in
Scout’s conception54. Because their father is not a laborer or keen to activities common to
other men in town, therefore, he is not manly in the girl’s eyes. Moreover, we observe that
Scout’s remark is essentially based, even if unconsciously, on a distinction of class and on
stereotyped ideals of masculinity:

54
Idem ibidem.
 86

Atticus was feeble: he was nearly fifty. When Jem and I asked him why he
was so old, he said he got started late, which we felt reflected upon his
abilities and manliness. He was much older than the parents of our school
contemporaries, […]
Atticus did not drive a dump-truck for the county, he was not the sheriff, he
did not farm, work in a garage, or do anything that could possibly arouse the
admiration of anyone.
[…]
He did not do the things our schoolmates’ fathers did: he never went
hunting, he did not play poker or fish or drink or smoke. He sat in the
livingroom and read (LEE, 2010, p. 118).

In the mad dog event, however, Atticus reveals that he is actually a great shooter,
killing the menacing creature with only one shot. Scout learns that her father is not as “feeble”
as she thought he was. Miss Maudie, being a friend of Atticus since youth and knowing about
this ability, tries to prove Scout that her father has many qualities. She questions the girl:
“‘Well now, Miss Jean Louise,’ she said, ‘still think your father can’t do anything? Still
ashamed of him?’ ‘Nome,’ I said meekly” (LEE, 2010, p. 129).
Jem and Scout see a side of Atticus that represents something that “could possibly
arouse the admiration of anyone” (LEE, 2010, p. 118) to their typified, childish perceptions,
but which their father chose to supress, omitting this part of his history from them. He does
not want them to know about what he considers a personal flaw in his record: his “One-Shot
Finch” (LEE, 2010, p.128) past identity.
In his attempt to reach moral perfection, Atticus ended up developing a somehow
limited relationship with Scout and Jem — he conceals what he considers a flaw of character;
he creates a distance by selecting the information about himself he is willing to give to Jem
and Scout. But there is a deeper meaning to his keeping this fact of his life from the children.
He does so not because he is ashamed of possessing or thinks less of such typically male
attribute, but because he wants his children to learn that bravery goes beyond any sort of virile
prowess.
First, when referring to his defending Tom Robinson, and then, to Mrs. Dubose’s
struggle with a morphine addiction, the definition of courage Atticus wants to pass on to his
children is that it means to face adversities despite knowing the odds are not necessarily in
one’s favor. He wanted his children “‘…to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea
that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you
begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what […]’” (LEE, 2010, p.
149).
 87

This episode and its unfolding reflect on important aspects of Scout’s development.
Using his own example, her father indirectly deconstructs, with the help of Miss Maudie,
Scout’s initial definitions of manliness based on stereotypes of masculinity. Moreover, when
telling Scout and Jem about Mrs. Dubose’s journey, he demonstrates that courage is not only
found in men, but mostly attributed to the female sex. For her courageous attitude, Atticus
perceives Dubose as a “great lady”: “She was the bravest person I ever knew” (LEE, 2010, p.
149).
It becomes clear that Atticus is just as relevant and definitive as Jem for Scout to
develop her identity and, mostly, her autonomy: the girl looks up to her father as much as to
her older brother. But while Jem directly intervenes and demands certain behaviors from his
little sister, Atticus’s methods for guiding his younger daughter as she grows up involve
‘demonstrating’ rather than ‘telling’ her what to do.
As previously mentioned, Atticus Finch is not a typical father, because the way he
raises Jem and Scout is slightly different from the conventions for child rearing55. In
situations where most grown-ups would simply rely on vague answers or ignore the child’s
doubts, Atticus tells things the way they are: he never infantilizes his explanations, even when
Scout and Jem do not have a full understanding of some concepts. Moreover, he does not
believe in physical punishment, at least not coming from him, and searches to be fair with
both his daughter and son: “‘[…] When Jem an’ I fuss Atticus doesn’t ever just listen to Jem’s
side of it, he hears mine too […]” (LEE, 2010, p. 113).
The children seem to acknowledge their father’s effort and prove that they learn from
him. But Atticus admits his single-parenting is not flawless: “[…] ‘Sometimes I think I’m a
total failure as a parent, but I’m all they’ve got’” (LEE, 2010, p. 366). His recognition of his
faults is very important for the narrative’s closure, because we learn that despite all his efforts,
Atticus is not as perfect as he wished he were: he is human, and therefore, subject to fail.
Yet, a fundamental contribution to the development of Scout’s identity and autonomy
is Atticus’s detachment from gender roles. For the most part, the father does not differentiate
the treatment he gives his son from the one he gives his daughter56. To Maycomb’s most
conservative citizens like Mrs. Dubose, “[…] it was heartbreaking the way Atticus Finch let
[his wife’s] children run wild” (LEE, 2010, p. 133). It seemed inevitable that Scout turned out
to be a tomboy, at least during the earlier stages of her life. To begin with, she never got to

55
Idem ibidem.
56
Although he does lend his father’s pocket watch to Jem once a week, which clearly represents a patriarchal
tradition.
 88

experience a relationship with every child’s primary female reference: the mother. For this
reason, she grew up in an essentially masculine environment centered on two primary male
references and, as a consequence, she mirrored their masculine manners and tastes while
growing up. Calpurnia, despite representing the strongest female reference of Scout’s
childhood, comes as a secondary influence in comparison to the girl’s immediate familial
relations.
As we have seen, Jem’s development is essential for Scout’s development and a
determinant for her tomboyish behavior, because Scout initially assimilates the masculine
interests and ways of her older brother. But Scout would not have been allowed to act in a
way that is socially expected from boys if her father had not given her complete freedom to
behave as such. He does not place gender norms on Scout: she gets the same rifle as Jem’s for
Christmas. In addition, he never forces her to wear dresses, nor demands that she starts “bein’
a girl” (LEE, 2010, p. 153) as her brother does. Despite Atticus’s “detachment”, he is careful
enough to understand and respect his daughter’s individuality. If Jem later on becomes a
reference to Scout for the pre-established differences between boy and girl; her father,
throughout her early childhood, promotes another reference which mainly deconstructs these
conventions.
Personally, Atticus does not seem to follow gender expectations by the book. For
instance, Atticus was the first male to break a generational custom that required all men born
into the family to reside in Finch’s Landing. By breaking this tradition, Atticus also breaks a
patrilineal cycle, as the Landing goes on to be managed by a woman, his sister Alexandra, for
the first time in the Finches history:

[…] yet, the tradition of living on the land remained unbroken until well into
the twentieth century, when my father, Atticus Finch, went to Montgomery
to read law. […] Their sister Alexandra was the Finch who remained at the
Landing: she married a taciturn man who spent most of his time lying in a
hammock by the river wondering if his trot-lines were full (LEE, 2010, p. 4-
5).

Scout’s relatives, like her Aunt Alexandra, her Uncle Jack and even Jem, constantly
remind her of her female condition and demand that she acts according to what society
expects from a girl. Whether his daughter will grow up to become a lady is not a
preoccupation to Atticus: “[…] But the only time I ever heard Atticus speak sharply to anyone
was when I once heard him say, ‘Sister, I do the best I can with them!’ It had something to do
with my going around in overalls” (LEE, 2010, p. 108).
 89

More than anything, Atticus wants Jem and Scout to follow his set of principles,
mainly because he fears they might become intolerant adults like some of their neighbors.
After the turbulent experience of Tom Robinson’s trial, the father’s main concern is that “…
when [Scout] and Jem are grown, maybe [they’ll] look back on this with some compassion
and some feeling that [he] didn’t let [them] down” (LEE, 2010, p. 139); and Scout does, as
her narrative proves. This way, Atticus’s lack of concern with pre-established ideas of
masculinity and femininity reflects on the development of Scout’s autonomy. Because of her
background, in a first moment, Scout feels free to speak her mind and does not accept the
roles of passivity commonly destined to the female sex.
Thus, To Kill a Mockingbird promotes a new dynamic for the primary relationships in
a Bildungsroman protagonist’s development. It is common to Bildungsroman heroines to be
raised within the social expectations for women, as in the examples of narratives of
awakening (ABEL, HIRSCH, LANGLAND, 1983). But in Scout’s apprenticeship, she is
raised by a father who does not impose these expectations to his daughter. This way, Scout
seems to develop an unusually autonomous identity for female Bildungsroman protagonists in
such an earlier stage of life. When the time comes and people start to demand she acts
according to those conventions, she initially refuses to accept the limitations that are generally
imposed to girls from birth. In other words, she was raised the same way as a boy is raised, so
until the eighth year of her life, she was unfamiliar to “the arts of silence”, and developed in
the direction of “self-assertion and self-articulation”, inverting Gilbert and Gubar’s (2000)
observation on the distinction of boy’s and girl’s developments.
Social expectations, one of the most relevant aspects which differs male from female
Bildungsroman according to Abel, Hirsch, and Langland (1983), might represent the greatest
conflict in the development of a female Bildungsroman heroine. The same way, the
experience of this conflict is a determinant for Scout’s personal growth. The protagonist was
mostly spared from the limitations that come with feminine values for the first years of her
life. However, the protagonist gradually experiences these pressures that become more
evident when her brother reaches puberty. Besides Atticus, one of the few people perceived as
a positive influence on Scout is Calpurnia, because she does not demand a typical feminine
behavior of her. But even though the cook does not impose these values to Scout, she is aware
of them and eventually reproduces the expectations they imply, for instance, when she says
that excessive demonstrations of knowledge are “… not lady-like” (LEE, 2010, p. 167) or
when she goes on to refer to Jem as “Mister”. However, Scout’s other relations pressure her to
start being a girl.
 90

Scout, as her nickname suggests, belongs to a society of boys. The tomboy’s

childhood friends are exclusively Jem and Dill, and the pressures of gender on Scout are first
experienced in her relationship with these two proto-men. In the narrative, besides Jem’s
move toward adolescence, which has already been demonstrated to be a gender reference for
Scout’s development, the arrival of Dill is also a determinant for this gradual demand of
femininity. For Scout, the primary charges of a typical female behavior comes from the world
of children which she inhabits.
On the following summer Scout and Jem spend with Dill, their friendship is already
affirmed. Dill becomes an important person in Scout’s life: they become sweethearts.
However, as gender roles become more evident in the children’s development, the boy ends
up moving closer to Jem. Up until then, the three had been inseparable during their plays,
which mostly revolved around their curiosity about Boo Radley.
From that moment on, Jem constantly proves his courage by trying to interact with
Boo. Scout menaces to break her older brother’s character because she notices that he is
actually scared. As a response, Jem tries to hurt his little sister by reminding her of her female
condition: “‘I swear, Scout, sometimes you act so much like a girl it’s mortifyin’” (LEE,
2010, p. 50). This exemplifies how, to their childish perceptions, courage is initially an
attribute related to masculinity, an idea which their father, as we have seen, later on
deconstructs.
This summer marks the beginning of Scout’s recognition of herself as female, and it is
her brother who starts this process, finding a necessary supporter on his male friend Dill. This
segregation based on gender, evidencing Scout as a girl in contrast to the brotherhood of boys
that Jem and Dill establish, excludes the protagonist from the unity the three children used to
share. The girl finds comfort in the company of their neighbor, Miss Maudie, a potential
positive female role model for Scout, although secondarily:

They spent days together in the treehouse plotting and planning, calling me
only when they needed a third party.
But I kept aloof from their more foolhardy schemes for a while, and on pain
of being called a girl, I spent most of the remaining twilights that summer
sitting with Miss Maudie Atkinson on her front porch (LEE, 2010, p. 55).

“[…] You’re the best lady I know” (LEE, 2010, p. 59).

The fascination for their mysterious neighbor Boo extends through that summer, so
they decide to enact a drama based on the Radley family. The previous plays the children
performed were mostly based on adventure books that revolved around a world of boys. In the
 91

past, Scout happily played male characters, but from that day on, Jem starts to impose female
roles to Scout during their plays, starting with the character of Mrs. Radley. Fundamentally,
he delegates her female stereotypes of passivity. Scout initially refuses to accept this forced
request, because in her eyes, the conventions that surround femininity represent an enormous
disappointment: they are the opposite of activity, they limit her. Although initially fighting
back, she ends up compromising:

Jem said, “Scout, you can be Mrs. Radley—”

“I declare if I will. I don’t think—”
[…]
Jem parcelled out our roles: I was Mrs. Radley, and all I had to do was come
out and sweep the porch. […]
As the summer progressed, so did our game. […]
I reluctantly played assorted ladies who entered the script. I never thought it
was as much fun as Tarzan […] (LEE, 2010, p. 51-52).

This exclusion moves from their fictional universe to their concrete reality. Jem and
Dill continually unite their potential masculine powers to delegate Scout passive roles. Jem,
who is older, tells his sister and Dill, who is also his junior, to watch for him while he takes
action and trespasses the Radley Place boundaries. The objective is to hand in a note to Boo—
once again Jem is trying to prove his virile courage. He takes advantage of his being the
oldest and not only charges Scout with unimportant tasks, but Dill as well. However, the
boys’ brotherly forces are united to convince Scout to assume the less amusing task of all.
The girl continues to refute this segregation while struggling with Jem and Dill’s impositions
and her desire to be around them:

Next morning when I awakened I found Jem and Dill in the back yard deep
in conversation. When I joined them, as usual they said go away.
“Will not. This yard’s as much mine as it is yours, Jem Finch. I got just as
much right to play in it as you have.”
[…]
“If you stay you’ve got to do what we tell you,” Dill warned.
[…]
Jem said placidly, “We are going to give a note to Boo Radley.”
[…]
“Now you´re in it and you can’t get out of it, you’ll just stay in, Miss Priss!”
“Okay, okay, but I don’t wanta watch. […]
“Yes, you will, you’ll watch the back end of the lot and Dill’s gonna watch
the front of the house an’ up the street, an’ if anybody comes he’ll ring the
bell. That clear?”
“All right then […]” (LEE, 2010, p. 61-62).

This growing separation eventually comes down to evidence their anatomical

differences, on the day they accidently catch one of their neighbors urinating out in the open.
 92

This might translate as a moment when Scout becomes aware that there are physical
distinctions between her and her companions which she can never compensate for, and this
impossibility seems to frustrate her:

At first we saw nothing but a kudzu-covered front porch, but a closer

inspection revealed an arc of water descending from the leaves and splashing
in the yellow circle of the street light, some ten feet from source to earth, it
seemed to us. Jem said Mr. Avery misfigured, Dill said he must drink a
gallon a day, and the ensuing contest to determine relative distances in
respective prowess only made me feel left out again, as I was untalented in
this area (LEE, 2010, p. 68).

Within the limits of their childish imaginations, Dill mimics the future expectations of
marriage and maternity with Scout. First he promises to marry her, but that is left aside and
replaced by his growing male bond with Jem. Later on, he decides that Scout and he should
literally ‘get’ a baby, and this comes as a response to his feelings of abandon by his mother
and stepfather. The boy and the girl assimilate and reproduce adult expectations. In Scout’s
childhood, these fantasies anticipate the most common conventions that are imposed to and
expected from women, another characteristic pressure in the course of a Bildungsroman
heroine’s development:

He had asked me earlier in the summer to marry him, then he promptly

forgot about it. He staked me out, marked as his property, said I was the only
girl he would ever love, then he neglected me. I beat him up twice but it did
no good, he only grew closer to Jem (LEE, 2010, p. 55).

“ […] Scout, let’s get us a baby.”

“Where?”
There was a man Dill had heard of who had a boat that he rowed across to a
foggy island where all these babies were; you could order one— […] (LEE,
2010, p. 191).

At a certain point, gender expectations start being demanded from Scout’s adult
references. Her father, as we have seen, does not ask his daughter to change the way she is,
but the girl’s other relatives do. In Maycomb, “Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-
o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frosting of sweat and sweet
talcum” (LEE, 2010, p. 6). Scout is socially expected to live up to this definition of routine,
which by that point in her life represents the absolute negative of hers, since her daily plays
involve activities such as rolling inside tires, playing in the mud, and being in constant
company of boys.
The pressure to assume a posture of femininity according to Southern values becomes
more evident and constant after the Christmas episode in Finch’s Landing. First, Jem and Dill
 93

exclude Scout from most of their plays, and then Aunt Alexandra and Uncle Jack try to
silence Scout’s tomboyish personality. As time goes by, Scout feels “…the starched walls of a
pink cotton penitentiary closing in on [her]” (LEE, 2010, p. 182). Scout seems to
progressively move from a world of autonomy, of “self-assertion” and “self-articulation”, to a
world of passivity, of “silence”, again in reference to Gilbert and Gubar (2000).
Uncle Jack disapproves Scout’s use of language at the table. At one point, she asks
him “[…] to pass the damn ham, please” (LEE, 2010, p. 105). The uncle frowns-upon this
behavior of Scout, as he believes these are not appropriate words for a little girl if she wants
to become a lady one day, to which she responds that this is not an aspiration of hers:

“You like words like damn and hell now, don’t you?”
I said I reckon so.
[…]
“Scout, you’ll get in trouble if you go around saying things like that. You
want to grow up to be a lady, don’t you?”
I said not particularly.
“Of course you do. […]” (LEE, 2010, p. 105).

After Scout punches her cousin, Uncle Jack reprehends and punishes her, but not
without making a remark that implies another social pressure of women: an ideal of beauty
perfection. He also reminds Scout of the expectation that she marries one day with this
observation: “‘There now,’ he said. ‘You’ll have a very unlady like scar on your wedding-ring
finger’” (LEE, 2010, p. 115).
But the one person in the course of Scout’s development who simply cannot accept her
tomboyish manners is Aunt Alexandra. As we have seen, she eventually becomes a female
reference in Scout’s life and obsessively tries to make her abandon her unfeminine behavior.
The girl describes the charges that her aunt placed upon her. Alexandra’s demands imply
typical definitions of femininity related to passivity, which do not correspond to Scout’s
personality. The narrator adds that her father was completely careless about his sister’s
complaints:

Aunt Alexandra was fanatical on the subject of my attire. I could not

possibly hope to be a lady if I wore breeches; when I said I could do nothing
in a dress, she said I wasn’t supposed to be doing things that required pants.
Aunt Alexandra’s vision of my deportment involved playing with small
stoves, tea sets, and wearing the Add-A-Pearl necklace she gave me when I
was born; furthermore, I should be a ray of sunshine in my father’s lonely
life. I suggested that one could be a ray of sunshine in pants just as well, but
Aunty said that one had to behave like a sunbeam, that I was born good but
had grown progressively worse every year. She hurt my feelings and set my
teeth permanently on edge, but when I asked Atticus about it, he said there
 94

were already enough sunbeams in the family and to go on about my

business, he didn’t mind me much as I was (LEE, 2010, p. 108).

Alexandra’s efforts to turn Scout into a lady are rooted in a deeper concern with
maintaining the tradition of the Finches as a respectable family from the County. She also
pressures her brother to demand adequate behaviors from both his children because she
believes their family holds a certain upper status in Maycomb’s society, something he is not
comfortable with doing as it goes against his personal values. Jem and Scout later on
demonstrate his aunt that their family is not as perfect as the picture Alexandra has painted for
herself. Yet Atticus tries to explain his sister’s values to Jem and Scout:

“[…] I don’t exactly know how to say this”

[…]
“Your aunt has asked me to try and impress upon you and Jean Louise that
you are not from run-off-the-mill people, that you are the product of several
generations’ gentle breeding—” […]
“She wants me to tell you you must try to behave like the little lady and the
gentleman that you are. She wants to talk to you about the family and what
it’s meant to Maycomb County through the years, so you’ll have some idea
of who you are, so you might be moved to behave accordingly” (LEE, 2010,
p. 177-178).

In another of her attempts to educate Scout on her ideals of femininity, Alexandra

hosts a tea party to Maycomb’s missionary circle of ladies and asks her niece to participate in
the event. This party takes place after Tom Robinson’s defeat in court, but these upper class
women seem to overlook the topic and rather concentrate on discussing the issues of distant
lands. Alexandra’s ambition with this move is to promote a feminine environment for her
tomboy niece to interact with and somehow try to initiate her in that routine of Maycomb’s
ladies which Scout previously describes.
Even though Scout is absolutely averse to the company of women, at this point, after
all the demands that she started being a girl, she has come to accept the idea of partially
assimilating the values of femininity in Maycomb’s terms. This event represents a milestone
in Scout’s gradual process of compromising to social expectations for girls, which had started
when Jem began his transition to adolescence and Scout relied in the adults Calpurnia and
Miss Maudie for company. With her attitude of accepting her aunt’s invitation, Scout is
demonstrating that she has learned from her father’s advice: she is trying to climb into
Alexandra’s skin and walk around in it so she can understand her point of view, why she
gives such an importance to these ideals of femininity.
Although Scout starts to accept the fact that she will probably have to be around
female company more often than she desires and emulate their behavior at social events, she
 95

cannot identify with this reality. She is empathic to her aunt’s conduct and beliefs, she may
compromise and wear a dress, but she does not see herself as a part of that reality. What
mostly bothers Scout is that the world of femininity seems superficial to her eyes, as
Maycomb’s ladies do not say what they mean, which she could only define as hypocrisy.
Different from these women in Scout’s perception, her father always told her the straight
story:

There was no doubt about it, I must soon enter this world, where on its
surface fragrant ladies rocked slowly, fanned gently, and drank cool water.
But I was more at home in my father’s world. People like Mr. Heck Tate did
not trap you with innocent questions to make fun of you; even Jem was not
highly critical unless you said something stupid. Ladies seemed to live in
faint horror of men, seemed unwilling to approve wholeheartedly of them.
But I liked them. There was something about them, no matter how much
they cussed and drank and gambled and chewed; no matter how undelectable
they were, there was something about them that I instinctively liked. . . they
weren’t—
“Hypocrites, Mrs. Perkins, born hypocrites,” Mrs. Merriweather was saying
[…] (LEE, 2010, p. 313).

It is on that same day that they receive the news that Tom Robinson was shot to death
when he tried to escape from prison. At that moment, Scout observes how her adult references
— her father, Calpurnia, her aunt, Miss Maudie — handle such a delicate situation. Alexandra
lets off her guard and demonstrates her care for Atticus while also acknowledging the
hypocrisy of Maycomb’s citizens. In the end, Scout seems to acknowledge that in spite of her
authoritarian posture, her aunt was more than a tyrant, she was also a woman of strength:
“After all, if Aunty could be a lady at a time like this, so could I” (LEE, 2010, p. 318).
Scout’s understanding of herself as a girl, from loathing to acceptance, is an important
transition that she must experience for her development in To Kill a Mockingbird. It is a
conflicting struggle, as it usually is for the female Bildungsroman protagonist, to meet with
what society dictates for the female sex while carrying a set of personal values that do not
correspond to those expectations. Even though her primary identification is with the world of
men, throughout her process of development, Scout demystifies her ideas of what it means to
be a woman. Scout gradually accepts social expectations for being a girl, but, in the end, she
mostly presents a critique to the behavior that society expects from women. An important
lesson that Scout learns about being a woman comes first from her father, and then is proven
by the women around her, as Calpurnia, Miss Maudie, and even Alexandra. To be a woman
involves more than dressing up in pastel prints and consenting to roles of passivity: it is
fundamentally an act of courage. In the end, Scout acknowledges that she has grown and
 96

turned out to be a brave girl: “‘Atticus, I wasn’t scared’ […] ‘Besides, nothin’s real scary
except in books” (LEE, 2010, p. 375).
The movement that Scout makes between her sixth and ninth year is similar to the
movement that both the Bildungsroman hero and heroine make in narratives of apprenticeship
when they reach maturity. As Seidel (2010) observes, Scout is taken on a journey from the
ignorance of prejudice to the enlightenment on tolerance, regarding the problems of class and
race which contaminated the society of Maycomb— the sense of conscious-awareness Lee
aims to transmit with her novel. Even though the protagonist never crosses the boarders of
childhood in the diegetic universe, there is an apprenticeship with the gradual process of loss
of her innocence that occurs within those three years, even if part of those turbulent situations
might have taken many years for her to assimilate. Jem says Scout is too young to understand
the events from Tom Robinson’s trial, but Scout seems to have carried all that weight inside
for the years that follow: “So many things had happened so fast I felt it would take years to
sort them out […]” (LEE, 2010, p. 277-278).
Scout experiences at a premature stage in her life her first conflict with reality, the
basic premise for both male and female Bildungsroman. In her apprenticeship, she learns with
those closest to her that the world is bigger than her front yard, and this world can be cruel:
the majority of her neighbors are intolerant, elitist, and racist; the only lesson they seem to
have learned is how to be hypocritical. Society sorts and labels people by class, race, and
gender, and the process to assimilate that involves Scout’s gradual loss of her childish
innocence. But Scout’s lesson is not a bitter one.
In the end, although Scout’s personal development is deeply marked by these conflicts
with the conventions of society, it actually proves it was an experience of positive outcomes.
The narrator demonstrates through the recollection of her memories that she understood the
problems within the society she was raised in. Atticus’s straightforwardness, although
questionable to the conservative citizens of Maycomb, have proven to be effective: “‘this is
their home […] we’ve made it this way for them, they might as well learn to cope with it’”
(LEE, 2010, p. 285).
We do not know how Scout became the woman who tells the story, but her remarks
demonstrate that those events covered a period of crucial learnings that clung to her. Scout
apprehends the lessons she learns from person in her life, especially from her father. Despite
the process of assimilating all those events, her understanding of Tom Robinson’s inevitable
death, given Maycomb’s racist context, proves that Scout had already awakened to what was
happening on around her: “[…] Atticus had used every tool available to free men to save Tom
 97

Robinson, but in the secret courts of men’s hearts Atticus had no case. Tom was a dead man
the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed” (LEE, 2010, p. 323). At almost
nine, Scout has already apprehended much of the complex relations of the world, that people
are unjust to people who do not deserve it because they do not want to climb into one
another’s skins and walk in around them. She understands, finally, why it is a sin to kill a
mockingbird.
 98

CONCLUSION

This work aimed to investigate how the characteristics that constitute the concept of
female Bildungsroman are featured in Harper Lee’s literary classic To Kill a Mockingbird.
The fundamental question that served as a guide to this research is, what essentially causes To
Kill a Mockingbird to be categorized as a female Bildungsroman?
In order to do so, we initially had to present a research on the Bildungsroman and its
origins, which mostly concentrates on novels of personal development that present male
protagonists. Bearing in mind the socio-historical distinctions between the male and the
female sexes, the approach to the female Bildungsroman was a necessary study for this work.
The studies on the female counterpart of the sub-genre evidence the need for a revision of the
traditional concept of Bildungsroman, for the simple fact that even though there may be
similarities between male and female narratives, the female experience of personal
development, given the aforementioned social distinctions, does not correspond to the male
experience.
Having reached the final part of this work, we may conclude that many of the
characteristics that form the concept of female Bildungsroman are featured in Harper Lee’s To
Kill a Mockingbird. First, we observe that Harper Lee’s novel and its supposed
correspondence to the author’s life reinforce the strong relation between the Bildungsroman
and the autobiography genre. As we have seen with previous examples, this is a characteristic
of both male and female novels of personal development.
The novel assimilates the narrative of apprenticeship structure to describe a shorter
period of the protagonist’s life, as it does not cover the usual transition from childhood to
adulthood that characterizes this pattern. Yet, there is an apprenticeship within that short
period of Scout’s childhood, as she moves toward enlightenment on the functioning of
society. Therefore, To Kill a Mockingbird presents a variation for the narrative of
apprenticeship pattern within the female Bildungsroman.
Scout’s identity and autonomy are deeply formed by the influence of those around her.
Among these people, the two most influential are her brother Jem and her father Atticus.
Scout’s shared development with her brother Jem evidence another recurrent characteristic of
the female Bildungsroman. The brother is a reference of gender distinctions for her growth
and necessary in Scout’s development as he helps her understand their society.
To Kill a Mockingbird promotes a new dynamic for the primary relationships in a
Bildungsroman protagonist’s development, as Scout is raised by a father who does not impose
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gender expectations to his daughter. A girl initially raised without social expectations
develops an unusual sense of autonomy for female Bildungsroman protagonists who are
raised within the boundaries of social expectations.
Yet, a socially expected behavior is eventually imposed to her. The conflict that Scout
goes through involves the understanding of gender segregation and the roles of passivity that
are imposed to women while she has previously formed an autonomous personality which
does not correspond to society’s expectations of girls. The demand to assume social
conventions for being a woman is possibly the greatest conflict that marks the process of
development in female Bildungsromane.
We may add that the conflict that Scout experiences with her tomboy personality and
the social demand for her to be a girl relates to the character of Jo March in Little Women.
This approximates a modern female character to another female classic character in North-
American literature and demonstrates that even though the novels are almost a hundred years
apart, there has not been a drastic change in the expectations that society places on women.
We acknowledge that this study has focused on Scout’s personal relationships the
most, leaving other characters that also contribute for her development aside. For further
research on To Kill a Mockingbird as a female Bildungsroman, we suggest an investigation,
for instance, on how the figure of Boo Radley, a relevant character in the narrative, might
represent a monitor of Scout’s development, from the children’s initial fantasy about their
unknown neighbour until the final moment she comes face to face with him.
Additionally, this work aimed to contribute to the study of the female Bildungsroman,
yet we acknowledge the need for an expanded approach to the ever-changing definitions of
the sub-genre. Most of the discussions in Abel, Hirsch, and Langland’s (1983) vital work are
based on nineteenth-century productions, thus we suggest that future researches investigate
other twentieth and twenty-first century exemplars of female Bildungsroman in order to
observe how the process of becoming a woman has developed throughout the years.
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