The Bildungsroman (novel Of Personal Development)

The Bildungsroman

The Bildungsroman, or novel of self-development, is often said to have origi- nated in Goethe s Wilhelm Meister (1795), and to have crossed the Channel in Thomas Carlyle s famous 1824 translation. However, it is tempting to include earlier novels in a history of the English Bildungsroman. Among the examples that could qualify are literary landmarks such as Robinson Crusoe (1719), Clarissa(1748), Tom Jones (1749), and Tristram Shandy (1759 1767) the novels of Fanny Burney and a number of those of Scott and Austen. Indeed, the fact that most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English novels are deeply concerned with self-development suggests that the term Bildungsroman should be considered as describing a central tendency of the English novel sui generis, although the term was coined in the early nineteenth century. Carlyle s translation of Wilhelm Meister coincides with intensified focus on inward psychological development, as opposed to outward adventures and progress. The nineteenth-century heyday of the Bildungsroman in English saw significant formal developments tailored to the intensification.

The unlikeness of Wilhelm Meister to any English Bildungsroman that pre- cedes or follows it points towards the particularities of the English species.1Wilhelm s story, like that of the heroes of Scott s Rob Roy (1818) or Thackeray sPendennis (1848 1850), begins with his struggle to escape a humdrum bour- geois future, in favor of a romantic alternative. But Wilhelm inherits a large fortune, and thereby comes to inhabit a social dimension in which rules of conduct are extremely flexible. In contrast English heroes find their desires and choices radically constrained by economic realities and socio-moral codes. The existence of economic, moral, and social constraints, or the lack of them, has great formal implications. In English Bildungsromane rigid nineteenth- century rules of sexual conduct also are great plot drivers. Bildungsromanewith female protagonists are sometimes treated as marginal to the genre, but the especially narrow constraints placed on women in Victorian Britain render them in many ways paradigmatic heroes. Whether male or female, however, the protagonists of English Bildungsromane almost always begin impoverished unless, like Dorothea Brooke of Middlemarch (1872), wealth actually hampers their actions. In many cases too Jane Eyre (1847), Wuthering Heights (1847),David Copperfield (1850), Great Expectations (1861), Tess of the d Urbervilles (1891),The Way of all Flesh (1903) hostile, malevolent, incompetent, or unsympathetic parents or step-parents get in the way of the development of their offspring or wards and, in doing so, they further funnel narrative energy. Thus the plots of English Bildungsromane are driven by the external constraints that attend their protagonists growing up a process that is posed as inherently problematical, reflecting, perhaps, the anxieties of a modern age increasingly at the mercy of an ever-accelerated rate of growth and change.

Wilhelm Meister is free to follow the wayward and unpredictable prompt- ings of his own impulses. While they eventually lead him towards a marriage that marks his achievement of maturity, the mental processes and external forces leading him there are hard to grasp. The reader feels no more sense of narrative necessity than Wilhelm feels economic or social exigency. The absence is reinforced by the final revelation that a secret society of intellectuals has been guiding and shaping Wilhelm s self-development. This Bildungsroman, it seems, can be concluded only by becoming a philosophical romance more like Johnson s Rasselas (1759) than a realist novel. We watch Wilhelm s process of development, but the narrative mode does not allow us to trace the interplay between inward impulse and outward influence and constraint that is the essence of the Bildungsroman in English. Wilhelm s vacillations are lightly ironized by the narrator, but at other times he acts as a mouthpiece for Goethe s own views. On the occasions when difference does arise between his perspective and that of the narrator, the extent of the distance between them is hard to judge. This uncertainty militates against the sort of immersion in a dynamic, evolving individual perspective that we find in the Bildungsroman in English.

A narrator s penetration of a character s interiority and a narrator s analytical understanding of external pressures on a character depend on manipulations of narrative mode. In Jane Austen s novels either a consistent focalization of the narrative through an all-but infallible primary character, such as Eleanor inSense and Sensibility (1811), or a precisely calibrated use of free indirect speech, keeps readers actively engaged in assessing the exact distance between the passing and conflicting impressions of the character and the decisive judgment of the narrator as well as the objective social and moral order reflected by that judgment. When in Emma (1816) Emma and Mr. Knightley differ in their assessment of Mr. Elton s interest in Harriet Smith, we cannot be long in doubt of the right interpretation (i.e. that Elton s interest in money precludes his having any passion for Harriet), in spite of the speciousness of Emma s internal reasoning:

[Mr Knightley] certainly might have heard Mr. Elton speak with more unreserve than she had ever done, and Mr. Elton might not be of an imprudent, incon- siderate disposition as to money-matters he might naturally be rather attentive than otherwise to them but then, Mr. Knightley did not make due allowance for the influence of a strong passion at war with all interested motives.2

The reiterated might flags a mind Emma s arguing with itself, attempt- ing to achieve belief in its own reasonableness as does the attempt at balance and moderation suggested by rather attentive than otherwise. However, but then marks a reversion towards a strongly held preconception, as might becomes did not, and the sentence, freed of the stilted punctuation of reason- ableness, careers headlong back towards Emma s blind unqualified faith in the influence of a strong passion at war with all interested motives. Through Austen s sophisticated modes of narration, we have first-hand access to the learning process of the maturing protagonist, and can even enter into it with her. But the rhetorical finesse in the manipulation of double perspective the narrator s and the character s creates a fictional world in which varying perspectives can be intimately understood and sympathized with, but also measured against a scrupulously analyzed and justified code of conduct. The narrative mode itself reveals the distance that Emma needs to travel towards maturity, for Austen s narration embodies the confident adulthood that is the goal of the Bildungsroman. Such maturity reaches through the egoism of youth, the temptations of circumstance, and the unquestioning acceptance of vulgar social norms, towards a conscientious yet self-protecting individual judgment unbiased by selfish wishfulness.

Austen s use of a narrative mode that combines intimacy with a sense of the distance to be traveled is formative for the English Bildungsroman. Austen influences, for example, Dickens s use of free indirect speech and dual perspec- tive in Great Expectations (1861), where the voice of the mature narrator con- tinually, with more or less explicitness bracketing the perspective of young Pip, contributes to make that novel one of the greatest Bildungsromane in English. However, the resounding confidence of Austen s narratorial perspective is seldom equaled in later novelists, in whose narratives the inevitable pain, loss, and risk involved in growing up is brought to the fore, and the very possibility of achieving maturity is placed in question.

While narratives of self-development began to flourish in English fiction, Wordsworth was refining The Prelude. Though not published until 1850, when the English Bildungsroman was already in full bloom, its central emphasis on the deep sources of the self in childhood had already been expressed by Wordsworth in poems such as Ode: Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood (1807). His idea that The Child is father of the Man is a guiding principle of Bildungsromane as various as Jane Eyre (1847), Wuthering Heights (1847),Dombey and Son (1848), David Copperfield (1850), Great Expectations, The Mill on the Floss (1860), Jude the Obscure (1895) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).

This focus on early childhood has crucial formal implications. In the second chapter of David Copperfield, I Observe, Dickens spells out a version of the suggestion in Intimations of Immortality that The things which I have seen I now can see no more :

The first objects that assume a distinct presence before me, as I look far back, into the blank of my infancy, are my mother with her pretty hair and youthful shape, and Peggotty, with no shape at all, and eyes so dark that they seemed to darken their whole neighbourhood in her face . . .

I believe I can remember these two at a little distance apart, dwarfed to my sight by stooping down or kneeling on the floor, and I going unsteadily from the one to the other ...

I believe the power of observation in numbers of very young children to be quite wonderful for its closeness and accuracy. Indeed I think that most grown men who are remarkable in this respect, may with greater propriety be said not to have lost the faculty, than to have acquired it.3

Echoing Wordsworth, Dickens claims for the Bildungsroman the sensuous, imagistic function heretofore the territory of Romantic poetry. He might almost be talking about what, since his time, psychologists have called eidetic memory memory that not only recalls details with extraordinary accuracy, but (and this is what is distinctive about it) does so without subsuming them to abstract or generalized patterns or categories of thought. Some children do have such special eidetic faculty but in most the abstraction of mature thought- patterns seems to eclipse it. Maturation is precisely this process of subsuming the particular to the general of finding patterns in our world, and of placing our own individuality within a network of determined roles and choices.

Dickens s sustained, immediate sensuousness a narrative capture of eidetic memory is relatively new to the novel, and only partly discoverable in Fielding and Austen. When Fielding sets out to describe the childhood home of Tom Jones, he descends from generalized descri ption into a metafictional joke that deflates the reality effect:

a fine park, composed of very unequal ground, and agreeably varied with all the diversity that hills, lawns, wood, and water, laid out with admirable taste . . .could give . . . Reader, take care, I have unadvisedly led thee to the top of as high a hill as Mr Allworthy s, and how to get thee down without breaking thy neck, I do not well know. However, let us e en venture to slide down together.4

And when the heroine of Emma has a rare and transformative encounter with a landscape, the terms of the descri ption quickly become saturated with some of the narrator s core values:

The considerable slope . . . gradually acquired a steeper form . . . and at half a mile distant was a bank of considerable abruptness and grandeur, well clothed with wood and at the bottom of this bank, favourably placed and sheltered, rose the Abbey-Mill Farm . . .

It was a sweet view sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive. (283)

The contrastingly distinctive, profuse detail of the Victorian Bildungsroman, infused with what Austen might have found an almost oppressive emotional intensity not subsumed to analysis, is designed to capture the world of child- hood. And the formal investment in the visionary significance of the particular indicates an emotional commitment to childhood as perhaps the height, rather than merely the root, of any individual development.

The immediacy of the child s view is conveyed not just through evocative detail, but also through first-person narrative, or an external narrator s first- person presence. Combining first-person with present-tense narration further narrows the space for the imposition of abstract meanings upon experience:

now I see the outside of our house, with the latticed bedroom-windows stand- ing open to let in the sweet-smelling air . . . Now I am in the garden at the back, beyond the yard where the empty pigeon-house and dog-kennel are a very preserve of butterflies. (David Copperfield, 15)

Now I can turn my eyes towards the mill again, and watch the unresting wheel sending out its diamond jets of water. That little girl is watching it too. . .It is time [she] went in, I think and there is a very bright fire to tempt her: the red light shines out under the deepening grey of the sky. It is time too for me to leave off resting my arms on the cold stone of this bridge.5

Vivid details of movement, sight, smell, touch, help a reader share a particular moment of experience with the child protagonist. A na ve immediacy of perspective is also suggested by the unframed incidental character of detail.Jane Eyre plunges us into the quotidian of the heroine s childhood experience in its very first line: There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had

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