Week 11-A Rethinking the Bildungsroman

Feng, Pin-chia.  The Female Bildungsroman by Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston. New York: Peter Lang, 1997.

Chapter One  “ Rethinking the Bildungsroman: the Politics of Rememory and the Bildung of Ethnic American Women Writers. ” 1-49

Chapter One  I. Traditional Definitions of the Bildungsroman  II. Definition of the Female Bildungsroman  III. Narratives of Bildung by Ethnic Women  IV. Knots of Subjectivity  V. Breaking Silence

I. Traditional Definitions of the Bildungsroman  Derived from the quest motif in traditional heroic narrative (2).

German Bildungsroman  Two narrative patterns: 1. a linear progression toward knowledge and social integration 2. a [spiral] upward movement toward spiritual fulfillment (2)

German Bildungsroman  Bild → imago or portrait (3)  Bildung → the process by which a human being becomes a replica of his mentor, and is identified with him as the exemplary model. (Fran ç ois Jost qtd. in Feng 3)  Bildungsroman → the father-quest (3)

Victorian English Bildungsroman  Adds an overt class ideology --Instructs the middle class that finding a proper vocation is the path to upward mobility (4)

Minority Subjects  Description of traditional plot elements becomes unsatisfactory when applied to contemporary Bildungsromane by ethnic women. (6)

II. Definition of the Female Bildungsroman  A major source: The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development

shared assumptions  The shared assumptions in the female Bildungsroman and the traditional male Bildungsroman are belief in a coherent self faith in the possibility of development insistence on a time span in which development occurs emphasis on social context. (11-12)

The female Bildungsroman  Two narrative patterns: An essentially chronological apprenticeship (similar to the linear structure of the male Bildungsroman) The awakening, which generally occurs later in the heroine ’ s life and consists of brief, internal epiphanic moments. (11)

III. Narratives of Bildung by Ethnic Women  “ I regard any writing by an ethnic woman about the identity formation of an ethnic woman, whether fictional or autobiographical in form, chronologically or retrospectively in plot, as a Bildungsroman. ” (15)

Main Features  Multiple consciousness (16) “ slippages of selves ” (Shirley Geok-lin Lim)  Rememory (Toni Morrison) Counter-memory (Foucault) Re-presenting various negotiations with interweaving and oftentimes repressed memories. (19)  Mother-quest (20-22)

Bildungsroman by Ethnic Women  Mosaics of heterogeneous dialogues heteroglossic utterances divided discourses Conformity (sameness) shared human experiences linear historical development Divergence (difference) traces of the repressed memories return of the repressed (23-23)

IV. Knots of Subjectivity FeminismPoststructuralism Essentialism “ Woman ” : Innate essence Constructionism “ Woman ” : Social construction A unitary selfA dispersed/fragmentary subject Individual agencySocial forces Authority of experience Identity as positionality

Conflicts resolved  Feminism + Poststructuralism → “ The personal is the political. ” (28) → “ the experiential realm of a woman of color is always already a meeting place of various, often contradictory, ‘ discourses ’ that need continual negotiation ” (29)

Feminism vs. Psychoanalysis  Psychoanalysis is inadequate in handling class and racial issues (30): Racial differences do not exist in psychoanalysis. Slave children belonged to their mother ’ s race instead of their father ’ s. (30)  Where psychoanalysis is helpful: The theory of “ return of the repressed ”

V. Breaking Silence  The history of women ’ s struggle for self-determination has been muffled in silence over and over.  The sanity and survival of an oppressed woman of color depend on speech. If she remain silent, her story and voice are likely to be appropriated by the oppressors and she is further oppressed and silenced. (32)

VI. Revising the Bildungsroman: Morrison and Kingston  1. They underline the importance of recovering repressed memory in the Bildungsroman of ethnic women.  2. They juxtapose Bildungsroman along with anti-Bildungsroman to undrescore the multiple jeopardy faced by women of color. (36)

VI. Revising the Bildungsroman: Morrison and Kingston (2)  3. Both stress the importance of the process instead of the product of Bildung in their novels.  4. They transform a traditionally personal and privatized genre into a political one and provide a postmodern interpretation of the axiom “ the personal is political. ” (36)

 The End