Still unfolding : paths to womanhood in the new American bildungsroman

This dissertation examines generic trends and ideological innovations in contemporary women’s coming-of-age narratives in the United States. Through a comparative genre study, I illuminate and interpret a number of key revisions within the genre since the late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century classics, including a radical shift in the endings of many recent texts. I show that today’s female bildungsroman subject is ethnically, racially, and socioeconomically diverse, and that she is getting older. She has an overall broader sense of educational and professional opportunity, and more relaxed attitudes toward sexuality and marriage than protagonists in the past. These shifts have implications for today’s narrative endpoints, and as I demonstrate throughout this dissertation, many recent female bildungsromane have conclusions that are conspicuously open-ended and future-oriented, rather than ending in marriage, death, or disillusionment. Contra Franco Moretti’s 1987 claim that “A Bildung is truly such only if, at a certain point, it can be seen as concluded: only if youth passes into maturity, and comes there to a stop” (26), authors today often eschew traditional endpoints for their female protagonists, suggesting and often celebrating the opportunity for protagonists’ further development and personal exploration. This kind of flexible, “in process” narrative resolution reflects, I argue, a contemporary view of development as a continual experience, rather than a discrete stage that is confined to youth. Implicit in the view of development as an ongoing process is a sense of hopefulness. Though that hope may be tentative, it marks many of today’s texts, even those that feature traumatic conditions and hardship. In this dissertation, I show that the shift to flexible, open endings is borne out across a diverse group of texts from the past decade (2006-2016): Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone (2006), Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011), Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot (2011), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013), Susan Choi’s My Education (2013), and Patricia Park’s Re Jane (2015). In each of my three chapters, I explore generic revisions by focusing on a classic bildungsroman trope— education, migration and mobility, and social class. Contemporary modifications to these tropes correspond to revisions in the ways that today’s female protagonists view themselves in the world. While these texts remain identifiable as bildungsromane and are connected to the generic tradition in key ways, this body of texts also reconceptualizes the sites, timelines, and goals for female development and identity formation todayEnglis