Romantic liaisons: Selves and subjects in novels of female formation.

Much critical attention has focused in recent years on the female Bildungsroman, yet a clear definition of this genre has yet to be established. Through the readings of several nineteenth- and twentieth-century English and French novels, I propose an alternative generic category, the novel of female formation. Plot is not the determining criterion for this designation, however, as is often the case for both the Bildungsroman and the female Bildungsroman. Instead, the central structural feature of novels that fall under this rubric is their depiction of the construction of the subjectivity of their female protagonist. They also share several other structural traits, including treatment of the heroine's relation to her (frequently absent) mother and to male models of subjectivity. Literary history, social conditions for women authors, and intellectual history in Europe converged during the Romantic era to set the stage for the rise of the novel of female formation. Mary Shelley's Mathilda (1819), George Sand's Indiana (1832), and Jane Austen's Emma (1816) are early exemplars of the genre that establish its problematic and produce models of female subjectivity that have come to be theorized in contemporary psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and feminist thought. Many of the issues these texts raise continue to engage twentieth-century novels of female formation, including Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out (1915) and Monique Wittig's L'Opoponax (1964). Among the issues that emerge as these texts address the central question of the female subject is the adequacy of female education. They also examine what place, if any, a society based on male imperatives affords the female subject, frequently generating a feminist critique in the process.Ph.D.Comparative literatureEnglish literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsRomance literatureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/128702/2/9124057.pd