English Honors Papers

Document Type

Restricted

Advisor

Rae Gaubinger

Publication Date

2025

Comments

Access to this paper is restricted to the Connecticut College campus.

Abstract

This thesis reconsiders the progress heroines make in Female Bildungsromane written by female authors in the nineteenth and first two decades of the twentieth century, which were previously debated in scholarship as unsuccessful due to their ‘failure’ endings of reductive capitulation to social integration (fates of heterosexual marriage and motherhood) or destruction of the autonomous self (fates of isolation, alcoholism, despair, illness, exile or, most commonly, death). I argue that the language of success and failure is too teleological and too narrow to effectively analyze the Female Bildungsroman given the heteropatriarchal constraints of society and literary genre, thus necessitating a revised assessment of how to dissect the growth of a heroine within novels from this period. Within this thesis, I propose a new theorization of the Bildungsroman based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs that principally studies the ongoing pursuit of self-actualization, which the Bildungsroman heroine is questing towards. This theorization relies on decentering Bildungsroman study from an overreliance on conclusions, focussing on moments in the development sections of these novels of development that exemplify both the progress heroines fashion towards self-actualization and the radical acts of resistance performed by female authors as they dare to tell stories of self-actualizing heroines in a time when gender denied women the right to exist beyond the relational self.

I first investigate the development of the heroine in a pair of famous nineteenth novels, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening that have the success of their female Bildungsroman storyline highly debated. These novels serve as case studies for the paradigmatic ‘failure’ endings – Pride and Prejudice as reductive capitulation to social integration and The Awakening as destruction of the autonomous self – as I attempt to rehabilitate the growth exhibited by heroines within these unsuccessful endings of the female Bildungsroman. I then pivot into the twentieth century to examine how modernism permitted female authors to craft female Bildungsroman with successful endings, especially for women with marginalized female identities. Through applying my revised Bildungsroman theorization to case studies of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, I illustrate how two different atypical middle-aged heroines, a queer spinster and an African American widow, grow significantly over the development portions of their novels to triumphantly conclude their stories as autonomous women in the continual pursuit of self-actualization. Consequently, in this project that spans 150 years of feminist literature, I intend to prioritize the growth, not the resolution, of a heroine’s story to rediscover inflexions of agency and progress within the Bildungsroman genre in a thesis that ultimately rehabilitates the progressive moves female authors construct within and beyond the limits of ‘failure’ endings, charting the course for the eventual arrival at the successful, Modernist Female Bildungsroman.

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The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the author.