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Тематический выпуск ВЗАИМОДЕЙСТВИЕ ЯЗЫКОВ И КУЛЬТУР: ТРАДИЦИИ И ИННОВАЦИИ
LANGUAGES AND CULTUREA IN CONTACT: TRADITIONS AND INNOVATIONS
Thematic issue
http://philjournal.ru 2021 No 3 243-253
Original Paper
DOI: 10.29025/2079-6021-2021-3-243-253
Gender and Genre: From the Female Bildungsroman to the Postfeminist Coming-of-Age Novel
Sona Snircova
Department of British and American Studies, Faculty of Arts, Pavol Jozef Safarik University in Kosice;
9 Moyzesova, 04001 Kosice, Slovakia;
ORCID ID: 0000-0003-3849-0175
Abstract: The paper draws attention to the fact that the introduction of gender perspectives into the studies of the Bildungsroman, or novel of development, has opened up the possibility of delineating specific female versions of the genre, ranging from the classic female Bildungsroman, through the feminist Bildungsroman to the postfeminist coming-of-age novel. The following discussion of heroines in British novels of development focuses on the changing socio-cultural factors that have influenced the representations of women's emancipatory struggles in works by female authors over recent centuries. The selected examples reveal that the transformations of the classic female Bildungsroman which emerged in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have brought about a series of significant innovations that include not only new types of heroines whose self-realization can be achieved in ways unthinkable for their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century predecessors but also more significant thematic and formal variations on the genre.
Keywords: gender, British literature, the novel of development, protofeminism, feminism, postfeminism.
Acknowledgements: The research presented in this paper has been supported by VVGS UPJS project vvgs-2020-1637 Sustainable institutional change through gender equality plans in small and mid-sized universities granted by PavolJozefSafárik University in Kosice.
For citation: Snircová S. Gender and Genre: From the Female Bildungsroman to the Postfeminist Coming-of-Age Novel. Current Issues in Philology and Pedagogical Linguistics. 2021, no 3, pp. 243-253 (In Engl.).
Оригинальная статья
УДК 82-31
DOI: 10.29025/2079-6021-2021-3-243-253
Пол и жанр: от женщины-романтика до постфеминистского романа о совершеннолетии
Шнирцова Соня
Кафедра британских и американских исследований, Факультет Философии, Университет им. Павла Йозефа Шафарика;
Мойзесова 9, 04001 Кошице, Словакия; ORCID ГО: 0000-0003-3849-0175
* © Шнирцова Соня, 2021.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License https://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/4.0/
Резюме: В статье обращено внимание на тот факт, что введение тендерных перспектив в исследования Bildungsroman, или романа развития, открыло возможность очерчивания определенных женских версий жанра, начиная от классической женской Bildungsroman и заканчивая феминистской Bildungsroman к постфеминистскому роману о совершеннолетии. Следующее обсуждение героинь в британских романах о развитии сосредотачивается на меняющихся социокультурных факторах, которые повлияли на представление женской борьбы за освобождение в произведениях женщин-авторов на протяжении последних столетий. Отобранные примеры показывают, что преобразования классической женщины Bildungsroman, появившиеся в двадцатом и двадцать первом веках, привели к ряду значительных инноваций, которые включают не только новые типы героинь, самореализация которых может быть достигнута способами, немыслимыми для их жизни. Предшественники восемнадцатого и девятнадцатого веков, но также и более значительные тематические и формальные вариации жанра.
Ключевые слова: тендер, британская литература, роман развития, протофеминизм, феминизм, постфеминизм.
Благодарности: Исследование, представленное в этомдокументе, было поддержано проектом VVGS UPJS vvgs-2020-1637 Устойчивые институциональные изменения через планы тендерного равенства в малых и средних университетах, предоставленным Университетом им. Павла Йозефа Шафа-рика в Кошице.
Для цитирования: Шнирцова С. Пол и жанр: от женщины-романтика до постфеминистского романа о совершеннолетии. Актуальные проблемы филологии и педагогической лингвистики. 2021. №3. С. 243-253.
Introduction and aims
The introduction of gender perspectives into the studies of the Bildungsroman, or novel of development, has opened up the possibility of delineating specific female versions of the genre, ranging from the classic female Bildungsroman, through the feminist Bildungsroman to the postfeminist coming-of-age novel. The following discussion of heroines in British novels of development focuses on the changing socio-cultural factors that have influenced the representations of women's emancipatory struggles in works by female authors over recent centuries. The aim of the paper is to provide selected examples that reveal that the transformations of the classic female Bildungsroman which emerged in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have brought about a series of significant innovations. These innovations include not only new types of heroines whose self-realization can be achieved in ways unthinkable for their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century predecessors but also more significant thematic and formal variations on the genre.
Literature review
From its eighteenth-century German prototype, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister (1795), to its most famous nineteenth- and early twentieth-century representations in British literature (David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Sons and Lovers or The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man), the Bildungsroman has typically been considered a genre which is primarily concerned with the development of a male character. As some feminist scholars [1] have pointed out, the apparent maleness of the genre informed the early attempts of German critics to delineate a definition of the genre. In an 1819 lecture, Karl Morgenster stated that the aim of "the genre was to portray the hero's Bildung (formation) in all its steps and final goal as well as to foster the Bildung of the readers" [quoted in 2: 1]. In 1870 Wilhelm Dilthey formulated an influential definition of the genre which saw the genre as the development of "a young male hero [who] discovers himself and his social role through the experience of love, friendship, and the hard realities of life" [quoted in 3: 2].
Mikhail Bakhnin's more extensive definition of the genre implies the male gender of the protagonist who develops through his interactions with the public space. Bakhtin categorises the Bildungsroman as a "realistic novel of emergence" [4: 24] in which human emergence "is no longer man's own private affair. He emerges along with the world and he reflects the historical emergence of the world itself' [4: 23]. The hero of the Bildungsroman is an individual living in a transitional period ("the very foundations of the world are changing", [4: 24] which forces him to transform into "a new, unprecedented type of human being" [4: 23]. Modernity appears in Bakhtin's account as "a completely new spatial sphere of historical existence" and the Bildungsroman serves as its main literary form through its capacity to reflect the historical change by focusing on "the problems of reality and man's potential, problems of freedom and necessity, and the problem of creative initiative [which] rise [in the genre] to their full heights" [4: 24].
A more recent study by Franco Moretti also relates the inner development of the young protagonist in the European Bildungsroman to his mapping of a social space which is fraught with uncertainty and contradictions. In his reading, the Bildungsroman appears as a "'symbolic form' of modernity" [5: 5], an era that brought about the destabilization of traditional social structures and radical changes in class mobility. He sees the novel's shift of focus towards the depiction of the development of young protagonists as a reflection of the changing perception of youth, a quality which had started to function as "a specific material sign" of modernity [5: 5]. Youth and modernity had become connected through their common attributes of mobility, inner restlessness and the progressive vision that sought "meaning in the future rather than past" [5: 5]. Although Moretti makes several references to female authors (Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot) and their Bildungsroman heroines (Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Eyre, Dorothea Brooke, respectively) in his discussion of the European Bildungsroman, he shares the perception of other distinguished critics [6; 7] that the genre is firmly associated with the male gender: "the very elements that characterize the Bildungsroman as a form: wide cultural formation, professional mobility, full social freedom - for a long time, the west European middle-class man held a virtual monopoly on these, which made him a sort of structural sine qua non of the genre" [5: ix].
However, this unproblematic acceptance of the essential maleness of the Bildungsroman has been challenged by feminist critics [1; 3; 8; 9; 10] who see the introduction of a gender perspective into the studies of the Bildungsroman as a serious precondition for the broadening of its definition. Many of the constitutive elements which male critics of the classic Bildungsroman determined as crucial in the protagonist's development such as formal education, an independent life in the city, successive love affairs or an active participation in society were not traditionally available to women in that period, and this has led feminist critics to attempt to delineate a specifically female version of the genre. Drawing on classic texts such as Charlotte Bronte'sJane Eyre, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, George Eliot's Mill on the Floss and many others, critics generally concur that the "heroine's developmental course is more conflicted, less direct" [1], primarily due to the heroine's restricted access to the public space and the lack of opportunities to search for goals in life beyond the spheres of marriage and motherhood. At the same time, they argue that the female Bildungsroman can best be described in terms of the two recurrent narrative patterns of apprenticeship (in terms of life rather than any vocational aspect), in which we follow the heroine's continuous development from childhood to maturity, and awakening, usually realized later in the life of a married woman. Other critical approaches note the importance of certain thematic tensions - "between autonomy and relationship, separation and community, loyalty to women and attraction to men" [1:11-12].
Research methods
The introduction of a feminist perspective into the research into the development of the heroine in women's literature has not only opened up the possibility of defining the classic female Bildungsroman as established in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but also to map the transformations which the genre has undergone throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Undoubtedly the central motif in the stories of female development is the heroine's struggle for emancipation, the specific characteristics of which vary according to the socio-cultural context of the given historical period. In the following sections, I present an overview of selected female characters whose stories reflect the changing socio-cultural factors that have influenced emancipatory struggles of female protagonists throughout the centuries in works by British female authors. The heroines presented below have been selected from the works that are major contributions to the British novel of development and demonstrate that twentieth and twenty-first century transformations of the classic female Bildungsroman have brought about significant changes. These changes encompass not only new types of heroines with a capacity for self-realization in ways unthinkable for their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century predecessors (such as equal access to formal education, active involvement in the public world of work and politics, or explorations of female sexuality) but also greater thematic and formal variations of the genre.
Results and Discussion
Jane Eyreis undoubtedly one of the best known heroines in British literature, a character who is seen by feminist critics as a crucial representative of protofeminist thinking in the British novel of development. In the period of the 1840s in which Charlotte Bronte was writing, Britain was experiencing the effects of the Chartist Movement. Although the Chartists' emancipatory struggle was primarily aimed at obtaining the rights of working people as a whole and specific women's rights were not yet considered an important social issue, British society was affected by the spirit of rebellion that also informs Jane Eyre's criticism of the position of women in Victorian society. Focusing on the process of the heroine's development from childhood to early adulthood,
Bronts combines elements of social criticism (realistic representations of the British school system), fairy tales (a poor girl's romance with a rich aristocrat), gothic narratives (an innocent girl confined within a mysterious house) with protofeminist passages that provoked negative criticism from some of the first reviewers of the novel. The most famous negative review is that by Elizabeth Rigby which condemned the novel as anti-Christian and connected it with the rebellious spirit that was threatening the authorities in the period: "We do not hesitate to say that the tone of mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has also written Jane Eyre" [11: n. pag.]. Rigby's list of the novel's subversive elements not only includes the perceived immorality of Jane's extramarital affair and her "murmuring against the comforts of the rich and against the privations of the poof' that Rigby sees as "a murmuring against God's appointment" but also the "pervading tone of ungodly discontentwhich is at once the most prominent and most subtle evil which the law and the pulpit, which all civilized society in fact has at the present day to contend with" [11: n. pag].
Although Jane Eyre's unwillingness to accept the social status quo was seen by early reviewers of the work in terms of political, religious and social rebellion [12: 611] rather than as a specifically female form of rebellion, it is clear that the heroine's emancipatory efforts are primarily provoked by the restrictions that Victorian middle-class women experienced in private and public spaces. In the most famous protofeminist passage of the novel, Jane Eyre clearly expresses her dissatisfaction with the traditional perceptions of the role of women in society:
Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex. [13: 93]
While many readers see Jane Eyre's romance with the Byronic hero character of Mr Rochester as the most memorable element of Bronts's novel, feminist critics perceive the work as an important precursor of feminist literature. Twentieth-century feminist criticism developed an extensive body of new interpretations of Jane Eyre as a text which abounds with elements related to the emancipatory struggle of women. Even the more mysterious elements of the novel (such as the mysterious house or the motif of the mad wife hidden in the attic) which had not traditionally been aligned with understandings of Bronts's social criticism acquired vital new meanings in some feminist readings of the novel. For example, Eugenia DeLamotteinterprets Bronts's usage of Gothic imagery in Jane Eyre within the context of the writer's protofeminist understanding that the true purpose of the Gothic romance was to express "that most women are 'confined' - not to a dungeon but to 'making puddings and knitting stockings' - and that they are victims of repetition - not because spectres haunt them night after night but because they do the same things day after day" [14: 201]. Another Gothic element of the novel, the character of Rochester's mad wife Bertha, has acquired a central position in the criticism that sees her as "a figure for the female condition in patriarchal society: repressed, raging and revengeful" [15: 108].
Although from a feminist perspective Jane Eyre's personal emancipatory development remains incomplete, or at best limited, Bronts's novel is still perceived as a predecessor of the feminist Bildungsroman which offers more radical authorial approaches to the representations of the conflict between the heroine and patriarchal society. The concept of the feminist Bildungsroman, primarily developed within the context of the second wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, focuses on women's entrapment within patriarchal power structures and on their struggles for gender equality. Unlike the first wave of feminism which was largely concerned with the acquisition of women's suffrage, the second wave addressed a far wider variety of issues, including the critique of male dominance in social institutions, domestic violence, sexual and reproductive rights of women and income inequality. The more radical fringe elements of second wave feminism called for the social separation of men and women and suggestions that lesbianism should be seen as the main tool of the feminist struggle for liberation from male hegemony [16: 192].
As with Jane Eyre, the heroine of the feminist Bildungsroman is presented as undergoing a process of maturation, but this is often shown to occur in public spheres, including educational, work or political spaces. The heroine's romantic experiences are often informed by a critical perception of heterosexual relations and also by her ultimate rejection of the traditional female social roles of wife, mother and housewife. While Jane Eyre loses the safe space of her family home as a consequence of her economic and family status as a poor orphan,
the typical feminist heroine leaves her home willingly, motivated by her strong feelings of alienation in the Marxist sense of the word: the alienation resulting from her "imprisonment" in the household, the monotonous drudgery of housework and from the restrictive effects of wifehood and motherhood and its deadening effect on the search for personal realization. The central motif of the feminist Bildungsroman, the "quest for an authentic self',is often "carried out in loneliness, alone, with other women, safe from the eyes of the male world" [3:248], and heterosexual marriage is often presented as "the very antithesis" of the female Bildung [17: 138]. Representative examples of the feminist Bildungsroman in British literature can be found especially in the works of Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble or Fay Weldon. The heroines of these works represent a new type of woman who combines her personal emancipatory struggle with active involvement in the political sphere.
One of the most significant examples of a heroine that actively participates in the public space can be found in the pentalogy of partly-autobiographical works, Children of Violence (1952-69) by Doris Lessing. As Esther KleinbordLabovitz observes, Lessing's representation of Marta Quest's development emphasizes the role of the collective and Lessing herself sees her cycle of novels as "a study of the individual consciousness in its relations with the collective" [quoted in 3: 145]. Marta's surname symbolizes her quest for her "real self' and for self-realization in society. The dialectical relation between subject and object (in this case, society) acquires a strong political dimension which is realized in each volume of Lessing'spentalogy through the heroine's involvement in social activities. Motivated by her experience of racial and gender inequalities in South Africa that have a crucial influence on the early stages of her development, Marta Quest connects her personal emancipatory desires with utopian Marxist visions of an egalitarian society.
Lessing's heroine illustrates the important connections which existed between post-war women's movements and the broader emancipatory movement informed by Marxist ideology and its focus on the struggle against capitalism. Unlike Jane Eyre, whose access to formal education is limited both by her economic situation and her gender, Marta Quest receives a much more liberal education which is informed to a large extent by her interest in left-wing ideologies. Her personal development is paralleled with her on-going process of political maturation, and her quest for gender equality becomes an integral part of the wider struggleagainst class and racial inequality. In the specific context of her struggle for women's rights the heroine of this type emphasizes the similarities between the subordinated position of the working class in capitalist societies and the subordination of women in patriarchal power structures. While the unequal position of working class people is determined by their relations to the means of production, the unequal position of women is determined by the biological aspects of their being and patriarchal society's attempts to fully control women's reproductive function.
Marta Quest shares Jane Eyre's sense of being restricted by traditional female roles and by the monotonous repetition of household activities, but she differs from her predecessor in the fact that her dissatisfaction is not compensated by an ideal or idealized romantic relationship. Reflecting the negative attitude towards marriage shared by many post-war feminists, Marta Quest sets out on her process of emancipation following her divorce from her first husband only to find out that her second marriage also fails to offer her a satisfying form of partnership. In Lessing's novels marriage is depicted as an institution which can provide the heroine with protection from the difficulties of wartime but it is also seen as an institution that forms a crucial obstacle in her emancipatory efforts. As Labovitz stresses, "marriage of this modern questing heroine begins in the iron grip of necessity and ends by providing bonds which prohibit growth" [3: 178].
While Lessing's novels root the heroine's process of development within a socio-cultural context suffused with left-wing ideologies, Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She Devil (1983) represents an example of the novel about female development influenced by academic feminism. One of the most crucial theoretical sources in the development of Anglo-American academic feminism in the 1980s was Bakhtin's theory of the grotesque, especially his ideas about the difference between classical and grotesque representations of the human body in the history of art and literature. Feminist critics who studied the biological aspects of gender inequality repeatedly drew on Bakhtin's studies [18] and stressed that in patriarchal societies the female body had been associated with the grotesque to a greater extent than the male body. In her seminal work The Female Grotesque, Mary Russo [19] discusses some stereotypical examples of the female grotesque in western culture, such as the Medusa, the Crone, the Fat Lady or the Unruly Woman, pointing out that women whose bodies do not correspond with classical ideals of beauty run a greater risk than men of having their bodies perceived as grotesque and that the unruliness that Bakhtin associates with the grotesque is perceived as a greater transgression of social rules if it is performed by the female grotesque body.
The dichotomy between classical and grotesque bodies forms the main motif in Fay Weldon's novel [20]. As a variation on the novel of development, Weldon's narrative falls into the category of the narratives that represent an "awakening, usually realized later in life of a married woman" 1: 11]. As with Marta Quest, Weldon's heroine Ruth only embarks upon her true personal development once she has escaped from the limitations of her married life. Ruth experiences a more radical process of emancipation then Marta due to the fantastic transformation incorporated in the otherwise realistic context of the novel, whereby she transforms herself from a dowdy, economically dependent wife who spends her life satisfying the needs of her family into a sexually attractive multimillionaire who asserts full control over the life of her now thoroughly subjugated husband. The heroine's transformation starts when her unfaithful husband calls her a "she-devil", unwittingly encouraging Ruth to embrace the title and abandon the restrictive role of the "good wife". As a she-devil she is unencumbered by a sense of shame and guilt or by the duty to be "good" and thereby starts her emancipatory process that includes taking devilish revenge against her husband and his mistress. Rebelling against the social norms and expectations which define the "good wife", Ruth corresponds with the grotesque figure of the unruly woman, famously represented in British literature by Chaucer's Wife of Bath. Through a series of skilfully designed schemes, she deprives her husband first of his house, then of his money, and finally even of his freedom (when he is imprisoned as a result of her scams), acquiring in the process literally everything his mistress had initially possessed, including the unique appearance of her classically beautiful body.
The transformation of Ruth's grotesque (too tall, too fat and too ugly) body into a body that is a perfect imitation of that of her husband's mistress represents the most absurd aspect of the heroine's development: her feelings of liberation are paradoxically connected with her willing subordination to the dominant norm of female beauty that the mistress's body complies with. The grotesque hyperbole that the author uses in respect to the possibilities of plastic surgery that the heroine undergoes serves to emphasize the criticism of patriarchal society that forces women to suffer extreme changes to their appearance in an effort to correspond with conventional ideals of beauty. Weldon thus suggests that economic emancipation does not automatically result in women's liberation, especially if women's minds remain under the domination of cultural norms that support the patriarchal distribution of power.
The influence of cultural norms on women's emancipatory struggles and the problem of the grotesqueness of the female body are also the central concern of Angela Carter's novel Nights at the Circus (1984). As a magical realist text Nights at the Circus [21] can perhaps be considered as the most famous example of the intersection between the traditionally realistic genre of the female Bildungsroman with a more fantastical narrative. Carter uses grotesque hyperbole and fantastical elements to create the image of a winged woman, a symbolic representation of the concept of the New Woman that emerged during the first wave of Anglo-American feminism. The concept of the New Woman was connected not only with the demand for women's suffrage but also with the demands for the economic and sexual autonomy of women which were extensively limited by Victorian social conventions. Despite the fact that the novel is set at the end of the nineteenth century, Carter's unique heroine enjoys a full spectrum of autonomy since her mysterious image as a winged trapeze artist becomes a source of her economic independence and sexual freedom.
As in the case of the "she devil" Ruth, Fevvers' story is framed by a male-female conflict in which the heroine wins over her male counterpart; Carter also focuses on the fact that women face a greater risk of social ostracism if their bodies deviate from dominant beauty ideals. However, Fevvers' victory, is much less ambivalent than that of Ruth, since it does not require that the heroine be forced to comply with any form of patriarchal aesthetic norm; on the contrary, the heroine's grotesqueness is celebrated as the very source of her empowerment. Drawing on Bakhtin's work [18] Carter endows Fevvers' grotesque body with the liberating effect that Bakhtin had identified in the carnivalesque grotesque and its capacity to transgress dominant social norms. Fevvers is excessive in all respects: she is too tall for a woman and too fat for an acrobat; her behaviour is extremely vulgar and her attitude to life is gargantuan. Unlike Ruth who destroys both her husband and her own grotesqueness in the process of liberation, Fevvers' emancipation reaches a climax when she is accepted as an attractive romantic partner by the novel's male protagonist despite her grotesqueness. The fact that the feminist Carter concludes the novel with a romantic denouement between the heroine and her male adversary indicates that most women, including many feminists, did not accept the possibility of the radical separation of men and women as a viable solution to gender conflict. On the other hand, the fact that Carter can envision a fully emancipated woman who is capable of forming a satisfactory romantic relationship with a man only
within the context of a magical realist narrative can be related to socio-cultural developments of the 1980s that many Anglo-American feminists perceived in a negative light.
One of the strongest critical responses to the cultural developments of the 1980s is Susan Faludi's study [22] that describes the patriarchal culture's "backlash" against the second wave of feminism as identified in postfeminist media images of women. Faludi sees postfeminism as a term coined by the American press in the 1980s in the context of its focus on the "paradox" at the heart of the lives of emancipated women who "have achieved so much yet feel so dissatisfied" [22: 91]. This postfeminist perspective was, in Faludi's opinion, promoted by the American media and the movie industry through the depictions of women who were "unhappy because they were too free; the liberation had denied them marriage and motherhood" [22: 126]. Angela McRobbie[23]continues Faludi's efforts in the mapping of postfeminist trends, drawing attention to media images of women, including such popular female characters like Bridget Jones, Ally McBeal and the characters from the Sex and the City series, as signs of a new cultural norm that invokes feminism only as a means of suggesting that it has already served its purpose and is no longer needed. Postfeminist cultural practices, in her opinion, emphasize the freedom of personal choices (a right guaranteed by the achievements of second wave feminism), which may also include the voluntary return to traditional female roles, such as the housewife or the sexual object. Postfeminist culture appears to promote these more traditional choices of women by exploiting the female anxieties related to the pressures of the biological clock and the fear of the "stigma of remaining single" [23: 11].
The most famous cultural trend connected with postfeminism is undoubtedly the Girl Power movement, personified in the 1990s by the British pop group the Spice Girls. The media images that presented the concept of a strong girl typically combinedexaggerated performances of the femininity and sexuality of the female body with traditional masculine subject positions. Girl Power discourse was also realized through the emergence of new female film and TV characters of the Ally McBeal type, which adopt "'new feminist' strategies, as a recourse to individualism, power through sex and working within the system to dismantle 'the master's house'" [24: 72]. In British literature the influence of the Girl Power movement contributed to the postmillen-nial transformations of the female Bildungsroman resulting in a number of coming-of-age novels that interact with media images of girlhood.
Caitlin Moran's novel How to Build a Girl (2014) is a representative example of how these postfeminist trends were integrated into literary representations of women's development: the heroine whose development is affected by the turn-of-the millennium cultural processes combines the two dominant forms of Girl Power that Anita Harris [25: 9] identifies in postfeminist media images: the "can-do girl" and the "at risk girl". As Harris explains, "can-do girls" are associated primarily with white middle class women who are defined by "their commitment to exceptional careers and career planning, their belief in their capacity to invent themselves and succeed, and their display of a consumer lifestyle" [25: 13]. In contrast, the "at-risk girl" version of Girl power is marked by "laddish" patterns of behaviour (drug abuse, binge drinking, violence, delinquency and sexual promiscuity) often associated with young women from marginalized, working-class or ethnic communities [25: 28].
Moran's novel [26] depicts the coming-of-age story of Johanna, forced by the economic pressures within her family to leave school early and transform herself into a successful career woman in the media industry; at the age of only sixteen, she takes a job at a London music magazine). The process of Johanna's development is influenced by the rebellious energy which was connected at first with the Riot Grrrl feminist punk music subculture of the 1990s and was later adapted into the mainstream forms of Girl Power in popular bands such as the Spice Girls. The emergence of the Riot Grrrl subculture can be perceived as an attempt to liberate women from the hegemony of the cultural norms that had deepened gender inequality through their emphasis on the dichotomy between feminine and masculine forms of behaviour. At the same time the movement represented an attempt to emphasize women's right to self-expression and self-realization in ways that were traditionally considered acceptable only for men. The Girl Power movement shared the Riot Grrrl subculture's focus on the association of women with traditionally masculine qualities, such as power, independence or self-confidence, and also emphasised the need for women to adopt a dominant position in romantic and marital partnerships, but Girl Power ultimately represented a weakened, mainstream version of the Riot Grrrl's cultural rebellion which was intrinsically intertwined with commodified media images. As critics of the Girl Powermovement [24; 27; 28] pointed out, its unquestionably positive aspects, such as the popularization of a strong image for
girls, always coexisted with its clearly negative tropes such as the emphasis on female self-representation as a sexual object, the encouragement of consumerism among women or its indirect contribution to the belief that such negative forms of masculine behaviour like binge drinking, violence or sexual promiscuity are essential signs of a strong girl image.
Despite the fact that the protagonist of How to Build a Girl embodies the positive image of a can-do girl with a strong personality and the ability to build a successful career on her own terms, Johanna also clearly represents many of the negative aspects of Girl Power. Her career success is conditioned by her ability to fit in with the team of male co-workers and her willingness to accept laddish patterns of behaviour such as heavy drinking, drug abuse and casual sexual relationships. At the same time, she is forced more or less consciously to suppress the more feminine aspects of her personality such as empathy or kindness, characteristics which are perceived as weaknesses which could threaten her success in the competitive work space. Thus the features which at first appear as a sign of her emancipation (i.e., the capacity to behave like men) is recognized in the course of her personal development as the necessary acceptance of male norms which still dominate the public space; success in such an environment requires her to lose important aspects of her female identity. Unsurprisingly, the heroine becomes most acutely aware of these negative aspects of her personal development in the context of her sexual maturation and her quest for a romantic relationship.
As Laura Harvey and Rosalind Gill [27: 56] have noted, the postfeminist Girl Power movement often sees extramarital sexual activity as a sign both of the characteristic of a strong girl but also as a specific cultural norm that has replaced the previous norm of premarital sexual innocence. In postfeminist representations of girlhood, the sexual activity of the heroine is often presented as a significant element of her personal development and as a sign of her true emancipation. This trend is reflected in Moran's novel through Johanna's refusal to associate the loss of virginity with a romantic relationship but her perception of it as a compulsory step towards maturity and her conscious decision to stylize herself as a sexual predator with a collection of one night stands. Despite these attempts to escape from the traditional norms of female behaviour, Johanna's relationships with men remain shaped by her romantic imagination which has been formed in part by classic female novels including Jane Eyre. While the underage Johanna perceives her sexual relationship with a much older upper-class man as a version of Jane Eyre's relationship with Mr Rochester, she in fact experiences a more realistic and more cynical version of Bronte's story and comes to the realization that the Cinderella-like position which women adopt actually deprives them of autonomy. Jane Eyre's protofeminist narrative and Johanna's postfeminist story both see the search for true love and an equal partnership as the central element of their female protagonists' process of maturation. The happy ending that Moran's novel offers in this respect shows that the radicalism of the feminist Bildungsroman has been replaced in the postfeminist coming-of-age novel with a revival, however problematic, of the classic female Bildungsroman's quest for female emancipation within the framework of male-female relationships.
Conclusion
The selected heroines discussed in this paper illustrate how female emancipatory struggles were played out in different historical periods and their literary reflections in the ideological contexts of protofeminism, feminism and postfeminism. Although the socio-cultural specifics of Victorian, post-war and postmillennial England are in many respects radically different and important differences can be found in protofeminist, feminist and postfeminist positions, the actual needs of the heroines remain essentially the same. The demand for gender equality and the desire for self-realization in the public sphere are connected with the quest for an egalitarian romantic relationship as a source of the heroine's emotional fulfilment. Despite the fact that the image of the heroine fighting for her rights has been significantly transformed by changing cultural contexts, as the comparison of the Victorian rebel Jane Eyre and the postfeminist "strong girl" Johanna aptly illustrates, the heroine's emancipatory struggle remains incomplete. What remains problematic, however, is not only the concept of postfeminist Girl Power itself, an approach which fails to offer women any real liberation from the hegemony of male cultural norms, but also the fact that women's need to create relationships (not only romantic) with men excludes the possibility of any truly radical solutions to the male-female socio-cultural conflict. An authentic depiction of a heroine who achieves a fully satisfactory outcome in her emancipatory struggle in the real world is an image that the literary world is still waiting to be realized.
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Список литературы
1. Abel E., Hirsch M. & Langland E. (eds.) Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development. Hanover and London: UP of New England, 1983.
2. Summerfield G. & Downward L. New Perspectives on the European Bildungsroman. London: Continuum, 2010.
3. Labovitz E.K. The Myth of the Heroine: The Female Bildungsroman in the Twentieth Century, Dorothy Richardson, Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing, Christa Wolf. New York: Peter Lang, 1986.
4. Bakhtin M.M. The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas, 1986, pp. 10-59.
5. Moretti F. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. Trans. Albert Sbragia. London, New York: Verso, 2000.
6. Howe S. Wilhelm Meister and His English Kinsmen: Apprentices to Life. New York: Columbia UP, 1930.
7. Buckley J.H. Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1974.
8. Fraiman S. Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.
9. Ellis L. Appearing to Diminish: Female Development and the British Bildungsroman, 1750-1850. London: Associated UP, 1999.
10. McWilliams E. Margaret Atwood and the Female Bildungsroman. Surrey: Ashgate, 2009.
11. Rigby E. Vanity Fair-and Jane Eyre. Quarterly Review. 1848; 84 (167): 153-185. http://www.quarter-ly-review.org/classic-qr-the-original-1848-review-of-jane-eyre/
12. Flood J.A. Eyre of Rebellion? In: Kriegel J. (ed.) Charlotte Bronts Jane Eyre. With an Introduction and Contemporary Criticism. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2014, pp. 611-630.
13. Bronts Ch. Jane Eyre. Norton: London, 2001.
14. DeLamotte E.C. Perils of the Night. A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
15. Wood M. Enclosing Fantasies: Jane Eyre. Federico A.R. (ed.) Gilbert &Gubar's Mad Woman in the Attic after Thirty Years. Columbia: University of Missoury Press, 2009, pp. 94-110.
16. Meehan E. British Feminism from the 1960s to the 1980s. In: Smith H.L. (ed.) British Feminism in the Twentieth Century. Hants: Edward Elgar, 1990, pp. 189-204.
17. Felski R. Beyond Feminist Aesthetics. Feminist Literature and Social Change. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989.
18. Bakhtin M. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.
19. Russo M. The Female Grotesque. London: Routledge, 1995.
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21. Carter A. Nights at the Circus. London: Virago Press, 1994.
22. Faludi S. Backlash. The Undeclared War against American Women. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1991.
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26. Moran C. How to Build a Girl. London: Ebury Press, 2014.
27. Harvey L. & Gill R. Spicing It Up: Sexual Entrepreneurs and the Sex Inspectors. In Gill R. &Schaff Ch.(eds.)New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 52-67.
28. Harris A. (ed.) All about the Girl. Culture, Power and Identity. New York, London: Routledge, 2004.
История статьи:
Получена: 30.07.2021 Принята: 26.08.2021 Опубликована онлайн: 25.09.2021
Article history:
Received: 30.07.2021 Accepted: 26.08.2021 Published online: 25.09.2021
Bionote:
Sona Snircova, PhD, Associate Professor of the Department of British and American Studies, Faculty of Arts, Pavol Jozef Safarik University in Kosice, Slovakia; e-mail: [email protected].
Сведения об авторе:
Шнирцова Соня, PhD, доцент кафедры англистики и американистики, философский факультет, Университет им. Павла Йозефа Шафарика, Кошице, Словакия; e-mail: [email protected].
