Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 74-05(E), Section: A.

Advisers: Katie Trumpener; Maurice Samuels.

For some time now scholars have been aware that the Bildungsroman is a troubled genre: far too often the hero's supposedly teleological movement from childhood to maturity is arrested, inverted, or frustrated. As Martin Swales noted over thirty years ago, even the most canonical Bildungsromane doubt if their heroes have "achieved any kind of worthwhile goal or insight." Yet such insights rarely inform the practice of Bildungsroman historians. The dominant version the Bildungsroman history is still a narrative of the fall: a relatively stable genre, firmly rooted in the stability of 19 th century bourgeois values, breaks down when faced with the acceleration of social change in the 20th century, producing dysfunctional anti-Bildungsromane instead of cogent narratives of socialization. My dissertation intervenes in the debates about the relationship between realist and modernist Bildungsromane by locating failure, inaction, and alienation in the heart of nineteenth-century realism. The texts of Stendhal, Balzac, Dickens, Meredith, Eliot, Flaubert, James, and Samuel Butler offer an impressive string of personal failures, untimely deaths, suicides, and withdrawals from the world. One after the other, the major 19th century Bildungsromane struggle---and generally fail---to produce viable narratives of maturation when faced with the challenges of capitalist modernity, including swelling class tensions, the escalation of urban poverty, rising nationalism, and animosity between Christianity and secularism.

In the first part of my dissertation I examine Balzac's Illusions perdues and Splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes in the context of the complex legal and cultural status of aristocracy in early and mid-19th century France. As I read transcripts of parliamentary debates, political pamphlets, and newspaper commentary, I argue that contrary ideological propositions which dominated the public discourse during and after the Restoration made it impossible for the Bildungsroman hero to successfully navigate social reality. Following a similar archival method, I offer readings of Dickens's Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Great Expectations in which I argue that Dickens's intense focus on orphans should be linked to Victorian debates about the poor and the working classes, marked by the conflict between insistence on individual responsibility, promoted by both laissez faire economists and Christian moralists, and humanitarian emphasis on the inability of individuals to overcome their circumstances.

By demonstrating that stable socialization is already under attack in the mid-19th century, in the second part of my dissertation I am able to reinterpret the formal and thematic innovations of modernist writers like Joyce and Proust not as signs of the breakdown of the genre prompted by the traumatic developments of the early 20th century, most notably the Great War, but as attempts to offer novel solutions to inherited problems. I read the rebellion of Joyce's Stephen as a culmination of a long process of the ideologization and intellectualization of the Bildungsroman hero (including Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Butler's Ernest Pontifex, and James's Hyacinth Robinson) which I interpret as a consequence of the emergence of new social movements and the rise of mass society towards the end of the century. Finally, I analyze the mechanisms through which Proust appropriates the familiar story of Balzacian social apprenticeship only to turn it from a narrative of class struggle in which the hero fights to the death into a heavily aestheticized voyeuristic spectacle. My revisionist account therefore portrays the history of the European Bildungsroman in terms of a continuity of crisis.