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Abstract
I attempt in this dissertation to redefine the Bildungsroman as a genre united not by its plot structure, (adolescent protagonist leaves family home to seek adventures in the world, eventually marries and recreates his family structure), but by its ironic stance towards this bourgeois plot. In particular, the Bildungsroman critiques the ways in which its plot is driven by bourgeois notions of gender and the limitations which gender places on plot in the larger sense. My examples of the male and female Bildungsroman (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795) and Sophie von La Roche's Die Geschichte des Fraulein von Sternheim (1771)) critique bourgeois gender in three ways: first, by a thematic emphasis on theatrics and masquerade which reveals that gender is a constructed social mask and not an inevitable result of nature; second, by a structural principle of parodic repetition which parodies, bourgeois icons such as the ideal father and mother; and third, by a refusal to accept the androgyne as a final solution to the problem of binary bourgeois gender oppositions.
The hero and the heroine of the Bildungsroman oscillate cyclically between a feminine and a masculine masquerade, a sort of gender bipolar (manic-depressive) disorder. Neither gender appears to be adequate: masculinity entails isolation and femininity loss of self. Eventually, the hero and heroine of the Bildungsroman search for an ideal androgynous character, but because the androgyne offers no radical reconstellation of gender, it is rejected as a possible solution. The male Bildungsroman ends with a refusal to conclude since concluding would in some way endorse bourgeois gender. Instead, it ends with a return to the beginning, nothing changed, nothing learned. But the female Bildungsroman offers the possibility that its heroine, through a reconceptualization of mothering, can achieve an alternative, though unnamed and unnameable space that refuses and exceeds gender binarisms.
