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Portraits of the Girl‐Child: Female Bildungsroman in Victorian Fiction 1
Author(s) -
Maier Sarah E.
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
literature compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.158
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 1741-4113
DOI - 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00411.x
Subject(s) - girl , portrait , literature , subject (documents) , george (robot) , art , popular fiction , psychology , art history , developmental psychology , library science , computer science
This article explores the origins and traditional conventions of the literary bildungsroman and investigates the possibility of a female bildungsroman in the Victorian novels Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë and Mill on the Floss (1860) by George Eliot. These novels paint literary portraits of the physical, educational and intellectual growth of two Victorian girl‐children into womanhood whose experiences are explored to determine to what extent the construction of the child subject in fiction shapes the women whom the characters, Jane and Maggie, become; further, theories of the genre are considered, as well as the alterations required to the bildungsroman paradigm in its application to female characters.