Female Bildungsroman in the Narrative of African Women Writers

This paper addresses the ‘Bildungsroman’ genre in African postcolonial narratives. It mainly focuses on African women writers’ literary works and, specifically, aims to shed light on how they blend female subjugation with an unknown genre in the narrative of female characterization and autobiographies. The study also evidences that, even though, the term ‘Bildungsroman’ is German in origin, i.e., ‘bildung’, which means apprenticeship, self-cultivation, formation, etc; and the word ‘roman’ which means novel, the concept is fully adapted and adopted in African male and female writers’ literary discourses. Thus the paper seeks to demonstrate that colonization in Africa has had intellectual impacts on modern African literature, as the pioneers of contemporary African literature have used foreign languages to write back, claim cultural retrieval, independence and represent their own experience through their own perspective and narrative in the midst of their protagonists’ psychological and physical transformation.

Gender and Genre: From the Female Bildungsroman to the Postfeminist Coming-of-Age Novel

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.

SOCIALIST AND EUGENIC: CZECH FAIRY-TALE FILMS AND THE NATION’S HEALTH

The article embeds the three most popular fairy-tale films by Vaclav Vořlíček (Girl on a Broomstick, 1971; Three Wishes for Cinderella, 1973; How to Drown Dr. Mraček or the End of Water Spirits in Bohemia, 1975) in the socialist campaigns orchestrated by the Czechoslovak government in the late 1960s and early 1970s, whose goal was to introduce women to new practices directly relating to reproductive behavior. I explore this cohort of “crazy” comedies stemming from the story of domestication of women as a historical continuity in the development of the comic female Bildungsroman, one of the mainstream genres interrogating nation-building and popular culture in the Czech lands from the second third of the nineteenth century until today. The core frame of the Czech female Bildungsroman, namely the binary opposition of “us/them” related to the Czech-German relationship, ascribing to women the risk of Otherness, and the call for their Czechinization through intercourse with Czech men, are deconstructed through infiltration by eugenic motives disseminated in the public discourse concerning the nation’s health between the 1960s and 1970s.

A Space of “unwonted liberty and pleasure”

Gardening and botany emerged as independent and stimulating pursuits permitted, and even encouraged, for women, in the nineteenth century. Drawing on the cultural history of these pursuits, this paper examines how Charlotte Brontë uses gardens as critical sites in the Bildungsromans of Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe. I argue that corresponding to this culture, and given the restricted locations in which the traditional female Bildungsroman may play out, Brontë’s gardens function as sites of liberation and self-discovery and are a fundamental part of the heroines’ journey into adulthood. They become crucial places for communication, courtship, and power relations, and of escape, sanctuary and introspection; public yet private spaces in which young women might negotiate and discover an empowered self. Critics have tended to treat gardens in the Brontë novels as Edenic, or as having pedagogical or moral associations. But taking an ecofeminist approach, particularly drawing on Stacy Alaimo’s work on trans-corporeality, I argue that Charlotte Brontë actively interrogates the relationship between Victorian ideologies of nature and the construction of female selfhood. Brontë valorizes the natural environment that was being eroded and exploited, appropriating gardens as a feminine territory that sustains and enriches the individual, albeit within the safe bounds of the domestic sphere.

Zinovieva-Annibal, Lydia Dmitrievna (1866–1907)

A Russian prose writer and dramatist, Zinovieva-Annibal (with her second husband, Viacheslav Ivanov) hosted the influential literary salon known as The Tower. Born in St Petersburg into an aristocratic family, Zinovieva-Annibal was a rebel and nonconformist throughout her life and in her work. She was known for her intensity and eccentricity. Writing in various genres, she produced Symbolist plays, such as The Rings [Kol’tsa] (1904) and The Singing Ass [Pevuchii osel], the novels Thirty-three Abominations [Tridtsat’-tri uroda] (1907) and The Tragic Menagerie [Tragicheskii zverinets] (1907), and other short stories, many of which were published only posthumously in the collection entitled No! [Net!] (1918). Zinovieva-Annibal is perhaps best known for Thirty-three Abominations, the first work of Russian literature to deal openly with the theme of lesbianism, which is portrayed in a decadent, tragic light. Like the short story ‘The Head of the Medusa,’ Thirty-three Abominations critiques the objectifying male gaze. The semi-autobiographical Tragic Menagerie, considered by critics to be her strongest work, is a female Bildungsroman, which traces the evolution of the heroine, Vera, from childhood to adulthood, when Vera is able ultimately to reconcile nature and culture on the Italian seashore.