The female Bildungsroman in the age of empire

This dissertation examines the tension-fraught formation of the British female Bildungsroman during the opening decades of the twentieth century. I argue that the sociopolitical circumstances of early twentieth century Britain create favorable conditions for the writing of the female Bildungsroman: the expanding opportunities for education and employment as well as the achievement of women's suffrage allow British women to break free from a domestic life and establish a public identity for the first time in British women's history. These circumstances that challenge the naturalized designation of man as the subject of Bildung give rise to the expectation for a countergenre to the male-oriented Bildungsroman---that is, the female Bildungsroman which represents the formation of female social subjectivity.;Discussing the pattern of female Bildung enacted in novels by Virginia Woolf, W. Somerset Maugham, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys, however, I emphasize that using the Bildungsroman genre to represent the modern women's effort for development involves tension, problems and, ultimately, contradictions: the Bildungsroman aims to educate the young male protagonist to accept the rules of existing society, but the women protagonists of the female Bildungsroman refuse to reconcile with the patriarchal social order and attempt to gain freedom from male domination. To reveal the conflict between the male genre's demand of socialization and the women characters' effort for anti-socialization more clearly, I pay close attention to the British empire and its impact on the modern female Bildungsroman genre. The ideological function of the Bildungsroman and the incommensurability between the patriarchal and imperial notion of Bildung and the female subject of Bildung become unmistakably clear, when the plot of education changes the women critics of empire into supporters of the imperial mission. Consequently, what begins as an anti-Bildungsroman ends as a Bildungsroman. The educational structure of Bildung claims oppositional women who criticize patriarchal and imperial oppression as immature beings, and the rebellious girls are transformed by the end of the narratives into docile, bourgeois women citizens.