Women's University Fiction, 1880–1945

Anna Bogen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317319566
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The rise of the middle classes brought a sharp increase in the number of young men and women able to attend university. Developing in the wake of this increase, the university novel often centred on male undergraduates at either Oxford or Cambridge. Bogen argues that an analysis of the lesser known female narratives can provide new insights.

1 From Public Scandal to Minority Pleasure: The Form, Content and Readership of the University Bildungsroman

In some ways, to label a text as a Bildungsroman is to suggest that its generic characteristics become more, rather than less, open to question. The definition of what constitutes a Bildungsroman has been continuously under debate for nearly two hundred years, despite the fact that it remains one of the most recognized of literary terms. James Hardin expresses the exasperation of many when he points out that 'scarcely any other term is applied more frequently to a novelistic form and scarcely any is used more imprecisely'¹ What exactly constitutes a Bildungsroman, where the category should be situated in place, time or even language, and whether its boundaries are aesthetic, historical or ideological are questions that critics continue to debate. The first use of the term in 1819 left the definition remarkably open. In a lecture entitled 'On the Nature of the Bildungsroman, Karl Morgenstern coined the term and defined it as 'the most exquisite of all the many types of novel', using Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship as the prime example and focusing on the Bildungsroman's gradual development of the character of the protagonist. Nevertheless, the lecture ended with an invitation to expand or challenge this new categorization: 'Many other related questions will remain, such as: is every good novel a Bildungsroman? Can and should every good novel be a Bildungsroman?'²

While the categorical ambiguity of the genre can thus be traced to its first definition, contemporary scholars have failed to settle the question either. It is important to note, for example, that many German scholars continue to view the Bildungsroman strictly as the product of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German culture, inseparable from the particular context of its time and language. Jeffrey Sammons, for example, who dismisses the taxonomic Bildungsroman definition of Anglo-American critics like Jerome Buckley as 'arrogantly provincial', claims that the concept of Bildung itself cannot be separated from its bourgeois context.³ As a nod to this historical rigour, some scholars, including Tobias Boes, Rita Felski and Mark Stein, prefer to translate the term into English, calling it the 'novel of development', 'novel of self-discovery or 'novel of transformation', thus avoiding the contentious use of the term Bildung. For others, such as Jerome Buckley, Franco Moretti and Marc Redfield, the term Bildungsroman can still be profitably separated from its origins and applied taxonomically to works in other languages and cultures.⁴ I have chosen to use Bildungsroman because of its rich critical heritage, building my own argument on the theoretical and formal debates of these scholars, combined with the specific context of university fiction. I use the term as a taxonomic and formal category, defining it as a novel focusing on the development and maturation of a single protagonist.

The primary area of focus that I have taken from Bildungsroman studies is an area that scholars, despite their disagreements, nearly all grapple with in one way or another: the relationship between form and content. The importance of a tension between these two concepts is already visible in Morgenstern's definition but was particularly expanded upon by Wilhelm Dilthey in 1870. Dilthey laid special emphasis upon the hero's place in society, suggesting that the completion of the hero's Bildung is synonymous with the acceptance of his social role.⁵ This suggestion makes clear the complicated ideological demand that the Bildungsroman's form makes upon its content – since the form invariably ends with the social and/or spiritual integration of the protagonist, it acts as a coercive or shaping force upon the particular historicized content or 'story' of each individual text. This idea was developed further in the early work of Georg Lukács, particularly in The Theory of the Novel (1920), a work that has had an important influence on scholarly studies of the Bildungsroman. The Theory of the Novel suggests that narrative form seeks – most of the time successfully – to create a totalizing world view within the novel that masks and rejects the dissonances of the modern world.⁶ This teleological structure ensures a particularly visible distinction between an ideologically driven form and a historically representative, variable content which provides a rich area for scholarly analysis. A third important theoretical influence on Bildungsroman scholarship comes from Mikhail Bakhtin, who, in an unfinished work on the genre, investigated the relationship between time/progress and space/stasis, concluding that the Bildungsroman is categorized by an uneasy tension between the two, which once again echo the form/content divide. Contemporary scholars have continued along similar lines. Patricia Alden, for example, borrows Lukács's identification of form with ideology, and labels content as 'history', which she characterizes as an opposing drive that provides a potential site of textual resistance. Franco Moretti's illuminating historical study of the European Bildungsroman sees the genre as 'intrinsically contradictory' and argues that modernity can only be represented by such a form in which what he terms 'values' and 'reality' exist within a compromise that is continually being re-formed. Martin Swales, who rejects Moretti's historicized definition for a German-centred but still taxonomic version, nevertheless constructs his own view similarly, borrowing Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's terms and describing the tension between the 'Nacheinander' (linear, narrative time: the 'form') and the 'Nebeneinander' (the self of the individual: the content), terms which also echo Bakhtin's time/space conflict. Nearly all Bildungsroman criticism not only notes, but focuses on this tension, and while the terms may range from 'form' and 'content' to 'time' and 'space', or even 'inheritance' and 'incest' (a Freudian version suggested by Michael Minden), the conflict remains central.⁷

It is perhaps recognition of this dissonance at the heart of the Bildungsroman, as well as the critical dissonance among scholars, that allows for the continuation of the Bildungsroman debate into the twenty-first century. The Bildungsroman is above all a space of intersection, allowing scholars to explore the extraordinary and significant contradictions that these texts sustain. I turn now to the examination of some of those contradictions by investigating further both the place of the Bildungsroman within university fiction, and the relation of the Bildungsroman to gender.

The University Novel and the Bildungsroman

If defining the Bildungsroman is no easy task, then defining the university novel, which I am reading as a particularly specialized form of Bildungsroman, is made problematic from the beginning. The term 'university novel' (or 'academic novel' or 'campus novel', or even, for those who dismiss 'the other place' entirely, 'Oxford novel'), is one that, like the Bildungsroman, is widely used and seldom defined. Mortimer Proctor's 1957 The English University Novel remains the only book-length study of the subgenre before World War II and his definition of it as an academic Bildungsroman describing, at least in part, the student protagonist's experiences at university (almost always Oxbridge), remains the most clear classification on offer. It is therefore the formal patterning of the Bildungsroman that gives this type of novel its exclusive characteristics. The university novel is a Bildungsroman of place, a growing-up narrative in which Oxford or Cambridge acts as the prevailing force upon the development of the protagonist.

Oxford and Cambridge narratives, of course, date back to the Middle Ages and Chaucer's 'Clerk of Oxenford'. The university novel, however, remains an essentially nineteenth- and twentieth-century phenomenon, with most scholars citing J. G. Lockhart's 1823 Reginald Dalton as the first true 'Oxford novel'. The subgenre arguably reached its peak in the early twentieth century, when the glowing reception of novels like Compton Mackenzie's Sinister Street (1913-14) gave a literary polish to what by then had become a significant popular fad. Hundreds of such novels were published during this period, the overwhelming majority of which took place at Oxford and described the lives of male students. This explosion of fiction direcdy reflected historical shifts in the higher education system. As Brian Simon and Sheldon Rothblatt, among others, have shown, university reforms and the foundation of new civic and redbrick universities in the mid-nineteenth century led a gradual reformulation of Oxbridge's role within the public sphere.⁸ Before the nineteenth century, Oxford and Cambridge were the only institutions of higher education in England.⁹ University College London was founded in 1827, followed by Durham in 1832, which initially provided largely religious training. Only in the late nineteenth century did other alternatives begin to emerge, with the foundation of civic colleges and later universities in provincial cities, including Owens College (Manchester) in 1851, Bristol (1876), Birmingham (1880), Liverpool (1882) and Sheffield (1897).¹⁰ Unlike Oxford and Cambridge, however, these new institutions attracted those from the middle and lower middle classes and maintained strong links with industry and trade. In order to remain competitive and neutralize this threat, Oxbridge promoted a distinctive educational model based on liberal rather than professional education, associating themselves with what F. S. L. Lyons has characterized as 'a different definition of the idea of the university', defining themselves and their methods as staunchly traditional or even 'ancient' in the face of new competition.¹¹ The university novel, therefore, flowered during a period when Oxbridge was not only being discussed and debated widely in the public sphere, but also perceived as being under threat. Such novels thus played an important role in disseminating to the public ideas about what life was really like in the newly christened 'ancient universities'.

Such ideas, of course, were far from neutral. Most significantly, the 'cheerfully careless effect of verisimilitude'¹² that these fictionalized accounts offered was complicated by the texts' use of the Bildungsroman form. The use of the form injected a dose of literary-psychological seriousness into books that tended otherwise towards the picaresque and farcical – when a young man's development was at stake, the picture of Oxbridge presented ceased to be an amusing panorama and took on a seriousness worthy of its protagonist's struggle, in a sense upping the ideological stakes. In this new subgenre, Bildung transformed into what John Dougill has described as 'the discovery of Oxford and the discovery of self'.¹³ 'Discovering oneself' and 'discovering Oxford', thus function as the form and content of the subgenre; the overarching teleological form of the Bildungsroman asserts that the protagonist must grow into a knowledge of himself by the text's end, while the particular historical 'content' of these texts is contained in their exploration of the Oxbridge setting. Here we have Moretti's values and reality, or Bakhtin's narrative 'time' and static 'space', classic ingredients for the formative tension of the Bildungsroman. In most male university fiction, however, this tension is diffused, elided or seems to disappear entirely. Before the mid-twentieth century, practically no 'negative' Oxbridge novels exist; rather, the subgenre was largely dedicated to extolling the virtues of the Oxbridge experience, which was itself largely normalized as a 'natural' part of growing up for those of a certain class. In these novels, therefore, discovery of Oxford becomes largely synonymous with discovery of self, and the distance between form and content, between ideology and history, often fuses together to create a unified view that presents a remarkably solid face to the reader. The Bildungsroman form expects the protagonist to mature; the Oxbridge 'content' expects him to mature institutionally. The content inevitably plays out the theoretical assumptions of its form, and the result is a type of fiction in which history and ideology, stasis and movement, autonomy and coercive narrative, are all inextricably bound up with each other to produce a world view that appears distinctively pro-Oxbridge.

Such a world view, of course, is characterized by its exclusiveness, targeting a narrow range of upper-middle-class men. It was therefore open to challenge not just from civic universities, but from women students within Oxford and Cambridge themselves. The women's university novel emerged relatively late within the popularity of university fiction, and novels about women students began to outnumber those about men in the 1930s. This sort of fiction builds on and challenges the paradigm presented by the Bildungsromane I have discussed so far, and therefore before looking at the lives of women students, it is important to briefly examine the genre's interaction with gender.

Gender, the Bildungsroman and the University Novel

Critical opinion on the gendered Bildungsroman has coalesced loosely around two general points of view. Both reflect the underlying anxiety that accompanies this topic in criticism – the sense of an ill-fitting relationship, but nevertheless one that it is somehow important to promote. The first perspective takes the view that the Bildungsroman, like so many literary categories, is, a genre guilty of excluding and marginalizing women, both as authors and subjects. As a result, some scholars have set out to prove that the female Bildungsroman can exist, and, moreover, that it has certain distinctive qualities. Such studies can be valuable and sensitive (they have done much important work, particularly on contemporary feminist novels), but, in their eagerness to develop a female canon, they sometimes propose 'female' characteristics that either impossibly limit literary possibilities or seem to disregard the Bildungsroman entirely. Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch and Elizabeth Langland, whose The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development (1983) can be identified as the seminal text in feminist Bildungsroman criticism, offer a version of the female Bildungsroman. Rejecting linear narrative form as exclusively 'male', they posit a new, more flexible definition of the Bildungsroman for women writers, one characterized by circularity rather than teleology, and replete with the 'female values' of community and sisterhood. While their pioneering study raises many important points about the male bias in Bildungsroman criticism, such an expanded definition, one that does not even necessarily include the maturation of the protagonist, is not always useful as the 'conceptual tool' that they intend it to be.¹⁴ Similarly, Susan Rosowski's work on the 'novel of awakening' in which a female protagonist 'awakens' to the limitations of patriarchy, works well with the novels she focuses on, but it insists upon a limiting view of female Bildungsromane as restrictively bound to themes of love an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Dreaming Spires
• 1 From Public Scandal to Minority Pleasure: The Form, Content and Readership of the University Bildungsroman
• 2 'The Praise of Uselessness': Liberal Education
• 3 'Gentlewomen, Scholars and Saints': Religion
• 4 'Home Without an Aspidistra': The Home, the College and the Local
• 5 The Divided Self and the Communal Cause: War, Politics and the Self
• 6 'Delightfully Self-Assured, Delightfully Self-Conscious': The Undergraduate Literary Scene
• 7 'Eros in Academe': Sexuality and the Body
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Selected Women's University Fiction, 1886—1945
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index