The Gendered Bildungsroman: Becoming the Artist as A Young Mother in Phelps’s The Story of Avis and Chopin’s The Awakening

Abstract

The Gendered Bildungsroman: Becoming the Artist as A Young Mother in Phelps's The Story of Avis and Chopin's The AwakeningHeejung ChaA general definition of the term Bildungsroman originated in Europe in the eighteenth century is based on 'a novel of formation,' which describes the protagonist's growth from childhood to maturity as a process of self-development. In the traditional Bildugnsroman, the self exclusively refers to the white Western-European male self in which a rebellious self reconciles with modern bourgeois social order and hegemonic patriarchal cultural norm. However, in terms of the gendered Bildungsroman, I argue that women writers reconfigure the general pattern of a literary genre and reinvent a transformed genre to counter-narrate predominant cultural assumptions which constrain women's existence in a male-centered society. By examining two female protagonists, Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin's The Awakening(1899) and Avis Dobell in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Story of Avis(1877) in terms of self-development as a female artist and female confinement, I explore the psychological conflict resulting from a patriarchal social structure and norms between socially approved and praised motherhood and artistic self-longings; that is, a conflict between a public existence(socialization) and a private passion(individual autonomy). In fact, calling in to question an institutionalized marriage, compulsory motherhood, and submissive femininity, Phelps and Chopin presents a viable narrative model for rethinking sex and gender differences in the context of female resistance and struggle to fulfill self-realization.