Journal articles on the topic 'Female Bildungsroman'

Abstract The paper explores, in the context of feminist discussions about the Bildungsroman, a contemporary British novel that offers shocking images of female coming of age at the turn of the millennium. Queering gender and introducing male elements into the heroine’s process of maturation, the analysed novel appears to raise questions about the continuous relevance of the feminist distinction between male and female version of the genre. The paper however argues that although significantly rewriting both female Bildung and pornographic narratives, Helen Walsh’s Brass can still be read as a variation of the female Bildungsroman and an example of its contemporary developments.

This article proposes that two alternative forms of the “Bildungsroman” developed from circa 1860 to 1960, featuring young female protagonists and aimed at girls as a readership. To explore this proposition, the article initially focuses on three girls’ series to see whether they meet the criteria for classification as a “Bildungsroman”: the South African “Soekie” series written in Afrikaans by Ela Spence, the well-known Canadian “Anne of Green Gables” series by L.M. Montgomery, and the German “Pucki” series by Magda Trott. In these series girls have to learn through experience as they move toward happiness and maturity. Secondly, the article explores the presentation of the female quest, as well as some development options “in parallel” in such novels as Louisa May Alcott’s now classic “Little women” and “Good wives”. The article concludes that some novels for girls move towards an exploration of personal development from childhood to maturity, but that the criteria for the “Bildungsroman” should be adjusted to include forms other than the single novels and novels focused on one protagonist that are more typical of the “male” “Bildungsroman”. It also suggests that the criteria for maturity, self-actualisation and social integration need qualification in the “female” version of this genre.

Debido a la proliferación de editoriales de carácter feminista, a finales de los años ochenta muchos colectivos de mujeres lograron finalmente visibilidad gracias a la literatura postmoderna. Autoras feministas y lesbianas como Jeanette Winterson utilizaron la escritura como un marco artístico donde exponer sus propios procesos de identificación e individualización al rebelarse contra la feminidad heterosexual y normativa impuesta por la sociedad. El objetivo de este artículo es ilustrar como la novela de Winterson Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) reelabora el concepto original de la novela de aprendizaje y desarrolla una perspectiva lésbica de la novela de formación.Palabras clave: lésbico, Bildungsroman, identidad, homosexual, autobiográfico, autodescubrimiento, Winterson, postmodernismo. The Lesbian Bildungsroman: The Process of Self-discovery in Jeanette Winteson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985)Abstract: Due to the proliferation of feminist publishing houses, such as Pandora Press or Virago, during the late eighties many oppressed female groups finally achieved visibility by means of postmodern literature. Female lesbian and feminist authors, like Jeanette Winterson, used their texts as an artistic framework in which they described their own processes of identification and individuation while rebelling against normative heterosexual femininity as imposed in Western societies. The aim of this paper is to illustrate how Winterson’s novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) reworked the original genre of the “coming-out” novel and developed the concept and practice of the “lesbian Bildungsroman”.Keywords: lesbian, Bildungsroman, identity, homosexual, autobiographical, self-discovery, Winterson, postmodernism.

Feminist critics have celebrated Kate O'Brien's pioneering approach to gender and sexuality, yet there has been little exploration of her innovations of the coming-of-age narrative. Creating a modern Irish reworking of the Bildungsroman, O'Brien's heroines represent an idealized model of female identity-formation which stands in sharp contrast to the nationalist state's vision of Irish womanhood. Using Franco Moretti's theory of the Bildungsroman, a framing of the genre as a thoroughly ‘modern’ form of the novel, this article applies a critical Marxist lens to O'Brien's output. This reading brings to light the ways in which the limitations of the Bildungsroman work to constrain O'Brien's subversive politics. Their middle-class status remains an integral part of the identity of her heroines, informing the forms of liberation they seek. Fundamentally, O'Brien's idealization of aristocratic culture, elitist exceptionalism and ‘detachment of spirit’ restricts the emancipatory potential of her vision of Irish womanhood.

Built on the storyline of the traditional fairy tale “Bluebeard,” Angela Carter’s short story “The Bloody Chamber” (1979) contains striking alterations in the use of the first-person narrator, ambivalent and complex characterization, explicit sexual description and a revised ending; all of which have given rise to heated arguments among feminist scholars and literary critics. This paper relies on a close reading analysis and engages in the ongoing discussions by considering the problematic categorization of the story—as a fairy tale, a pornographic fiction, a gothic horror, and especially as a bildungsroman novel—in relation to several gender aspects such as power relations between the sexes, the concept of gaze, sadomasochism and the representation of men and women and their relationship. By focusing on gender issues in the short story and using the narrative structures of these genres as a framework, Carter’s ingenious revision of the norms becomes a sharper critique of the restrictions of the traditional genres, as well as the oppressive social and patriarchal ideologies hidden in them. Also, the study reveals how the short story can be a totally different read with the education of the female narrator at the center because the lesson learnt is not a reproof of female curiosity as the traditional “Bluebeard” endeavors to deliver but is her own sexual awareness, readjustment of certain values and the realization of female bonding and realizable autonomy outside the conventional realm of matrimony.

This article addresses the formation of female intellectual subjectivity in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Bildungsroman, Nervous Conditions. Written just five years after Zimbabwe became an independent nation, Nervous Conditions critiques government representations of females as physical labourers confined to domestic space, thus functioning as a counter-narrative to that limited national imaginary. The article rethinks concepts of resistant agency that other critics of the novel employ in their readings of the protagonist, Tambu. It argues that resistance, like any other concept, has a history, and that because Tambu is not a Western creation, Western ideals of freedom and individuality cannot account for the heroic aspects of her behaviour. Reformulating Judith Butler’s concept of subject formation, it develops ways of reading agency outside the binary logic of subordination and subversion, suggesting that agency develops unevenly on a continuum between complete compliance and complete resistance to norms. It also argues that spatial politics are crucial to Tambu’s quest for intellectual subjectivity. Thus, Tambu reconstructs the daughter’s bedroom to make it into a space that matters, producing bodies that matter.

Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) taps into the increasing popular interest for exploring the ways in which gender and sexual identities are constructed in the mainstream British culture. Often been considered an autobiographical and a bildungsroman, this book has successfully dealt with the protagonist’s self-development from infancy to adulthood and her search for individuality through a series of formative experiences. These experiences, however, encapsulates her struggle against—the oppression of religion of the asphyxiating society where she lives, in her sexual initiation, in her subsequent isolation, and finally in her success to move away from oppression to freedom and independence. Thus this research paper is an attempt to excavate how Winterson has challenged the prescribed set of attitudes of a society (especially the religious ones) towards sexuality through the experiences of a character who experiences her lesbian identity within a closed society that rejects same-sex love and tendencies. Moreover, this paper also aims to redirect our focus towards the breaking down of traditional clear-cut boundaries with respect to the artificial construction of gender and identity.

Emma Cline’s 2016 novel The Girls, famously inspired by the Manson family and the murders committed by the group in 1969, is in fact a feminist bildungsroman. Its middle-aged protagonist-cum-narrator reflects not only on her own life and identity, but, most importantly perhaps, on what it means to grow up as a woman in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The present article centers on the ocular trope which Cline uses in her novel in order to showcase issues such as self-perception, self-worth and the shaping of young women’s identity. Focusing on the metaphorical dimensions of the act of looking, I propose to read Cline’s novel in light of Laura Mulvey’s seminal feminist theory of the male gaze and the opposite notion of the female gaze formulated by later feminist scholars. My analysis foregrounds those aspects of The Girls which make it a protest novel, denouncing the female condition in patriarchal societies and suggesting ways of opposing the objectification and indoctrination which lead to women being manipulated and victimized.

Giving a right place to literature for children in the context of general literature means to recognizing its roots and influences in a wider landscape. Charlotte Brontë work inserted in this context has a double meaning both because it links adult and child female characters (The italian society of literates has defined them «personagge»), and because it brings us back to the roots of a literature written by women with female protagonists able to undermine the socially approved traditional rules. Recovering Jane Eyre is the first step to be taken to trace a new way of writing about women and telling about “the becoming” of women, delineating a parallel path to bildungsroman, in which the feminine youth has not found full consideration. To define an itinerary for women and girls it is then necessary to analyze the studies of feminist literary criticism that has investigated the relationship between women and literature since 70s, both from the writer’s and reader’s point of view. The objective thus becomes the one to recover the history of that link that unites the presence of women and girls in literature and their search for an autonomous space of imagination, thought and action. Inserting Jane Eyre in the children’s literature allows us to trace the birth of the authentic female child, and the beginning of an emancipatory process that poses important questions about the role of reading and literature in social and educational contexts.

ABSTRACT Jessica R. Feldman, ““A Talent for the Disagreeable””: Elizabeth Stod-dard Writes The Morgesons (pp.202––229) Critics have tended to read Elizabeth Stoddard's bewildering first novel, The Morgesons (1862), as a Bildungsroman——anautobiographical portrait of the artist as a young woman in early-nineteenth-century New England——or as an instance of female Gothic, proto-regionalism, or sentimentalism. Such interpretations, often focusing on the narrative arc of Cassandra Morgeson's self-empowerment, tend to ignore the novel's less comforting messages along with its painful, mysteriously awkward, even pathological atmosphere. Aspects of the novel that cannot be restated simply as plot——the structures of its words and sentences, its tone, patterns of imagery, rat-a-tat dialogue——Stoddard has thrust into a prominence that we have not adequately studied. When we begin to explore these formal elements in relation to the artistic environment in which Stoddard wrote The Morgesons, we can see that the novel analogically tracks her troubling personality and her contemporary situation in New York City. She was, for better and for worse, a woman writing among the male ““Genteel Poets,”” a group that was itself quite conflicted and that both helped and hindered her. Moreover, finding a form sufficient to express that complex situation required her to experiment with prose in ways that look forward to high Modernist works of the early twentieth century. Only through an experimental novel of layered and fragmented tales, voiced in language that insists on its own materiality, could Stoddard find adequate self-expression.

The paper considers repressions and Holodomor as a kind of literary practice and traumatic experience in the works and biography of the Ukrainian diaspora writer Olha Mak. The analysis covers fiction, memoirs, and journalistic texts, in particular the memoirs “From the Time of Yezhovshchyna”, the essay “Capital of Hungry Horror”, and the story “Stones Under Scythe”, considered in the context of the fi ction and documentaries of the postwar Ukrainian diaspora. In this case, the writing appears to be a vital natural resource for recreating the memory, where one’s own individual experience becomes a material, an object for self-refl ection. The process of writing is associated with moral and ethical duty of witnessing the past; it has a powerful therapeutic meaning and protects from immorality integrating individual experience and history into collective, social, cultural, etc. The memoir “From the Time of Yezhovshchyna” by Olha Mack, dealing with the theme of Soviet terror and repressions, is a peculiar form of re-experiencing a personal tragedy associated with the arrest and deportation of the author’s husband. It shows the self-denial of the Soviet human, the wife of the ‘enemy of people’, and records her traumatic experience and memories.The Holodomor theme, elaborated by Olha Mack in various genres and forms, was not only a material, an object of research, but also a part of her personal biography and family history. The Holodomor in the perception of Olha Mack symbolized the threat to social, national (spiritual) life connected with various social, cultural, and mental illnesses; hence, it involves the idea of eliminating Ukraine not only as material and spatial entity, but also as abstract and spiritual one. The story “Stones Under Scythe”, dedicated to the memory of the Holodomor, is considered as a kind of the classical bildungsroman genre’s variation. Its conceptual fi gures are images-archetypes of the child-victim, the female martyr, the great mother. The Holodomor (both physical and spiritual, which destroys the foundations of national dignity, national solidarity and so on) in the story by Olha Mack is not only the topic, but also a continual metaphor and key motive.

Harriet Jacobs'sIncidents in the Life of a Slave Girlwas edited and introduced to its antebellum reading public in 1861 by the white abolitionist Lydia Marie Child. Nearly a century and a half later, another Lydia once again brings Jacobs's story to the public attention asHarriet Jacobs, a stage play by critically acclaimed African American playwright Lydia R. Diamond. Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre commissioned and debuted the play in 2008 as part of its youth program. Regarded as Diamond's best work, the play ends with Jacobs, recently liberated from her hiding space of seven years, declaring to the audience, “But it was above Grandmother's shed, in the cold and dark, in the heat and solitude, that I found my voice.” This aspirational claim to an unshackled black girl voice reverberates a twenty-first-century renewal of black women artists, scholars, and activists committed to recovering, proclaiming, and celebrating black girls. With subsequent back-to-back productions in 2010 by the Underground Railway Theater and Kansas City Repertory Theatre (KCRep), the play heralds the millennial energy of both the 2013 #blackgirlmagic social-media campaign and the 2014 formation of black girlhood studies (BGS), an academic field that prioritizes “a rigorous commitment to locating the voices of black girls,” and elucidating the “local” intersections of race, gender, and other areas in which “black girls’ agency comes into view.” It is precisely this energetic recovery of a black girl voice on the contemporary stage—a Harriet for the new millennial—that makesHarriet Jacobsso attractive. Describing her vision for the KCRep production, director Jessica Thebus stated: “Our task as I see it, today, is to tell the story with the clarity and energy of Harriet Jacobs's voice with her humor, with her intellect, and consciousness.” And promoting Wayne State's 2017 production, Dale Dorlin writes:For director Billicia Charnelle Hines, Harriet Jacobs is not a slave play, but a prime example of a heroine's journey. “This is an adventure story,” says Hines, “about a heroine who, no matter what, was determined to be free. That's someone I look up to. … I want people to think of her as a hero.”Hines's focus on the hero and adventure genre echoes the comments of Hallie Gordon, director of the original Steppenwolf production, which located the play within another genre of Western subject formation, the bildungsroman; for Gordon, “Harriet Jacobsis about the strength of this one girl who turns into a woman in front of our very eyes.” Critic Nancy Churnin, lauding the play's accessible rendering of a young female who finds in dismal confinement not only freedom but her voice, titled her 2016 review of the Dallas-based African American Repertory Theater's production, “A Slave Tale with Echoes of Anne Frank.” Resonant with Diamond's own desire for “Harriet Jacobs … to exist, theatrically, alongside Anne Frank and Joan of Arc,” Churnin's title presumably refers toThe Diary of Anne Frank,Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett's 1955 stage adaptation of Anne Frank'sDiary of a Young Girl(first performed at the Cort Theatre on Broadway). Still, considering that Jacobs lived well before Frank, the comparison is curious. Reflected in that curiousness is something of the irony of lauding a portrait of historical black girlhood that obscures the minor complexities of a “slave tale” or “slave play.” The comparison effectively fits the black girl into a role of heroic girl power shaped by a history of white girlhood, in which the slave girl, coming too early, can be imagined only anachronistically at best.

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice has previously been situated as a romance novel. Critics such as Pamela Regis support reading the novel as a romance: She states that the novel shows the most characteristic features of the genre, as it focuses on a female protagonist and the goal of marriage. However, the romance genre does not embrace the individual character development of the protagonist, Elizabeth Bennet, which I find central to the novel. I therefore argue that this development justifies reading the novel in terms of the Bildungsroman genre. This article will examine the central features of the Bildungsroman genre and how these are expressed in Elizabeth’s mental and behavioural development throughout the novel. Consequently, the presence of these genre features situates Pride and Prejudice as a Bildungsroman.

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.

As an archetype, the vampire is alive and well in the collective psyche. A closer look can reflect back to us what we deem monstrous out there as well as inform us about the monstrous within. This is fundamental to Jung’s notion of the Shadow and fundamentally an issue of ethics. This paper explores how specific attributes of the contemporary vampire reflect our ethical agon at the beginning of the 21st century, using two popular vampire sagas, the Twilight series and True Blood as examples of the tensions between abstinence and indulgence among a predatory species. This paper explains the elements of the female Bildungsroman literary genre found in both stories, which offers psychologists a particularly fruitful view into ethics and character development, and shows how the central love relationship between a human female and a vampire male dramatizes some of the trickier aspects of relating to the Other in the most intimate manner. The paper concludes by comparing Aristotelian virtue ethics with Jung’s notion of individuation to discern who is the real monster—and who aspires to the classical notion of arête.

Abstract: The subversive potential and transformative strength of the neo-Victorian genre is explored and consolidated by writers such as Sarah Waters. In her debut novel Tipping the Velvet (1998) the author makes explicit what was virtually impossible to express in Victorian times, but also what is still struggling for socio-cultural recognition. However, can the TV adaptation of Waters’s lesbian Bildungsroman be said to achieve the same? This article explores the adaptation of the novel, broadcast on British television in 2002, and discusses whether or not its re-presentation of female same-sex erotics discredits the issue of lesbianism.Resumen: Gracias a Sarah Waters, entre otras, la crítica especializada ha reconocido la capacidad subversiva y transformadora del fenómeno conocido como Neo-Victorianism. En la novela Tipping the Velvet (1998) la autora hace explícito lo que era imposible expresar en la época victoriana, pero también lo que todavía no ha encontrado total reconocimiento desde el punto de vista social y culturalmente. Sin embargo, ¿se puede afirrmar que la adaptación televisiva de la novela resulta asimismo subversiva? Este artículo analiza la adaptación emitida en la televisión británica en 2002 y cuestiona si larepresentación del erotismo lésbico subraya la normalización de la figura lesbiana.

Australian suburbia, historically and culturally, has been viewed as a feminised domain, associated with the domestic and family, routine and order. Where “the city is coded as a masculine and disorderly space… suburbia, as a realm of domesticity and the family, is coded as a feminine and disciplinary space” (Wilson 46). This article argues how the treatment of suburbia in fiction as “feminine” has impacted not only on the representation and development of the character of the “suburban female”, but also on the shape and form of her narrative journeys. Suburbia’s subordination as domestic and everyday, a restrictive realm of housework and child rearing, refers to the anti-suburban critique and establishes the dichotomy of suburbia/feminine/domesticity in contrast to bush or city/masculine/freedom as first observed by Marilyn Lake in her analysis of 1890s Australia. Despite the fact that suburbia necessarily contains the “masculine” as well as the “feminine”, the “feminine” dominates to such an extent that positive masculine traits are threatened there. In social commentary and also literature, the former is viewed negatively as a state from which to escape. As Tim Rowse suggests, “women, domesticity = spiritual starvation. (Men, wide open spaces, achievement = heroism of the Australian spirit)” (208). In twentieth-century Australian fiction, this is especially the case for male characters, the preservation of whose masculinity often depends on a flight from the suburbs to elsewhere—the bush, the city, or overseas. In Patrick White’s The Tree Of Man (1955), for example, During identifies the recurrent male character of the “tear-away” who “flee(s) domesticity and family life” (96). Novelist George Johnston also establishes a satirical depiction of suburbia as both suffocatingly feminine and as a place to escape at any cost. For example, in My Brother Jack (1964), David Meredith “craves escape from the ‘shabby suburban squalor’ into which he was born” (Gerster 566). Suburbia functions as a departure point for the male protagonist who must discard any remnants of femininity, imposed on him by his suburban childhood, before embarking upon narratives of adventure and maturation as far away from the suburbs as possible. Thus, flight becomes essential to the development of male protagonist and proliferates as a narrative trajectory in Australian fiction. Andrew McCann suggests that its prevalence establishes a fictional “struggle with and escape from the suburb as a condition of something like a fully developed personality” (Decomposing 56-57). In this case, any literary attempt to transform the “suburban female”, a character inscribed by her gender and her locale, without recourse to flight appears futile. However, McCann’s assertion rests on a literary tradition of male flight from suburbia, not female. A narrative of female flight is a relatively recent phenomenon, influenced by the second wave feminism of the 1970s and 1980s. For most of the twentieth century, the suburban female typically remained in suburbia, a figure of neglect, satire, and exploitation. A reading of twentieth-century Australian fiction until the 1970s implies that flight from suburbia was not a plausible option for the average “suburban female”. Rather, it is the exceptional heroine, such as Teresa in Christina Stead’s For Love Alone (1945), who is brave, ambitious, or foolish enough to leave, and when she does there were often negative consequences. For most however, suburbia was a setting where she belonged despite its negative attributes. These attributes of conformity and boredom, repetition, and philistinism, as presented by proponents of anti-suburbanism, are mainly depicted as problematic to male characters, not female. Excluded from narratives of flight, for most of the twentieth-century the suburban female typically remained in suburbia, a figure of neglect, satire, and even exploitation, her stories mostly untold. The character of the suburban female emerges out of the suburban/feminine/domestic dichotomy as a recurrent, albeit negative, character in Australian fiction. As Rowse states, the negative image of suburbia is transferred to an equally negative image of women (208). At best, the suburban female is a figure of mild satire; at worst, a menacing threat to masculine values. Male writers George Johnston, Patrick White and, later, David Ireland, portrayed the suburban female as a negative figure, or at least an object of satire, in the life of a male protagonist attempting to escape suburbia and all it stood for. In his satirical novels and plays, for example, Patrick White makes “the unspoken assumption… that suburbia is an essentially female domain” (Gerster 567), exemplifying narrow female stereotypes who “are dumb and age badly, ending up in mindless, usually dissatisfied, maternity and domesticity” (During 95). Feminist Anne Summers condemns White for his portrayal of women which she interprets as a “means of evading having to cope with women as unique and diverse individuals, reducing them instead to a sexist conglomerate”, and for his use of women to “represent suburban stultification” (88). Typically “wife” or “mother”, the suburban female is often used as a convenient device of oppositional resistance to a male lead, while being denied her own voice or story. In Johnston’s My Brother Jack (1964), for example, protagonist David Meredith contrasts “the subdued vigour of fulfillment tempered by a powerful and deeply-lodged serenity” (215) of motherhood displayed by Jack’s wife Shelia with the “smart and mannish” (213) Helen, but nothing deeper is revealed about the inner lives of these female characters. Feminist scholars identify a failure to depict the suburban female as more than a useful stereotype, partially attributing the cause of this failure to a surfeit of patriarchal stories featuring adventuresome male heroes and set in the outback or on foreign battlefields. Summers states how “more written words have been devoted to creating, and then analysing and extolling… [the] Australian male than to any other single facet of Australian life” (82-83). Where she is more active, the suburban female is a malignant force, threatening to undermine masculine goals of self-realisation or achievement, or at her worst, to wholly emasculate the male protagonist such that he is incapable of escape. Even here the motivations behind her actions are not revealed and she appears two-dimensional, viewed only in relation to her destructive effect on the weakened male protagonist. In her criticism of David Ireland’s The Glass Canoe (1976), Joan Kirkby observes how “the suburbs are populated with real women who are represented in the text as angry mothers and wives or simply as the embodiment of voraciously feral sexuality” (5). In those few instances where the suburban female features as more than an accessory to the male narrative, she lacks the courage and inner strength to embark upon her own journey out of suburbia. Instead, she is depicted as a victim, misunderstood and miserable, entrapped by the suburban milieu to which she is meant to belong but, for some unexplored reason, does not. The inference is that this particular suburban female is atypical, potentially flawed in her inability to find contentment within a region strongly designated her own. The unhappy suburban female is therefore tragic, or at least pitiable, languishing in a suburban environment that she loathes, often satirised for her futile resistance to the status quo. Rarely is she permitted the masculine recourse of flight. In those exceptional instances where she does leave, however, she is unlikely to find what she is looking for. A subsequent return to the place of childhood, most often situated in suburbia, is a recurrent narrative in many stories of Australian female protagonist, but less so the male protagonist. Although this mistreatment of the suburban female is most prevalent in fiction by male writers, female writers were also criticised for failing to give a true and authentic voice to her character, regardless of the broader question of whether writers should be truthful in their characterisations. For example, Summers criticises Henry Handel Richardson as “responsible for, if not creating, then at least providing a powerful reinforcement to the idea that women as wives are impediments to male self-realisation” with characters who “reappear, with the monotonous regularity of the weekly wash, as stereotyped and passive suburban housewives” (87-88). All this changed, however, with the arrival of second wave feminism leading to a proliferation of stories of female exodus from the suburbs. A considered portrait of the life of the suburban female in suburbia was neglected in favour of a narrative journey; a trend attributable in part to a feminist polemic that granted her freedom, adventure, and a story so long as she did not dare choose to stay. During the second wave feminism of the 1970s and 1980s, women were urged by leading figures such as Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer to abandon ascribed roles of housewife and mother, led typically in the suburbs, in pursuit of new freedoms and adventures. As Lesley Johnson and Justine Lloyd note, “in exhorting women to ‘leave home’ and find their fulfillment in the world of work, early second wave feminists provided a life story through which women could understand themselves as modern individuals” (154) and it is this “life story” which recurs in women’s fiction of the time. Women writers, many of whom identified as feminist, mirrored these trajectories of flight from suburbia in their novels, transplanting the suburban female from her suburban setting to embark upon “new” narratives of self-discovery. The impact of second wave feminism upon the literary output of Australian women writers during the 1970s and 1980s has been firmly established by feminist scholars Johnson, Lloyd, Lake, and Susan Sheridan, who were also active participants in the movement. Sheridan argues that there has been a strong “relationship of women’s cultural production to feminist ideas and politics” (Faultlines xi) and Johnson identifies a “history of feminism as an awakening” at the heart of these “life stories” (11). Citing Mary Morris, feminist Janet Woolf remarks flight as a means by which a feminine history of stagnation is remedied: “from Penelope to the present, women have waited… If we grow weary of waiting, we can go on a journey” (xxii). The appeal of these narratives may lie in attempts by their female protagonists to find new ways of being outside the traditional limits of a domestic, commonly suburban, existence. Flight, or movement, features as a recurrent narrative mode by which these alternative realities are configured, either by mimicking or subverting traditional narrative forms. Indeed, selection of the appropriate narrative form for these emancipatory journeys differed between writers and became the subject of vigorous, feminist and literary debate. For some feminists, the linear narrative was the only true path to freedom for the female protagonist. Following the work of Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Elaine Showalter, Joy Hooton observes how some feminist critics privileged “the integrated ego and the linear destiny, regarding women’s difference in self-realization as a failure or deprivation” (90). Women writers such as Barbara Hanrahan adopted the traditional linear trajectory, previously reserved for the male protagonist as bushman or soldier, explorer or drifter, to liberate the “suburban female”. These stories feature the female protagonist trading a stultifying life in the suburbs for the city, overseas or, less typically, the outback. During these geographical journeys, she is transformed from her narrow suburban self to a more actualised, worldly self in the mode of a traditional, linear Bildungsroman. For example, Hanrahan’s semi-autobiographical debut The Scent of Eucalyptus (1973) is a story of escape from oppressive suburbia, “concentrating on that favourite Australian theme, the voyage overseas” (Gelder and Salzman, Diversity 63). Similarly, Sea-green (1974) features a “rejection of domestic drabness in favour of experience in London” (Goodwin 252) and Kewpie Doll (1984) is another narrative of flight from the suburbs, this time via pursuit of “an artistic life” (253). In these and other novels, the act of relocation to a specific destination is necessary to transformation, with the inference that the protagonist could not have become what she is at the end of the story without first leaving the suburbs. However, use of this linear narrative, which is also coincidentally anti-suburban, was criticised by Summers (86) for being “masculinist”. To be truly free, she argued, the female protagonist needed to forge her own unique paths to liberation, rather than relying on established masculine lines. Evidence of a “new” non-linear narrative in novels by women writers was interpreted by feminist and literary scholars Gillian Whitlock, Margaret Henderson, Ann Oakley, Sheridan, Johnson, and Summers, as an attempt to capture the female experience more convincingly than the linear form that had been used to recount stories of the journeying male as far back as Homer. Typifying the link between the second wave feminism and fiction, Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip features Nora’s nomadic, non-linear “flights” back and forth across Melbourne’s inner suburbs. Nora’s promiscuity belies her addiction to romantic love that compromises her, even as she struggles to become independent and free. In this way, Nora’s quest for freedom­—fragmented, cyclical, repetitive, impeded by men— mirrors Garner’s “attempt to capture certain areas of female experience” (Gelder and Salzman, Diversity 55), not accessible via a linear narrative. Later, in Honour and Other People’s Children (1980) and The Children’s Bach (1984), the protagonists’ struggles to achieve self-actualisation within a more domesticated, family setting perhaps cast doubt on the efficacy of the feminist call to abandon family, motherhood, and all things domestic in preference for the masculinist tradition of emancipatory flight. Pam Gilbert, for instance, reads The Children’s Bach as “an extremely perceptive analysis of a woman caught within spheres of domesticity, nurturing, loneliness, and sexuality” (18) via the character of “protected suburban mum, Athena” (19). The complexity of this characterisation of a suburban female belies the anti-suburban critique by not resorting to satire or stereotype, but by engaging deeply with a woman’s life inside suburbia. It also allows that flight from suburbia is not always possible, or even desired. Also seeming to contradict the plausibility of linear flight, Jessica Anderson’s Tirra Lirra by the River (1978), features (another) Nora returning to her childhood Brisbane after a lifetime of flight; first from her suburban upbringing and then from a repressive marriage to the relative freedoms of London. The poignancy of the novel, set towards the end of the protagonist’s life, rests in Nora’s inability to find a true sense of belonging, despite her migrations. She “has spent most of her life waiting, confined to houses or places that restrict her, places she feels she does not belong to, including her family home, the city of Brisbane, her husband’s house, Australia itself” (Gleeson-White 184). Thus, although Nora’s life can be read as “the story of a very slow emergence from a doomed attempt to lead a conventional, married life… into an independent existence in London” (Gelder and Salzman, Diversity 65), the novel suggests that the search for belonging—at least for Australian women—is problematic. Moreover, any narrative of female escape from suburbia is potentially problematic due to the gendering of suburban experience as feminine. The suburban female who leaves suburbia necessarily rejects not only her “natural” place of belonging, but domesticity as a way of being and, to some extent, even her sex. In her work on memoir, Hooton identifies a stark difference between the shape of female and male biography to argue that women’s experience of life is innately non-linear. However, the use of non-linear narrative by feminist fiction writers of the second wave was arguably more conscious, even political in seeking a new, untainted form through which to explore the female condition. It was a powerful notion, arguably contributing to a golden age of women’s writing by novelists Helen Garner, Barbara Hanrahan, Jessica Anderson, and others. It also exerted a marked effect on fiction by Kate Grenville, Amanda Lohrey, and Janette Turner Hospital, as well as grunge novelists, well into the 1990s. By contrast, other canonical, albeit older, women writers of the time, Thea Astley and Elizabeth Jolley, neither of whom identified as feminist (Fringe 341; Neuter 196), do not seek to “rescue” the suburban female from her milieu. Like Patrick White, Astley seems, at least superficially, to perpetuate narrow stereotypes of the suburban female as “mindless consumers of fashion” and/or “signifiers of sexual disorder” (Sheridan, Satirist 262). Although flight is permitted those female characters who “need to ‘vanish’ if they are to find some alternative to narrow-mindedness and social oppression” (Gelder and Salzman, Celebration 186), it has little to do with feminism. As Brian Matthews attests of Astley’s work, “nothing could be further from the world-view of the second wave feminist writers of the 1980s” (76) and indeed her female characters are generally less sympathetic than those inhabiting novels by the “feminist” writers. Jolley also leaves the female protagonist to fend for herself, with a more optimistic, forceful vision of “female characters who, in their sheer eccentricity, shed any social expectations” to inhabit “a realm empowered by the imagination” (Gelder and Salzman, Celebration 194). If Jolley’s suburban females desire escape then they must earn it, not by direct or shifting relocations, but via other, more extreme and often creative, modes of transformation. These two writers however, were exceptional in their resistance to the influence of second wave feminism. Thus, three narrative categories emerge in which the suburban female may be transformed: linear flight from suburbia, non-linear flight from suburbia, or non-flight whereby the protagonist remains inside suburbia throughout the entire novel. Evidence of a rejection of the flight narrative by contemporary Australian women writers may signal a re-examination of the suburban female within, not outside, her suburban setting. It may also reveal a weakening of the influence of both second wave feminism and anti-suburban critiques on this much maligned character of Australian fiction, and on suburbia as a fictional setting. References Anderson, Jessica. Tirra Lirra by the River. Melbourne: Macmillan, 1978. Astley, Thea. “Writing as a Neuter: Extracts from Interview by Candida Baker.” Eight Voices of the Eighties: Stories, Journalism and Criticism by Australian Women Writers. Ed. 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