Beyond gender and genre

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Winter 1996 by Hirsch, Marianne

SUSAN FRAIMAN, Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 189, cloth, $35.00, paper, $15.00. Is there a female Bildungsroman? Unbecoming Women begins with this question only quickly to lay it aside in favor of other broader and more current feminist critical concerns-the intersection of gender and class, for example, and polyvocality, the competing and conflicting discourses that shape classic and seemingly transparent texts. Yet, despite the frustrations she continues to voice, Fraiman does not completely jettison the notion of a novel of development; the term after all is in her subtitle, complicated but not entirely undermined by the "unbecoming" in her title. She thus goes some way toward accounting for the continuing appeal to feminist critics of a notion that a decade or two ago has already been shown as more than problematic when it comes to novels by and about women. Clearly, women's developmental course, at least as represented in the nineteenth century British novel, is neither linear nor coherent, and female protagonists are not autonomous, creative, mobile, or able to triumph over adversity. The ideological assumptions associated with development or Bildung can provide no more than a foil when it comes to describing women's course through the novel of Georgian and Victorian England, yet Fraiman is certainly not alone in returning to this genre and in invoking its explanatory power, if only as a foil. Perhaps we cannot measure the extent of "unbecoming" to which female protagonists are subjected, the depth of deformation they trace, without invoking an idea of becoming or formation. And perhaps, as much as we may try ourselves to develop new models and new paradigms with which to reread the formative texts that have been the basis of feminist critical tools, we may just have to continue to refine, recast and critique without being able to overhaul those very same instruments we wanted to replace years ago. Unbecoming Women is a model for such a process. Susan Fraiman's analysis is historical as well as generic and closely textual; her interpretations are illuminating and her lucid theoretical formulations broadly applicable. What emerges is a reading of a set of by now canonical texts-Burney's Evelina, Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Bronte's Jane Eyre, and Eliot's Mill on the Floss-as open-ended, contradictory, subversive and deeply resistant to the dominant ideologies of becoming woman, particularly of the romance plot. In addition to providing new readings of the novels, Fraiman also offers a conversation with some dominant trends of feminist literary criticism and, in the case of some of the novels, with several generations of interpretations that these novels have provoked. She is most convincingly critical of the recuperative readings of female development, those feminist attempts to find redeeming qualities, or at least meaning, in the heroines' self-sacrifice, spiritual retreat, or even suicide. Instead of recuperative scenarios, she uncovers dark submerged plots of compromise, loss, disorientations, and derailments. Conceptually, Fraiman begins by uncoupling "female" from "development" and examining the gap she has opened in between. She inserts other models than the Goethean, the extensive body of conduct books for women, for example. And she inserts the many elements that shape development and complicate an analysis based primarily on gender: in this reading, mainly class and sexuality. Women writers, she demonstrates, are particularly acute when it comes to issues of class oppression and they undercut the plots of heterosexual romance with forms of homosocial bonding among women. Identity and subjectivity emerge as provisional, forever to be renegotiated in relation to changing circumstances and sadly unchanging constraints. The goal of Fraiman's analysis is not to arrive at a distinctly female form of the Bildungsroman, but to uncover the struggles within the dominant paradigms that these writers continue to engage and reformulate to the point of challenging the very basis of the Bildungsroman itself: individualism. Thus, genre is not a set of characteristics but a set of quarrels, redefinitions and negotiations.