Rethinking the Bildungsroman: Return of the repressed in 'The Bluest Eye', 'Sula', 'The Woman Warrior', and 'China Men'

This dissertation traces the textual construction of identity in contemporary Bildungsromane by American women of color and situates the discussion at the intersection of genre, race, gender and class. The first chapter surveys the definitions of the male and the female Bildungsroman and argues that American women writers of color are transforming this traditionally andro- and Eurocentric genre to record their culturally specific problems of identity-formation. Borrowing Susan Friedman's theory of return of the repressed in women's narrative, I argue that personal memories, specific cultural history, and racial experiences continually haunt a woman of color.; The working through of repressed memories is analyzed in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Sula, and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and China Men. I read The Bluest Eye as a double Bildungsroman: Claudia grows up and retells Pecola's haunting story whereas Pecola "grows down" into madness, depending on their respective familial backgrounds and reactions to racial ideology. Sula is another double Bildungsroman. Nel and Sula are not opposites but complements. Sula represents the suppressed free spirit that Nel needs to rediscover in herself. Together they project a new black womanhood that is both rooted in community values and free.; In her mother book, The Woman Warrior, Kingston's first-person narrator uncovers a repressed matrilineage, what I call a "counter-lineage," in Chinese American culture. She also finds a personal yet rooted artistic voice in the process. In China Men, the narrator returns to her patrilineage and pursues her selfhood in relation to her male relatives. The narrator's Bildung is closely connected with the retrieval of two repressed narratives: the father's Chinese story and a suppressed Chinese American historical discourse. Her attentiveness to the voices around her makes the daughter storyteller a cultural historian who successfully passes on "tribal memories."; The most significant revision that Morrison and Kingston have brought to the Bildungsroman is their deployment of the narrative of anti-Bildung. The gap between Bildung and anti-Bildung highlights the multiple oppression faced by women of color and interrogates the established standards and value system of the hegemonic culture.