Bildung and the metaphor of growth in the novels of T. Hardy and D.H. Lawrence

Kerbel, Sorrel

Bildung and the metaphor of growth in the novels of T. Hardy and D.H. Lawrence

Doctoral Thesis

1987

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Department of English Language and Literature

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

This dissertation explores aspects of the German Bildungsroman, several nineteenth century English versions, and Lawrence's revitalisation of a genre which had become unfashionable and almost moribund. It examines Jude the Obscure (1896) and three of Lawrence's novels in the light of a distinction between a Bildungsroman and an Entwicklungsroman, showing where Hardy and Lawrence merge generic tradition and individual predilection to modify the forms. Hardy is chosen for comparison and contrast with Lawrence, partly because of Lawrence's own critical interest as evidenced in "The Study of Thomas Hardy" (written concurrently with the Brangwen saga), and because Jude the Obscure represents the state of the Bildungsroman at the turn of the century. Chapter One describes specific narrative features of the Bildungsroman to arrive at a "schema" of Bildung, and differentiates between Bildung and Entwicklung. Though its scope is necessarily restricted, its aim is an awareness of the grid of conventions upon which and against which the individual work operates. Chapter Two offers Jude the Obscure as Bildungsroman. It argues that Hardy, with his "radical", "Meliorist" approach, deliberately questions and frustrates the tradition. Hardy refuses the socially acceptable reconciliation of the paradigm, and has lost the Romantic vision of Nature as recourse, a vision Lawrence abundantly retains. The metaphor of organic growth, a legacy of the English Romantics, is central to Lawrence's modification of the paradigm in Sons and Lovers, The .Rainbow and Women in Love. His fidelity to a sequential chronology is justified in terms of Entwicklung, a pattern of continuous growth, so that "form is content". Lawrentian questers belong to a Romantic elite of unique individuals who grow to fulfilment naturally, breaking out of their enclosures. Entwicklung is socially subversive, rejecting conventional social integration, questioning its assumption of the individual's helpless passivity, and transcending the limitations of class and birth. Though the phases of Bildung and choice of imagery are traditional, Lawrence's metamorphosis is highly original and Modernist in terms of sheer narrative experimentation and sensibility. And the traditionally "closed" ending of the paradigm is exchanged for open-ended ambivalence, not only a reflection of Lawrence's philosophy that art should never be contained, but itself echoing the instability and insecurity of the new age.

Description

Bibliography: pages 211-226.

Keywords

English Language and Literature

Reference:

Collections

PhD / Doctoral

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