Race, Sex and Self: Aspects of Bildung in Select Novels by Black American Women Novelists

Abstract

As in other aspects of America's literary culture, any consideration of variants in development of the Bildungsroman genre would be less textured without inclusion of works by Black women authors. While the novels of Black American male writers have been replete with scenes of initiation more typical of Western Bildungsroman tradition (i.e., the famous Battle Royal scene in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, episodic agony from familial and societal oppression in Richard Wright's Black Boy and youthful religious confessions in James Baldwin's Go Tell It On The Mountain), representative novels by Black American women writers have no similar preoccupations with adolescent recognitions. Virtually to a woman,1 they have not devoted comparable, measurable space in their works to the components traditional in Western Bildungsroman (that is according to the standards set forth by well-known scholars of the genre, Jerome Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding, and Ray L. Ackerman, Bildung and Verbildung in the Prose Fiction Works of Otto Julius Bierbaum): first physical awakenings; dramatic adolescent conflicts and later reconciliation with family, religion, educational systems or national community.2 When using Bildungsroman themes these women writers did not even choose the adolescent years as appropriate frameworks for Black feminine rites of passage; nor as novelists do they concentrate on youthful recognition of racial rejection by the dominant white society. Rather, they collectively depict the Black woman's internal struggle to unravel the immense complexities of racial identity, gender definitions (in contexts of Black and not white experience), and awakening of sexual being in short to discover, direct, and recreate the self in the midst of hostile racial, sexual and other societal repression to produce a literature not confined to usual Bildung development at set chronological ages. From the first novel by a Black American woman in 1892, Frances E. W. Harper's lola Leroy: Or Shadows Uplifted, through the prolific period of the Harlem Renaissance in which several Black women writers ap-