The Thatcherite Bildungsroman

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 1987, Margaret Thatcher said ‘there is no such thing as society’. If the classic Bildungsroman moves toward integration into the social order, how does the genre register the British 1980s’ valorisation of autonomy over solidarity? The plots of what I call the Thatcherite Bildungsroman exploit the unstable marriage between traditionalist ‘Victorian Values’ and transformative ‘creative destruction’. The Thatcherite ideal of self-development through market labour seems to depend upon the family unit to stabilize the social order. However, the drive toward autonomy that Thatcherism championed undermined the unity of the family. The divorce plot replaces the marriage plot in these books because the novel of self-development cannot help asking whether the atomic unit of the social order is the family or the individual. In David Mitchell's Black Swan Green, the divorce plot – the novel begins with a mysterious female caller and ends by dispersing the household – allows the teenage protagonist to understand ‘creative destruction’ as self-development. In contrast, the abortive divorce plot in Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty – in which the gay protagonist is sacrificially expelled from a heterosexual nuclear family – manifests a homophobic paranoia about what a 1987 Act of Parliament called ‘homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’.