"those marvellous perhapses": Form and the Feminine in The Getting of Wisdom

Abstract

The critical history of the female Bildungsroman in English ranges from Esther Labovitz' view that it is purely a twentieth-century phenomenon, to that of Franco Moretti, who begins his discussion of the English Bildungsroman with Elizabeth Bennett and insists that it reaches its peak in Middlemarch (Labovitz 7, Moretti 214). These conflicting opinions raise the question of what constitutes female Bildung, and how that Bildung interacts with the marital plot. Moretti is obviously happy to view marriage as the ultimate possible outcome of women's development, if Middlernarch is to be regarded as the height of the genre. The submersion of female Bildung in the marriage plot is common in nineteenth-century fiction, and while this may be satisfying in Pride and Prejudice, by the time of Middlemarch, the reader is left with a clear sense of loss at the curtailment of the heroine's aspirations. This is emphasised by the need the narrator feels in the final lines to justify her heroine's end, though Dorothea's "sacrifice" is clearly acknowledged (Eliot 811).