ABSTRACT
At a remove from the harmonious, interactive formation chronicled in the classic Bildungsroman, Atwood’s The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle very explicitly explore an emerging multiplicity in the protagonists’ selfhood. Perhaps more dramatically than in Surfacing, this development is unstable and fragmented, void of the measured rhythm of the Bildungsheld’s linear progress. When studied against Rita Felski’s useful definition of the female Bildungsroman as biographical, dialectical, historical, and teleological (Beyond Feminist Aesthetics 135), The Edible Woman makes a radical contribution to the tradition, a contribution that is at odds with many contemporaneous practitioners and critics of the genre. Atwood’s subversive rendering of the genre may be read in two ways. It might be regarded as a carefully executed revenge on the Bildungsroman, as Atwood’s infiltration and re-working of the genre exposes the exclusively masculine ideals embodied in its conventions. Equally, it questions the idea of appropriating the genre as a medium for nurturing the aspirations generated by the apparent feminist liberation of the 1960s and 1970s. In her fiction, Atwood recasts the established structures of the Bildungsroman, resulting in a carefully controlled implosion of the traditional model. Yet the nature and course of development manifest by her characters, though inscribing a common dynamic towards plurality, multiplicity, dissemination, and even disintegration, find very different modes of expression.
