Female Bildungsromans for College Grads

Williams, Kirke, Dunham and Mame in "Girls"

Williams, Kirke, Dunham and Mame in “Girls”

I’ve been reporting on my senior projects (see here and here) so today I turn to Emily Rosen’s study of the female growth story or bildungsroman in the 20th and 21st centuries. Emily is looking at a short story (J. D. Salinger’s 1955 “Franny”), three films (Claudie Weill’s 1978 Girlfriends, Ben Stiller’s 1994 Reality Bites, and Noah Baumbach’s 2012 Francis Ha), and one television series (Lena Dunham’s Girls, beginning in 2012 and now entering its third season). Emily has found a topic that hits very close to home.

That’s because many women appear to be taking longer, for a variety of reasons, to enter a settled relationship and a long-term career. In other words, the growth story that ends, as many movies do, with either a successful entrance into college or graduation from it can seem unsatisfactory to today’s 20-something woman. The stories Emily has chosen are for the most part about women who have recently earned their college degrees.

Emily notes that the bildungsroman works differently for men and women. Drawing on the ideas of scholar Annis Pratt, she says that, whereas men traditionally “grow up” to already established places in society, women must learn to “grow down.” Emily says that she finds this distinction “essential to understanding female characters as they work to subvert the identity imposed upon them and to move toward the development of an autonomous female identity.”

Emily has divided her growth stories into pre-Betty Friedan women (“Franny”),  second-wave-feminist baby boomers (Girlfriends), third-wave-feminist Generation Xers (Reality Bites), and present day third-wave-feminist Millennials (Francis Ha, Girls). She is discovering that, while many of the same issues keep arising, the changing face of feminism does change the stories.

For instance, Franny, while still in college, is confused as to what she wants. A college student at (I think) Mt. Holyoke, she is visiting her boyfriend at Yale, who appears to have a promising future as an English professor. Rather than looking forward to marrying him or, for that matter, finding her own path, she has a mental breakdown, brought about in part because she is so confused. Her state of mind seems like what Friedan describes in The Feminine Mystique (1963), which would appear ­eight years after Salinger’s story and would give college-educated women like Franny a framework for understanding their deep dissatisfactions.

Emily is finding subtle differences between the conclusions of the various films. In the 1978 Girlfriends, the protagonist, a professional photographer, appears to have had a career breakthrough by the end of the film. She is also hitting it off with her boyfriend, but that relationship doesn’t appear as important as her career.

In Reality Bites, by contrast, the career is very much in limbo by the end of the film and her relationship is only in slightly better shape. In the 21st century stories, Francis is rethinking her expectations about both career and relationship and the protagonists in Girls are perpetually up in the air with everything. Emily notes, however, that the open-ended nature of the television series isn’t all that much different from the ambivalent endings of Reality Bites and Francis Ha. Through multiple episodes, Dunham is able to spell out what the endings of the films hint at.

In short, the 2nd way feminist Girlfriends seems more optimistic about careers than the 3rd wave feminist films of late 20th and early 21st century. Nothing, meanwhile, seems as bad as Franny’s 1950’s existence.

Emily is looking for other novels and films that treat this subject so I invite readers to send in titles. Recently we came up with the films Crossing Delancey (1988) and The Devil Wears Prada (2006) as other “working girl movies”—or more specifically, “recent college graduate working girl movies” (although Izzy in Crossing Delancey, while a college-educated bookstore clerk, is in her 30’s, which either doesn’t fit the genre or extends its age possibilities).

What with the economic downturn, which is making transition into the work place difficult even for college graduates, the attraction of such growth stories to students like Emily show how critical a narrative can be. The female bildungsroman, including Girls, is not just diversionary entertainment but a survival guide for life.

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