Our humanity has been so little explored and so little made available to us through art that sometimes we doubt it ourselves and live one-dimensional lives because that’s all we imagine can be possible. Literature, if it does nothing else, should stimulate one’s imaginary to know that there is more—maybe not more ‘out there,’ but more inside of us that we can use for our own survival (Shange, in Lester 1990, 730).
The Bildungsroman may be particularly attractive for women writers not only because of its focus on becoming, on individuality as malleable rather than fixed, but also because its conventions foreground the dialectical interactions of the individual and society in a manner also characterizing much feminist theory about the interplay of personal experience and socio-cultural formations (Boesenberg 1999, 6).
