Contemporary Bildungsromans and the Prosumer Girl

J[oanne] K. Rowling’s Harry Potter franchise set a powerful new distribution model for cross-marketing cultural content spanning a variety of age, race, and gender demographics. Hot across Potter’s jugular, the coming-of-age novel series Twilight¹ continues to drive the young adult market, selling a combined total of just under 26.5 million copies in 2009.² The first book alone has sold 25 million copies worldwide and been translated into thirty-seven languages.³ The Twilight Saga, a series of film adaptations of the novels, earns loyal fans and revenue returns totaling $389 million so far for just the first three films.⁴ While the sales and earnings do not come close to the Potter empire,⁵ they are remarkable insofar as girls drive the Twilight phenomenon, a demographic once ignored as mere sidekick to the primacy of the men-in-training youth market.⁶ The consumption of Twilight on such a huge scale and the zeitgeist of girl desire articulated through hundreds of pages catapult it to the top of the contemporary bildungsroman for girls, offering plot cues and character subreferences that permeate girl culture and popular culture at large. While Twilight is notable for making novel reading trendy among girl nonreaders and readers alike, its most significant effect lies in the proliferation of fan texts, taking reader response to a whole new level of self-actualization. Girl prosumers (producers/consumers) deploy technological savvy and critical aesthetic acumen to generate a host of responses to Twilight, which they then publish on the Internet. The key difference for the Twilight phenomenon is that the bildungsroman as enculturation narrative now requires the production of new texts—texts based upon the original but that operate outside the purview of previous reader/text response. The prosumption of Twilight illustrates one of a number of vectors through which girls enculture and produce one another, actualizing one or any number of selves online.

The Twilight Saga can be categorized as a bildungsroman proper because the story arc encompasses an individual’s arduous, conflicted growth through and into a social order, initiated by loss and extrafamiliar bonding.⁷ Bella, the protagonist, faces not only the typical struggles of a girl grappling with the constraints and pleasures of her inevitable womanhood, including the passion and heartbreak of heterosexual love relations, she also takes on the seemingly impenetrable domain of the vampire, having to assimilate conventional gendered societal mores while negotiating the rules of the undead world. The self-enculturation of the protagonist is achieved over the span of four books and culminates in her physical and spiritual transmogrification: the traditional markers for female maturity are met as Bella becomes wife and mother, and she is fully accepted into a vampire society by becoming one and fighting amongst them against a common enemy.

The popularity of the Potter franchise and the Twilight series signals a return of the traditional bildungsroman genre to the fore. The saturation of the Twilight novels among girl readers is due in no small part to the categorical specificities and resonances of the female bildungsroman for the twenty-first-century girl. Feminist myth critics of the 1970s and 1980s such as Annis Pratt noted the disparities between hero and heroine action in novels of development, configuring female narrative archetypes and articulating the ways in which the bildungsroman plots are “shaped by the dominant social norms for womanhood,”⁸ such as learning to be submissive, accepting pain as a female condition, equating sexuality with danger, marrying after the inevitable failure of a rebellious autonomy, and regressing from full societal participation in order to actualize the inconsequential status of the female self. “In most of the novels of development it seems clear that the authors conceive of growing up female as a choice between auxiliary or secondary personhood, sacrificial victimization, madness, and death.”⁹ Twilight hits all of these markers. While there are some feminist exceptions, girls still turn to the traditional novel of development as assimilatory road map, a Walmartian greeter of womanhood in book form who shows them what is available on every aisle. The eviscerations...