Dialogic Interplay in Coming-of-Age Novels by West Indian Women Writers

In the last ten years, a number of coming-of-age novels with female protagonists have emerged in the English-speaking Caribbean countries. In a recent article, Renee Hausmann Shea points out that these novels by Caribbean women writers have much to offer teachers of literature and their students in the United States, for whom the realities of life in the late twentieth century have more in common with the lives of their Caribbean counterparts than they have with the world of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister or even Joyce's Stephen Dedalus. Shea explains:

The conflicts and contradictions of class and color, the dual history of colonized people, the ironies inherent in an educational system that enshrines one culture at the expense of any other are contemporary Caribbean women writers' subjects—and these are difficult realities. But they are the realities of today's multi-racial and multi-cultural America, and these works explore them with sensitivity, wit, and brilliant command of language.

(40)

Although, as Shea points out, "few of these novels and stories were written expressly for adolescents," their protagonists are "bright, rebellious, intractably clever, and always strong-willed" adolescents whose problems and experiences evoked a very positive response among Shea's female high-school and college-preparatory students (36).¹

Before beginning my discussion of such works by Jamaica Kincaid, Erna Brodber, Zee Edgell and Paule Marshall, it is helpful to look at the theoretical framework of the genre itself. These West Indian writers have not only made important contributions to the literature of adolescence; they have reimagined the entire concept of development, challenging their readers to rethink the way that they view themselves and inhabit the world. Carolyn Heilbrun maintains that "lives do not serve as models; only stories do that. And it is a hard thing to make up stories to live by" (37). Women writers from the West Indies are creating stories to serve as models for young women's lives by questioning both the traditional male Bildungsroman or quest plot and the female marriage or courtship plot.² Their alternative to these limited and limiting narrative models acknowledges essential differences between girls and boys, women and men, but at the same time this new model of female development demands equality of opportunity and freedom from gender-based oppression for the female protagonists.

In the introduction to The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development, Elizabeth Abel argues that the Bildungsroman was limited to the development of male protagonists because assumptions about the self's autonomy and integrity did not reflect the maturation experiences of women. Abel cites several feminist theorists—including Nancy Chodorow, Carol Gilligan, and Jean Baker Miller—to illuminate tills problem:

Historically, only the masculine experience of separation and autonomy has been awarded the stamp of maturity. ... A distinctive female "I" implies a distinctive value system and unorthodox developmental goals, defined in terms of empathy rather than achievement and autonomy.... Female fictions of development reflect the tensions between the assumptions of a genre that embodies male norms and the values of its female protagonists.

(10-11)

Abel's view is shared by Sibel Erol who describes a distinctly female alternative to the male linear model: "Totality is not analogous with the ending of a linear progression.... the end of the forwardly linear, physical journey is a psychologically backward circular journey into the dawn of the preoedipal totality with the mother" (7-8).

Not all feminist critics are comfortable with a distinctive female model of development, for the adventure or quest model has a certain appeal for both genders, especially now that young women in many cultures are no longer limited exclusively to domestic duties, and education and travel opportunities are available to girls as well as boys. Given that women are no longer excluded from the public realm, should the European Bildungsroman model be appropriated by women writers for their female protagonists? Or is there something unique to female experience that is inadequately served by the Bildungsroman's emphasis on autonomy and individualism?

Ann R. Morris and Margaret M. Dunn observe that Chodorow and Gilligan have stirred...