The Form of the Novel

This chapter assesses Germaine de Staël's reckoning with the “new genres or sub-genres characteristic of realism,” the Bildungsroman and its British analogues, the Anglo-Irish national tale and Scottish historical novel, formed in the “novelistic revolution” of European Romanticism. Modeling the scientific conception of human nature as a developmental entity or emergent phenomenon, these new genres or subgenres rehearse a universal formation of species being—a Bildung der Humanität—through the ontogenetic narrative of subject formation. Staël's broad target is the structural exclusion of women from the category that underwrites the new forms of the novel: the Enlightenment's grand universal particular, “man.” And yet, excluded from the new conception of humanity, women were most fully expressive of it. Where men are fixed in a social taxonomy, like animals in the system of nature, women possess the plasticity and fluidity, the capacity to move up and down the scale of being, that are specific markers of the human in late Enlightenment anthropology.