The Boarding School Bildungsroman

Maybe it has something to do with growing up on the grounds of one, but I have always gravitated towards school stories. By this I mean the sprawling and evergreen genre that is about as diverse and versatile as the name suggests. I just watched The Holdovers - which was on my tbw (to be watched) list since it came out in 2023 - and it was as exactly my cup of tea as I’d anticipated, set in a New England prep school in the 70s, with a quippy script, engaging characters, sparkling performances, and a Labi Siffre-heavy soundtrack (all my favourite things). If I could distil this into a novel, it would be my go-to.

Still from The Holdovers, dir. by Alexander Payne, 2023. Image found on Atlas of Wonders.com

But where did the school story come from? In a previous post I delved into Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays, thought to be the father of the modern school novel, but another important figure in its rise was a fellow Bandonian, LT Meade.

Susan Cahill writes that LT Meade (born in Bandon, Co. Cork, where I went to school) was “[l]argely credited with popularizing the school story, […] an extraordinarily prolific writer, writing somewhere near three hundred books in a range of genres including romance, crime fiction, and sensation, career, and supernatural novels, but she is best known for the girls’ school story” (213). Despite her popularity and productivity however, Cahill states that by 1929, Meade’s work had been included in “a list of children’s books that public librarians were recommended to remove from their shelves because of their lack of literary value [ouch] (Mitchell 1995)” (Cahill 213).

Whatever their merit or otherwise, Meade’s novels relied on tropes and typecasts, with the Irish characters in her stories displaying many of the characteristics expected of them by non-Irish readers of the time. As Cahill continues, “[t]he Irish girls in her school stories owe much to late-nineteenth-century stereotypes of Irishness, particularly Matthew Arnold’s sentimental feminine Celt and the exaggerated brogue of stage Irishry. They are often wild, rebellious, frank in speech, unruly in manners, and overemotional, and their English counterparts in the stories are both attracted to and repelled by them for these reasons. Their Irishness also tends to present them as spectacles, as highly visible presences in the English schools through their choice of clothes, speech, accent, and stories told of home. Furthermore, these Irish girls are not always assimilated into the English schools they inhabit and disrupt” (217). The title of Meade’s most well-known novel, Wild Kitty (1897), perhaps says it best.

Found on Good Reads

    While Meade then can be considered an early propagator of the school story, her heroines lacked the development required of the Bildungsroman. Sometimes called the novel of development, or formation, this genre is often tied to the school novel for obvious reasons. The Bildungsroman focuses on the growth of a character’s subjectivity and agency through a teleological narrative structure, that is, towards a specific end goal or closure. Typically, this includes a protagonist's transcendence from the private to the public sphere by realising a vocation or ambition, or their integration into society - the Bildungsroman hero is usually an outsider. Soňa Šnircová describes it as “[i]nspired and shaped by Enlightenment thought”, and furthermore, “from its eighteenth-century German prototype, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1795), to its most famous nineteenth- and early twentieth-century representatives in British literature, (David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Sons and Lovers, The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man), [the Bildungsroman] appears as a genre mainly concerned with male development” (10).

Šnircová illustrates the exceptions to this, with Jane Eyre (1847) being the most famous example. This canonical female Bildungsroman retains many aspects of the typically male Bildung, with “a heroine that not only enters the public space of formal schooling and work, but also achieves a considerable degree of autonomy and control over her life” (Šnircová 17). A similar case is often made for Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), whose protagonist, Jo March, makes a living through writing, at first selling her sensational stories (a genre in common with Meade), and later novelising her life. This transition for Jo, from the juvenilia of pirates and bandits, to the maturer work of her first novel, is a wonderfully metatextual Bildungsroman, as Jo the character narrates her living and then writing of Little Women, within Little Women, while the real author, Alcott, whose life largely parallels that of the March sisters, is the allusive writer haunting the margins.

Jo of course also founds a school for boys (though Greta Gerwig’s 2019 film changes this to a co-ed endeavour), defying her great aunt’s gendered expectations by transforming her bequeathed house into a vocation of which she would have been deeply disapproving. By becoming a published author, a governess in New York, and finally establishing a school, Jo definitively enters the public sphere of work to claim that agency typically afforded male characters of the novel of formation.

Aunt March's house, Plumfield, from the 1994 Little Women

This differentiation between the female and male Bildungsroman persists today, with many school novels by men tending to be termed literary fiction (think Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), John Knowles’ A Separate Peace (1959), Tobias Wolff’s Old School (2003), Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies (2010), or Kevin Power’s Bad Day in Blackrock (2008), to name a few). Those written by women however can often be unfairly trivialised or dismissed as romantic or teen comedies. Writing for The Guardian, Viv Groskop called Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep (2005) “an addictive portrait of adolescence - The OC meets Donna Tartt's The Secret History with flashes of Clueless.” Although Clueless is now rightly critically acclaimed, and The Secret History (set in a college not a school) is largely credited as the foundational text for dark academia (whatever that says), The OC, I think we can agree, is not the yardstick for prestige tv. Prep, incidentally, is one of my favourite novels, following four years in the life of outsider, Lee Fiora, as she navigates the rarefied world of Ault, an elite Massachusetts’s boarding school.

According to Sophie Spieler, the school story usually “follow[s] the same conventions as the collegiate campus novel with regard to structure and content—the protagonist, usually a social and cultural outsider, enters the exclusive campus and has to navigate his or her new surroundings, often feeling overwhelmed and out of place” (177-8). So far, so expected of the genre then. But Sittenfeld’s characteristic style of writing—deadpan, overthinking narrators, with detached and niche, but somehow universal, perspectives—brings a much-needed freshness to this stale atmosphere of cloistered privilege. As Spieler notes, Prep’s blurb draws our attention to its “brilliant dissection of class, race, and gender in a hothouse of adolescent angst and ambition” (213). I italicise that only because I’m mildly obsessed with greenhouses, having written my MA thesis on these Romantic structures and their relevance to Jane Austen (note: Sittenfeld’s 2016 novel, Eligible, is a modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice). As Spieler continues, “[l]ike the gated community, the summer resort, or the country club, elite campuses are characterized by opacity and hyper-visibility at the same time, and hold a sense of intrigue and mystery to outsiders. Elite campus novels satisfy their readers’ curiosity about life behind the ivy-covered walls of highly selective institutions, an almost voyeuristic desire that is often informed by adulation and resentment alike” (Spieler, 180; emphasis added).

I am interested in how these structures – educational, patriarchal, private, privileged – act as narrative hothouses. In particular, how these opaque but hyper-visible campuses (to use Spieler’s wording), inversely echo the transparent spectacle of the glasshouse, with all the ingredients needed to force pupils, and plots, to maturity. Does confinement within the leafy enclave of Ault School nurture or stunt Prep's students? And how does the boarding school novelist cultivate their characters' subjectivities? Deidre Lynch coined the term ‘greenhouse romanticism’ (see previous posts!) to consider Jane Austen’s figurative use of the language of greenhouses and ‘forced’ nature as an implicit commentary on the status and education of women. Lynch discovered that Austen aligns the language of forced fruit, cultivation, and pruning, with women’s formal or artificial education, while an appreciation of nature in its unaltered state is affiliated with innate morality. Can we read in Prep’s ‘hothouse of adolescent angst’, a language of natural growth and forced maturation like Austen’s? Or are these hotbeds of hormonal tension (boarding schools) just a fun playground for tropes like forced proximity?

    School stories often maximise this trope, exploring life within a microcosm and the attendant opportunities for tension, observation, scandal, intrigue, mystery, and increasingly, crime. The aforementioned Bad Day in Blackrock pairs the entitlement of the privately schooled with the death of a student, (though much of the plot takes place outside the school) and the resulting consequences, or lack of (adapted brilliantly in Lenny Abrahamson’s 2012 film, What Richard Did). Tana French’s The Secret Place (2014), and Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions For You (2023) similarly bring the crime/detection narrative into the boarding school novel, with murder shattering the supposed idyll of the closed campus.

    In The Holdovers however, an interesting microcosmic motif is used. The film takes place over Christmas in a comically unfestive, emptied out school. Angus is one of the only students left over the holidays with an ornery instructor for a babysitter, and as he looks out on grounds blanketed with snow, it's clear this is the last prison he would choose for himself. In a festive relief scene, Angus picks up a snow globe, (a Chekhov's snow globe, it turns out) and we get the sense that while within the elite world of Barton Academy, he can only observe through glass the snowy scenes of family life he craves.

Perhaps what unifies these narratives of elite schools and those caught within them, is as Spieler contends, that hyper-visibility while remaining opaque. Like the greenhouse, or the snow globe, these worlds both contain and preserve societal aspirations while staying hermetically-sealed from reality (and the plebs). Visually beautiful, but potentially suffocating? Either way, give me a preppy school novel for Christmas and I'm happy.

IMDb

Works Cited

    Cahill, Susan. “Where Are the Irish Girls?: Girlhood, Irishness, and LT Meade.” Girlhood and the Politics of Place, edited by Claudia Mitchell and Carrie Rentschler, Berghahn Books, 2016, pp. 212–27. JSTOR, doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt14jxn16.17.

    Groskop, Viv. “The Happiest Days of Your Life? Come Off It.” The Guardian, 11 Sep. 2005.

    Lynch, Deidre. “‘Young Ladies are Delicate Plants’: Jane Austen and Greenhouse Romanticism.” Elh, vol. 77, no. 3, 2010, pp. 689-729.

    Schäfer, Stefanie. ‘Just the two of us’: Self-narration and Recognition in the Contemporary American Novel (2011).

    Šnircová, Soňa. Girlhood in British Coming-of-Age Novels: The Bildungsroman Heroine Revisited. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017.

    Spieler, Sophie. “The Wealthy, the Brilliant, the Few: Elite Education in Contemporary American Discourse”. American Culture Studies, vol. 33, 2021.