Representations of the Female Bildungsroman in Modern Narratives of Travel

This thesis explores the concept of a reworked Bildungsroman in modernist texts that have not previously been studied together. This project maintains that The Voyage Out (1915), Women in Love (1920), and Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941) expand traditional Bildungsroman and Grand Touristic narratives by representing gender limitations within the literary frameworks. I demonstrate how the texts represent non-conservative paths of development for women by using travel as a mechanism for exploring the impossibility of integration and equality between the sexes, as well as well as a means for demonstrating how women are constructed, perceived and historically mythologized in a foreign space.