Gender conflicts in the fiction of Liliana Heker

Abstract

In the ongoing theoretical discussion about the female Bildungsroman (also known as the novel of development or the novel of self-discovery), feminist critics have made note of its vitality and flexibility as a genre. It has been and continues to be an important vehicle through which female writers can articulate the complex nature of development for women in light of changing social conditions in the second half of this century. That the genre has resonance for women today stems from its markedly different evolution from the original Bildungsroman, Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, which was modeled on and is appropriate to the life of its male protagonist. After experiencing some degree of alienation, the hero of the classical model was eventually reintegrated into a milieu whose values on the whole corresponded to his own.