David Copperfield, Émile, and the Legacy of Enlightenment Education Literature

Abstract:The Bildungsroman is a genre concerned with the construction of the individual's relationship with society. Critics have often associated Victorian Bildungsromane with the loss of agency as ideological forces funnel literary characters (and, by extension, their readers) through a series of conventional plot points designed to reinforce a fairly conservative set of middle-class values. This essay complicates such readings by pairing Charles Dickens's paradigmatic Victorian Bildungsroman David Copperfield (1850) with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's progenitor to the genre, Émile (1762). I suggest that setting Dickens's novel against the more philosophically dense and overtly confrontational Émile highlights David Copperfield's vexed relationship with established social codes, supplying the foundation for an important reconsideration of the Bildungsroman's role in subject formation.