"This Cindery Creature Is What You Made Me": Bildung after Trauma in L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between

Abstract

During his lifetime, L. P. Hartley (1895-1972) was considered an outstanding author, but after his death, he was increasingly regarded as an outmoded writer due to his frequent use of nineteenth-century styles and genres, particularly that of the Bildungsroman. Several scholars have opposed this perception of the novelist by pointing out his use of modern themes, but none have explored the ways in which Hartley may have deviated from the traditional Bildungsroman-format in response to his contemporary socio-historical context. This thesis examines this possibility by analyzing Hartley’s masterpiece The Go-Between (1953) and demonstrates that Hartley indeed worked with the literary tradition of the Bildungsroman and the Enlightenment ideals that permeate it, but has simultaneously included thoroughly modern, post-World War II ideas about the world in his story. Consequently, in The Go-Between, Hartley has brought together past and present by, on the one hand, portraying the Bildung of his protagonist according to the archetypal plot of the genre but, on the other hand, deviating from this format in the ending by portraying the protagonist’s traumatization as a mirror-image of the devastation of Europe after the horrors of World War I and II. Thus, Hartley challenges the Enlightenment presuppositions that stand at the core of the Bildungsroman, but simultaneously reinvents the genre and the Bildungs-ideal in light of the changed worldview of the late 1940s and 1950s. In this respect, for his time, Hartley has shown himself to be a significantly more innovative author than his long-standing reputation suggests.