SOURCE: DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. “To ‘Bear My Mother's Name’: Künstlerromane by Female Writers.” In Tell Me a Riddle, edited by Tillie Olsen with an introduction by Deborah Silverton Rosenfelt, pp. 243-69. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1985.

In the following essay, originally published in 1985, well-known feminist writer DuPlessis explores the nature of the feminist künstlerroman by examining several of the genre's more prominent examples from the last century.

No song or poem will bear my mother's name. … Perhaps she was herself a poet—though only her daughter's name is signed to the poems that we know.

—Alice Walker, “In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens” (1974)

The love plot and Bildungs plot are fused in a particular fictional strategy, a figure emerging in a range of narratives from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh to Margaret Atwood's Surfacing.¹ And the central struggle between designated role and meaningful vocation...