66 McDonnell, Jane. "'Perfect Goodness' or 'The Wider Life': The Mill on the Floss as Bildungsroman." Genre 15 (1982): 379-402. McDonnell maintains that in this novel, Eliot arrests the progression toward identity and independence in harmony with society, which is typical of the traditional Bildungsroman, to shift to mythic representation of the life of the heroine because the Bildungsroman form does not lend itself to the realities of women's life histories. Miller, Nancy K. The Heroine's Text. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. Without discussing the Bildungsroman directly, Miller does treat the evolution of the female Bildung in the destinies of eight eighteenth-century heroines in male-authored texts. Whether the heroine is integrated into society or dies (the only two options), "female Bildung tends to get stuck in the bedroom." Morgan, Ellen. "Humanbecoming: Form and Focus in the Neo-Feminist Novel." Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives. Ed. Susan Koppelman Cornillon. Bowling Green: Bowling Green UP, 1972. This essay is a (now dated) survey of the three recast novel forms that Morgan sees as appropriate to "neo-feminism," including the female Bildungsroman. She calls for utilizing this form to promote the "authentic selfhood" of female protagonists and their struggle with patriarchal institutions. O'Neale, Sondra. "Race, Sex and Self: Aspects of Bildung in Select Novels by Black-American Women Novelists." Melus 9.4 (1982): 25-37. According to O'Neale, Black American women authors do not employ the standard themes of the Bildungsroman as defined by Buckley, nor do they concentrate on the adolescent years as the time of rites of passage for the Black protagonists, because those standards have been established by and for Western white males. Rather, "they collectively depict the Black woman's internal struggle... to discover, direct, and recreate the self in the midst of hostile racial, sexual and other societal repression." Pratt, Annis. "Women and Nature in Modern Fiction." Contemporary Literature 13 (1972): 476-90. Again, this study is limited to novels in English (written in this instance between 1896 and 1927). In the works cited, which Pratt considers Bildungsromane, she finds that the heroines-like their counterparts in male Bildungsromane -"are initiated into naturistic and sexual ecstasy, the heroine of the female genre being more likely to view herself as coextensive with the green world and the hero of the male genre to view his heroine and the green world as coextensive parts of each other but rightfully subordinate to him." For the heroine, these naturistic experiences provide a foundation for the authentic self that struggles against the gender roles held out by society., and Barbara White. "The Novel of Development." Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction. By Pratt. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1981. The argument here is that while the hero of the male Bildungsroman has his choice of integration of the independent self into the social order, the heroine of the novel of development regresses from full participation in adult life, as she must, given pre-determined gender roles. The authors therefore propose that the term Entwicklungsroman ("the novel of mere growth") is more appropriate to these female novels. The examples are limited to novels in English.