“Some Crude Intrusion of the Actual”: Damaged Totality in The Last September

To track the bildungsroman’s travels into modernism is to encounter a period in which a classically optimistic genre begins instead to produce, across the board, “failed” developmental narratives—ones which end in either premature death or terminal adolescence. In this article, I focus on one such antidevelopmental narrative: that of Lois Farquar, of Elizabeth Bowen’s 1929 novel The Last September. Building from and extrapolating the theory of the modernist bildungsroman established by Jed Esty in Unseasonable Youth (2012), I argue that The Last September’s “failures” are symptomatic of its broader refusal to instate the nation as a cohesive and fulfilling guarantor of personal development. I go on to suggest that, in problematising the cohesive national totalities of the nineteenth-century realist novel, Bowen is in fact aiming idiosyncratically at a “modernist” form of realistic representation; faced with the contradictions of early-twentieth-century Anglo-Irish experience, she senses the incompatibility of the classical bildungsroman form and attempts to develop a narrative form commensurate to the social conditions of the period.