I have claimed that biological theories of development participate in the narrative grammar of Bildung and thus in the structure of the Bildungsroman. Elaborating this claim is one purpose in this chapter, which surveys late eighteenth-century models of embryogenesis and their links with contemporary theories of self-cultivation. My point is that the ideal Bildung plot has, like the ontogenetic plot of embryology, a recapitulatory structure. This is not to reduce actual Bildungsromane to a formula, but it should contextualise the formal strategies of nineteenth-century Bildungsromane, as well as their modernist successors, by situating them within a dominant understanding of progressive development and linear time.

The chapter also presents the various forms of biological reversion which supply alternative developmental structures in the modernist Bildungsromane featured in subsequent chapters: atavism, Mendelian throwbacks, sex change, neoteny and interrupted metamorphosis. It will be useful to think of reversions as developmental dynamics which defer maturity or restore immaturity. Atavisms and Mendelian throwbacks are reversions to ancestral conditions which are, in the context of recapitulation, equivalent to immaturity; so is sex change, at least as it occurs in Orlando. Neoteny and interrupted metamorphosis delay or prevent the onset of adulthood. Treating the five forms of reversion together should help compare various biological phenomena which might otherwise seem unrelated.

EPIGENESIS AND THE RECAPITULATORY SHAPE OF LIFE

With apologies to Mr Emerson in A Room with a View, Bildung is not the body, but it is (partly) of the body. Derived from Pietism and associated primarily with the spiritual, idealist and cultural, the modern concept of Bildung also reflects ‘close affinities between the life-sciences and aesthetics models of autopoeiesis around 1800’ (Pfau 2010: 28). Schelling, a central figure of Weimar classicism, theorised that biological processes ‘were isomorphic with those acts delineated subjectively in the self’ (Richards 2002: 116).