Dying to Live: British Idealism and the Bildungsroman

This essay considers one important episode in the relationship between the British novel and the philosophical movement known as British Idealism. Focusing on two novels from the 1880s, Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean and Mary Augusta Ward's Robert Elsmere, I show how both works adapt the generic framework of the bildungsroman to reflect a distinctively idealist notion of development, which conceives of ethical, spiritual, and aesthetic growth as a kind of death—a “dying to live.” Viewed, in this way, from beyond the grave, the early deaths of both Pater's and Ward's eponymous protagonists represent not a critique of the logic of bildung but its ultimate fulfillment.