This paper studies the novel series Children of Violenceby Doris Lessing as a Female Bildungsroman.Doris Lessing reconceptualizes and deconstructs the genre of the male bildungsroman in this series. The odyssey of female selfhood in her fiction dismantles a genre marked by an exclusively patriarchal heritage. Lessing responds to the male tradition of writing in two ways, through imitation and subversion, two features which are the main characteristics of parody. Her questioning of the commonly accepted values of British literary tradition (closure, teleology, and subjectivity) - a questioning which is totally dependent upon that which it interrogates. It induces the contradictory duality which Linda Hutcheon has characterized as parodic.

Bildungsroman, deconstruction, parody, feminism, genre, postmodern.