The Bildungsroman and class consciousness: the role of shame in Kipps by H.G. Wells

Kipps(1905) by Herbert George Wells establishes an ambiguous relationship with the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman: by parodying it and by caricaturing its archetypical characters, Wells’s work lays bare the values and cultural background on which the nineteenth-century production of the genre was based. In particular, given the focal role of the social compromise between bourgeoisie and aristocracy in this production, Wells’s novel has the effect of showing the weakening of the upper class as well as illustrating a transition phase of the middle class which had not yet been legitimised to constitute a new social model. To this end, this study will follow two trajectories: on the one hand, it will illustrate Kipps’s deviation from the classic Bildungsroman on the structural and semantic levels, in which the values and ideals underlying the reference genre are reversed. On the other hand, it will examine the role of the emotion of shame in the three main phases of Kipps’s Bildung and the different traits that it assumes in the gradual emergence of a social reflection and a class consciousness in the protagonist’s experience. Being strictly related to the protagonist’s social ascent, shame involves both the social and the moral levels. As a social emotion, in this novel it implies social ranks and a real or internalised audience, while as a moral emotion it is crucial to the definition of the protagonist’s identity and to the acquisition of self-awareness through the comparison with the others. In terms of the reversal of the socialisation process expected by the traditional Bildungsroman, this analysis illustrates how the protagonist’s overcoming shame coincides with his distancing from the norm, from the class conventions that the novel emphasises and calls into question.