But when a young lady is to be a heroine... Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way

~Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen~

I've been trying to read simultaneously for my 3 english classes, and I happen to be reading a lot of bildungsroman. Bildungsroman is a literary genre, a story of the development and maturation of a young person into one of morally and socially righteous character, through emotional journeys and experiences. So basically if you think about it, everyone's life is a bildungsroman. And like in real life, some are just more interesting than others. So what makes a life a book-worthy bildungsroman?

The summary of the bildungsroman goes like this: boy gets girl, and then becomes like everybody else.

This is true in David Copperfield. It's also true in all the Jane Austen novels. The heroine gets married, and then the story ends. Why continue? She now fits neatly into her little role in society, of the happily married woman rescued by her loving (and conveniently handsome and wealthy) husband. But why does the story end once that perfect significant other is found? Don't people's lives continue after? Or is it just so boring, so "normal" that words needn't further explain it? Don't people continue to learn, morally, socially, and otherwise, even when they have the perfect man?

Bildungsroman are known for being dominantly "love stories". Not in a cheesy-drugstore-romance-novel way, but in that the happy end results in a concluding marriage/partnership. So if bildungsromans are love stories, and almost everybody's lives can be written into a bildungsroman, then by transitive property doesn't that mean that people's lives simply revolve around romances waiting to happen?

And if so, what does that mean about people's lives who aren't romances? Do we then, not get to be heroes? And even if our lives do just result to be a simple love story, if we're rescued by men anyway, wouldn't that mean we're technically still not the heroes of our own lives? And what if becoming like everyone else isn't the ending we want to have? Why do our lives have to be centered on finding that one person and fitting into that role of the bildungsroman hero/heroine? Is it even possible not to be the hero if your own life? What defines a hero or heroine anyway?

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