Abstract
A. S. Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden is a bildungsroman that explores its heroine, Frederica Potter's, complicated coming of age during 1953, the year of the Coronation of Elizabeth II. Likewise, the Coronation itself can be considered a bildungsroman of Elizabeth, and of Britain. Both novel and Coronation link the development of individual young women to that of the nation: on the one hand, they are constrained by an ideology of domesticity that channels them into marriage and motherhood; on the other, they derive symbolic – and perhaps some real – power through the way national myths of identity revolve around their likeness.
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