One narrative form that has significantly shaped the Western profile of adolescence is the novel of education, or traditional "bildungsroman." The very notion that adolescence is punctuated with "storm and stress" is culled from G. Stanley Hall's close reading of Goethe's (1774) "bildungsroman," "The Sorrows of Young Werther." For Hall, Werther's growth embodies the tumultuous adolescent journey that vacillates between "egoism" and "sociability" and "childishness" and "humanism"--competing tensions he believes education must contain (Young-Bruehl 1996, 331). Often cited as the most influential writer of the "bildungsroman," Goethe seeks to manage these tensions in the unfolding of his plots (Kornbluth 1959; Moretti 1987). Of course, in the process of managing these tensions, writers determine their very shape: They determine what it means to be grappling between "childhood" and "sociability" by handling the connotations of these terms in very particular ways. This article will explore the ways in which the theories of Jean Jacques Rousseau and John Locke, which are tested and propagated further still by traditional novels of education, have transformed historical conceptions of what it means to grow up into purportedly natural conceptions of development. The novel of education conceals and embeds the potent semiological system that defines the primitive child, the volatile adolescent, and the mature young adult, turning this system into an inductive one that still informs the discursive and pedagogical practices we use when thinking about and working with adolescents.