Set in British Honduras in the 1950’s, Beka Lamb (1982) dramatizes the colony’s nationalist quest for self-rule and nationhood through the account of two characters—Toycie Qualo and Beka Lamb—and their bid for female self-autonomy within colonial, patriarchal constraints. This study focuses on the two characters’ ideological disempowerment as an anticolonial, feminist metacritique undertaken by Edgell. Along with this critique, however, Edgell simultaneously undertakes a generic intervention in and manipulation of the bildungsroman. Along these lines, this study examines Edgell’s construction of Toycie and Beka as a double subjectivity in which the mirrored self reveals the challenge to its “inner life.” Here, the psychic collapse of the mirrored self undermines the teleology of the bildungsroman, disrupting the character’s ability to achieve the traditional goal of the genre: the “precise stand and assessment of [herself] and [her] place in society” (Hirsch, 298). Thus, this study proposes Beka Lamb as Edgell’s deconstruction of the bildungsroman and her production of a subversive metacommentary on the mutability of the structure, demands, and expectations of the genre.