Earth Mothers and Femmes Fatales: Willa Cather's Women

Essay from the year 2004 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1.0 (A), University of Kent (School of English), course: American Modernism: Fiction, language: English, abstract: According to Evelyn Helmick Hively, Willa Cather's novels mirror the author's 'broad experience with people from all strata of society' (Hively 171). Consequently, Cather's characters come from diverse cultural and social backgrounds. It is today regarded as one of the author's primary literary achievements that her ... novels reveal a different West and [offer] an alternative direction for American literature. They spoke for the Midwestern immigrant and the woman, who had hitherto been silent, and they spoke in the language of an old culture taking root in a new land. (Thomas 64) In fact, although Willa Cather's female characters live on the margins of American society, they are strong-willed and in control of their destinies. Cather illustrates that even in the male-dominated, restrictive turn-of-the-century society, women have a large number of choices and can shape their lives in ways that their predecessors could not. Harvey remarks tha t 'gender ... proves an asset in their efforts to achieve self- fulfilment, helping them turn inward to explore self in a way that [male characters] never could' (Harvey 33). Willa Cather's heroines construct their own identities to varying degrees, taking advantage of the opportunities for personal improvement available in frontier and post- frontier America, often manipulating the established image of womanhood and challenging traditional views. Even though all of Cather's heroines are subject to similar social expectations and pressures, their lives differ to a great extent. Cather shows that there is more than one way in which the pioneer woman can seek self- fulfilment. In order to illustrate this, the essay will analyse four heroines, that is, Alexandra Bergson from Cather's 1913 novel O Pioneers!, Ántonia Shimerda (later Cuzak) and Lena Lingard from My Ántonia and Marian Forrester from A Lost Lady. All of these characters live in rural Nebraska in or, in Marian Forrester's case, at the end of the pioneer era. Harvey states that at that time, a woman was supposed to fill a variety of roles, all primarily for the purpose of helping a man achieve his American Dream. [...]