Earth Mothers and Femmes Fatales: Willa Cather's Women (ePub)

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. [...]