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This thesis explores the way Willa Cather’s writing parallels visual art’s tenebrism – a dramatic way of illuminating a single person, object or idea by juxtaposing light against dark. Throughout her career, Cather uses this technique to convey truths relating to self realization, aestheticism, spirituality, and social awakening.

This dissertation argues for a new way to characterize the relationship between religious discourse and aesthetic attention in twentieth century American literature. The study of religion and literature has been dominated by two theses: on one hand, critics since Matthew Arnold have advanced a secularization thesis where art serves as a surrogate for religion; on the other hand, recent postsecular critics study how literature encodes religious convictions. In this study, I demonstrate that an important strain of twentieth century writing requires a third approach, showing how writers achieve the artistic goal of vivifying quotidian experience by incorporating faith as a formal element. For example, in Marilynne Robinson’s fiction, we might ask why novels committed to a Calvinist belief in immortality are simultaneously enamored with material experiences and ephemeral images. Why does faith in eternity compel the narrator of Gilead to attend to the surfaces of ordinary objects, such as a cascade of bubbles that floats past his window while he contemplates his incipient mortality? I argue that Robinson is one of many writers for whom the background of religious conviction activates an aesthetic process that renders the finite as uniquely worthy of attention. For these writers, a robust engagement with religion makes the secular newly visible.Writers as diverse as Robinson, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, James Baldwin, and Don DeLillo elicit new modes of aesthetic attention as they engage religious discourse. If modernist aesthetics are thought to be predicated upon finitude, as in Wallace Stevens’s famous assertion that “death is the mother of beauty,” then this tradition of American writers revises this premise, making the mundane newly visible by grappling with religious ideas. Where American literary history is traditionally conceived as a history of secularization, or as an archive of religious ideas that resist secularity, this study shows how religion’s persistence over the past century has served to instigate aesthetic attention to the ordinary.

Willa Cather’s Southwestern novels feature cultured male protagonists as the driving sources of action. The male characters explore the natural world and advance the plot, but Cather positions female figures, particularly spinster figures, on the sidelines of the protagonists’ plots to offer support and connection with the natural world. Using an ethic of care framework and ecofeminist Val Plumwood’s master model, this thesis examines the ways in which Cather marginalizes female figures even as they serve crucial roles in the male protagonists’ development. While the male protagonists link spinster figures and sexualized feminine bodies with the natural world, they imbue the natural world with feminized characteristics. In this way, Cather’s male protagonists reify the connection between women and nature that is used to dismiss and denigrate the autonomy of the natural world and women. Adviser: Melissa J. Homestead

This project focuses on the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century depictions of success and failure in prominent fiction and addresses how these concepts played a vital role in the construction of masculinity during that period. While I highlight how the idolization of popular fictional success narratives under American corporate capitalism served to standardize hegemonic forms of masculinity, I also detail how certain authors redefined failure in order to challenge standards of masculinity. I begin by considering how William Dean Howells uses ethical challenges to self-made manhood to challenge the meaning of male failure. In contrast, I argue that Frank Norris wanted to legitimize reactive male violence to stave off fears about failure; despite the fact that he clearly evolved in his thinking about violence throughout his career, his essential verdict about failure itself and the gender-bound obligation to avoid it did not change. I then turn to Jack London to examine the marked contrast between the depiction of success in his early writing career and his late career by examining two novels in each period. I assert that while the early London thought obtaining success was essential for obtaining a sense of meaning, his later novels did not retain the same trust in the popular conventions about success. I follow London by turning to Willa Cather, who, I argue, destablized popular conventions like success and failure through her construction of gender. Finally, I conclude by considering how popular, gender-bound conventions about success and failure still determine our narratives in television, film and fiction in different ways.

This thesis examines the complexities of civilian identity and the crisis of gender in twentieth century fiction produced after World War I. Of central concern are four novels written by prominent women authors, novels that deal with themes of trauma, violence, and shifting gender roles in a post-war society: Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Jacob’s Room. Although these novels do not directly portray the battlefield experiences of war, I argue that, at their core, they are “war novels” in the fullest sense, concerned with the aftereffects of a war that shattered civilian identity and broke worlds in two. I situate my argument around Cather’s famous assertion that “The world broke in two in 1922, or thereabouts,” included in the preface to her 1922 collection of short stories, Not Under Forty. Cather’s assertion echoes a similar statement by Virginia Woolf, imploring that “on or about December 1910, human character changed,” made in the same year. These two statements encompass the attitudes of a generation of writers uniquely attuned to the changing social and political climate in which they were producing some of the most important literature of their time. The four novels I explore here represent unique examples of the capabilities of modernist narrative techniques and language. These narratives set up a dichotomy between genders, exploring how the war caused a rift in traditional gender roles that eventually lead to a “crisis of gender.” Ultimately, these novels question the illusion of wholeness that soldiers were expected to portray after returning from a war that split their world in two, and forever fractured the idea of civilian and domestic life. Adviser: Guy Reynolds

Willa Cather develops the Professor and Tom Outland's identities in the novel The Professor's House through the lenses of domesticity, masculinity, and memory. For the Professor and Tom Outland, these identities are liminal and influenced by the landscape and space around them. Although both liminal, these identities are ultimately different, as the Professor's liminality seems to artificially have an affect on Tom as the novel reads on.Through defining the two main characters in the novel as liminal, Cather makes a comment on a modern shift in the concept of identity, suggesting that as time goes on and values change, we all will struggle with liminality. The Professor's House is an ontological study, filled with ambiguities and open to many readings. The liminal is the best explanation of what happens to the Professor and Outland throughout the novel, and one that enables the reader to not only understand more about contemporary trends in Cather studies, but also understand more about the nature of being.

This project examines Cather’s experimentation with conflicting voices of narrative authority in the presentation of four central female characters in The Professor’s House, using St. Peter and an entity termed the implied narrator as lenses through which we view other characters. The project is broken down into four chapters, each dealing one addressing the central issues involving that specific female character.

This project examines the impact of Christian Science on American culture through the interventions of three major literary figures—Mark Twain, Willa Cather, and Theodore Dreiser—in the major debates that surrounded the movement. I argue that both Christian Science itself and the backlash against it were responses to the shifting conditions of modern life, that Christian Science and public discourse on it laid bare distinctly modern tensions and anxieties about changes in U.S. culture. Recent scholarship has pointed to the durability of the secularization thesis in the study of American literature despite the easily discernible impact of religion on American culture more broadly throughout the history of the U.S. This critical perspective has been particularly difficult to dismantle in the study of post-Civil War American literature. While it is true that Protestant Christianity lost some of its dominance in the late nineteenth century, this period also saw the rise of various influential heterodox religious groups, including Christian Science. This dissertation will make sense of why and how Christian Science captured the imaginations of so many Americans, including some of the greatest storytellers of the day. Christian Science was not the story of how a group of deluded fanatics attempted to turn back the tide of modernity. Instead, Christian Science was a product of modernity that provided a unique and, in its particular context, scientifically plausible response to the problem of human suffering. Furthermore, the controversies that surrounded Christian Science crystallized anxieties about the fate of individual autonomy in the modern U.S., the exercise of therapeutic and religious freedom, the concentration of individual wealth and power among a privileged few, the extension of American power abroad, and sexuality. Each chapter will examine a narrative or set of narratives that demonstrate how the Christian Science debates heightened and spoke to those concerns.

This dissertation focuses on constructions of female authorship in selected prose narratives of four American women writers in the early twentieth century: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zitkala-Ša, and Gertrude Schalk. Specifically, it examines portraits of women in pieces that appeared in national magazines from 1900-1935 that bracket these writers’ careers and that reflect anxieties about their professional authorial identities complicated by gender and, in the case of Native American Zitkala-Ša (Yankton Sioux) and African American Gertrude Schalk, race as well. In a period characterized by fierce debates over the role of women in a dawning modern age, these writers participated in cultural fascination with the New Woman by fashioning narratives that spoke to that interest but that also reflected conflicts or issues in the writer’s own life impacting her construction of literary authority in the public eye. I see a pattern of interest in the project of authorship across all four of these writers from the beginning of their careers until the end in my study of some of their first published pieces and some of their last. After a contextual overview, I move chronologically through my four writers. I focus first on Wharton’s novella The Touchstone (1900) and its resonance in the story "Pomegranate Seed" (1931), tracing Wharton’s efforts to construct herself as a professional writer entering a male-dominated public arena. I next explore Cather’s "Office Wives" stories (1916-1919) and novel Lucy Gayheart (1935), connecting her anxious position as a professional female author with her critical attitudes toward the office and artistic production. Finally, I examine Zitkala-Ša’s construction of literary authority and her paradoxical status as a New Woman through themes of domesticity and liberty in her autobiographical sketches (1900) and story "The Widespread Enigma Concerning Blue-Star Woman" (1921). I then identify prominent themes Schalk carries over from her late 1920’s urban realism fiction to her 1930’s romance formula fiction to reveal her constructions of gender, class, and race as at once fixed and fluid negotiations. Advisor: Maureen Honey

Though her early writing owes much to nineteenth-century American Realism, Willa Cather experiments with male and female literary traditions while finding her own modern literary voice. In the process Cather gives nature an ambivalent role in My Ántonia, O Pioneers!, and Death Comes to the Archbishop. She produces a tension between rivers and gardens, places where nature and culture converge. Like Mary Austin and Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather confronts the boundaries between humans and nature.

ABSTRACT This study focuses on twenty-one particular texts published in 1925 as contemporaries of The Great Gatsby. The manuscript is divided into four categories—The Impressionists, The Experimentalists, The Realists, and The Independents. Among The Impressionists are F. Scott Fitzgerald himself, Willa Cather (The Professor’s House), Sherwood Anderson (Dark Laughter), William Carlos Williams (In the American Grain), Elinor Wylie (The Venetian Glass Nephew), John Dos Passos (Manhattan Transfer), and William Faulkner (New Orleans Sketches). The Experimentalists are Gertrude Stein (The Making of Americans), E. E. Cummings (& aka “Poems 48-96”), Ezra Pound (A Draft of XVI Cantos), T. S. Eliot (“The Hollow Men”), Laura Riding (“Summary for Alastor”), and John Erskine (The Private Life of Helen of Troy). The Realists are Theodore Dreiser (An American Tragedy), Edith Wharton (The Mother’s Recompense), Upton Sinclair (Mammonart), Ellen Glasgow (Barren Ground), Sinclair Lewis (Arrowsmith), James Boyd (Drums), and Ernest Hemingway (In Our Time). The Independents are Archibald MacLeish (The Pot of Earth) and Robert Penn Warren (“To a Face in a Crowd”). Although these twenty-two texts may in some cases represent literary fragmentations, each in its own way also represents a coherent response to the spirit of the times that is in one way or another cognate to The Great Gatsby. The fact that all these works appeared the same year is special because the authors, if not already famous, would become famous, and their works were or would come to represent classic American literature around the world. The twenty-two authors either knew each other personally or knew each other’s works. Naturally, they were also influenced by writings of international authors and philosophers. The greatest common elements among the poets and fiction writers are their uninhibited interest in sex, an absorbing cynicism about life, and the frequent portrayal of disintegration of the family, a trope for what had happened to the countries and to the “family of nations” that experienced the Great War. In 1925, it would seem, Fitzgerald and many of his writing peers—some even considered his betters—channeled a major spirit of the times, and Fitzgerald did it more successfully than almost anyone.

This inquiry into contemporary forms of the incest narrative focuses on three women writers who subvert and reinvent the standard incest model for their own ends. Since the beginnings of Western literature, incest telling has been tricked out in riddles. In Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, a question—why is there a plague on Thebes?—takes the title character on a quest which eventually leads to the dread answer: because its king is sleeping with his mother. Incest hides in this narrative, its secret waiting to be recognized and decoded. Oedipus remains the archetypal incest story; the riddle form is the standard incest model. But the work of Maxine Hong Kingston, Willa Cather and Kathryn Harrison has done much to change the way that incest is usually told. The standard incest model confirms our belief in incest as a shocking transgression. When the discovery of incest is delayed through riddling, the assumption is that telling this transgression is so fraught it can derail the narrative; it is so horrific that we have to approach it obliquely. In that it defers the announcement of incest through the scattering of clues—the narrative equivalent of clearing one’s throat—the riddle form affirms the view that speaking of incest is as vexed and potentially traumatic as the act itself. By subverting the riddle form, Kingston, Cather, and Harrison not only challenge the way that incest is traditionally told, they also redefine what is and what is not sayable. In “No Name Woman,” Kingston uses incest as a stepping stone to arrive at another, more forbidden revelation. In Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Cather provides what seems to be a textbook incest riddle, but elides the revelation; she uses the unanswered incest riddle to indict the system of slavery and the way it blinkers those who participate in it. In The Kiss, Harrison eschews riddling altogether, casually referring to her sexual relationship with her father on the first page of the text; she thus comments on incest itself—how common it is, how undramatic and unrevelatory to its traumatized victims.

This research examines the theme, individuality, and discusses how it changes throughout Gather’s career. The following chapters consider what was occurring in the world and in Gather’s own life that may have affected her work. They show that even though her novels’ characters and ambience may change dramatically, individuality remains a theme throughout her career. Most often. Gather presents a struggle for individuality in three different ways.At times Gather’s characters resist marriage and family, knowing that it threatens their sense of self. Other characters marry and then discover later in life that because of their social responsibilities, they have lost their true self. The novel then becomes a psychological struggle in which the protagonist attempts to either regain it or accept the loss. Finally, Gather believed that people are most aware of their true selves when they are young, before their lives revolve around social commitments and responsibilities. Therefore some of her characters seek individuality by attempting to return to youth.

During the pivotal years of Willa Cather's artistic development, she regularly engaged a variety of American arts communities that encouraged, challenged, and influenced her work and professional growth. Her interactions with these communities were an effort to locate a sustainable, meaningful relationship to her fellow artists. This dissertation explores her efforts by analyzing the character of the communities, chronicling Cather’s involvement within them, and interpreting the impact on Cather’s life and work. After the Introduction, the chapters are organized to follow Cather as she experimented with various communal forms and developed her own relationship to the literary scene. Chapter one explores Cather's relationship with Annie Adams Fields and the circle that gathered around Fields's Boston home. Fields, who was Cather’s ideal of the literary hostess, demonstrated the power a community could have on an artist's work and engaged Cather's imagination as a representative of the American literary past. Chapter two investigates Cather's experience in Greenwich Village during the early twentieth century, a time when the neighborhood was popularly known as the home of political and artistic radicals. Cather's comments about the Village, particularly in her story "Coming, Aphrodite!," demonstrate her efforts to counter the Village's popular identity and define her own role within the community. In chapter three, I look at Cather's involvement in three formal artists' colonies: the Bread Loaf School of English, Mabel Dodge Luhan’s colony, and the MacDowell Colony. Her involvement with and eventual rejection of these colonies suggests Cather’s growing awareness of her own creative needs and worth as a legitimate artist. The final chapter details the most profound artistic relationships of Cather's life, the intimate circle of her friends and fellow writers. Examination of her professional exchanges with Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, and Edith Lewis reveals that Cather frequently relied on the encouragement and suggestions of these women while creating her work. Adviser: Susan J. Rosowski

Paintings and Drawings in Willa Cather's Prose: A Catalogue Raisonné considers the specific artists and their visual art that greatly influenced Willa Cather's textual compositions. The Catalogue draws upon the author's research of Cather-related art from both American and European libraries and art museums. This art includes painting, drawing, illustration, and tapestry. A detailed and alphabetized list of selected artists and paintings that Cather preferred is provided. The artists are cross-referenced with Cather's own statements about their work or style. Included is biographical data for each artist, the named work of art, and often the date executed, the location then and now, and the museum acquisition date. Bibliographical information is given for books and articles on a related subject and for relevant criticism by Cather scholars. In addition, the illustrators for Cather's work, and her portrait painters, Leon Bakst and Nicolai Fechin, are discussed. The author comments briefly on how a specific work of art or style may correspond to Cather's textual allusions. Throughout her career Cather memorized details about individual artists, including their lives and paintings, and she also followed the changing movements in art. Cather's interest in visual art was extraordinary. It ranged from the Old Masters, the French Academics, Dutch and Barbizon genre painters, to the revolutionary French Realist and Symbolist artists, the English Pre-Raphaelites, and the Impressionists- -both European and American. Cather deliberately used visual art to inform her textual structure, character, mood, or theme. Many of her writings reflect techniques used by the Symbolist artists and writers, and she even put to use the Post-Impressionist "language of cubisme." Links between paint and prose found in Cather's textual composition are explored in this dissertation. Advisor: Susan J. Rosowski

The marriages depicted in Willa Cather's fiction are a crucial element of her works. Although she does not describe in detail the marital relationships between her characters, Cather does depict these marriages realistically, and they are also interrelated with the major themes of her fiction. The marriages in Cather's works are divided into three general classifications: the successful, the borderline, and the failure. The successful marriage is characterized by affection and friendship. In the borderline marriages the partners are mutually dissatisfied with their relationship, but they do not separate or divorce. The marital failures are complete breakdowns that result in irreparable wounds healed only by the complete withdrawal or death of one of the partners. A study of marriage in Cather's works reveals there are more successful marriages than failures.

The object of this paper is to consider the life and literary devices of Willa Cather as revealed in her best novels. It will discuss some of the factors and elements which had a direct hearing upon her success as a novelist. It will also be the aim of the paper in considering her life and literary doctrines, together with her familiarity with subject matter and perspicuity of expression, to show how they combined to bestow upon her the artistic success which is presently accorded her. | In the discussion of her doctrines, it will become immediately evident that familiarity with subject matter and perspicuity of expression are the direct result of adherence to her own literary doctrines, and are somewhat linked together. It seems to follow logically that if one is familiar with his subject matter, this usually enhances his ability to express himself clearly; if one expresses himself clearly, it is very likely that he is familiar with his subject matter. One complements the other.

In 1909 when Willa Cather wrote for McClure's her account of the cemeteries of Europe, she made special note of the inscription above the tomb of Alexandre Dumas, the younger: "I am keenly interested in my life, which pertains to time, but I am more interested in my death, which pertains to eternity." Judging from her own preoccupation with these subjects, the statement might have suited her equally well. George Kates in commenting on this essay has said that this was "a subject that was never afterward to leave her: the mystery and meaning of life and its end."

All writers, great and poor, have been influenced by- forces outside themselves. This is only natural, because no man, least of all a writer, lives in a vacuum. He must be influenced to some degree by the sights, sounds and people that surround him from day to day. These influences may take the form of places or events; or they may take the form of other people, or of even another culture. | So it is with Willa Cather. I propose to examine her published work in order to ascertain to what extent, if any, French cultural influences, in their various forms, entered into the spirit and the letter of her work. I propose to investigate the possibility of this influence in two ways: directly, by what she says, either in her own person, or through the mouth of one of her characters; and indirectly, by what others say about her. My criteria for determining whether or not an item is indicative of French influence are based on the following evidence: | 1. Any direct statement she makes concerning France or the French. | 2. Any quotation from French literary or historical sources. | 3. References to ideas or objects definitely French. | 4. The use of the French language. | 5. Obvious parallels between her works (in whole or in part) and some French material that could have suggested ideas. | 6. Any relevant statement made by another person in writing about Miss Cather. | 7. The use of the French people as characters in a work, especially as protagonists.

The state of Nebraska is part of the great plain which stretches west of the Missouri River, gradually rising until it reaches the Rocky mountains. The character of all this country between the river and the mountains is essentially the same throughout its extent: a rolling, alluvial plain, growing gradually more sandy toward the west until it breaks into the white sandhills of western Nebraska and Kansas and eastern Colorado. Prom east to west this plain measures something over five hundred miles; in appearance it resembles the wheat lands of Russia,which fed the continent of Europe for so many years. Like Little Russia it is watered by slow-flowing, muddy rivers, which in midsummer lie low and shrunken, their current split by glistening white sand-bars half overgrown with willows.

The last hard rays of a December sun still shone over Red Cloud when I rose to take my leave of the two gracious old ladies who had been Willa Gather's lifelong friends. The last words of the older sister, the Carrie, to whom Willa Cather had dedicated her My Antonia, still sounded in my ears and rather dimmed the amenities—the "thank-yous,” the "good-byes," the "come-agains."

To present to the reader the development of New Mexico as portrayed in its widely varied character types, and to show its Empire Builders through the mirror of fiction is the goal in which this thesis has in view. A secondary purpose will be accomplished if, by means of the excerpts presented, interest in reading the books in their entirety shall lead to a broader knowledge of the growing bibliography of Southwestern fiction.

Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, and Willa Cather are often mentioned together as traditionalists, the supposition being that their common interest was inspired by similar forces; all women, all of the same era, all greatly appreciative of many of the same values, and all doing most of their outstanding work during their middle and late years.It has become a convenience of criticism and scholarship to consider authors as belonging to certain schools. It has also been a convenience to study the origins of these schools as social phenomena having more to do with a direction of society as a whole than with individual psychological forces within each author. Such an approach may be adequate for a movement that rises to its apex and dwindles to a shadow all within one generation--as did the extreme Naturalism of Norris--, but it is not sufficient for traditionalism which has repeated itself several times throughout literary history.It is, therefore, the purpose of this study to investigate the lives and works of Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, and Willa Cather in order to demonstrate the different forces tending each towards vastly different tradition-influenced work, specifically novels. In such treatment, each author can be presented individually in a brief biographical study, and then her novels can be discussed with her own psychological framework and the whole field of traditionalism kept in mind as a balance. The emphasis here will be upon the diverse influences in their lives and the extremely varied work these differences motivated.Traditionalism will not be exactly defined because this paper has been undertaken with the hope of broadening rather than limiting the concept of "traditionalism." It is the intention here to investigate and evaluate both the intent and extent of the various degrees and elements of traditionalism as they appear in the bulk of these authors' novels.