Willa Cather and her Fiction Writing

These selfdramatizing career and fully grownlife beginningswhich today would cause raised eyebrows among only the nigh straitlaced in the culturesuggest little of the spirit that Willa Cather now has as matchless of the more important American novelists of the twentieth century. Cather's fiction deals non merely with outrageous bohemians and others on the fringe of union but with a whole set of characters and own(prenominal)ities, some who above all seek integration with the American mainstream, others who by reason of their unmatched qualities create and live extraordinary lives.

The specific role that Cather's gender whitethorn fix vie in her development as a writer and in the development of her fiction has been a subject of much tiny inquiry. Seeking to identify a female "voice" in her fiction, early critics sought to explain her work in equipment casualty of the fact that she was a career woman who lived the artist's life in the first half of the twentieth century, what one would now forecast a "liberated woman." The earlier critics were loath to mention sealed other aspects of Cather's personal life (suggested by the William Cather portion of it) that may have influenced her writing. More recent critics, less constrained by discretion or social delicacy, have noned with candour that Cather was a lesbian who appears to have privately acknowledged the personality of her sexuality but who never "came out," as the phrase goes. only if finally, whatever may have influ

The situations of marriage, family, and culture in which the characters operate place women's anger with their visual sense in life at the center of action. And it is plain from the porta pages of the novel that Sapphira is angry with her lot. For one thing, the Colbert marriage is not one of the great love affairs of the nineteenth century. heat content and Sapphira have come to a cordial accommodation in which he takes tea with her and sometimes sleeps with her; that is all. Aside from the fact that Sapphira Dodderidge has married into a social class beneath her is the even more seeming fact that she has developed a contempt for and resentment of Henry as such.

The feeling is on the whole returned, with the result that the Colbert descent is a portrait of a marriage of disappointed, if intermittent, lovers. At the equivalent time, Sapphira benefits from her slur as doyenne of a leading family and fulfills the social role, which includes a strong sense of noblesse oblige to the slaves she sees as her inferiors, to perfection.

Undoubtedly, Cather's position as a writer had the effect of liberating her from a stately existence, but her fiction as well as her personal history suggest that as an artist she was able to lever the complexities of many a(prenominal) ways of life. Her fiction is not polemically "liberationist" in tone, and she hardly sets out to "prove" anything about women in society or about the relationships between women and men. Yet (unlike so many male writers of high reputation) she creates a number of women characters who are not merely the prime movers of narrative action but whose actions influence, for true(p) or ill, the lives of others. If some of her women fulfill conventional social roles, it does not follow that Cather is engaged strictly by the sociological implications of those roles. Rather, she invites the endorser to explore with her the consequences and implications of actions that proceed from the roles that all human beings assume from ti
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