A Gender Study Of Male And Female Roles In O Pioneers!

Willa Cather (1873-1947) is the most prominent American literary master of the 20th century. Since she stepped into the literary world, the critics have been bound up in searching her creation thoughts and methods in her literature. O Pioneers! is Cather's first novel, which wins her fame for the first time. Critics from both home and abroad decode this novel from different viewpoints, especially analyzing the heroines in it from the perspective of Feminist Criticism. However, the male characters, who are contradictory to traditional male images, are rather igonred by the critics. In fact, Cather expresses her own understanding of the gender roles by way of both the male and female characters in this work, which will be explored in this paper from the perspective of gender studies.Gender studies is an important branch of Feminism. It studies gender relationship in the contexts of nation and culture, which challenges traditional viewpoint of categorizing men and women from the perspective of nature. In addition, Gender studies claims that genders are not innate but acquired through the influence of culture.Under the guide of gender studies, the body of this paper is divided into three chapters. Chapter 1 analyses the gender roles of male characters in this novel and points out how Cather describes some male characters as emotional and with universal fraternity. And she mainly represents the failure of men in public working field and their awkward position for loss of family domination because of the loss of economic status. Thus Cather successfully deconstructs the patriarchal male roles. Chapter 2 analyses the gender roles of female characters in this novel. Cather portrays new women and endows them with masculine qualities such as bravery, adamancy and intelligence. Cather disapproves the traditional marriage and thinks that women should get rid of the subsidiary position and gain self-independence only through economical independence. In this way, Cather deconstructs the patriarchal female roles. Chapter 3 discusses Cather's view on gender roles and her construction of new gender roles, holding that the aim of Cather's deconstruction of patriarchal gender roles is to hope to establish a new gender role relationship with androgynous characteristics, which means that men should give up androcentrism and women should gain economical independence through their intelligence, courage and actions so that both genders could obtain common development. Thus it can be seen that Cather not only opposes the patriarchal gender roles but also constructs a kind of new harmonious gender relationship characterized by androgyny, giving answers to the development of gender relations of American society in the late 19th century.