| Impressionism,an artistic movement which originated from the French painting of the late 19th century,has brought about an aesthetic revolution not only in the sphere of painting but also in other fields of art.The impressionist painters have created distinctive artistic features by attempting to depict transitory visual impressions and emphasize the aesthetic function of painting.Light and color are used as chief tools to conceive the world.Impressionism,together with post-impressionism,which developed from impressionism and was more concerned with moods or sensations,has greatly influenced literature and provided a great deal of inspiration to literary writing.Literary impressionism is characterized by the use of perceptions of color and light to evoke subjective and sensory impression.It mediates between subject and object,makes the surface show the depth and the fragment suggest the whole.Through such a significant form,an organic structure and theme are thus achieved.The novels of Willa Cather,the Pulitzer Prize winner in 1923,have been bestsellers and have led to the production of a large number of scholarly works from critics. However,no one has ever tried to analyze systematically her works by using literary impressionism,especially the consciousness of subject in impressionism,except for a few articles abroad briefly mentioning the use of color in her works.This fact urges the writer of this dissertation to explore the impressive staying power of her works,to study the literary impressionism implied in her works and her aesthetic pursuit.Considering the features of literary impressionism in Cather's creation,the writer of this paper attempts to use theories relating to literary impressionism to analyze Cather's novels and her literary theory.Drawing on literary impressionism,both theoretically and methodologically,by re-reading Cather's novels,the author of this paper believes that what we have found not only enables us to have completely new insight into her novels' content,form and language use,but also more importantly,into the complexity and profundity of her writing.We hold that Cather belongs to neither romanticism with strong sentiment nor pure realism of depiction.By applying the theory of literary impressionism,we can get a better understanding of her style and artistic appeal.O Pioneers!,My Antonia,A Lost Lady and The Professor's House have been chosen as the objects of this study because these novels are Cather's famous writings,which not only include her innovation in writing pioneer novels after she has found her own voice,but also consist of her top achievement in her unique style.These novels are sufficient for the revelation of her writing features.Cather,with the position of an observer by the window,observes the world with her own eyes and the world takes on a color of her own,which brings a strong and distinctive consciousness of subject in her selection of the material and her description of the perception.This consciousness of subject embodies her aesthetic standards and value conceptions.It is just owing to this consciousness of subject that the connotation of her novels is widened, which brings the reader "the morning perfume of garden".Chapter One,the introduction of this dissertation provides a general view of the critical responses to Willa Cather both at home and abroad.After briefly tracing the origin and historical development of literary impressionism,this paper gives a summary of the definition and features of literary impressionism and points out that the present confusion in defining the term is due to the failure to grasp the common core of impressionist painting and literary impressionism:both the painters and the writers observe the world with their subjective eyes and their works are the carriers of their life, passion,and their aesthetic standard as the subject,the representation of the germination of the subjective consciousness of the subject.The writers,after having absorbed the techniques of the impressionist painters,strive to present human perception,focusing their individual impression on a fleeting moment to provide the fragments of impression upon which the whole can be constructed.In a sense,the progress of mankind is not only promoted by human rational knowledge but is the result of the improvement of human perceptual idea.It can be said that the history of painting and even the history of all art is the history of observation which reflects the change of human visual sense and records clearly how the thoughtful artists consider and change the angle of the observation in the relation between the subject and object.In ancient Greece,art was considered an imitation of nature.During the Renaissance period,art was thought "a mirror" of nature and reality,and the value of copying and reproduction was highly emphasized.According to such principle of truth,the subject was forever hidden behind the artistic work.The traditional art before impressionism failed to transcend the reality,to observe the object in an abstract imaginative way and then again come back to the primary impression of the subject. How is it possible for man as the subject to transcend the object and possess the subjective consciousness which upholds man himself as the conscious presupposition of understanding and reflecting the world? This problem remained unsettled until the appearance of impressionism.Chapter Two explores the formation of subjective consciousness in color in Cather's novels.Color,as an external phenomenon,is perceived and felt with the birth of man.The process of knowing,pondering and understanding color,in a degree,reflects the development of the history of mankind's thinking in treating the objective world and knowing himself.The painters before impressionism believe that there is a "true" color that can be trusted as the existing color of the object,while the impressionist painters trust themselves,believing that the subject can pursue and master colors that change themselves with light.They run after the sense of color.This pursuit of sense has changed to be directed by the subject.Monet's Impression.Sunrise is not just an image of the dawn over a harbor, but an effect of the scene on the eye of a subject-observer.The painting expresses a perception.While less fully descriptive than the conventional paintings,it has its own validity-a truth to the perception of nature rather than an imitation of nature.Cather looks at light and color in a similar way.The exquisite,detailed and graphic descriptions of the environment are not only parts of her novels,they also serve independently as narrative sections of aesthetic conception.In those narrative sections her emotions come from and compose a state of fusion with the objects around,which provides an emotional background for the life and disposition of the characters.There is a specification of emotion in contrast and elaboration.The characters and the objects in the picturesque scene she describes become the carrier of aesthetic representation,with the emotion as its central tone.The picturesque world she describes becomes her ideal rather than the real world.This subjective emotion is not represented directly as what it is but is presented only after her feclings have been filtered through reason,which creates a dense colorful mood, atmosphere and appeal of a blending of feeling and setting.Thus,a kind of artistic glamour and aesthetic feeling like lyric prose is developed and the reader is led to a picturesque world of custom and scenery.Chapter Three analyzes the forming of the subjective consciousness in Cather's composition of novels,which is chiefly manifested from three aspects:dot,line and tableau.To the impressionist painters,composition means only one thing:the creation of subjective consciousness,which means to emphasize the individualized" subject through freely represented composition.The conception and composition of the picture have almost been formed in the subject,for what the impressionist painters emphasize is the fleeting impression with the aim of a free sightseeing tour for the subject.Cather also chooses fleeting impression as the essential element for the dot of composition, because,as she sees it,life is composed of impressions received at a moment by the mind and the illumination of each moment reveals the meaning of life.While O Pioneers! is composed of five parts,The Professor's House consists of the now forward and then backward inner activities of the protagonist.During such a process the episodes and impressions of the narrator's recollection are inserted;My Antonia and A Lost Lady are all like integrated pictures of a complete figure made of slices of impression from the linking of the narrator's episodes.The purpose of describing those impressions is to hold the fleeting beauty through the flowing perception of the subject so as to convey clearly and directly whatever the subject feels.Cather uses juxtaposition to compose the line of her work.In order to draw the special moment on the canvas,the impressionist painters fix the moment in time and translate space into time through the juxtaposition of different colors,the movement of the objects and the form of composition.The impressionist writers,in order to create the fleeting moment in space to display the impression,do something similar to transform time and space through the interspersion of the episodes and the fusion of the past and the present.Similarly Cather meticulously arranges the structure of the novel,breaks the natural flow of the traditional plot and inverts the time order to describe the impression left by various events.Through juxtaposition commonly used by impressionist painters, Cather,by weaving several scenes together or putting them in different sections, produces various instant strokes in her narration to convey the deep meaning through the series of the flowing impressions.By juxtaposing the past and the present,and connecting and contrasting various events,the novelist rearranges the static pictures and reduces the continuity of time,thus the use of juxtaposition fills the novels with an artistic spatial sense and a synchronic spatial result is achieved.The effect of juxtaposition is most obvious in the novel The Professor's House,in which the recollection and the present,the ideal and the despair are woven together,from which the protagonist St.Peter experiences his fate once again.This means of artistic expression breaks through the bonds of the traditional novel plot,and departs from the structural mode of realism which develops the theme from the plot.This kind of departure embodies the independence of the subject,to be exact,it indicates the forming of the subject.The composition of tableau means the modification of the spatial relationship between various dots and lines.Freedom is what the impressionist painters appreciate most.They develop their own characteristics by expressing the impression from the subject and this subject is distinct for its obvious individuality.In the famous picture Rehearsal on the Stage,Degas uses the overlooking angle to compose his scene,which, till then,had never been used in the other paintings.Overlooking,while it seems a problem of point of view here,actually reflects the self-directed performance of the subject.That is to say,it is not just a display of the moment of rehearsal,but an observation with a studious eye of the subject from an angle never noticed before.Here, the object exists to be observed and subjectified.This method of composition,in essence,highlights the feeling of the subject and embodies the independence of the subject.Likewise,Cather uses the inner point of view that can best demonstrate the subjective emotion.This inner point of view not only depicts objectively the outside world,but also pays more attention to the impression and perception to manifest the inner world of the subject.This inner world is the world of the subject.From such an angle,Cather shows a clear subjective position.And her choice of narrator confirms her focus on the impression of the character.This strategy achieves the narrative diversion from "plot" to "man",which also displays Cather's subjective consciousness to the full. My Antonia,A Lost Lady,and The Professor's House are all conducted in the third person restricted narrative point of view.This internalized point of view reveals naturally the subjective feeling,which brings a faint sentiment to the work.In the process of the increasing lyric atmosphere,the author's longing for the beautiful and her pursuit of the ideal is conveyed.Chapter Four probes the forming of the subjective consciousness in the way Cather chooses her material.The impressionist painters,using their mind and their subject to observe and perceive life,attempt to have their own reflection as the subject.That's why everything in their fields of vision is communicated with the minds and the scenery in their view is no longer a dull theme but life itself.Many of Manet's pictures take the life of the common people as his material and his own thinking as subject.Monet's painting Impression·Sunrise describes the common scene in life as a bright-colored picture which contains boundless beauty,for this sunrise has been translated by the subject,by the mind of Monet.That's why the scenery in his vision is a world of brilliance.Van Gogh's sunflowers are his living sunflowers because they exist not only as the expression of the thinking process of the painter as the subject but more as the representation of the subjective emotion and aesthetic concept.Therefore the picture is more like a song of life,a poem and the full bloom of the subject.Cather has the same strong subjective consciousness in choosing her material.Noticing the various abuses brought about by the rapid development of industrialization,she longs for simple pioneer life and takes a rather reserved attitude toward modern civilization.In trying to seek a spiritual beauty in the highly industrialized society,she turns her view to the life of the American western pioneers and their tradition,which is just like watching beautiful pictures through a window,in this way her ideal is conveyed.In many of her novels,the nostalgic passion for the pioneer spirit replaces the function of the traditional plot to achieve unity and becomes the bond of the whole work.It pieces together the scraps of memory to form charming scenic pictures,which have become the place of Cather's spiritual inhabitation.The selection of the material is vital to Cather's writing and also an exhibition of her persistence on subjectivity.Chapter Five tries to elucidate the understanding of literary impressionism the author of this paper has acquired.If realism can be compared to a mirror,modernism to a prism,then literary impressionism can be likened to a window.The object is represented through the point of view of the window as chosen by the subject rather than panoramically.During the process of such representation,the consciousness of the subject is forming,while the metaphor of prism implies the transformation of the object, and thus means the expansion of the consciousness of the subject."The Novel D(?)meubl(?)",published in 1922 represents Cather's mature reflection on the nature of art.It can be regarded as a summary of her literary ideal and theoretical basis,upon which Cather,as a novelist,develops a unique writing style.Cather concerns herself neither with the romantic twists in the plot nor with the realistic detailed description.Rather,she pays more attention to the selection from among a series of events.She believes it is much more difficult to decide among the various features of objects in displaying the nature of art than just to observe the object carefully and reproduce it exactly.She worships Balzac but at the same time she mutters disparaging remarks about his utmost literalness and calls him "interior decorator" and a writer of "romance of business":you have to sort out Balzac's meanings from a great dusty warehouse of misplaced vain matter-furniture,in a word.On the contrary, Cather highly appreciates Tolstoy in that his description of the material things is always so much a part of the emotions of the people that they are perfectly synthesized.Cather, on the one hand,affirms the realistic atmosphere created by realism represented by Howells,the founder of American realism,on the other hand,she is not satisfied with this kind of mechanical imitation of reality.She holds that a writer should have the imaginative power to manifest the emotional atmosphere so as to deepen and broaden the traditional realism.Those ideas display Cather's creative sense,which in the opinion of the writer of this dissertation,implies the forming of the consciousness of the subject.The conclusion summarizes the general aesthetic effect of the employment of literary impressionism in Cather's works.This effect helps to link artistically the inner feelings with the external surroundings and fuse the subject and the object together, which develops one obvious feature of her works:the simplification of the plot and the concentration on the spiritual realm of the character.While reading her novels,we can easily feel Cather's emotion between lines of the simple plot.Although the plot narrative still exists,it does not constitute the main content and structure but becomes the tool and back-up of expressing the subjective feelings.As a result,the style of Cather's novels comes close to that of narrative lyric prose.The style of the fusion of subjective emotion and objective reality avoids not only the passive tendency of romanticism caused by unpractical illusion and the pursuit of readers' interests,but also the pale moral lessons of some realist mechanical writings.The artistic fusion of imagination and emotional atmosphere,the implication of the moral adherence in aesthetic concept-such a combination of the flexible entertainment of romanticism and the instructive function of realism leads her works into a new stage of development and embodies the transition from tradition to modern.The picturesque scenery through the window painted by Cather's superb artistry reflects the theme of her pursuit of lofty spirit and noble heart,from which Cather finds her spiritual garden.What is more,the fresh air blown through the window provides an artistic moment,and the people living in the modern world today of sound and fury are able to cultivate their minds and purify their souls.
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