Between the angle and the curve: Mapping gender, race, space, and identity in selected writings by Willa Cather and Toni Morrison

This study situates the fiction of Willa Cather and Toni Morrison within the American literary landscape. The dominant tradition in American fiction emphasizes the mobility and frequent desire for escape of central characters. Home is often longed for, but in an abstract way; the contrast between freedom and confinement links the home with the latter condition. Home as a site of oppression is a concept which Cather and Morrison challenge. Rejecting simplistic depictions of the home, they incorporate nurturing, but complicated domestic spaces into their fiction. They also create powerful natural settings. The two, seemingly contradictory spaces, are in fact complementary in their writings.;By focusing on seven novels from each author, an understanding of their range of responses to mainstream practices of dividing the landscape into gendered spaces is attained. The primary source of analysis is the fiction, but theories from various critical approaches---geography, psychology, architecture, ecofeminism, social anthropology, and philosophy---are utilized. Issues of identity, particularly in terms of gender and race, are central concerns in the close textual analysis. The specific areas of interest in the exploration are the treatment of humanmade and naturally occurring shelters, representations of landscapes (physical and social settings), gendered landscapes, and the presentation of home with its emphasis on connection.;Cather and Morrison resist categorization. Fluidity and interconnectedness rather than rigidity and contradiction dominate in their representations of space. Domestic space is naturalized; natural space is domesticated. Ranging between accommodation, covert undermining, and overt rejection, Cather and Morrison blur spatial boundaries. Geography and gender roles are malleable in the novels in this study. A hybrid geography capable of connecting immensity and intimacy, one which incorporates rather than excludes, emerges in the fiction of Cather and Morrison.