Everyday Life And Fin De Siècle Literary Imagination In Willa Cather's Major Works

As one of the most distinguished American writers,Willa Cather(1873-1947)has been read against a broad range of critical,cultural,and literary contexts.While the dominant literary trend in Cather scholarship in the past decade centered on her involvement with contemporary American culture,it is an undeniable truth that the real greatness of Cather lies in her ability to absorb the essence of various literary traditions and to come up with an aesthetics of her own.Throughout her literary career,Cather experiments continuously with narrative forms.Although she keeps re-contextualizing every new work,she maintains a keen interest in everyday life activities like living(in the neighborhood),cooking and storytelling.This dissertation attempts to explore Cather 's representation of the practice of everyday life in her major works.This study of Cather's writings on everyday life provide an appropriate paradigm for the understanding of her works,for it not only embodies nearly all the major interest of Cather scholars both at home and abroad,but also helps to throw new lights on Cather's thematic concerns and artistic pursuit throughout her literary career.In other words,everyday life serves as a prism through which readers get to know how Cather's aesthetics is intertwined with her understanding of place,femininity and modernity.To understand Cather's preoccupation with everyday life depiction,her particular status as a writer of transition,or to put it another way,her engagement with the literary imagination of fin de Siècle is a decisive element in her artistic development as a writer of everyday life.A literature review of Cather's interaction with the major literary movements of fin de Siècle helps to show the bearing of the writer's historical moment on her writing practice.Yet to have a comprehensive and thorough understanding of the expression of her everyday life aesthetics,a better theoretical framework is needed for such an interpretation.Michel De Certeau's elaboration on the relationship between"storytelling" and everyday life,Pierre Mayol's discussion of the importance of "the neighborhood" as a spatial parameter for the understanding of the ongoing rhythm of everyday life as well as Luce Giard's interpretation of both the gendered and the racial evocations of "doing-cooking" provide the theoretical framework for this dissertation.The importance of the neighborhood to the creation of Cather's art cannot be overemphasized,given that six of her fictional villages are based on her childhood hometown,Red Cloud,Nebraska.Cather's fascination with the goings on of the everyday life in the neighborhood manifests itself in the following aspects:the daily routine of one's domestic life as a reflection of the power relationships at work in one individual family;the dwellings arranged in a specific landscape as an embodiment of the relationships among different social classes and ethical groups;the ruins of the Canyons of the Indians as a register of past experience and their impact on characters who live or tour around the place.Cather's depiction of doing-cooking is an expression of her thematic concerns about the relationship between art and gender throughout her literary career.Doing-cooking is traditionally held as the sphere of women and is usually relegated to a matter of little importance.In some of her works,Cather elevates cooking to the status of art,hence saving innumerable housewives from anonymity.In others,such as The Professor's House and One of Ours,she creates female characters who are determined to liberate themselves from the kitchen and male figures who are quite devoted to cooking,thus subverting traditional concepts of the relationship between gender and cooking.The call of the past feels strong in Cather's delineation of food in her major works.Cather's characters follow strictly their own particular ways of cooking so as to make distinctions between their own culture and the culture of others'.Two examples of this theme are the mutual mistrust shared between Mrs.Burden and Mrs.Shimerda in My Antonia and the superiority Cecile feels over the Harnois in Shadows on the Rock.Cather's fiction is alive with the pulse of oral narrative,which is evident not only in her preference for episodic stories over plot-driven details,but also in her narrative style of inserting stories within stories.Storytelling is both the narrative style and subject matter of Death Comes for the Archbishop.By putting before the readers the(actual,imagined or partly imagined)life of Father Latour and all those related to him,Cather offers us "truth" instead of "facts" in this novel.As for Cather's inset stories,they may originate from diverse sources and cover a wide range of genres,yet one common attribute shares among these stories is that they involve those dark sides of human experience,such as "pain," "horror," and "death".A textual analysis of Cather's representation of the geographical,the gendered and the artistic aspects of the practice of everyday life aims to reveal the complexity of Cather 's aesthetics.Cather 's aesthetics of everyday life is deeply rooted in daily life,yet reaches far beyond one's usual life experiences.Everyday life details such as the practice of neighborhood and cooking do not simply document and illustrate what are explicitly stated;rather,one can extrapolate their political ramifications.In prioritizing and romanticizing the hard facts of everyday life in her major works,Cather makes art out of everyday life experiences.