The Complex Of Love Tragedies In Willa Cather's Two Major Novels

When she died, her reputation was firmly established as one of the most significant American novelists, and during the succeeding decades her stature has continued to grow. It is Willa Cather, the late Victorian female writer, depicting pioneering adventures and spirits. No American writer can be more certain than she to capture ultimately the admiration of posterity. Willa Cather owns high reputation in the American literature, but because she chooses not to be written by other critics about her biography, she destroys lots of her letters and materials expressing her own thoughts. Thus, it becomes pretty difficult for people to have an insight into her personal life and psychological world, especially when a person intends to write about her world of love stories.Recent criticism has recognized that her fictions with their fluid structure, self-consciousness about writing, their celebration of storytelling and point of view are a major work of Modernism. For example, My Antonia - its inventiveness now seems all the more adventurous for having been published before Ulysses, The Great Gatsby, To the Lighthouse, and The Sound and the Fury. Willa Cather's place in American literature was established with her first Nebraska novel, O Pioneers!, which was also thefirst novel she liked to think of as her own, published in 1913, which was followed by her most famous pioneer novel, My Antonia, in 1918.Based on the dramatic social change and other factors, unfortunately, Willa Cather's love stories are often tragic and lacking in romance. Cather pointed out the tragic crisis hidden behind the prosperity, deep in human beings' hearts. Cather wrote in her Preface to the 1932 English edition of The Song of the Lark1 that "success is never so interesting, as struggle." The main characters not only struggle with their material production, but also with their love problems. Through these struggles, they move closer and closer to maturity. Thus, analyzing the complex of love tragedies in Cather's fictions has its positive function.In this paper, I'm going to discuss the different reasons which result in the tragedies, and apply those reasons to each pair of lovers or couples respectively.