The Road Is All

It is generally acknowledged that Cather is a strong fonder of "past." In her novels, the "past" is always something old, lost beauty and is explored with great affections, while the present is always absent and ignored. Thus, for years, she has been read through a critical lens either as a nostalgist or antiquarian. This thesis, however, by reading her four frontier novels, O'Pioneer! , MyAntonia, A Lost Lady, and Death Comes for the Archbishop as a saga of migration, finds out a progressive Cather rather than a conservative escapist as many critics have asserted.This thesis falls into five parts. The first chapter is the beginning of the thesis. It discusses Cather's marginalized and controversial literary life in the American literary canon. Then it introduces the meaning of migration, and explores the relationship between Cather's literary life and American migration. Finally, it briefly explains why we read her four books of "frontier" as a saga of migration.The second chapter discusses the outward forms of the physical migration. Then it studies the reasons and motives behind Cather's migrants. There are various forms of migration: international as emigration and immigration, internal as the seasonal and daily. In most cases, the migrants are restless, energetic people who migrate voluntarily. However, as a conscientious writer with acute observation, Cather also writes the forced, miserable migrations for political and economic reasons.Migration does not just mean a physical migration, with the spatial changes, people's world of beliefs and their way of doing things change accordingly, and that will lead to their psychic and cultural migration. Thus, the third chapter focuses on the psychic migration explored in the saga. When uprooted, people usually have two kinds of feelings: the negative feelings such as anxiety, insecurity, increased isolation, loneliness, even despair; the positive feelings such as the courage to do what others dare not to do, the restless desire for seeking value elsewhere. Usually, the negative feelings cause one to look back and the positive feelings encourage one to look forward. In her saga, each migrant comes to a crossroad. For instance, Alexandra and Carl's psychic migration between rootedness and uprootedness, Jim Burden and Mr Shimerda's psychic migration between home and homeless, Niel's psychic migration between staying and going, and La Tour, Valliant's psychic migration between thepast and the present. From these spiritual crossings, Cather fairly celebrates that the "future" is our psychic destination, and the past can only be a home where we draw strength and take recess. In all, for the people "on road," home is where our heart goes.The fourth chapter studies the cultural migration of Cather's migrants. With the cultural conflicts they meet for their spatial changes, there are usually three kinds of reactions for the migrants in a world strange to them: blending, assimilation and suspending. But the process of cultural assimilation, blending, and suspending is very complex, sometimes it intertwines and interacts. From Alexandra and Antonia's Swedenized and Bohemianized American life, Cather suggests that cultural blending shall be an ideal way for migrants. It usually brings peace and harmony to their life. Form the assimilation of Jim and Niel to new culture, Cather implies that sometimes cultural assimilation is a painful experience to migrants, because they are bound to lose much culture of their own. Nevertheless, they will gain more by accepting the new and adapting to it. Of course, the cultural suspending mainly brings pain and defeats to her migrants. La Tour and Vaillant, as the missionaries from the highly civilized French culture to a half primitive and half civilized New-Mexico, witness and experience the cultural migration more completely and acutely.The last chapter discusses a "Catherian logic" of the real migrants and the quasi-migrants. That is, the past will never overpower the destination, and migration is not a choice but a condition of being. If the migrants stick to a single place or a single idea when things have changed, they are doomed to fail, and sometimes it will be a matter of life and death to them. Nevertheless, for those real migrants, they shall prosper for their positive psychic and cultural migration.By focusing on the past "migration" in Cather's four representative novels, we find out that her literary acumen is not backward and nostalgic, on the contrary, the incessantly quest for value of her migrants will still be meaningful for all those who in the modern world somehow uproot.