Willa Cather's Southern Complex In My Antonia

Willa Cather, a famous American woman writer, has long been regarded as a novelist of prairies and the American West. And her novel My Antonia has been categorized as a frontier novel due to its obvious Western setting and its stories about pioneers who settled the American West. Recent studies have suggested this novel's intricate connection with the South, and have revealed its Southern subtext. Yet they have not explored Cather's complex feelings about the South and solved the problem of why a Southern subtext is embedded in the text of My Antonia, a novel about the American West. This thesis is intended to explore Cather's complex feelings about the South through a Jungian psychoanalytic analysis of the novel. It argues that a Southern subtext is embedded in the novel because of Cather's Southern complex. With the help of Jung' methodology of the Word Association Test, this thesis has found out four stimulus words (old world, cavalier, home and storytelling) and discovered the existence of Cather's Southern complex by looking for traces of her responses to these stimulus words. With references to some Cather critics, it has revealed the emotions that underlie her Southern complex and sorted out a line of these emotions: a deep love of the South-a sense of loss at leaving the South-a doubt about Southern values-a sense of resistance against Southern traditions-a longing for a return to the South. It has also explored the causes of her Southern complex and found out that it is caused both by her personal experiences and by the influence of the Southern home archetype. Having spent nine happy childhood years at her comfortable Virginia home and influenced by the home archetype buried in her unconscious, Cather was endowed with a strong Southern complex. Although she moved with her family to the West at the age of nine, went alone to Pittsburg and New York, and wrote a lot of works about the Western prairie, her Southern complex was alwaysin her mind and influenced her literary creation. This explains why a Southern subtext is embedded in the text of My Antonia and why she uses Southern setting and themes for her last novel Sapphira and the Slave Girl and returned spiritually to her beloved Southern home at the end of her literary career. I hope that this paper will help the readers of My Antonia to understand Cather as a Southerner and her novel My Antonia from a new perspective. When we read her novels, we should always keep in mind that she has a Southern complex. Otherwise it will be very difficult for us to understand her works.