Willa Cather's Criticisms On Modern American Society On The Basis Of Her Three Novels

Willa Cather (1873-1947) is one of the greatest writers in the American literary history of the twentieth century. Before becoming a professional writer, she had worked as an editor and wrote short novels in her spare time. Then, she took Sarah Orne Jewett's suggestion to write novels about Nebraska life. In many of her Nebraska novels, Cather dealt with the pioneers' self-realization on the prairie. In these novels she highly praised the pioneer ideals.For her special concern on the pioneer ideals, many critics labeled her as an elegist of the pioneer age and claimed that she gave no record of America of her time and she was an escapist. Their criticisms are partial. In the decade after the First World War, as many of her contemporaries, she began to write novels to criticize modern society and the pioneers were not the protagonists of these novels. Willa Cather, as a writer of 1920s, she also felt the disillusionment with and disappointment of the modern society as her contemporaries did. One of Ours, A Lost Lady and The Professor's House, the novels that published in a few years after the First World War reflect her disillusionment with the modern society. The pioneers are no longer the protagonists in these novels. In these novels, she criticized the darkness of modern society and depicted the restless and sterile life in small Mid-West towns. This thesis is intended to further prove that Willa Cather is a critic of modern American society but not an escapist,...