A Gender Study Of Willa Cather's The Song Of The Lark And A Lost Lady

Adopting a gender approach, this thesis examines Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark (1915) and A Lost Lady (1923). In analyzing these two novels, the thesis explores how gender structure operates in shaping two female protagonists and how their consciousness of and their reactions to the gender structure affect their fate.The thesis consists of three chapters with an introduction and a conclusion. Chapter One centers on the concept of gender as a social institution and the connection between gender and Cather's The Song of the Lark and A Lost Lady. Chapter Two focuses upon the male characters in the two novels and examines how they work together to keep the female protagonists from realizing their identities. Chapter Three studies the two female protagonists and illustrates how their different self-orientations have impact on their self-development.The thesis concludes that the female protagonists'different degrees of consciousness of and their corresponding acts of subversion of the unbalanced gender structure contribute to their different degrees of self-realization.