Psychological Androgyny: A New Perspective To Study Willa Cather

As a great writer in American literature in the early 20th century, Willa Cather has been the subject of critical studies for a long time. Her great literary accomplishment wins her a high reputation, and she is especially known for her Midwest novels concerning frontiers from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. In her works, Cather successfully created quite a few impressive characters with different personalities from the traditional sex-role identity assigned to men and women. Critics have expressed various opinions on the sex-role identity of the author herself and her characters. Their main argumentation is that Cather and her characters suffer from sexual ambiguity. This thesis has applied psychological androgyny, one of the most important psychological concepts in the last century to the analysis of the author and her characters, especially the three female protagonists in Cather's three novels O Pioneer!, My Antonia and The Song of the Lark. From the perspective of psychological androgyny, this thesis discusses Cather's life, her personality and her desire to fight off social prejudices against women at that time and free themselves from the household. She quests for the integrality of masculinity and femininity in women so that they can also fulfill a sense of wholeness. Elaborate next are Cather's three protagonists in the Midwest --- Alexandra Bergson, Antonia Shimerda and Thea Kronborg who incarnate Cather's ideal of psychological androgyny and finally achieve self-fulfillment. The conclusion is that Willa Cather and her characters suffer no sexual ambiguity. Instead, they try to break the barrier built between the two sexes, realize self-value and pursue the harmonious co-existence of both male and female characteristics, the natural state for human beings. And their destination is the realization of self-value.