A Study Of Willa Cather's Persistent Pursuit Of Androgyny As Reflected By Her Novel O Pioneers!

Willa Cather is one of the most famous and prolific women writers in the American literary history in the first half of the 20th century. She is famous for her excellent portrayal of the life on the Mid-western American frontier. She has highly praised the pioneering spirit by describing the lives of the immigrants and has successfully created many outstanding and impressive women images that are greatly different from the weak and dependent women characters in certain traditional literary works. Cather has succeeded in searching for her identity both as a writer and as a woman owing to her dedication to art and her aspiration for freedom. Both her life experiences and her works have displayed her desire to fight off the social prejudices against women and free women themselves from the household. In my opinion, instead of an escapist from reality as some critics believe, Cather is brave enough to face the cruel social reality and revolts against patriarchy actively in her own way.In O Pioneers!, one of her most famous novels, Cather has successfully created an impressive androgynous female character Alexandra whose personality is different from that of the traditional women. Although this novel depicts the pioneers'hard life on the great prairie in Cather's time, it profoundly reflects the women's strong dissatisfaction with the traditional social position and roles assigned to them in the patriarchal society. Besides, Cather has displayed her feminist ideas through depicting how the woman pioneer Alexandra faces the reality and establishes her identity. Alexandra's struggle to survive on the Mid-western American frontier, and her fortitude and independence can reflect Cather's positive attitude towards the women's life in her time. Meanwhile, Cather has also displayed the repression and discrimination that the women had suffered. She has deconstructed the traditional opposition between men and women and created the androgynous image of Alexandra, indicating that in the patriarchal society, to be androgynous is one of the best ways for the women to face the reality and achieve self-fulfillment. Cather's creation of the androgynous image is a brave challenge to the patriarchal social structure in her time. By taking the social background of Cather's time into consideration and from the perspective of androgyny, I will give a detailed analysis of both the unconventional androgynous female protagonist Alexandra in O Pioneers! and Cather's persistent pursuit of androgyny. By examining Alexandra's strategies to cope with the predicaments in a male-supremacist society, I find out that Cather is not an escapist from reality or an elegist of the pioneer age, but an acute observer of her time and an active participant in revolting against patriarchy, and in Cather's opinion, it is important to pursue the harmonious co-existence between men and women so as to establish an equal relationship. Her feminist ideas as reflected in O Pioneers! make a great contribution to modern American feminist literature.