An Analysis Of Androgynous Consciousness In My (?)ntonia

Humankind has been apprehending the world with androgynous vision ever since its existence. In the archaic mythologies, the primary gods are all androgynous, breeding myriad things and supervising them concurrently. However, with the development of material civilization, androgynous consciousness dribbles away. Afterwards, the early matriarchal society with worship of reproduction and the patriarchal society of modern times relying on productivity appear successively and facilitate disparate gender values. Willa Cather, born in the end of nineteenth century, detecting that the orthodox gender value is detrimental to the configuration of pleasing and promising human relations, approaches the great sense of androgynous consciousness anew by memorizing the pioneers’lives in Nebraska Prairie. Over these years, Cather’s idea of androgyny has not garnered sufficient academic attention. Therefore, this thesis aims to examine how Cather expounds on her advocation for androgynous consciousness.This thesis consists of five parts. The Introduction begins with an discussion on Willa Cather and My Antonia, and then outlines the general development of androgyny serving as the theoretical background for this research and summarizes the literature review on My Antonia both at home and abroad. The main body is divided into three chapters. Chapter One elucidates that the severe natural environment and conservative social canon result in the absence of androgynous consciousness, which brings about constant conflicts between the sexes. The first part of Chapter Two discusses the feasibility of the presence of androgynous consciousness on the basis of its internal physiological foundation and external social condition. Then the second part excavates the underlying androgynous consciousness in the mind of such characters as Antonia, Lena, Jim, and so on by analyzing their breakthroughs in gender identity, job restriction and self-actualization, and indicates that androgynous consciousness plays a significant role in individuals’ self-perfection. Chapter Three reviews the positive significance of androgynous consciousness in establishing harmonious interpersonal relations. The first part elucidates that androgynous consciousness is beneficial to build harmonious relations between the sexes through the pleasing marriage between Antonia and Anton Cuzak. The second part reveals how the individuals with androgynous consciousness establish harmonious relations with the same sex after demonstrating the strong friendship between Peter and Pavel, and between Lena and Tiny.This thesis concludes that, as a kind of more refined gender value, androgynous consciousness has vast importance to individual’s gender identity and the building of harmonious interpersonal relationships.