A Study Of Willa Cather’s Homeland Writing

The American writer Willa Cather was always in the migration all her life, "on the road" has been the normal living condition for her. However, the critics have rarely noted the desire to go back home that was hidden behind the writer’s experiences of migration. From the perspective of Cather, the homeland meant the continuity of spiritual traditions, which always attracted her to return to Nebraska and the pre-industrial ideal places to find the home of her soul in this materialistic world. Cather’s concern on the homeland has originated from the experience of migrating to the Nebraska in her early life, the feeling of dislocation resulted from the loss of homeland has last a lifetime and led her to continually seek balance between migration and homecoming. In addition, Nebraska was the source of the writer’s creation, Cather has established the value of pioneer tradition and the meaning of homeland through her association with those immigrant women. On the other hand, under the influence of anthropology and archaeology in the early 20th century, Cather started paying more attention to the value of local traditional culture. Traveling from the southwest of America to Quebec of Canada, Cather has accumulated rich cultural experience, which made her have a broader view and therefore Nebraska was not the only homeland.In Cather’s novels, the characters have experienced the process of creating, losing and in the end pursuing the homeland:On the background of Nebraska, Cather’s early novels recalled the stories of the previous immigrant generations on this virgin land, through which the heroines inherited the adventurous and enterprising spirit to create their own homeland by integrating with the land and raising the life; In the 1920s, the invasion of machine into garden was increasingly apparent, the characters in Cather’s novels have realized the loss of western pioneer tradition and could not help in the whirlpool of materialism and consumerism. In the novels of this period, the loss of homeland has been the common theme; When the world has broken into two, Cather chose to review the pre-industrial spiritual traditions including Catholic faith, Indian culture and traditional French civilization, which have provided a stable and ordered feeling like home in the late novels.It is worth noting that Cather’s novels were characteristic in the artistic forms, including the memory vision, symbolic images and juxtaposed techniques. When the homeland has lost, the characters had to reproduce the past through the recollection and get the feeling of spiritual belonging in the process of recognizing themselves; In addition, there were many symbolic images in Cather’s novels, which were not only the external manifestations of home but the symbols of spiritual tradition and the objects of homeland consciousness; Last but not least, the usage of juxtaposed techniques made Cather’s novels have multiple meanings. Compared to modern materialistic society, the pre-industrial world has always been the writer’s ideal homeland.