Author Date

2024-03-13

Degree Name

BA

Department

English

College

Humanities

Defense Date

2024-03-04

Publication Date

2024-03-13

First Faculty Advisor

Kristin Matthews

First Faculty Reader

Dennis Cutchins

Honors Coordinator

Aaron Eastley

Keywords

Willa Cather, Women’s Lit, Western, American Literature, Immigration

Abstract

This thesis analyzes Willa Cather’s Great Plains Trilogy—O, Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918)—in the context of the immigration boom of the early 1900s and the myth of an “American Eden.” This concept was born of cultural portrayals of the West as dominated by white, male pioneers who subdued the landscape, but Cather’s novels, centered around immigrant families, significantly revise this popular myth. Nativists saw the West as the source of American virtues such as democracy and diligence and viewed sending immigrants West as an essential tool for “Americanization,” the process by which immigrants could work themselves into respectability. However, social and gender constraints in Cather’s novels show this promise of acceptance to be a fiction. Her novels also condemn immigrants who buy into the American commercial mindset and overvalue profit in an effort to fit into their new society. In response to these traditional ideas of Americanization and consumerism, she holds up the efforts of her immigrant heroines who create “new Edens” based on collaboration and harmony and ultimately find both success and fulfillment. In doing so, she offers a new, inclusive view of American identity that redefines the American project of creating one people out of many.

Download

Share

COinS