Aesthetic and environmentalist organicism in Willa Cather's 'Death Comes for the Archbishop' and 'Shadows on the Rock'

Willa Cather's art--although never labeled as 'organicist' by herself--is based on an organic concept of nature and manifests the ideas of organicism both from an aesthetic and an environmentalist perspective. Similar to the organicist poet-philosophers such as Goethe, Coleridge, or Emerson before her. Cather believed that nature consists of both matter and spirit, not in a dualistic, but in a polar relation to each other. Whereas new, feminist, and cultural criticism on Cather has tended to regard Cather's organicist allegiance to both matter and mind, or nature and culture as dualistic, eco-critical scholarship on her work reveals that these oppositions are clearly rooted in Cather's polar thinking.; This study shows that Cather's novels Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock are neither exclusively romanticist nor realist works of art but a seamless blend of both. The author creates in them an organicist bond between the romantic and modern concepts of nature and consciousness. Like her contemporary, Frank Lloyd Wright, the American architect in his buildings, so Cather, the novelist, was able to make modernism and organicism compatible in her literature.; The different chapters of this study analyze Cather's aesthetic and environmentalist organicism by selecting a number of interdisciplinary topics. Chapter one traces Cather's life from the perspective of her ecological consciousness. Chapter two shows how organicism originating in Romanticism was decisive for Cather's concept of art. Chapter three employs Frank Lloyd Wright's theory of organic architecture to analyze and reveal as characteristically organic Cather's dramatization of the relationship between the southwestern buildings, the land, and its people in Death Crones of the Archbishop . Chapter four shows that Frederic E. Clements' organicist theory of plant communities is an apt model for the biotic relationship Cather created between the Canadian climate and the protagonist Cecile in Shadows on the Rock. Chapter five finally illustrates how Cather's organicist philosophy of nature quite naturally led her to an organicist aesthetics of food in Shadows on the Rock.