| A comprehensive rereading of Willa Cather's modernism shows a novelist in pursuit of life affirming values. Cather's concerns with gender, nature, and spirituality are illumined by the theoretical insights of contemporary feminist theologians such as Carol Christ, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, and Rosemary Radford Ruether. Cather validates women's mystical experiences, includes women in the quest paradigm, and asserts the dignity of nature. Like the romantics she imagines nature as a locus of possible transcendence, but she deplores the notion of nature as a "commodity." Her veneration of nature duplicates her elevation of women, her contention that women, as well as men, can be heroes and participate in a spiritual life.; Cather experiments with personal myth and emphasizes storytelling as an affirmative act. Archetypal tales of men and women of heroic vision, who carved new paths for others to follow, inspire those who remember their stories. As a testament to the strength of the human spirit, the defeats of those who failed to realize their dreams are not futile, for in Cather's world view, nothing is ever lost. Even death promises renewal, and memories of those who are gone nourish their survivors. Though she shares the angst of her fellow modernists for a world she said "broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts," and her later works are imbued with darkness, she continues to search for and present alternatives to modernist despair.; To concentrate primarily on the novels that have not attracted the most critical notice, focal chapters examine O Pioneers!, Song of the Lark, One of Ours, The Professor's House, Shadows on the Rock, and Sapphira and the Slave Girl; ancillary sections discuss My Antonia, A Lost Lady, My Mortal Enemy, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and Lucy Gayheart. |
