Social construction in the Midwest fiction of Willa Cather, Wright Morris and William H. Gass

Willa Cather, Wright Morris and William H. Gass, using similar settings and cultural myths, establish differing constructions of the Midwest, in part because their work was written within different social contexts and with different ideological investments. Their permissive narratives struggle to cover over contradictory desires as these writers confront the issues of violence and failure, gender, class and ethnicity.; Their critical writing defines the relationship between their fictional worlds and the world they model. Those models depend on two social contexts, the setting of the fiction and of the authors. The models are shaped by the the myths of the garden and the frontier, which attempt to deny the problem of failure in the American dream. Yet violence and drought call into question the dominant ideologies that inform these myths.; Cather's construction of gender is shaped by two conflicts of her time: patriarchal verses feminist values and culture verses nature. Her major female characters challenge traditional gender definitions, yet her minor characters undermine that challenge in their acceptance of Victorian-American values. Morris's pioneer women also contrast with Cather's major figures. Rather than idealizing them, he presents their struggle to create order under frontier conditions. His novel Plains Song, subtitled For Women's Voices, contrasts with the absence of women's voices in Gass's metafiction.; Differing presentations of class also separate these writers. Cather attempts to hide differences as she describes lower-class immigrants from an idealized and condescending upper-class perspective. Morris confronts the numbing quality of the pervasive middle class. His characters may rebel, but they cannot create a viable alternative.; Western American historiography suggests parallels for determining these writers' attitudes toward western myths. Cather shares Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier ideals, Morris has similarities with revisionists such as Patricia Limerick, and Gass extends their work by deconstructing the myths.; In their widely-varying, socially-constructed interpretations of similar materials, these writers have created versions of a "useable past" in their Midwest fiction that reflect the conflicts and hopes of their times.