Spirit In Pursuit Of Ideal In The Wilderness--An Attempt To Analyze Pioneer Fiction By Willa Cather

Willa Cather (1873－1947)is one of the famous women writers in American modern literary history. She is the first woman writer deeply involved in the description of the pioneers' spirit in cultivating the vast prairie of the middle-west. Her fiction is unique in its powerful representation of the setting and the characters and rich in its language and imagery. Her fiction recently meets with so much recognition that she is seen as one of the most outstanding American novelists of the 20th century, and some critics even remark that she is the greatest woman writers ever since the foundation of the United States of America. Maxwell Geismar, famous American literary critic said she is an "Agrarian in the industrial society" and a "defender of the spirit beauty in the increasing materialization". O PIONEERS! and MY ANTONIA are two of her major pioneer novels and also her representative works. These novels express her deep love for the land and her distaste for the materialism and conformism of modern life. They concentratively embody Cather's spiritual pursuit---a pursuit in the western wilderness for an ideal life and spiritual beauty that are different from what lies in reality, an everlasting spiritual power and a spirit of beauty.Willa Cather is an admirer for the nature and the most harmonious and free state represented by the nature is the ideal spiritual world Cather has been pursuing after. Therefore, the author automatically presents a strong tendency of coming back to the nature, but this tendency, quite different from before, is incarnated in the frontier women. In O PIONEERS! and MY ANTONIA, she creates two frontier women--- Alexandra Bergson and a daughter of Swedish immigrant farmers, and Antonia Shimerda, a beautiful immigrant girl from Bohemia. They become the author's spiritual spokeswomen.In O PIONEERS! and MY ANTONIA, Willa Cather breaks the traditional female literary figure and shakes off the shape of Eve, a woman figure that is always clinging to Adam in the Garden of Eden. Her heroines are independent, free and with charming personality, and with the spiritual beauty of the immigrant features---pioneering, enterprising, self-reliant, fortitudinous, independent and optimistic. At the same time, with the freedom and equality endowed with by the nature and land these women are inspired to look at themselves, the world and every conflict with a brand new look. In O PIONEERS! and MY ANTONIA, the author prominently shapes two frontier women --- Alexandra Bergson, a daughter of Swedish immigrant farmers, and Antonia Shimerda, a beautiful immigrant girl from Bohemia. They had the courage and vision to face all obstacles in their difficult lives. They were struggling in the wilderness, pursuing for the freedom and equality which make them enthusiastic and clinging to life. They show great devotion to the land and intimate contact with the nature, finally get inosculated with the land. They thus get to a state of utmost freedom and harmony longed for inside Cather's ideal world.Traditionally, pioneer life is often more closely related to men as is often the case before. It shows the virile strength and pioneering spirit. But Cather's works commemorate important aspects of the American experience outside the literary mainstream --- pioneering, the establishment of religion, and women's independent lives and natural beauty. Therefore, in her pioneer novels Cather automatically presents this strong tendency of going back to the nature, and this tendency can clearly be seen on her characters --- women pioneers rather than on men. As a woman writer, Cather's sense of form is tenuous, depending largely on the preconscious shape of passion rather than conscious architectural design. The passion that shapes her best works is for the land --- the Nebraska prairies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries --- and for the women who revered the land and struggled to transform it from the wild grassland into the most fertile grain-producing region of the world. In O PIONEERS! and...