Submergence And Emergence In My (?)ntonia

Willa Cather,one of the most prominent twentieth-century American women novelists,employs extensively the device of the submergence-emergence motif in one of her representative novels,My Antonia.In this thesis I set out to argue that in the novel animals,plants and even some inanimate objects-like the plough-live, grow and operate in natural cycles of submergence and emergence,mostly for the purpose of subsequent growth and maturity,while the author does not fail to note certain species that do not quite fit into this harmony,like the rattlesnake.On another level the characters herein try to emerge from their submergence in various confines, limitations and clouds of darkness.For humans,the novel sets submergence and emergence as dichotomies where mostly they advance from the state of undesirable submergence into the desired state of emergence,freedom,growth and maturity,while a certain few fall from the normal state of emergence into tragic submergence for their own misdeeds.There are similarities and parallels between the natural and human world,where certain forms of submergence and emergence correspond to and illuminate each other.Cather judiciously employs this device of submergence and emergence throughout her novel to shape her characters,plots and narrative as a whole into exactly what she wants them to be,and to foreground and underscore her themes of change,difference,coming of age,and memory and reminiscence,while she herself,by the uses of this device,gains her own emergence to a certain extent from the confines of social and literary traditions and conventions.