Quest For Identity: Female Initiation In Willa Cather's My Antonia

Willa Cather, one of the most distinguished American writers in the first half part of the twentieth century, establishes her reputation largely on her novels about immigrants on Nebraska prairie. The women pioneers she creates in her works leave an everlasting image in American literary history. Among the Nebraska novels, My Antonia was the one she cares most and the most beloved story for the part of readers. In My Antonia Cather portrays several female characters that are consistent with the fight against male supremacy in the patriarchal society and struggling for their individual identity. Actually the novel is a song of female initiation.Since its publication the novel has been interpreted elaborately by critics from the perspectives of history, race, feminism, narrative techniques, writing style and ecocriticism. So far few have analyzed the story from the perspective of initiation story. Initiation story, a splendid pearl in literature, mainly deals with the psychological process of the youth from innocence into maturity. Most writers of different generations are concerned with the growth of youth.This thesis tries to study the novel as a Bildungsroman and mainly focus on the initiation process of female characters'quest for identity. As Cather blends so many life experiences in the story that tracing the initiation process of female characters in My Antonia could help us to understand better the author's pursuit of identity all her life and show us the tough process of women's asking for equality and quest for identity.This thesis will be divided into five parts. The first part presents a brief introduction tc the author, the work, the current research status and the reasons of studying the novel from the perspective of Bildungsroman. Chapter one mainly introduces female initiation story and Cather's life experiences and their reappearance in My Antonia. Chapter two focuses on depicting the initiation process of these female characters in the novel. Chapter three analyzes these women's identity ahieved through self-fulfillment in the fields they really belong to. Conclusion restates the main idea of the thesis. Furthermore, it points out that the study of these female characters'special initiation processes can serve as a window through which we can see and then study the modern female initiation stories in the male-dominated world.