Modernity In The Professor’s House

Willa Cather’s special enchantment with the American Southwest and the Nebraska prairie has made her a regional writer. Although she lived through the first half of the twentieth century, most of her works are about the frontier life and early European immigrants of the previous century. Her nostalgia is often read by critics as escapism from or indifference to her contemporary era. However, The Professor’s House, published in1925, proves to be her first novel of a totally different subject matter and innovative structure. In The Professor’s House, the vast Nebraska prairie and tranquil pastoral life are replaced by a modern Mid-Western city near Lake Michigan and the modern life overcrowded with money, dullness and mediocrity. The protagonist Professor St. Peter is an intellectual and cosmopolitan whose values conflict with his surrounding environment. After the completion of his history works, he indulges himself more and more in his memory of the past. The professor’s alienation grows intense and nearly leads him to suicide in the end.This thesis explores Willa Cather’s engagement with her era in The Professor’s House based on an analysis of aesthetic and literary modernity. Modernity characterized by instrumental rationality promotes the development of modern cities and bureaucracies, but also conflicts with the individual’s value rationality, and pours the modern man in a maelstrom of disunity, which is the manifestation of modernity crisis. Cather’s aesthetic modernity is manifested in her reflection on modernity and the concern for the existence and emotional state of the modern man living in a world of chaos and change. Furthermore, this novel shows a strong sense of literary modernity as Cather chooses to represent the protagonist’s spiritual state by adopting modernistic writing techniques such as a fractured structure, juxtaposition and shifts in narrative perspectives.