Spiritual Ecology Study Of Cather’s Works

Willa Cather (1873-1947) was the first woman-writer in the history of United States to depict frontier time and the stories of immigrants. She was one of the most outstanding American novelists in the 20th century. As a defender of spiritual beauty, Willa Cather depicted the symptoms of spiritual imbalance of all levels of society from the rich to the poor in her novels. Under the background that the spiritual ecology crisis became more and more serious in our modern society, the spiritual ecological literary value of her novels became a hot topic in academic circle. This paper adopted the theory of spiritual ecology of Lu Shuyuan to analyze and interpret Willa Cather’s works and her ideas of spiritual ecology comprehensively from the angle of human and nature, human and society, as well as human and culture. It focused on Cather’s four important works and her viewpoints of spiritual ecology. First, she called for people to praise nature, and to revere nature. She advocated people’s constructing a harmonious and united relationship between the spiritual body and the surrounding environment; secondly, she suggested modern people resist the temptation of modern consumerist society. Cather believed that people should abandon the materialistic value and reconstruct a spiritual homeland of human beings in nature. Third, she believed that faith and traditional civilization had great effect on treating human’s mental imbalance. She suggested we should respect and tolerate the difference between different countries and nationalities.In summery, this thesis attempted to show Willa Cather’s consciousness of modern spiritual ecology.