An Organicist Reading Of Willa Cather’s Works

Willa Cather seemed to be quite different in the niche of modern classic writers.She seemed to be very traditional,writing about the old things in the old way,while other modern literature giants such as T.S.Eliot and Virginia Woolf were writing about modern experiences with avant-garde skills.Yet when digging into her works,we will find that she was also wrecked with modern pains.What distinguished her from others is that she looked backward into the pioneers’ history for the organic wholeness as an ideal against the modern fragmentary painful experiences.Organcism attracts attention in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Willa Cather’s works have a strong tendency of organicism.Lawrence Buell,the pioneer researcher in ecostudy and a very important researcher on Willa Cather,regards organicism as a key field for further study when summarizing researches on Willa Cather.However,for the time being,researches are still focused in culture,ecostudy,feminism study and so on.Few are studying the belying organicism in Willa Cather’s works.Therefore in my thesis Willa Cather’s works’ relationship with organicism will be studied.And since organicism is not a single specific string of theory,the thesis chooses her representative work of each writing period that most manifest organicism and uses the most suitable organicist theory for each of them.Cather’s early work My Antonia could be seen as the heroine Antonia’s journey to realize her part within the whole.Deep ecologists hold the belief of organicism in current days and have developed their own organicist ideas.They focus on the relationship between human beings and nature,but are convinced that the relationship between human beings and nature also affect the relationship between human beings,and how one deals with oneself.In My Antonia,it is through"identification-as-belong" and "identification-as-kinship" that Antonia gradually finds and fulfills her part,the earth-goddess,and finally comes to self-realization.In Cather’s middle work The Professor’s House,house is the center image.The professor is torn between his social life and his spiritual life,a mirror of Milla Cather’s own dilemma.He looks forward to the reunion with his younger self.According to Frank Lloyd Wright,a famous organic architect,buildings should be related to vista,vista within-insight into oneself,ie,the spiritual life,and vista without-to connect,ie.the social life.Blue Mesa gives St.Peter a ray of hope,yet the move into the new house aggravates his dilemma.Cather’s late work Shadows on the Rock writes about the immigration story of the French to the Quebec.The Quebec immigrants bond with the new land and bond within themselves and finally make a "climax community"-a term from Willa Cather’s contemporary,Frederick Clements,an organicist ecologist.In the climax community,people from diverse backgrounds retain elements of their old place and past culture yet are also well-adapted to the new land.Together they make a whole which is larger than the sum of parts.Like a tree newly implanted,the community adapts and grows and finally comes into blossoms.By writing about the organicist pursuit of the protagonists,Willa Cather expressed her criticism against modern men’s alienation from self,from other people and from nature.Whereas the fragmentation in modern life is rather disappointing,the pioneers’ life provides a pastoral where human beings finally unite with nature,with other human beings,and with themselves.