The Awakening Of Female Consciousness

Willa Cather is a brilliant female writer in the early twentieth century.She is famous for her fiction about pioneering.The pioneering females conducted in her works have left indelibly artistic images in American literary history,those pioneering females initiates their own voice through telling stories,and thus gain power of discourse and identity.My Antonia is one of her most important works and has received many attentions from different fields.The story sets up a male-dominant society,women are oppressed,the most obvious is the suppression of female discourse.This thesis purports to study the internal relations between discourse and power in the novel from the perspective of discourse power,through analyzing the confusion Antonia experiences,to discuss the changes of female consciousness in discourse power,and their pursuit of female discourse.Except for the introduction and conclusion,this thesis includes three chapters.Chapter one mainly explores the predicament of female voice under the two different cultural environments,and the effects of male discourse power on female characters;chapter two analyzes the marginalization of female identity in male-dominant society,and illustrates the process of Antonia's self-identity construction;chapter three discusses Antonia's personalities after she is aware of the importance of mastering her own discourse power,in doing so,she dispels her dilemmas.In the end,this thesis comes to a conclusion.As the spokesman of female,Cather describes the changes of the heroine Antonia's discourse power,which emphasizes in the process of pursuing self-identity,Antonia's awakening in female consciousness,from innocent to mature,she walks out of confusion and finally finds her own belonging,and leads her own happy life.