Willa Cather Works Themes Essay, Research Paper

Sara Orne Jewett, a local colorist from Maine, one time suggested that Willa Cather

write from her ain background. Cather followed that advice and became celebrated for

her narratives of the American frontier ; particularly those about epic adult females who

struggled to chasten the prairies of Nebraska and the Southwest. Cather & # 8217 ; s foremost

novel was published in 1912 and was called Alexander & # 8217 ; s Bridge. In 1913 came O

Pioneers! which took its rubric from a verse form by Walt Whitman. My Antonia,

published in 1918, is likely her best known work, and features the Hardy,

sensitive adult females who led brave, simple lives of endurance in the harshly

beautiful wilderness. These immigrants would go the female parents of a new race of

Americans, and the book spans the few coevalss that saw the prairie

transformed into modern farming area and metropoliss. In 1927, Willa Cather wrote what is

considered her best work, Death Comes for the Archbishop, about missional

priests in New Mexico. In 1923, she won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, the

narrative of an American husbandman who dies in conflict in World War I. Like the storyteller

in My Antonia, Willa Cather was born in Virginia, the oldest kid in an Irish

household, and moved to Nebraska with her household when she was eleven. It was 1883.

In the book, the male child, Jim Burden, compares the gentler land of Virginia to the

wild beauty of the prairies. Like him, Willa lived with her grandparents, and

like Jim & # 8217 ; s grandparents, her household emphasized mind, morality and ladylike

behavior. Like her supporter, Cather grew up among European immigrants and

enjoyed the simple pleasances of a rural childhood, like giving dramas. Willa

Cather had an involvement in medical specialty and a womb-to-tomb love of music and theatre. One

of her books, Song of the Lark, was about a frontier miss who becomes a great

opera vocalist. Cather ne’er married, and harmonizing to one beginning, she sometimes

wore work forces & # 8217 ; s apparels and passed as a male physician, in order to avoid the bias

against adult females that was common in society in those yearss. Though she chose a adult male

as her storyteller, My Antonia is more concerned with the lives of the immigrant

misss who grew up strong on prairie farms, worked in town to gain their manner, and

so made lives for themselves in their new state. The writer seems particularly

sympathetic to the adult females when Lena faces a dual criterion, and is blamed for

the attending her beauty arouses in a married supporter. Antonia besides suffers

rejection when her fianc? gets her pregnant before he abandons her. The

writer & # 8217 ; s pr

eference for the charitable husbandmans and sensitive adult females over the

town prig is similar to Sinclair Lewis & # 8217 ; s judgements in Main Street. Not merely is

farming the land hard on these adult females, but matrimony and little town society are

excessively. But in America, the hired misss can make up one’s mind to go forth or remain and construct new

lives. Like many creative persons, Willa Cather may non hold felt to the full accepted in little

rural towns because the subject of the misunderstood creative person recurs in her work. In

My Antonia, the heroine & # 8217 ; s male parent is the transplanted creative person, a instrumentalist who is

unprepared for prairie life. He has been taken advantage of by the adult male who sells

him the farm. He is non respected as he was in his fatherland, and his accomplishments do

non assist him in farming. He is evidently depressed by the alterations in his life,

and when his premature decease is suspected of being a self-destruction, he is even

punished in decease. No local graveyard will bury him in their hallowed land, so

he is buried under a hereafter crossroads harmonizing to a barbarous usage. Again, like

her storyteller in My Antonia, Willa Cather graduated from the University of

Nebraska in 1895 and went E. She taught English and Latin in high school in

Pittsburg while composing poesy and short narratives from 1901 to 1906. Later, in

New York, she joined the staff of “ McClure & # 8217 ; s Magazine ” and became an

editor. In 1912, she foremost visited the Southwest, where she “ discovered

herself ” and was particularly impressed with the Anasazi drop homes. On

subsequently travels west, Willa Cather revisited Nebraska and became reacquainted with

Annie Sadilek Pavelka, the childhood friend who inspired the character of

Antonia. In 1917, Cather wrote My Antonia in New Hampshire and published it the

following twelvemonth. Willa Cather traveled to Europe and visited the original places

of her immigrant characters. She was particularly affectionate of Czechoslovakia, which is

where the fictional household, the Shimerdas, came from. She spent her last old ages

in New York and New England, where she became a really private individual. To the terminal

of her life, she was devoted to the humanistic disciplines and books. When she died in 1947, she

was buried in New Hampshire. Like many of her characters, she had seen America

develop from frontier to a modern state in her life-time.

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“ Cather, Willa ” Detecting Authors CD-ROM, Detroit:

Gale 1996 “ Cather, Willa ” World Book Encyclopedia, 1990 “ Cather

Timeline ” Cather Biography Internet, hypertext transfer protocol: //www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~cather/biographical.html

“ Cather ” Twentieth-Century Criticism Reference