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WILLA CATHER'S FAMILIES: FICTIONS AND FACTS IN HER PLAINS' WRITINGS
Abstract
In understanding Willa Cather's Plains' fiction, it is helpful to recognize the importance she places on the role of the family. She captures and reveals the essence, significance, and relationship of family members, their complexities, their strengths, their idiosyncracies, and their absurdities in the Plains' novels and in some of the short fiction of the Plains. Much of Cather's work focusses on pioneers of Webster County, Nebraska, where family was an important social and economic unit. An analysis of her fiction reveals close family ties characteristic of belief in the status of the family unit. Generally speaking, the mother is viewed as the center of the family and the determining factor in its degree of stability, while on occasion the father emerges as a strong character, as seen in "Neighbour Rosicky." In this dissertation I explore family relationships in the Plains' fiction of Willa Cather in what I believe is a unique study. The seven novels which I categorize as Plains' writings and the seven pieces of short fiction having family relationships offer a variety of portraits on the family: the dominant, good-natured wife and ineffective husband; the comfortable, seasoned, and peaceful elderly couple; a couple who lives in perpetual warfare; the truly happy, compatible couple; the absurd marital relationship; the charming wife married to an older man; the once compatible husband and wife who are drifting apart; and the ill-suited partners whose marriage dissolves. Variations of these combinations attract the creative imagination of Cather who features the marriages and family groups in her penetrating, insightful fashion. Chapter one scans the dearth of studies on family relationships in literature in general, but does point to the interest of writers like Dickens, Austen, Thackeray, and Faulkner in family and their use of family in their novels; chapter two describes the various husband-wife relationships in Cather's Plains' fiction; chapter three shows the parent-child roles where it exists, in these novels and short stories; chapter four highlights different surrogate relationships important to the children in these works; chapter five deals with what I label the outsider-insider characters--individuals who live within the family, share their lives in as intimate a fashion as if they were biologically a part of the family. Chapter six is devoted to concluding thoughts regarding the study. The scope of the study would not be complete without including biographical data on Willa Cather's personal involvement in or with husband-wife relationships, parent-child roles, surrogate experiences, and outsider-insider connections. In each chapter I survey the relevant biographical information; over and over it shows how meaningful these relationships were to her, and how they were the material at the center of her life from which she wrote her Plains' fiction.
Subject Area
American literature
Recommended Citation
GEHRKI, BARBARA ANN, "WILLA CATHER'S FAMILIES: FICTIONS AND FACTS IN HER PLAINS' WRITINGS" (1981). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI8203216.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI8203216