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Willa Cather: ANn Emersonian Angle of Vision
Abstract
Leading scholars of Willa Cather's work have long agreed that she writes in the "tradition of American Romanticism." Close to the common heart of her work is the pervasive influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson, but this relationship has been largely unexamined in any detail. In order to see the Emersonian angle of vision most easily, we consider an early story in which a young man comes to find his Emersonian soul. In "Eric Hermannson's Soul," a young man has an end that is just a beginning in a typically Emersonian manner. He is saved through transcendental insight. In My Antonia we see another young man, Jim Burden, come to an Emersonian resolution after many years of wandering away from his sources. In One of Ours Willa Cather considers yet a third young man, Claude Wheeler, who, like Eric Hermannson, finds his Emersonian soul--but his story is tragic because he dies in his discovery. For Eric Hermannson and Jim Burden the end is their beginning, but for Claude Wheeler the end is death. Their stories, when examined in detail, as they are here, reveal a fundamental Emersonian angle of vision but they do not reveal Cather consciously drawing on Emerson's writings though she echoes his attitudes, phrases, ideas, and even vocabulary. One finds constant parallels between Cather's stories and Emerson's essays which illuminate the patterns of fiction and their themes. The world of Willa Cather is a spiritual world as well as a world of literal reality, as it was for Emerson. Unlike T. S. Eliot and the "lost generation," in Willa Cather's literary world the characters operate in an Emersonian universe. Her novels and short stories are like Nature's mutable clouds, ever changing but always interrelated, and like Emerson himself full of moments of luminous intuitive insight set against a fabric of ordinary existence.
Subject Area
American literature
Recommended Citation
Shubik, Valerie Reid, "Willa Cather: ANn Emersonian Angle of Vision" (1985). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI8602121.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI8602121