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To the Northeast: The quiet center of Willa Cather's art and life
Abstract
Willa Cather's writing gains much of its power from its conflicting impulses, often of a character seeking a personal meaning of home, occasionally of one finding it. This study explores the basis of Cather's personal feelings of dislocation, and how she attempted, especially in Shadows on the Rock, to find a spiritual center of her art and life. It also explores the role of the Northeastern culture in Cather's search for belonging, in part as this cultural legacy was bequeathed Cather by Sarah Orne Jewett. Shadows on the Rock, Cather's only novel set in the Northeast, more specifically in Quebec, is central to this study because of its treatment of French culture and the adaptation of that culture to the New World, and because of Cather's interpretations of seventeenth-century French-Canadian figures and their contributions to the spiritual and domestic identity of the frontier. The interplay Cather creates between her historically based and her purely fictional characters becomes the heart of this unconventionally plotted novel. Most simply put, the connection of these characters makes Shadows on the Rock a tale of domestic belonging achieved, largely through Cecile Auclair's representing of Old World traditions as they are adapted to life in the New World. Sources used in this study include Cather's texts and the little known historical materials upon which she drew, as well as recent criticism, histories, and biographies. A comparison of historical writings and Cather's fictive interpretations of such resources is especially revealing of Cather's aims and techniques in her search for spiritual integration. Conclusions gleaned from this study are that Cather's work gains force not only from the conflicting personal impulses she tried to resolve through her fiction, but also from her resolutions of these dichotomies in powerful scenes of connection and domesticity, especially in Shadows on the Rock. These images and themes may have been fostered by Jewett, and it is undeniable that the Northeast came to have a special significance for Cather; but the "quiet centre" of art and life revealed in her fiction remains at core uniquely Cather's.
Subject Area
American literature|Modern literature|Biographies
Recommended Citation
Brienzo, Gary William, "To the Northeast: The quiet center of Willa Cather's art and life" (1990). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9030108.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9030108