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The evolution of Willa Cather's judgment of the machine and the machine age in her fiction
Abstract
This dissertation focuses upon the evolution of Willa Cather's idea of the machine and the machine age in her fiction. As a preface to my discussion of Cather's fictional treatments, I survey the literary and technological backgrounds for the world of Willa Cather when she began her writing career in the 1890's. Cather did not imitate her forebears, but she drew from those who preceded her; in particular, her fiction demonstrates the influences of two British writers of the nineteenth century--Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin--as well as that of early twentieth-century French philosopher, Henri Bergson. These literary influences are reflected especially in Cather's handling of vitalistic and mechanistic forces as they affect her characters and their environments in the fiction through 1925. Additionally, Cather's early fiction reveals the impact of McClure's Magazine, where she worked as an editorial assistant from 1906-1912, indicating a connection between the magazine's treatment of technology and Cather's rendering of it in "Behind the Singer Tower" (1912) and Alexander's Bridge (1912). Although Cather expressed early optimism in response to modern technology in her 1890 high school commencement address and also in her 1896 short story, "Tommy, the Unsentimental," by the time of "Paul's Case" in 1905 she began to suggest negative effects of technology, with Paul a kind of human sacrifice to the machine. Gradually, Cather revealed an evolving judgment of the industrial age in her fictional offerings from 1905 through 1925. Her most explicit and overt fictive critique of modern technology appeared in One of Ours (1922), followed by her Nation essay entitled "Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle" (1923), a real life expose of machines and the machine age, wherein Cather nostalgically recalled the self-reliance and creativity of a machineless, bygone era. After The Professor's House (1925), she retreated, by and large, into the preindustrial past for her fictional materials.
Subject Area
American literature|Biographies
Recommended Citation
Graf, Nanette Hope, "The evolution of Willa Cather's judgment of the machine and the machine age in her fiction" (1991). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9129551.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9129551