Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1994
Abstract
Canadian poet Eli Mandel has said that the prairie writer is one who points in the direction of the prairie and not necessarily one who always lives there or writes exclusively about that region. Mandel, who suggests that the prairie has as much to do with "state of mind" as with locale and that prairie space is dynamic, cites Margaret Laurence and Robert Kroetsch, among others, as examples of Canadian writers identified with the West who have withdrawn and returned. 1 In the United States, Willa Cather comes to mind as prototype for Mandel's paradigm, and although her later work is not constrained by her fictive return to the prairie, Cather's earlier novels and stories have shaped an American consciousness of prairie space as much as they have been shaped by the place and the concept. Early in the twentieth century, Cather seems to have created a space that other prairie writers would successively modify, including not only well established Canadians such as Laurence and Kroetsch, but, for example, the much earlier Sinclair Ross, until recently obscure, and on the U.S. side the still earlier Sinclair Lewis, whose claim to membership in the prairie genre rests with Main Street. This evolution has produced a classic tradition in the prairie novel, identifiable by its spatial archetypes involving motion and diversity particularly with reference to gender relationships. Not surprisingly, in an essay titled "The Fear of Women in Prairie Fiction," Robert Kroetsch uses Cather's My Antonia and Ross's As for Me and My House to define the peculiarities of male/female polarity as represented in prairie fiction through two traditional images, horse and house, which can be extended to produce new gender insights.2
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 14:1 (Winter 1994). Copyright © 1994 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.