In The Song of the Lark (1915), Willa Cather does something extraordinary by presenting a well-rounded and likeable Mexican character. This is quite different from her contemporaries’ stereotypical depictions of minorities. To include immigrants in a modern novel was avant-garde and radical subject matter; and presenting a realistic, likeable Mexican character was unheard of because the colonized and immigrants were largely ignored in American literature, or deliberately overlooked. When they were included, persistent demeaning views and unflattering Mexican stereotypes were the norm. This paper seeks to explain how positively Cather depicts Mexican characters, decades before Civil Rights. Cather includes the plight of Mexicans in her novel and gives voice to those that were silenced and ignored. Even though she was a bestselling author and considered one of the best American writers of the era, she has not been properly credited for how progressive she was in her treatment of minorities. It is well documented that Cather used juxtaposition and absences in her writing to convey meaning; I build on these absences to add in rhetorical silence and connect her use of silence to the academic conversation about speech in post-colonial analyses. By contextualizing her writings within the period, I demonstrate how progressive her novels are. Even though most depictions of minorities at the turn of the century were stereotypical, Cather diverges from the racism, which makes her decades ahead of her contemporaries in including good immigrants and minorities in American literature.

Though her early writing owes much to nineteenth-century American Realism, Willa Cather experiments with male and female literary traditions while finding her own modern literary voice. In the process Cather gives nature an ambivalent role in My Ántonia, O Pioneers!, and Death Comes to the Archbishop. She produces a tension between rivers and gardens, places where nature and culture converge. Like Mary Austin and Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather confronts the boundaries between humans and nature.

This thesis examines how masculinity is attained through various displays of violence, ambivalence, heterosexuality, and sentimentality in the works of Ernest Hemingway and Willa Cather.

Gender roles are a tool used by society to set acceptable boundaries and ideals upon the sexes, and during the early part of the twentieth century in America those gender boundaries began to blur. As a result of the 19th Amendment, men must have felt their decreasing importance because women were no longer solely dependent upon them, and gender roles shifted as woman began to occupy territory that was traditionally held by men. The “New Woman" entered the workforce, and refused to accept traditional female gender conventions. In response to the “New Woman," Theodore Roosevelt and other leading males sought to reinforce the ideal of the male as the protector and provider. As woman took on characteristics commonly associated with men, men now had to grapple with a changing gender identity that often left them confused and frustrated. Willa Sibert Cather's life reflects the fluctuating gender conventions of early twentieth century America as she struggled to define her gender identity. In her youth, Cather chopped her hair and dressed like a boy. She also spent time dissecting frogs and called herself “William Cather, M.D." Cather's cross-dressing reveals her unconventional core and her desire to define herself regardless of societal expectations. Cather also had many close relationships with woman, and these close relationships have led many scholars to label her a lesbian. Cather, however, left us a mystery surrounding her gender preference because she never openly called herself a lesbian. Cather's supposed lesbianism is useful because it reveals the ambiguity of her personality. Cather is paradox because she sought for self-definition, but she also suffered from an identity crisis. By using the shifting nature of gender roles in the America during the early decades of the twentieth century and Cather's confused and unconventional life as a backdrop, I would argue that My Ántonia (1918), The Professor's House (1925), and “Neighbor Rosicky (1932)" reveal the consequences of gender roles. Cather's novels and short story should be analyzed for her interest in exploring male reaction to prescribed gender roles which, ultimately, reveals Cather's attitude towards the existence of gender conventions. Cather advocated for a more fluid and balance way of defining male and female roles. Cather's novel My Ántonia and The Professor's House reveal the consequences of gender roles because both Jim and Professor St. Peter are frustrated, fearful, unsatisfied, ambiguous, and unhappy with the roles that they have been playing. In sharp contrast to these two novels is Cather's delightful short story entitled “Neighbor Rosicky." In this short story Cather presents a protagonist who is whole and balanced. “Neighbor Rosicky" is Cather's statement regarding the importance and beauty of self-definition. Ultimately, her literature can be viewed as a rejection of both male and female gender qualities which demonstrates that Cather and her fiction cannot be reduced to an identity agenda.

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This dissertation explores the reoccurrence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein within twentieth-century American novels. While the inaccurate 1931 film version by James Whale remains the best known adaptation of Frankenstein, I argue that Willa Cather, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Chuck Palahniuk return to Shelley’s 1818 novel to critique racist and misogynistic responses to anxieties about gender and racial power in the age of industrial consumer culture. In doing so, I extend existing scholarship on the American Gothic to demonstrate that The Professor’s House, Invisible Man, Beloved, and Fight Club represent a specifically Shelleyan Gothic tradition in twentieth-century American literature. My project draws upon influential feminist and postcolonial readings of Frankenstein and on the theoretical work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and later critics who have developed her theory to show how the twentieth-century novels echo themes and motifs from Shelley’s novel to critique the destructive effects of male homosociality. Each novel contains a protagonist that resembles Victor Frankenstein and responds to historically specific anxieties about gender, race, and industrial technoscience by creating a doppelgänger who enables participation in a homosocial bond that is initially empowering but proves destructive to women, racial minorities, and eventually the creature and creator figures themselves. My reading reveals unexpected similarities between Cather’s The Professor’s House and Palahniuk’s Fight Club. Cather’s novel appears to glorify Tom Outland as the ideal masculine hero but ultimately reveals him to be a monstrous doppelgänger who acts out the Professor’s oppressive impulses; similarly, Fight Club seems to romanticize the male violence instigated by the doppelgänger figure Tyler Durden but actually echoes Shelley’s critique of male homosociality as monstrous. My reading also reveals previously overlooked similarities between Invisible Man and Beloved, both of which feature a black protagonist who surprisingly resembles Victor Frankenstein by creating a doppelgänger to challenge his or her disempowerment by the structures of white male homosociality but end up emulating the destructive homosocial structures they critique. My dissertation shows how all of these writers share Shelley’s critique yet move beyond it by offering alternatives to the destructive cycle of violence, embodied in each case by a female figure who resists or reclaims the position of the abject other in the homosocial triangle.

No description available.

This dissertation explores the reoccurrence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein within twentieth-century American novels. While the inaccurate 1931 film version by James Whale remains the best known adaptation of Frankenstein, I argue that Willa Cather, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Chuck Palahniuk return to Shelley’s 1818 novel to critique racist and misogynistic responses to anxieties about gender and racial power in the age of industrial consumer culture. In doing so, I extend existing scholarship on the American Gothic to demonstrate that The Professor’s House, Invisible Man, Beloved, and Fight Club represent a specifically Shelleyan Gothic tradition in twentieth-century American literature. My project draws upon influential feminist and postcolonial readings of Frankenstein and on the theoretical work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and later critics who have developed her theory to show how the twentieth-century novels echo themes and motifs from Shelley’s novel to critique the destructive effects of male homosociality. Each novel contains a protagonist that resembles Victor Frankenstein and responds to historically specific anxieties about gender, race, and industrial technoscience by creating a doppelgänger who enables participation in a homosocial bond that is initially empowering but proves destructive to women, racial minorities, and eventually the creature and creator figures themselves. My reading reveals unexpected similarities between Cather’s The Professor’s House and Palahniuk’s Fight Club. Cather’s novel appears to glorify Tom Outland as the ideal masculine hero but ultimately reveals him to be a monstrous doppelgänger who acts out the Professor’s oppressive impulses; similarly, Fight Club seems to romanticize the male violence instigated by the doppelgänger figure Tyler Durden but actually echoes Shelley’s critique of male homosociality as monstrous. My reading also reveals previously overlooked similarities between Invisible Man and Beloved, both of which feature a black protagonist who surprisingly resembles Victor Frankenstein by creating a doppelgänger to challenge his or her disempowerment by the structures of white male homosociality but end up emulating the destructive homosocial structures they critique. My dissertation shows how all of these writers share Shelley’s critique yet move beyond it by offering alternatives to the destructive cycle of violence, embodied in each case by a female figure who resists or reclaims the position of the abject other in the homosocial triangle.

This dissertation is mainly based on the reading of three American novels to explore how female characters deal with their illegitimate pregnancies and how their solutions re-shape their futures and affect their inner growth. Chapter 1 discusses Dorinda Oakley's premarital pregnancy in Ellen Glasgow's Barren Ground and draws the circle of limits from Barbara Welter's "four cardinal virtues" (purity, submissiveness, domesticity, and piety) which connect to the analogous female roles (daughter, sister, wife, and mother). Dorinda's childless survival reconstructs a typical household from her domination and absence of maternity. Chapter 2 examines Ántonia Shimerda's struggles and endurance in My Ántonia by Willa Cather before and after Ántonia gives birth to a premarital daughter. Ántonia devotes herself to being a caring mother and to looking after a big family although her marriage is also friendship-centered. Chapter 3 adopts a different approach to analyze Charlotte Rittenmeyer's extramarital pregnancy in The Wild Palms by William Faulkner. As opposed to Dorinda and Ántonia who re-enter domesticity to survive, Charlotte runs out on her family and dies of a botched abortion. To help explain the aftermath of illicit pregnancies, I extend or shorten John Duvall's formula of female role mutations: "virgin>sexually active (called whore)>wife" to examine the riddles of female survival and demise. The overall argument suggests that one way or another, nature, society, and family are involved in illegitimately pregnant women's lives, and the more socially compliant a pregnant woman becomes after her transgression, the better chance she can survive with her baby.