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Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Conditions in the field of American literature during the first four decades of the twentieth century were not always helpful or encouraging to aspiring writers in the United States. The literature which may be called characteristic of this period began with the novels which writers like Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser were publishing around 1900. These men initiated a new period in American writing, which developed in power and maturity especially during the twenties and thirties. For the first fifteen years of the century, however, neither academic criticism nor journalistic opinion were prepared to favor the new growth. Taking American universities as a measure of the prevailing attitude toward writers who were interested in becoming part of the new movement, Bernard De Voto pointed out that even as late as 1920 few universities provided any encouragement for the man (at the time he would hardly be called a scholar) who was interested primarily in literature written in the United States. Universities on the whole provided favorable climates only to that scholarship and criticism which was devoted to English literature of a respectable age, and looked upon American literature as “at best only a pleasant brook flowing toward the stream of English literature and acquiring merit only as it drew near.” Similarly the critical journals were not much interested in the American literary output. Even important periodicals like The Nation and The Bookman followed trends [...]

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This thesis explores the use of music in the literary works of author Willa Cather.

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1938 B41

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of English

The marriages depicted in Willa Cather's fiction are a crucial element of her works. Although she does not describe in detail the marital relationships between her characters, Cather does depict these marriages realistically, and they are also interrelated with the major themes of her fiction. The marriages in Cather's works are divided into three general classifications: the successful, the borderline, and the failure. The successful marriage is characterized by affection and friendship. In the borderline marriages the partners are mutually dissatisfied with their relationship, but they do not separate or divorce. The marital failures are complete breakdowns that result in irreparable wounds healed only by the complete withdrawal or death of one of the partners. A study of marriage in Cather's works reveals there are more successful marriages than failures.

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.