The thesis in this essay states that Ántonia Shimerda and Lena Lingard in My Ántonia achieve a higher degree of woman emancipation because of their active response to prevailing power structures and that Cather uses the hardships and disappointments of these young women to highlight these power structures. Therefore, My Ántonia can be regarded as a novel taking a stand against patriarchal power structures. The primary text is My Ántonia by Willa Cather, which is analysed with the help of Foucault’s theory of power and Judith Butler’s gender theories. The essay discusses which power structures are affecting Ántonia Shimerda and Lena Lingard and how these obtain a higher degree of woman emancipation due to their response to these power structures. Furthermore, the essay also deals with which inequalities in society that are highlighted by Cather in My Ántonia and how this is made.

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.

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.

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.