Willa Cather's Fiction
When Willa Cather left home and went to col
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When Willa Cather left home and went to college in 1899, she adopted the name, manner, and dress of a man. At a moment of American history that saw few women enter higher education, fewer still seek postgraduate employment in the business or professional world, Willa Cather, product of a conventional middle class upbringing, boldly established an unconventional, experimental social image. Calling herself William Cather, she established a campus wide reputation as a critic of the theatre, and planned a career as a writer. If she felt that she could succeed as a writer only as a man, this would have been consistent with the then generally accepted notion that only men in the culture were either talented enough for or temperamentally suited to the rigorous, disciplined, or indeed experimental life of the serious artist. After graduating from the University of Nebraska with honors (by this time she was wearing dresses again), she set out for cosmopolitan America, in the manner of many a college educated young man, to seek artistic and financial success. For more than ten years she worked as managing editor for the Pittsburgh based McClure's Magazine, producing literary and theatrical criticism as well as short fiction for the publication, accumulating a number of friends and acquaintances in the world of publishing and art, all the while perfecting her craft, accumulating material for future stories, and planning for the day she could quit her job and work as a ful
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o their psychology and follow their feelings and behavior into unique sentinent territory. A reader even a feminist one may not necessarily claim to understand All Women after a careful pass through Cather's novels. But one might, with what Cather would have called the "happy few," be better equipped to appreciate the complexity of some few of them.
Undoubtedly, Cather's position as a writer had the effect of liberating her from a conventional existence, but her fiction as well as her personal history suggest that as an artist she was able to appreciate the complexities of many ways of life. Her fiction is not polemically "liberationist" in tone, and she hardly sets out to "prove" anything about women in society or about the relationships between women and men. Yet (unlike so many male writers of high reputation) she creates a number of women characters who are not merely the prime movers of narrative action but whose actions influence, for good or ill, the lives of others. If some of her women fulfill conventional social roles, it does not follow that Cather is engaged strictly by the sociological implications of those roles. Rather, she invites the reader to explore with her the consequences and implications of actions
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Approximate Word count = 2268
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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