This reveals the more liberated ideals of the west and of the pioneer culture. First, Alexandra envisions herself "being lifted and carried lightly by some one very strong. He was with her a long while this time, and carried her very far, and in his arms she felt free from pain." The masculine figure takes the place of the gossamer female angel. She is about to be subsumed by the ethereal lover. "When he laid her down on her bed again, she opened her eyes, and, for the first time in her life, she saw him, saw him clearly, though the room was dark, and his face was covered." Here, gender roles are again reversed as they are in the previous passage when the man is the angel. The man is now being veiled, his "face was covered." Veil is usually used to conceal the woman's but not the man's identity; this also ties in with Brown's stereotype of the pioneer woman in her bonnet, a headdress like a veil used to cover and protect the face. The man wears an angelic veil in Alexandra's vision: "His white cloak was thrown over his face, and his head was bent a little forward." From here, Alexandra is able to explore her sexuality. The imagery becomes overtly phallic. "His right arm, bared from the elbow, was dark and gleaming, like bronze, and she knew at once that it was the arm of the mightiest of all lovers." The arm is the phallic symbol, "bared…dark and gleaming…the arm of the mightiest of lovers" is language that thinly cloaks the male sexual organ. Similarly, Alexandra allows the lover to bring her to orgasm: "She knew at last for whom it was she had waited, and where he would carry her." When she awakens, Alexandra has a " hard cold and a stiff shoulder" Cather uses diction like "hard" and "stiff" deliberately to underscore the phallic imagery as it applies to Alexandra's sexuality. The female movement in the west can be viewed as an emergency, in the sense that there were more men than women during initial waves of migration. With men outnumbering women, and the desire for women burgeoning among heterosexual men who did not find satisfaction in prostitution alone, it was necessary to call for the population of western lands with liberated women. Alexandra exemplifies a new liberated woman of the west. However, she is not a liberated woman because of her sexuality. She is liberated because she is economically independent....
Alexandra did inherit her property from a male, her father, but that was in spite of the fact that she had brothers. Her father had what would have been considered viable male heirs, but he also knew that his male heirs could not manage the property as well as his daughter. The father comes across as a potent paternal figure who recognizes the importance of feminist theory long before it was fashionable to do so.
Cather's characterization of Paul, his imagination is theater. His imagined life is the theater that he has built with glitter and effects in a dream world that not only gave him comfort, but and also sustained him. The author uses Romance, alluding to Paul's idealized view of reality. He got a feeling of excitement from his escapades influenced by his deep desire to be at the Carnegie Hall where
Willa Cather Willa Sibert Cather was born in Winchester, Virginia, in the year 1873. She lived in Virginia until she turned nine years old at which point she moved to the Nebraska prairie, to the borough of Catherton, which bore her familial namesake because so many members of Cather's family already lived here. This move to the prairie and her subsequent period of growing to adulthood on the prairie would be
Willa Cather About the Author The author Willa Cather Sibert born on 1873 is an American writer, and one of the country's leading novelists. Here vigilantly skilled prose express dramatic pictures of the American landscape along with those people who were molded. She was influenced by the writing style of the American regional writer Sarah Orne Jewett. However, she set many of her works in Nebraska and the American Southwest areas with which
Mrs. Forrester is the most affected of all. Changes happen irremediably to the whole town. People remaining in the old word are further and further drawn apart from people going along with the new order, till there is no way of communication between the two left. Business is treated from a much broader angle, companies develop in a higher speed in terms of tome and space. "Cather's A Lost lady
Sculptor's Funeral," by Willa Cather, and the essay "Art for Art's Sake," by E.M. Forster. Specifically, it will discuss how these two pieces reflect each other. ART IN LITERATURE Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort (George Bernard Shaw 1909). George Bernard Shaw's dry outlook on art directly opposes the thoughts of E.M. Forster's essay, but his acerbic look at art
Willa Cather: O Pioneers! Willa Cather's O Pioneers! was her second published novel, although she, herself, preferred to consider it her first. She believed it was the first work in which she truly had found her own voice. The novel concerns homesteaders in Nebraska in the late 1800's and early 1900's. The protagonist is a woman, Swedish by birth, who has brought her land up to rich production and brought prosperity
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