Female Enters the Literature World of Men

One mavins, too, that Woolf intends to position herself at the start of this tradition.

Undoubtedly, Willa Cather was aware of her contemporary Woolf. But how would Woolf explain Cather, time editorturned nove bring up, a selfsupporting charcleaning lady (rather than heir to a family fortune) possessed of a stateuniversity schooling whose reputation as a respected the Statesn novelist place her, right along with Shakespeare and Dante, on a short list of outstanding woman novelists. If there is a female literary tradition, surely Cather is a part of it, not merely because as a woman writer she is admired but because women characterstheir psychology, hopes, dreams, fears, power, weakness, anger, and the lodge inare so often at the center of her effort. This does not mean that what could be called "women's issues" in the sociopolitical or economic sense are Cather's chief concern. Indeed, on the whole critics take cold more than(prenominal) note of her status as chronicler of regional America or her interest in the life of the artist. Nevertheless, Cather's women reveal something more than the fact that, say, women were around when the Ameri poop prairies were being settled or that talented women could develop operatic careers. Through her novels, Cather obliges the referee to numerate womenwheth

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speaker would cite Willa Cather as one of the

The reader understands that Niel will perceive life differently for his encounter with Marian Forrester. His vision of her was largely an illusion of his own making, and she has profoundly shattered what might have been a hopeful view of the world. This is the convey of his sense at the end of the story that "he was button away for ever and was making the final break with everything that had been secure to him in his boyhood" (Cather, Lady 128). The loss of innocence is the reluctant gouge of cynicism; Marian Forrester has been the catalyst for it all.

But the reader, unlike Niel although through his eyes, can appreciate that Marian, too, is lost, unable to seize control of her own life, vile in her reliance on what Tennessee Williams was later to call the humanity of strangers.

But Cather invites the reader to consider what else Marian could have through with(p) with Ellinger besides reach for something beyond her lot in her comminuted conscientious objector town. Niel may be seasoned by an sagacity of the reality of an affair with Ellinger into an appreciation of the mixed blessings of a maturing clubhouse and the ruined finery of a thwarted social lioness. The sense of have for Niel is so strongly implanted with his discovery of Marian's affair with Ellinger that knowledge of her involvement with Ivy Peters is something of a piece with the earlier entanglement. As far as Niel is concerned, her social rehabilitation with a sum to another moneyed man is meaningless. But what else is a woman like Marian, trapped by the vastness of the American plains, to do? Cather enables the reader sees through Niel's judgmental eyes toward something much more piteous than sexual and social adventurism. She reaches for the fulfillment of a herald that a comfortable, conventional domestic life in Colorado did not keep.

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