Reenvisioning Cather's Spaces: Dualities of Landscape and Meaning

Program year: 1993/1994Digitized from print original stored in HDRThis study began as an effort to explain recurrent window imagery in the works of women authors. As I examined the fiction and nonfiction of Willa Cather and Virginia Woolf, the very frequency of window imagery seemed to be evidence that it is a meaningful element. I found in the writings of each that the numerous window images suggest a diversity of meanings and rich emotional connotations. Moreover, Cather and Woolf seemed to me to use window images in very similar ways; both use images of windows to indicate important dualities. For just as the inner and outer surfaces of a glass pane both separate and connect the worlds on either side, so the window image symbolically separates yet joins the opposing aspects of a wide assortment of dualities. Its very blankness or transparency, as well as its role as an item of familiarity, makes the window a convenient object on which both of these writers plausibly projected their ambivalent feelings about such issues as masculinity and femininity, youth and age, and public versus private spheres. Most importantly, I found that for both Cather and Woolf the window image serves to represent the duality of entrapment and freedom, especially for women characters. Windows often serve as actual and figurative barriers that imprison as well as openings affording a glimpse of release. At the beginning of my project, I was interested in what is "behind the window" of Cather's and Woolf's indoor settings, wanting to know how their domestic spaces are delineated and how these spaces relate to the themes and motifs of their books. As I read both primary and secondary materials, my hypothesis that window imagery emphasized enclosure led to an increasing interest in what lies on the outside, beyond the window, and how this relates to what is contained within. A series of interrelated questions came to mind. Woolf's female protagonists, for example, are circumscribed by window imagery as they care for their households, but how might they behave if "released" from societally-conditioned roles? In Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, in what way are Woolf's chaotic London streets and domestic, glassed-in dinner parties related? In To the Lighthouse, characters who are painting or walking out-of-doors see the family mother, Mrs. Ramsay, framed in a picture window. To what extent is motherhood, a role executed "inside," defined by Mrs. Ramsay, and to what extent by the perceptions of these outsiders? Still, the main female characters and narrators I studied in Woolf seldom ventured out of the boundaries of the household, leaving women's lives in the area outside the window a gray, unexplored region. My investigation of Woolf's imagery led to many appealing discoveries. I continue to believe that Woolf's and Cather's novels offer great possibilities for parallel comparative studies, which I hope to pursue at another time. But my study of Cather's work and of her biography as told by Sharon O'Brien led me to more and more new questions. My readings and critical research made me realize that the window is part of a larger pattern in the works of Cather than I had realized and I wanted to accept the challenge of exploring that pattern