Emerging Voices: The Portrayal of Minorities in the Work of Willa Cather

The thesis seeks to explore the portrayal of the othered, marginalized individuals in the fictional work of Willa Cather. The primary focus of the text is the first-person narrative of My Ántonia (1917). Other complementary primary sources are Cather's remaining two prairie novels - O Pioneers! (1913) and The Song of the Lark (1915) - and two books of the author's later artistic creation - Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940). The former two books function as a preliminary mapping of Cather's concerns developed in My Ántonia, the latter two texts present Cather's later reflections of otherness. The thesis focuses on Cather's incessant examination of the workings of the white, male, heteronormative discourse in the context of modern American nationhood: by her "queer" writing, she aims to unearth and subvert the coercive social mechanisms, and give voice to those who were eclipsed from the project of the rising economic empire: ethnic others (African Americans, Native Americans, European immigrants), and gendered and sexual others (women, homosexuals and lesbians). The identity of modern American society reposes on the construction of the social other and the artificial category of normality. Cather, on the other hand, examines the difference - sexual, racial,..