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“The History Of Every Country Begins In The Heart Of A…Woman”: Willa Cather’S Reclamation Of The Female American Immigrant Through Edenic Western Narratives, Emma Fox

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis analyzes Willa Cather’s Great Plains Trilogy—O, Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918)—in the context of the immigration boom of the early 1900s and the myth of an “American Eden.” This concept was born of cultural portrayals of the West as dominated by white, male pioneers who subdued the landscape, but Cather’s novels, centered around immigrant families, significantly revise this popular myth. Nativists saw the West as the source of American virtues such as democracy and diligence and viewed sending immigrants West as an essential tool for “Americanization,” the process by which …