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Liminal Identity In Willa Cather's "The Professor's House", Alexandra D. Debiase

ETD Archive

Willa Cather develops the Professor and Tom Outland's identities in the novel The Professor's House through the lenses of domesticity, masculinity, and memory. For the Professor and Tom Outland, these identities are liminal and influenced by the landscape and space around them. Although both liminal, these identities are ultimately different, as the Professor's liminality seems to artificially have an affect on Tom as the novel reads on. Through defining the two main characters in the novel as liminal, Cather makes a comment on a modern shift in the concept of identity, suggesting that as time goes on and values change, …