Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)
Studies - Enikő Bollobás: (De-) Gendering and (De-) Sexualizing Famale Subjectivities: Woman-Hating and Its Revisions in Literature and Painting
2.2. Willa Cather: the bare material of androgyny Willa Cather provides a different example for constructing a nonmisogynist text. Almost all of her novels are unusual with respect to the absence of the heterosexual love plot (the only exception being the little known first novel Alexander's Bridge). In two of the novels especially Cather has provided clear alternatives to the familiar drama of heterosexual love, The Song of the Lark (1915) and My Antonia (1918). In the first Cather's job was easier: the genre of the Künstlerroman needed to be re-gendered for Thea Kronborg, the passionate and determined opera singer, and have her subordinate her heterosexual desire to music. No such obvious replacements would have been sufficient in My Antonia. Here the male narrator and the female protagonist are representatives of some shared androgynous ideal. Jim and Antonia are childhood friends on the Nebraska frontier; here, away from a society that constructs gender, they can afford to be neither "masculine" nor "feminine," but have an androgynous self that precedes this gendering. The frontier provided the setting for Cather's "démeublé" ideal, to use her word from her 1936 essay, "The Novel Démeublé," in which she discusses leaving "the scene bare for the play of emotions, great and little" (287). This is the "underfurnished" world par excellence , where "[tjhere was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made" (7). Unlike in traditional texts relating the myth of origin of the frontier, here the prairie obliterates the men: Ántonia's father commits suicide, while Jim first feels "erased, blotted out" (8), "dissolved into something complete and great" (14), and then leaves for the city. Although it is Jim's text, Antonia does not get to be erased, but rather, against this background of bare material substance she is given elemental presence. It is the woman who gets to be inscribed upon the blank page of the frontier. Her work, her passion for wide spaces, her tirelessness in "serving generous emotions" (227), and her commitment to survival: these are the components of her androgynous identity that make her one with the land —help her feel at home as well as leave her mark here. Always remaining outside the heterosexual love plot, Cather manages to celebrate the deep attachment of Jim and Antonia, "the 114
