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영어

In Western litetradition, stories of the human search for meaning are almost exclusively male centered. However, Willa Cather challenges long established narrative codes which forbid women's spiritual journeys in Western literature. In The Song of Lark, Cather's protagonist, Thea Kronborg, creates a vision for her life out of the vast space and startling forms of the Western landscape. In order to express female self-assertion, Cather puts the landscape as an integral part of Thea's spiritual renewal in The Song of Lark. Establishing a relationship between nature and the female protagonist is a way to represent spiritual experience in terms of the continuum of transformation and rebirth available in natural metaphors. The metaphor of nature as a cyclical process of life, death, and rebirth takes the vital principle of life as a pattern of narrative which permits Cather's character to escape the spiritual death of narrative closure. In the pattern of Western narrative, female experience is subordinate to and peripheral to the male establishing self-definition. The heroic quest is solely for the male character, with the female serving a limited function as a boundary or a space through which the male passes. Thea, however, is modeled upon Cather's own determined refusal to tailor her spirit to the limited roles of women. Cather reverses the usual gender scenario by having Thea rejects completely the role assigned to her as a female and is single-minded in her devotion t her art. Cather establishes the link between Thea's dedication to becoming an artist and her refusal to engage in the marriage plot very early in the novel. For Cather, art is not an idle pursuit but a serious discipline upon which the artist's spiritual survival depends. Thus, the visionary force in Thea's life is art, not a relationship with a lover. This keep Thea out of the trap of the romance plot, and gives her the emotional and physical freedom normally claimed by the male artist － to define herself through her art rather than through marriage. Cather's most radical innovation, however, is to ally Thea to the sweeping spaces of the Western landscape. In establishing the prairies of the West as her literary landscape, Cather claims the frontier as a place where a woman may define a vision for her life, as well as private, art as a way of locating her experience. In the creation of Thea's spiritual journey, Cather develops a new paradigm for a woman's relation to the landscape. Thea's experience in Panther Canyon provides her with the spiritual authority to carry her vision forth into the world. In short, Thea's story is such a spiritual landscape, in which Cather explores the inner landscape traversed in the creation of a female artist.