In Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady, two types of men are presented to the reader – the old fashioned man who belongs to the Old West, and the new man who is a product of the Industrial Revolution. Niel Herbert and Ivy Peters exemplify these two types of men; by their outlook upon life and by their actions, they are as fundamentally opposed to one another as the Old West was to the Industrial Revolution.
Niel and Ivy’s separate outlooks upon life – that of the Old West versus that of the Industrial Revolution – are as disparate as their appearances. Niel, with his “clear-cut [features, and] his grey eyes, so dark they looked black under his long lashes,” (Cather 33) represents the Old West and all its hopes and dreams, while Ivy with his red skin, harsh dimples like “a knot in a tree-bole,” (21) and his “fixed, unblinking” (21) eyes, is the realist of the next generation. Niel, younger than Ivy by several years, “had believed that man could live according to aesthetic ideals, and this belief is a positive one. However, he had not yet harmonized such ideals with human life” (Rosowski, Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady: The Paradoxes of Change, 59). It is this refreshing – though naïve – belief in the ability of men to rise above petty emotions, and particularly his reverence of Marian Forrester as an archetype of womanly goodness, which is slowly worn away in Niel as the novel progresses. When Niel returns to Sweet Water after his time away at a university, he meets Ivy, and from their brief conversation Niel realizes the difference between himself and Ivy. The men of the Old West, Niel realizes, were “dreamers, great-hearted adventurers who were unpractical to the point of magnificence; a courteous brotherhood, strong in attack but weak in de...
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.... Though Niel realizes that Marian Forrester is not the pure ideal he has reverenced from childhood, his treatment of her does not change – it remains courteous and gallant, as any man of the Old West would have done. At the last, the difference between these two characters can be summed up in a few words. Neil Herbert possesses that indefinable quality of life and action which belongs to all gentlemen, and Ivy Peters does not.
Works Cited
Cather, Willa. A Lost Lady. New York: Random House, Inc., 1972. Print.
Dawson, Dawn P. Magill’s Survey of American Literature. Pasadena, California: Salem Press, Inc., 2007. Print.
Mainiero, Lina. American Women Writers. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., Inc., 1979. Print.
Rosowski, Susan J. “Willa Cather’s “A Lost Lady”: The Paradoxes of Change.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 11.1 (1977): 59. JSTOR. Web. 07 March 2012
Dyck, Reginald. "The Feminist Critique of Willa Cather's Fiction: A Review Essay." Women's Studies 22 (1993): 263-279.
Magill, Frank N. Magill's Survey of American Literature, Volume 5. New York: Marshall Cavendish Corporation, 1991. 29 Apr. 2011
American Literature. 6th Edition. Vol. A. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 2003. 783-791
The heroine, Mrs. P, has some carries some characteristics parallel to Louise Mallard in “Hour.” The women of her time are limited by cultural convention. Yet, Mrs. P, (like Louise) begins to experience a new freedom of imagination, a zest for life , in the immediate absence of her husband. She realizes, through interior monologues, that she has been held back, that her station in life cannot and will not afford her the kind of freedom to explore freely and openly the emotions that are as much a part of her as they are not a part of Leonce. Here is a primary irony.
Dyck, Reginald. "The Feminist Critique of Willa Cather's Fiction: A Review Essay." Women's Studies 22 (1993): 263-279.
Since Niel Herbert is bigoted, he should not be esteemed as a hero. While the boys are playing in the beginning, Marian Forrester delivers cookies to the boys, and “[t]hey were all rather pleased that Mrs. Forrester had come down herself, instead of sending Mary" (Cather 19). They may simply enjoy the company of Mrs. Forrester. However, the following lines indicate otherwise: “Even rough little Thad Grimes… knew that Mrs. Forrester was a very special kind of person. George and Niel were already old enough to see for themselves that she was different from the other townswomen, and to reflect upon what was that made her so. The Blum brothers ... realized, more than their companions, that such a fortunate and ...
On the one hand Wharton delivers a critique of this society but is also attracted to it- she judges Lily’s character but makes her very attractive. It is difficult not to sympathize with Lily, who was brain-washed into being an avaricious climber by her mother.
In her lifetime, Edith Wharton experienced the restraining nature of societal expectations against her attempts to establish her individual identity, in both her sexuality and publication of her written works. Wharton specifically has an excellent opportunity to criticize the expectations placed on American women during the Realist era because she emigrated to France and experienced a radically different system to that of America’s. This enabled her to more clearly contemplate how society limited and impacted the personal development of women without Wharton being restricted by her knowledge of solely the American social system. The struggle with societal expectations establishes itself in her novella Summer, in which Charity Royall faces the
Works Cited Cather, Willa. "Paul's Case." The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Eds. R.V. Cassill and Richard Bausch. Shorter 6th ed. New York: Norton, 2000. 198-207.
Edith Wharton’s writing style is characterized as simple and control. Her choice of vocabulary and sentence structure, which is complete as the lives led by her protagonists, is deceptive. Throughout the novel, Wharton builds up patterns of imagery, patterns of behavior and specially charged works. All of which serve a definite style and structure purpose. She chooses adjectives and adverbs carefully and uses them infrequently. Her attention to minor details and her use of structure to relay Ethan’s complicated and tragic life story to readers enables her to portray her characters as victims of the rules of society. Wharton shows silence by her personal experience when writing and did not readily discuss her writing. Wharton relied on personal
With success, modern day culture has taken strides in illuminating the oppression perpetuated onto women, but a conversation centered on the oppression of men is nearly nonexistent. In The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton describes the life of Newland Archer set in Old New York society. Newland Archer is a man who has his life seemingly predestined given where he is born in society. In the novel, Wharton describes not only Newland’s life, but also the stringent society that dominated Old New York. Wharton phenomenally criticizes several aspects of this high society including those topics that are often obscure. Although historically men are oppressors, in The Age of Innocence, it is in fact Newland Archer who is being oppressed in Old New York’s
Stillinger, Jack, Deidre Lynch, Stephen Greenblatt, and M H. Abrams. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume D. New York, N.Y: W.W. Norton & Co, 2006. Print.
...inally, Wharton demonstrates through the separation of Archer and Ellen that people must put aside their personal desires for the greater good of the social dimension.
A comprehensive review of Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh anchored on the continuous desolation of its characters.
Belasco, Susan, and Linck Johnson, eds. The Bedford Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 1, 2nd Ed., Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2014. 1190-1203. Print.