Theme Of Gender Roles In My Antonia And The Professor's House

Identity, including gender identity, is entangled in setting. Daniel Russell argues that whatever the influence, positive or negative, the place of the novel must be considered when assessing characterization1. I would argue that this is particularly true when it comes to the American landscape which, historically, has been key to the development of American culture. A country mythicized with statements such as ‘the streets are paved with gold’, is one where space and place are intricately linked with the identity of the place and the people in it. The role of place has historically asserted itself within the masculine identity of the male American ego, as something to alter and to dominate. As well as be altered by and dominated by. It is

The following chapter will examine the ways in which Cather has entangled gender within the landscape of her novels, and as a result mired her characters within the landscape. Cather situates her characters position in the landscape, so much so that even the names she gives them places them in nature. By exploring this and how Cather conforms and deviates to gendered sublimes, in her novels My Antonia and The Professor’s House, this chapter will demonstrate how Cather situates her characters in ‘place’ and what the implications of her doing so are.

Gendered identity’s entrenchment in place is evident in Cather’s novel The Professor’s House. Throughout the novel she establishes the characters relationship to nature, and tethers them irrevocably to it through her naming. The names of the two main male characters, Tom Outland and Napoleon Godfrey St. Peter, bring forth ideas of expansion, exploration and conquering. The name Outland

Indeed this is not the only language that is suggestive of sexual organs, another example, perhaps one with a more direct symbolism, occurs when Tom describes the Tower within the mesa. The tower is depicted as being, “beautifully proportioned [...] swelling out to a larger girth a little above the base, then growing slender again. There was something symmetrical and powerful about the swell of the masonry.”14 By sexualizing the topography of Tom’s surroundings, Cather is committing to the masculine sublime. By using masculine language to describe the landscape of the canyon and mesa, Cather is putting forth the historical idea that the wilderness is a feminized place meant to be dominated by male ideals. In fact, Cather goes on to describe the tower as being “the fine thing that held all the jumble of houses together and made them mean something.”15 Complying with the understanding that it is the male explorer that gives meaning to the places he ‘discovers’. This is confirmed by Thomas P. Slaughter, who argues that an explorer is “the first to claim a discovery and report it in print, in a European language”. Men therefore have always been the only ones to have given meaning to their, often feminized,