الفهرس 
Assumed Voices in an Alternating AgeOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Assumed Voices in Willa Cather’s ”Alexander’s Bridge”, ”The Professor’s House”, ’’My Antonia” and” A Lost Lady”
This study explored Cather’s use of multiple assumed voices in four of her novels: ”Alexander’s Bridge”, ”The Professor’s House”, ’’My Antonia” and ”A Lost Lady”. It analyzed Cather’s use of multiple assumed voices to depict the themes, the characters, the mental states, the technical devices and the human conditions which made Cather’s fiction genuine portrayals of a society and an art in change, reflecting the double lives recurrent in her fiction and experienced by her main characters in that transitional era.
The study consists of four chapters and a conclusion. The first one traces the concept of voice in an alternating age in relation to the theme of the double-lives prevalent in that era. The second chapter studies the technical innovations in Cather’s fictional writings which are mainly influenced by Cather’s journalistic experience and her knowledge of the realm of painting. The third chapter explores Cather’s portrayal of the theme of double-lives in both Alexander’s Bridge and The Professor’s House, with all the suffering and happiness this may engender due to the competing obligations of private and communal life on Bartley Alexander and Professor Godfrey St. Peter respectively.
The final chapter of this study investigates Cather’s use of a multiplicity of assumed voices in portraying the issue of the ”double-lives” women were obliged to lead in the early twentieth century. Focusing more on the experiences of displaced and immigrant women, giving them voice in her fiction, Cather emphasized the possibilities for alternative lives and roles for women. In the Conclusion findings of the study are presented and discussed and recommendations for further studies are suggested.
Willa Cather evidently approves of a reduced role of the author and favours an enlarged role for the readers, when she declared that she wanted to be an author who is ”out of it”, letting her characters tell their own story (Leddy 1). She said she was trying to “cut all analysis, observation, description, even the picture –making quality, in order to make things and people tell their own story simply by juxtaposition”, without any persuasion on her part. Her narrative work is, thus, turned into a sort of a stage where a multiplicity of voices meet, debate or compete. Jo Ann Middleton rightly observes that “contributing to the emotional impact of Willa Cather’s fiction and thus to its “‘staying power’… is her very real insistence on the importance of what is not in the text”, thus, Shifting the focus from the author to the reader, who can actually construct and add to the meaning of the text (x). Such gaps and absences procure the reader’s involvement in creating and interpreting the meaning of texts, inviting a multiplicity of voices in constructing the meaning of her novels.
In Cather’s novels, polyphony is evident in her ability to create characters belonging to different genders, life stages, social strata, various cultures and professions, assuming their voices and voicing their concerns. Gathering a multiplicity of marginalized voices, like those of poor immigrants, echoing their aspirations and exposing their sufferings, ensures Cather’s success in creating polyphonic novels, where she assumes a multiplicity of voices, not assigning one of them specifically as her mouthpiece.
Cather’s novels, dialogic or polyphonic par excellence, in Bakhtin’s sense, not only engage with their readers but also with time. In Jabbur’s view, Cather foreshadowed T. S. Eliot’s ideas concerning the ’historical sense’ that involves ”a perception not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence” (395). However, Cather, as Giannone argues, stresses memory, not for nostalgia or escape, as she has the oral sense of memory as transmission of Knowledge (Murphy 42). Cather turned to the American past for “a heritage, a tradition within which her individual talent can make its place” (Middleton x). Hence, voices from the past resonate in her novels, influencing the lives and destinies of her protagonists.
Voices from other ancient popular cultures are also heard and treated with respect in Cather’s works. She assumes the voices from such cultures in order to give them a voice. The dialogue in her works extends to involve representatives of dead cultures like that of the bodies found in The Blue Mesa in The Professor’s House. Cather also enters into the culture of this ’world above the world’ and time, to see the world in its own eyes. When she returns to her own place she exposes how that other is dealt with by people of her own time and culture. Seeing that other ’others’ existed around her, and representing them, sympathizing with them, and even identifying with them, Cather kept a true dialogue constantly running in her fictional works. Perhaps, Willa Cather found in establishing dialogue between cultures a way for altering hers and her characters’ reality, by presenting a multiplicity of voices.
Cather used her fiction to criticize the prevalent assumptions of her culture, propose alternative assumptions to address and reform her disappointing reality. She tried to create an alternative world to that she knew, manifesting one motive underlying the novelistic tradition according to Edward Said: ”the desire to create an alternative world, to modify, or augment the real world through the act of writing” (40). Within Cather’s accounts of breaking fresh grounds in a strange land, Giannone adds, ”stirs a search for the source and meaning of life”(123). This constant search for a meaning of life often amounts to feelings of duality and uneasiness. This is because of the variety of conflicts a self is subjected to when trying to impose meaning on a seemingly meaningless reality.
Cather successfully used a multiplicity of voices to depict this theme, creating, for instance, split characters or literary doubles. By casting the splits in her own psyche, in the form of two characters, “Cather is able to dramatize and play out a personal conflict while at the same time raising larger issues…such as ethnicity” (Moraru 218). This is true for almost all Cather s protagonists for whom we may identify literary doubles. Experiencing feelings of uneasiness and dissatisfaction with their lives, they seek alternative ones. This issue is sometimes solved by the character or the author, ”by adding a new voice or a group of voices to double their lives by adding a new one to it” Said (48), thus, enriching this character’s life and solving its dilemma.
This theme of the double-lives is also asserted through Cather’s creation of a multiplicity of narrators, without assigning one specific voice to mouth her opinions, and through the depiction of unreliable narrators, which provides her readers with endless possibilities for alternative voices, stories, realities and lives for both her characters and her readers. Cather encouraged her reader again and again, through her use of painting, art and drawings, juxtapositions, suggestion and framing techniques to use his own mind, and voice his own ideas and interpretations, as there is always more than one perspective on things, where all voices are invited to share in constructing meaning.
The act of writing was a powerful tool which, Rabin claims, allowed women writers ”to break free of the discourse that treats identity as singular, consistent, and unchanging “(14). However, Cather, according to Rosowski, still saw language as ’imperfect’, so she used strategies to ’’supplement or bypass language (her use of other arts- musical and visual, for example)” (135). Cather’s fiction, thus, “teems with knowledge of the arts” (Homestead and Reynolds xii). She used ‘painterly’ techniques to experiment with her fiction and help her in portraying her characters, and follow the example of modern painting by ’disfurnishing the novel’ (Slote and Faulkner 238-40). By disfurnishing novels, and getting rid of all the extra details, Cather is able to use suggestion and juxtaposition to give more voices the chance to be heard. Disfurnishing a scene, the author’s presence is minimized, and readers are allowed more freedom to create their own fictional world. Readers, in that way, are more actively invited to share in the interpretation and construction of meaning.
Willa Cather, Harold Bloom states, “has few rivals among the American novelists of this century” (1). Her fiction “is being read and studied today more than ever”, John Murphy observes, “as she takes her place beside Faulkner as one who mythologized her province and linked it to the world” (My Antonia 5). I recall, however, John Murphy’s words describing Cather’s art as “an understated art, at its best creating essences, “felt upon the page without specifically being named there” (”The Green Vase, The Yellow Orange” 432), referring to Cather’s understated position in the literary canon, in spite of her greatness as a writer. With so many things still ‘left unsaid’ about Willa Cather and her art, but which are ‘still felt on the page’, Cather’s criticism needs quite a good number of those dedicated readers/ researchers who can appreciate all the aspects of her work which are not yet fully appreciated.