Psychology, Experimentation, and Feminism in Cather's and Stein's Writings - Research Paper Example

? Psychology, Experimentation, and Feminism in Cather's and Stein's Writings and number Assignment August Psychology, Experimentation, and Feminism in Cather's and Stein's Writings Two of the most influential writers of the modern times are Willa Cather and Gertrude Stein. They experimented with their writing styles and genres and showed different aspects of feminism and psychology. The main question that this paper will answer is: Based on their backgrounds and social standing, how do the works of Willa Cather and Gertrude Stein compare? This paper shows that psychology, experimentation, and feminism are prominent themes in Cather's and Stein's writings, but their works have different content and directions, due to differences in their backgrounds and social standing, where Stein is more influenced by Cubism and her psychology background, while Cather concentrates on pioneer writing and expressing her lesbian psyche. Willa Cather focuses more on “pioneer” writing, since she came from a family of migrants and lived with other pioneering immigrants. On December 7, 1873, Willa Cather was born somewhere near Winchester, Virginia (Bloom). In 1883, at the age of nine, the Cathers migrated to Nebraska, where they started a small, farming pioneer community (Bloom). Soon, the family settled in the Red Cloud town (Bloom). When Cather left Virginia's hills for the plain Nebraska prairie, she describes the feeling of being “thrown out into a country as bare as a piece of sheet iron” (Bloom). She lived with other immigrant families, and many of them were “Swedes, Russians, Germans, and Bohemians” (Bloom). She heard numerous stories from them, which she later incorporated into her writing (Bloom). Porter describes Cather as “...the true child of her plainliving, provincial farming people, with their aristocratic ways of feeling and thinking; poor, but not poverty-stricken for a moment" (30 cited in Stout 725). Because of this migrant/immigrant background, Cather worked on numerous novels that dealt with the pioneer's life. Her book, O Pioneers! (1913) describes the frontier and how immigrant families strove to make life out the prairies. Cather has also been influenced by Sarah Orne Jewett, who published novels about her native Maine. Cather soon wrote about her life in Nebraska (Bloom). In other novels, Cather works on pioneer periods that were much older than she originally experienced herself. She went to the Southwest a number of times after 1912, because she was fascinated with its history and landscape (Bloom). Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and Shadows on the Rock (1931) explores how missionaries and settlers, respectively, confront authority and assert individualism, as they search for their identities and ancestral histories (Bloom). Cather and Stein write about feminist ideals and challenges. Cather revels in feminist themes, as she writes about the mountains that women surmounted to pursue male-dominated industries, including the arts and literature sector. Her novel, The Song of the Lark (1915), depicts a young, female writer's life and her artistic development (Bloom). This novel also featured familiar “landscapes” that affected her writing, the way it did for Cather (Bloom). Furthermore, Cather is also known as a lesbian, which influenced the psyche of her writing. Cather's intimate relationship with Isabelle McClung had reached its end in 1916, when McClung married the violinist, Jan Hambourg (Bloom). Some critics argue that this loss pushed Cather to write My Antonia (1918) (Bloom). This novel expresses Cather's longing for her lost female companion. Cather's personal life, nevertheless, is something very private to her, which is why scholars assert that she wrote about her androgynous male characters as if they were her. Cather insists on the “boundary” between private and public life that resounded in how she guarded her private life, but still expresses it through her male characters (Stout 468). Stein also writes about feminism, when she breaches sex-gender distinctions in Tender Buttons. As a psychology student, she also writes and questions patriarchal gender roles and she asserts gender determination according to one's merits, and not on one's sexual organs. Psychology dominated many of Stein's and Cather's works. Stein's psychology background allowed her to devote herself to her characters' language and psyche. Gertrude Stein's birthplace is Allegheny, Pennsylvania. She was born on February 3, 1874, to wealthy German-Jewish immigrants. Stein studied at the Radcliffe College from 1893 to 1897, where she majored in Psychology under the renowned psychologist William James, according to Poets.org. She left Radcliffe and studied at the Johns Hopkins University, where she pursued medicine for four years (Poets.org). She never graduated from both institutions, but her psychology background made a large impact on her writings. Stein also developed an intimate relationship with another woman, Alice Toklas (Maurer 71), but she has not seemed to focus on her lesbian personality. Instead, her works demonstrate amazing dexterity in differentiating diverse personalities. In her novel Three Lives, Stein “pushed” grammatical structure to extreme levels by encasing speech pattern differences among three lay people (Shuman). Anna and Lena are German immigrants and domestic helpers, while Melanctha Hebert is a young African-American woman, and also a domestic household help (Shuman). Stein follows their language games closely and writes them as if she were three people. Stein and Cather also experimented in their writing styles. Cather enjoys pioneer and autobiographical stories, while Stein focuses on Cubist expressions. For instance, Cather, as one of the staff of the Home Monthly magazine in Pittsburgh in 1896, wrote about the wives of the two presidential candidates, Mrs. William McKinley and Mrs. William Jennings Bryan (Stout 470). She used her contacts to achieve new information about her subjects. Cather also acted as the ghost writer of The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy (Stout 470). Through the introduction to the volume, David Stouck stresses that Cather is “indisputably the principal author” (xvii cited in Stout 471). Stein writes in an experimental manner, due to the influence of Cubism on her philosophy and writing. The novel cubist paintings of Picasso and Matisse, which Stein collected, affected her work on Three Lives (Heldrich 427). Georgia Johnston notes that as the century turned, Stein wanted to break away from the past (31 cited in Heldrich 427). She wanted to generate a new form of writing that resisted the earlier influences of literary realism (Heldrich 427). She sought to eject the nineteenth-century styles and concentrate on an “aesthetic... more circular narrative” (Chessman 22 cited in Heldrich 427). Cubism's fragmented perspective of reality and the short story genre appealed to Stein greatly, because they provided the freedom of expression she desired (Heldrich 427). Stein asserts that in Three Lives, the connection between the part and whole becomes more pronounced (Heldrich 428). Every part of the writing can stand on itself, but these parts can never lose their unity with the whole, because “[e]ach part is as important as the whole” (Heldrich 428). The connection between the part and the whole addresses her view of short stories, wherein parts of it are critical, but so is the general understanding of the whole (Heldrich 428). As a result: “the story cycle foregrounds the important dynamic between part (story) and whole (collection/cycle) in the text” (Heldrich 428). Stein underscores too that Cezanne stresses this connection between part and whole in his paintings by his employment of lighting, which results to contrasting images (Heldrich 428). Edward Fry says that Cezanne wanted contrasted lighting to generate “multiple perceptions from discrete points of view, accumulated and then expressed in a single composite shape” (37 cited in Heldrich 428). His landscapes and still life paintings, including the Mont Sainte-Victoire (1904-06) underscore his aesthetic perspective (Heldrich 428). This aesthetic greatly influenced Stein, as she finished her Three Lives (Heldrich 428). Picasso also had a significant impact on Stein. For Stein, Picasso's paintings “foregrounds” the different surfaces of realities and generates a new style of describing the complexity of the twentieth century: “...Picasso was the only one in painting who felt it. the only one [sic]” (Picasso 21-22 cited in Heldrich 429). Stein also struggles with her characters to find new ways in “approaching, perceiving, and depicting” different themes (Heldrich 429). Psychology, experimentation, and feminism are prominent themes in Cather's and Stein's writings, but their works have different content and directions, because they had different backgrounds and social standing. Stein is more influenced by Cubism and her psychology background, while Cather focuses on pioneer writing and expressing her lesbian psyche. They are, nevertheless, both concerned of breaking away from literary and gender expectations. They exemplify creativity in writing about themes and issues that women writers have not done before. They assert the power of the female in its pluralities, where women can also be creative and radical writers. Finally, Cather and Stein demonstrate the art of psychology, as their characters reflect the conflicting personalities that struggle with the self and society. Works Cited Bloom, Harold. “Biography of Willa Cather.” Bloom's Major Novelists (2000): 11-13. Web. 30 Aug. 2011. Literary Reference Center. Heldrich, Philip. “Connecting Surfaces: Gertrude Stein's Three Lives, Cubism, and the Metonymy of the Short Story Cycle.” Studies in Short Fiction 34.4 (1997): 427-440. Web. 30 Aug. 2011. Literary Reference Center. Maurer, David. “The Unconventional, Unforgettable Gertrude Stein.” Biography 7.6 (2003): 68-73. Web. 30 Aug. 2011. Literary Reference Center. Poets.org. “Gertrude Stein.” Web. 30 Aug. 2011. . Shuman, B. R. “Gertrude Stein.” Masterplots II: Juvenile & Young Adult Biography Series (1993): 1-2. Web. 30 Aug. 2011. Literary Reference Center. Stout, Janis P. “Katherine Anne Porter's `Reflections on Willa Cather': A Duplicitous Homage.” American Literature 66.4 (1994): 719-735. Web. 30 Aug. 2011. Literary Reference Center. ---. “Between Candor and Concealment: Willa Cather and (auto)biography. Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 32.3 (2009): 467-492. Web. 30 Aug. 2011. Literary Reference Center. Read More