A Lost Lady – ISU Willa Cather was an American author known for depicting the “settler and frontier life on American plains” including a few of her novels that deal with a post-pioneer life (Britannica). Cather’s novel, A Lost Lady, (1923) “mourned the passing of the pioneer spirit” (Britannica) and lends itself well to the archetypal approach to literature. A Lost Lady offers aspects of archetypal critical approach to literature through the symbol of the rose as applied to the characters Mrs. Forrester, Captain Forrester and Neil Herbert symbolizing beauty, admiration and the loss of innocence. The archetypal approach is based on the beliefs that myths contain motifs and symbols that are collective and communal, common to all cultures. Archetypes are repeated universal symbols and patterns of human experience. These symbols evoke similar responses through varying cultures and unite people together through people’s common psychology and spiritual activities. Psychologists believed that the root of an archetype is the “collective unconscious” of humans. The archetypal approach will be applied throughout this essay in respect to they symbol of the rose in relation to the characters Mrs. Forrester, Captain Forrester and …show more content…
Mrs Forrester’s attractiveness and captivating presence is represented by the beauty of the rose while Captain Forrester’s affection for nature and roses relates to Mrs. Forrester’s connection to the rose. Finally, upon realizing Mrs. Forrester’s disloyalty to her husband, Neil’s loss of innocence is signified by the throwing away of the roses, whereby he throws away any respect or admiration he had for Mrs. Forrester. The archetypal symbol of the rose exemplifies the archetypal approach to literature Willa Cather uses throughout her novel A Lost Lady. The loss of the pioneer- life is evident in the novel through the evolution of the characters and the passing of Captain
The subversion of the archetypal symbol takes place within various levels of the narrative, the first being the immediate layer of the narrative itself, and the second being the symbols within the narrative. I shall first discuss how Bei Dao subv...
In William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," Miss Emily Grierson is a lonely old woman, living a life void of all love and affection; although the rose only directly appears in the title, the rose surfaces throughout the story as a symbol. In contemporary times, the rose also symbolizes emotions like love and friendship. The rose symbolizes dreams of romances and lovers. These dreams belong to women, who like Emily Grierson, have yet to experience true love for themselves.
Ideally, the author and the audience must share mutual feelings, and the use of universal symbols in the novel is crucial in understanding the tragic that the family faces (Duckart n.pag). However, the use of universal symbols in Otsuka’s book takes a different dimension by attaching personal symbols to the ideas and feelings of the reader. In the end, nature, colors, and animals are recurrent symbols that are integral in embracing individual symbols that are attached to the tragic times that the Japanese-American family
At the beginning of this century, ships docked in American ports with their steerages filled with European immigrants. Willa Cather’s My Antonia, contains characters that immigrate to the country of America in search of hope and a new future in the Midwest prarie. This novel can be considered an American tale because it holds the American concept of the “melting pot,” the ideal of America as the “land of opportunity,” and the character’s struggles could only have occurred in America rather than their own country.
In the novel O Pioneers! the author Willa Cather?s vision of Alexandra Bergson is consistent in character treatment with other authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne (Scarlet Letter), and Stephan Crane (Maggie: A Girl of the Streets). In each novel, all authors possess a central character that has an obvious tension between themselves and their community. Unlike the previous authors, Cather?s sympathies lie toward Alexandra. She makes Alexandra seem artificial because she has given a woman (also being her main character) strength and courage, along with power to overcome those who wish to pull her down.
Throughout the world today, many people make connections between the outside world and supernatural experiences. In literature, there are a countless number of archetypal situations, characters, and symbols that appear in all genres. The archetypes occurring in literature vary on what form of literature it is. Such as in mythology, many things really happened, while in literature today, a lot of things may not really be happening but are implied through symbols. In Mary Higgins Clark’s Let Me Call You Sweetheart, prosecutor Kerry McGrath undergoes an archetypal quest; in doing so, she becomes a earth-mother by sacrificing herself for the betterment of Skip Reardon, a man sentenced to jail for murder.
These definitions of this age old symbol, the rose, evolved over time as cultures came into contact with what has now called the Language of the Flowers. This “language” first appeared in the East and was used as a form of silent communication between illiterate women in harems. During the Victorian era this form of communication began to move towards Western Europe. The first compilation of this language was written in French and then was later translated into English. (Seaton, ).The Victorians used this new method of communication to express love, sorrow and much more through the flowers that they cultivated and bought. This language of flowers or rather the use of flowers to symbolize different messages can certainly influence a story if one has knowledge of this method and chooses to interpret it in this manner.
Great literary characters are immortalized and perpetually discussed not because they are individually so grand and majestic, but because they exist as more than themselves. A great literary character truly exists in the external and symbolic associations that the author and audience apply. In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald reveals social and emotional elements of his character Daisy Buchanan through the symbols of white dresses and a pearl necklaces in order to convey a message concerning detrimental class values, a theme that can be better understood by comparing Daisy to a diamond.
“The Bohemians, you know, we’re tree worshipers before the missionaries came. Father says the people in the mountains still do queer things, sometimes, —they believe that trees bring good or bad luck” (Cather, Willa. 56). The symbolism of mulberry tree, Willa Cather in O Pioneers! constitutes an excellent example of a forbidden love. Literary critics have shown how Caulfield's confusion, desperation, and unwillingness to make a commitment render him a character in crisis. The mulberry tree has evolved decade after decade, to inspire stories, novels, and even tales.
Carl Jung was a Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist who developed many theories concerning the unconscious mind. Jung’s theories state that the unconscious part of a human’s psyche has two different layers, the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The personal unconscious is unique to every individual; however, the collective unconscious “is inborn.” (Carl Jung, Four Archetypes, 3) The collective unconscious is present in everyone’s psyche, and it contains archetypes which are “those psychic contents which have not yet been submitted to conscious elaboration” (Jung, Archetypes, 5); they are templates of thought that have been inherited through the collective unconscious. Jung has defined many different archetypes such as the archetype of the mother, the archetype of the hero, the archetype of the shadow, etc. These Jungian archetypes are often projected by the collective unconscious onto others. If the novel A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving is examined through a Jungian archetypal lens it is possible to discern different archetypes projected by the protagonist’s unconscious self to illustrate the effects of the collective unconscious on character and plot analysis.
Symbolism is also used in regards to the roses. Miss Strangeworth received a letter saying“Look out at what used to be your roses”. The roses symbolize her reputations of always being loyal, trustworthy, and truthful. When they get cut down it represents her reputation becoming tainted as the town finds out she has been writing her false
In her novel, My Antonia, Cather represents the frontier as a new nation. Blanche Gelfant notes that Cather "creat[ed] images of strong and resourceful women upon whom the fate of a new country depended" . This responsibility, along with the "economic productivity" Gilbert and Gubar cite (173), reinforces the sense that women hold a different place in this frontier community than they would in the more settled areas of America.
Mrs. Marian Forrester strikes readers as an appealing character with the way she shifts as a person from the start of the novel, A Lost Lady, to the end of it. She signifies just more than a women that is married to an old man who has worked in the train business. She innovated a new type of women that has transitioned from the old world to new world. She is sought out to be a caring, vibrant, graceful, and kind young lady but then shifts into a gold-digging, adulterous, deceitful lady from the way she is interpreted throughout the book through the eyes of Niel Herbert. The way that the reader is able to construe the Willa Cather on how Mr. and Mrs. Forrester fell in love is a concept that leads the reader to believe that it is merely psychological based. As Mrs. Forrester goes through her experiences such as the death of her husband, the affairs that she took part in with Frank Ellinger, and so on, the reader witnesses a shift in her mentally and internally. Mrs. Forrester becomes a much more complicated women to the extent in which she struggles to find who really is and that is a women that wants to find love and be fructuous in wealth. A women of a multitude of blemishes, as a leading character it can be argued that Mrs. Forrester signifies a lady that is ultimately lost in her path of personal transitioning. She becomes lost because she cannot withstand herself unless she is treated well by a wealthy male in which causes her to act unalike the person she truly is.
The first theory to be discussed is structuralism, this theory is composed of many different branches. The branches that this paper will be looking into is archetypes. The definition of of archetype is typical images, characters, narrative designs and themes and other literary phenomena. Archetypes have their own form of criticism that is called archetypal criticism. Archetypal criticism means the generic, recurring and conventional elements in literature that cannot be explained through historical influence or tradition.
Works Cited Fryer, Sarah. Fitzgerald’s New Women: Harbingers of Change. Eds. Jackson R. Bryer, A. Walton Litz, and Linda Wagner. Studies in Modern Literature, No. 86.