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When we come to a prairie, we feel a sense of freedom. When we live in the city, we are aware of the noise. Similar to nonhuman animals, humans have a se nse of space, and in the meantime, humans comprehend the world rationally. Cather is a very sensitive writer. She visits many places in her life, observes, smells and feels places; she can capture the sentiment exquisitely. However, Cather does not only describe the landscape but also depicts the emotional relationship between the landscape and humans. When writing these novels, she pays much attention to the way characters in the novels perceive the landscape, nature and the surrounding spaces. Their perceptions of them frequently have a symbolic meaning in her novels.
This section will discuss the way Cather represents the past nature by portraying the natural landscape and by describing the relationship between the character and the landscape. The emergence and the development of the term
‘landscape’ is inextricably associated with the development of human’s inner self.
The term ‘landscape’, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was first used in 1603, signifying the scenery in a painting: “A picture representing natural inland scenery”. From 1725, ‘landscape’ began to signify the land or natural scenery perceived through individual’s viewpoint: “A view or prospect of natural inland scenery, such as can be taken in at a glance from one point of view”.
Considering the historical background at that time, such as the development of modern science, the Reformation, and the industrializ ation and the commercialization of the society, it is not surprising to see the evolution and the development of the word ‘landscape’. From that time on, humans began to realize their own points of view created and modified by their own inner selves and began
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to be segregated and separated from nature. According to J. H. Van den Berg, the Dutch psychiatrist, the birth of nature is inseparably associated with human’s consciousness of inner self. He takes Da Vinci’s world-famous painting Mona Lisa as an example. He believes that Mona Lisa and Luther’s manuscript embody the same spiritual expressions. Mona Lisa’s smile, in his view, is a sign of the abundant inner world and the secret hidden inner self. Furthermore, he points out that the landscape in this painting has extraordinary significance, which symbolizes human’s estrangement from nature.
At the same time she [Mona Lisa] is the first (it is unavoidable) who was estranged from the landscape. The landscape behind her is justly famous;
it is the first landscape painted as a landscape, just because it was a landscape. A pure landscape, not just a backdrop for human actions: na ture, nature as the middle ages did not know it, an exterior nature closed within itself and self-sufficient, an exterior from which the human element has, in principle, been removed entirely. (Van den Berg 231)
‘Landscape’ as natural scenery from man’s viewpoint separates human from nature, and destroys the original bondage of human with nature. In the introduction of Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama shows a similar assertion:
“For although we are accustomed to separate nature and human perception into two realms, they are, in fact, indivisible” (6). Leslie Marmon Silko also maintains that the term landscape is actually a misleading: “So long as the human consciousness remains within the hills, canyons, cliffs, and the plants, clouds, and
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sky, the term landscape, as it has entered the English language, is misleading”.
Silko believes that the relationship between the humans and their surroundings is not correctly described by a portion of territory, for when human s stand on a mountain peak or a high mesa edge, they already become a part of the surroundings. So, the term landscape is misleading, because it is based upon dualism of the subject and the object, or the viewer and the view, as well as upon homocentrism of the dominant human and the subordinate surroundings: “This assumes the viewer is somehow outside or separate from the territory he or she surveys. Viewers are as much a part of the landscape as the boulders they stand on.
There is no high mesa edge or mountain peak where one can stand not immediately be part of all that surrounds” (884-85).
In Cather’s novels, human’s separation from and integration with the surrounding landscape are of great significance, which deserves discussion and analysis. Cather occasionally allows the characters to merge into the landscape as a part of it, while sometimes keeps them out of and detached from the landscape as a viewer or an outsider. She displays these two distinct depictions delicately and exquisitely. When the character is half merged into the landscape, still keeping their selfhood independent of the surroundings, he or she sometimes comes up with the half collective memories or the historical landscape—the landscape which tells about what happened there in the past. This sympathy between the character and the surrounding landscape in the past forms one of Cather’s important ways of representing the past nature in her novels.
In “Dangerous Crossings: Historical Dimensions of Landscape in Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, The Professor’s House, and Death Comes for the
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Archibishop”, Carol Steinhagen classifies the dangerous crossings which appear frequently in Cather’s three representative novels: “movement from one geographical region to another, movement from one isolating shelters like attic rooms into society, movement from conception to art, and movement from life to death” (63). What she regards as the most dangerous crossing is the one which leads man into the realm of all-ness. Because it diminishes the self in modern society, separating it from the historical landscape that allows it to experience the collective memory. In a sense, the dissolution of the ego consciousness means the death of the individual and the inner self:
To truly cross into the realm of all-ness is dangerous because it separates the individual from those literary and historical forces that have given her a sense of selfhood and allowed her to participate in the collective memory that has created a shared sense of landscape. It is, as Cather recognized, a kind of self-destruction. (66)
The self-destruction here means the loss of the inner self, the vanishing of the subjective ego. When man completely merges into the landscape, his inner self is lost and unable to feel anything around him, to be finally estranged from the landscape. Keeping his selfhood awake to gain sympathy with the landscape, man can achieve a sense of oneness with nature, experience a land and participate in the collective memories engraved in the landscape. Steinhagen’s term of the dangerous crossings is a thought-provoking perspective that arouses human’s reflection and concern on the relationship between human and the landscape in
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Cather’s novels. There are many other descriptions on the dangerous crossings in her works than what Steinhagen deals with in her article. For example, an intricate relation between the character and the landscape is embodied in Cather’s another famous novel, The Song of the Lark as well. Furthermore, in My Ántonia, there are some other episodes which also represent the way a character participates in the collective memory and the historical landscape.