《我安东尼亚》生态女性主义的研究论文.doc

really a time of freedom. But when entering adolescence, children became socialized. The boys were taught the masculine virtues, such as bravery and independence, while girls were taught the feminine virtues, such as submissiveness and passivity. Cather manifested her defiance against this social convention through her behaviors. Cather graduated from Red Cloud High School in 1890 and moved on to Lincoln, Nebraska to study at the University of Nebraska where she became the editor of the school magazine and wrote reviews for the Lincoln papers. Gradually, she gave up her pursuit of a medical career and turned to writing. After graduation from university, she returned to Red Cloud and in 1896, moved to Pittsburgh to write for several magazines and lived there until 1906. During this period, she published in her first collection, the Troll Garden (1905), arousing S.S. McClure’s interest, who later hired her as the managing editor for the McClure’s Magazine. In 1908, she met Sara Orne Jewett, novelist and short story writer with The Country of the Pointed Firs as her representative work. Jewett had an enduring influence on Cather and was ranked by the latter with Mark Twain and Henry James. She helped Cather in leaving McClure’s, and fashioning the literary self she would later call the “real me” (qtd. in O’Brien, 1987: 335). Jewett obviously noticed her young friend’s gift and warned her that the magazine work would become barrier to the development of her literary talent. “You have to make a way of your own,” she said, “you must find your own quiet centre of life, and write from that to the world… in short, you must write to the human heart.” (qtd. in O’Brien, 1987: 345-6) Under the encouragement of Jewett, Cather left the magazine in 1911 and wrote her transitional work Alexander’s Bridge, which ended her apprenticeship to her hero Henry James and began to speak in her own voice. The 1910s saw Cather’s literary breakthrough, as her “Prairie Trilogy”—O Pioneers! (191