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Abstract
Drawing upon methodologies from folklore studies and performance theories, this dissertation begins by examining how Willa Cather's early years as a drama critic influenced her idea of art. Her reviews articulated a performance theory of her own that centered on how art is experience rather than object, an emotional encounter between artist and audience. Cather's early fiction, The Troll Garden stories and the novel The Song of the Lark, demonstrated her primary artistic principle--that "to feel greatly is genius, and to make others feel is art."
In the fiction that followed, Cather applied this performance theory to the performances of the hearth--the oral storytelling events that pervade her fiction, where storytelling is an ongoing process of art and living. Representing the major stages in Cather's thinking, the novels My Antonia, A Lost Lady, and Shadows on the Rock demonstrate an evolution from storytelling as an act of personal intimacy to storytelling as an act having significance within an entire community and nation.
In My Antonia, Antonia Shimerda's storytelling illustrates how telling a personal narrative means inviting the audience into the inner self. Antonia's stories, even those in which she acts more as observer than as principal character, reveal the depths of her own agonizing fears about isolation; however, Cather emphasizes, in the act of telling the stories, Antonia creates a lasting intimacy with her audience that belies any threat of alienation.
In A Lost Lady, on the other hand, Cather considers the limitations of storytelling: in particular, the breakdown of "story" into gossip and intimacy into invasion as well as the hazards of adopting a public myth as a self-defining story.
Suggesting in Shadows on the Rock that storytelling is a community-building event, Cather showed how the Quebec citizens, by cooperatively telling the stories of themselves acting together in the New World, recognize the miracles of everyday life and recognize themselves, too, as a part of the greater whole.
