윌라 캐더의 『오, 개척자들!』 과 『길 잃은 여인』에 나타난 대지와 자본

Abstract

O Pioneers! and A Lost Lady, the work of Willa Cather, have been widely celebrated as an epitome of substantializing the ecological ideal of ecocriticism: the human and nature harmoniously go together to compose the environment itself, although A Lost Lady ends in a tragedy of losing “the Forrester Place” in which human and nature coexist in a beautiful harmony. With all those ecological features, however, it is very skeptical to see them as the ecological embodiments of pure environmental imagination, It is also hard to see the plots of the novels emerge organically from natural environments. Rather, the land of the Nebraskan prairie has not come alive until “a human face was set toward it with love and yearning” as Alexandra of O Pioneers! says that “the history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.” In A Lost Lady, the Forrester Place, the symbol of the ecological ideal, is in fact a product of the capital of the railroad industry. It is ironical that by use of Captain Daniel Forrester’s accumulated capital, who has worked for the railroad industry, the meadows of half pasture and half marsh at Sweet Water turned into an ideal ecological garden defended from industrial exploitation. The land of nature in the two novels of Cather operates, in essence, following the commodity logic of capitalism. Eventually, it turns out in the novels that it is the people, who perceive well the economic principle of capital working in the prairie land, that have enjoyed tremendous material successes. Without the help of capital, the dramas of nature in her novels would not be initiated since they belong to, in a significant way, the economy of capitalism. This contradictory duality of the environmental imagination in O Pioneers! and A Lost Lady could be attributed to their negligence of the value of labor, as well as of hard working laborers in the prairie town.