Date of Award
5-2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
College/School
College of Humanities and Social Sciences
Department/Program
English
Thesis Sponsor/Dissertation Chair/Project Chair
Melinda Knight
Committee Member
Jeffrey Gonzalez
Committee Member
Laura Nicosia
Abstract
This thesis analyzes Willa Cather’s “Prairie Trilogy,” which includes O Pioneers! (1913), Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918), all successful books for Cather, to show how she depicts different immigrant groups. This thesis uses four different lenses to demonstrate how Cather prioritizes some immigrant groups over others, most notably Scandinavians. The first lens is how immigrants use the English language. The second is the depiction of immigrant hygiene practices. The third is a eugenicist lens. The fourth is a values-based lens, with the values belonging to the Anglo-Saxons already present in the country before the various waves of migration. This topic is important because it is a literary representation of one of the debates of the era. These novels shed light on the lives of immigrants around the turn of the twentieth century.
File Format
Recommended Citation
Ackerman, Kameron Blake, "Social Hierarchy in Willa Cather's "Prairie Trilogy"" (2025). Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects. 1544.
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/etd/1544
Included in
Demography, Population, and Ecology Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons, Race and Ethnicity Commons