Boundaries and Marginality in Willa Cather’s Frontier Fiction

Abstract

The announcement for the 1994 ‘Dissent and Marginality’ conference described frontiers as having ‘disconcerting properties — neither inside nor outside, neither known nor unknown. They are where change takes place, and certainties are questioned’. In the case of the American frontier, we might add that ‘frontiers are neither old nor new’, and in the case of popular American mythology, we might describe frontiers as places ‘where self-definition and self-understanding emerge from change’. Certainly, few images have contributed as much to the sense of self-understanding for North Americans as that of the American frontier, at one time boundless and inviting, a testament to courage, it represents the impulse for exploration and the relentless drive to conquer and master the environment. Indeed, in much American literature and popular thought, the American frontier, the Western boundary, exists as that which provides opportunity, unbounded freedom, and prosperity. In American iconography, the Western frontier has and in many ways still symbolizes the New World experiment of the Americas and the democratic experiment of the United States.