LANGUAGE IN INDIA

RELIGION AND FICTION
What Can We Learn From Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop?

C. Priyadharsini, Ph.D. Candidate
Mangaiarkarasi, Ph.D.

Religion in Indian Fiction

This article is about an American novelist and about how religion is embedded in creative fiction in American literature. Indian writing in English, or for that matter, fiction in Indian languages, largely ignores the value religion plays in moulding the character and events in life. Here and there, religion plays a very important function of identity of characters, and, at times, even forms part of the reflection of the characters in fiction. Like caste markers, religious identity is often used to bring in an aura of realism. The roles of fate and the noble deeds, and thethoughts of elders, of course, continue to have their function in Indian fiction.

Religion in American Literature

Religion is sought to perform a different set of functions in characterization in American literature. Dominated by the writers of the Caucasian race, whose specific ethnic identities are now almost lost in the stream of the White populace as a distinct group within the United States, religion in American literature imbibes a sense of history, social markers, and socialization processes. While secularism is the dominant stream, religion plays a very important role in terms of metaphors and messages even in secular fiction. Religion plays the part of something noble and something edifying even in current American literature. And if a particular novel focuses on a region, then, religion becomes part of the community, its history and civilization.

Importance of Reading Fiction from Various Sources

In this essay, we would like to present some aspects of the writing of a well-known American author, Willa Calder, and to show how religion plays a part in her story and characters.

Learning the art of story telling and story construction is a continuing process for every one, including seasoned writers. We do believe that by reading fiction from a variety of sources will enable Indian writers to revisit the role of religion and religious traditions while weaving their own stories.

Willa Cather - Focus on the Particular and the Universal

Willa Cather is a splendid example of a writer whose work is deeply rooted in a sense of place and at the same time universal in its treatment of theme and character. Cather combined a regional knowledge of Nebraska with an artistic expertise reminiscent of the nineteenth-century literary masters to create one of the most distinguished achievements of twentieth-century American literature.

Willa Cather, a novelist, short story writer, poet and journalist was born in Gore, Virginia, in 1873. When she was nine years old her family moved to Red Cloud, Nebraska. The desolate Nebraskan prairie and the diversely cultured European settlers that Cather encountered strongly engaged her youthful imagination. Years later, her early experiences were reproduced in the settings and the characters of her fiction. Specific incidents recollected in her fiction often became the basis of her stories.

The Call of the Prairie

Cather's family moved to Nebraska when she was ten, where they lived on an isolated farm and then in a raw frontier settlement in Red Cloud. She encountered immigrants, especially German and Scandinavian, upon whom many of the characters were based. She understood virtues and vices of the frontier life. On the one hand, the sturdy dignified strength of simple people struggling to establish their lives, homes and communities on new soil, and on the other, the crude materialism and intolerance, which was so evident in the frontier towns.

Ethical Goals and Cather's Place in American Literature

Willa Cather aspired toward the ethical goals of the great tradition, consequently becoming the twentieth-century successor of the nineteenth-century novelists. More notably than Cooper and with a moral intensity comparable to that of Hawthorne, Melville, and James, Cather represented the tensions of American existence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Like her predecessors, she is a commentator on the prevailing American condition. Sometimes urgent in her fears, but always ardent in her faith, she constantly held before herself the vision of realizable ideals.

Courage, Idealism and Modern Materialistic Values

In her Nebraskan novels, courage and idealism are juxtaposed with modern materialistic values. Cather's sensibility and her high regard for the artist and European culture in her later novels link her with Gustave Flaubert and Henry James. Her vision of the wasteland and her alienation from modern American society link her to the lost generation of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

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Meithei Personal Names | The Status and Teaching of English in Pakistan | ELT in Higher Education in Iran and India - A Critical Review | Demands for a Separate Linguistic State - The Question of Identity and Territorializing Bundelkhand in India | Case Marking in Gojri | Religion and Fiction | Writing Across the Curriculum -
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