Abstract
Willa Cather wrote Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock based on the missionary life of Europeans in Quebec and New Mexico. In both novels she depicts a different type of colonizer-colonized relationship. The colonizers arrive with their stereotypical views about the natives to purportedly civilize them. But later, through their interaction with the natives, their superior, patronizing attitude gradually changes, so that, the boundary between the colonizer and the colonized becomes blurred. Contrary to their presuppositions about natives and also the long-established colonial attitude, the missionaries in these two novels treat the natives sympathetically and in some cases equally. Using Homi Bhabha's theory of hybridity, this essay attempts to analyze these two novels in terms of the depiction of cultural relation/interaction. Keywords: Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop , Shadows on the Rock , Colonialism, Cultural Hybridity
Highlights
Willa Cather’s two late sequential novels, Death comes for the Archbishop (1927) and Shadows on the Rock (1931), are historical fictions
She brings historical characters sometimes with changing their names into her fictional characters; for instance, in Death Comes for the Archbishop, Father Jean Marie Latour and Father Joseph Vaillant were changed out of actual names of Father Lamy and Father Machebeuf
Without changing the real historical characters names, she uses them in her novels such as Father Martinez in Death Comes for the Archbishop and Bishop Lavel and Count de Frontenac in Shadows on the Rock (Danker, 2000, p 37)
Summary
Willa Cather’s two late sequential novels, Death comes for the Archbishop (1927) and Shadows on the Rock (1931), are historical fictions. Without changing the real historical characters names, she uses them in her novels such as Father Martinez in Death Comes for the Archbishop and Bishop Lavel and Count de Frontenac in Shadows on the Rock (Danker, 2000, p 37). Based on these two novels' solid historical background, most of the written reviews and researches on them focus mainly on their historical authenticity. Focusing on the characters' actions and reactions and the colonizer and colonized relationship, the objective is to examine the applicability of Homi Bhabha's theory of hybridity to analysis of the process of transformation of characters
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